Mom & Me Two Archive

    I've said this to my mother a couple of times over the last few weeks. Maybe I'll comment on it later when I have both actual and emotional time. Maybe not. I can imagine the variety of reactions to me saying this, let alone feeling it, and they delight me, especially the negative ones. Considering how we honor our real dogs in this society yet believe that one of the worst names we can call someone is a "dog", I'm sure me saying this will be misunderstood by most of my readers. Yet the above phrase represents one of the most accurate and personally heartwarming descriptions of how I feel within my relationship with my mother at this time. I hope I continue to feel this way toward my mother. I could do no better than to take my cues in my relationship toward my mother from a beloved, faithful dog.
    I finally got her moving yesterday, really moving. For a couple of hours. She felt great afterwards, didn't even feel the need to take a nap. The stimulation of being out in the world reminded her that sociality does a lot to improve her mood. Today she's tired, her back is, as she describes it, "iffy" although she's said in response to my repeated queries that she's not experiencing pain. She's napping a lot. I think she'll have recovered tomorrow and we'll try it again, perhaps on a more elementary level, if there is such a thing. I have high hopes.
    Meanwhile, I've been feeling profoundly spiritually exhausted. This is only way I can describe it. I've been very careful about sleep, food, supplements and movement, taking moments here and there to do what I need to do for myself. Yet, beyond all the precautions I feel constantly and internally as though I need to sleep something off. Today is the first day since I've begun feeling this way that I've been with myself with so few distractions. Although I'm feeling quite unsettled and anxious I'm glad I have a chance to focus on this, this, hmmm, this undercurrent of spiritual exhaustion. I can't quite figure out what to do to alleviate it. I hope I'll figure something out. I know better than to think that this level of, well, of, whatever, can be taken care of by a vacation from my mother. From this point on, even if I were able to take some days off from caring for my mother, even knowing that she was being cared for with love and appropriate attention, I'm tied to her now in a way that disallows our fundamental absence from one another. Although my sojourn with my mother is certainly connected with this feeling and is both affected by and affecting it to the point where if I had not been doing this I may have been able to blunt my awareness of this feeling for many more years, it's not the cause. Of this I am sure.

    Yesterday when we were in line at one of the places we visited my mother pointed to the man standing in front of us and said, "Fred's here." I looked at his back and noticed he was wearing a leather belt with his name punched and stained into it.
    We both chuckled. "Did you tell him we'd be here?" I asked, under my breath.
    "I thought you did," she responded.
    "I guess I forgot to give him our descriptions," I said. "I think he thinks he missed us." We chuckled again.
    Later, as I was guiding Mom through the cart section of the checkout so she could stay with her oxygen, "Fred" came back through the checkout line and pulled me aside. "Is that your mom?" he asked.
    I grinned. I love to acknowledge her as 'mine'. "Yes," I said.
    He put his arm around me and said, "I thought so. I lost my mother a month ago. Enjoy her."
    I started crying. "I do." I assured him. He started crying.
    A moment later he was headed out the door waving back to me.
    "What did he want?" my mother asked as we made our way out.
    I told her what he'd said.
    Her face crinkled into a huge smile. "He doesn't need to worry. I can't imagine us enjoying each other more."
    Neither can I. I'm glad we're in agreement on this.