Helped my mom move this weekend. It was a sad thing really. My mom has a house - at least until the close on the 28th of this month anyway - that she loves. It's only the second house she's ever owned. I lived there for a number of years myself when I was in highschool. It's a lovely home with two bedrooms, two baths, a huge living room, dinning room, family room, kitchen, laundry, two-car garage and screened-in pool in the back. She's on a corner lot - the former model of the development when it was built back in 1971. It has a lovely front courtyard, a huge oak tree out front, and a garden she planted and nurtured in the back. Over the years, she's slowly but surely made it a place she loved; a place she thought of as home. They tiled the floors, redesigned the master and secondary baths, fixed the roof, the pool area, and painted the kitchen. Her and her husband repaired and replaced and really made it her dream. She worked hard her whole life and finally had something to show for it.
So, then a couple years ago, my mom gets this disease It's called Scleroderma. (hers specifically is the CREST Syndrome version) It causes her all kinds of pain not to mention secondary problems such as Raynaud's phenomenon, systematic lupus, etc. It's debilitating. The medications which are intended to limit the spread and worsening of the disease seem more often then not to make her only worse. They cause problems with her kidneys; they cause problems with her heart; they cause problems with her blood; etc. etc. etc. The problem is that this disease doesn't make a lot of sense and it's not really understood. (She was misdiagnosed about a dozen times over the course of almost two years before she figured it out). So now, she's in pain all the time and is extremely sensitive to all sorts of things like the slightest changes of temperature - her hands go literally blue if she gets a chill. Her joints ache and swell and her knees and legs can't tolerate her standing for any amount of time. She struggles to maintain a full time job to pay the bills even with both her and her husband working full time jobs. Her health continues to deteriorate and she finally ends up in the hospital last week for five days. (seems her disease has caused fluid to collect in the area around her heart) I worry about her all the time and it hurts to see my young, viberant mother so continually reduced and made smaller by her own body...
Late last year they decided that she needed to stop working. She's almost 55; it's not like she doesn't deserve to stop working (she's medically disabled at this point and should have stopped two years ago) and she has become vested by the state for her years working for the government. To "retire" however, they need to sell the house. They simply can not afford it with any loss of income. So, it goes on the market. The whole time though it's for sale, my mom I can tell is secretly hoping it won't sell; or that it will take years so that she might stay there longer. It was something she did not want to do. She kept fighting to work, fighting to maintain her job even though it hurt her so much. She was afraid of the change and afraid of the loss and afraid of seriously and truly being disabled. Of being unable to be self-supportive. She worried about not being useful or productive and mostly, she was just afraid.
But the house sold. And sold quickly. And now, on Thursday it's no longer her house. It's theirs. And she's left without the ability to work or the home she loves. Instead, she's somewhere much smaller, needing so much work, and sacrificing so much of her posessions to make it work. It sounds so shallow, but when you're losing so much, something as simple as the loss of your dinning room table (for lack of room) can cut like a knife. It's not the table itself, it's the symbol for all that she used to be and used to have.
So, Sunday I went over there to help her unpack. To set up and try to make this second home her home. (the house is one that her husband has owned from before they were together, one that he's been renting out these years). I worked so hard to make it be that home for her. I unpacked everything I could, set up her pictures and the items in her hutch, all the while trying to make her smile at all the things she has and all the things she's had since I was little. I tried to do for her in small guestures what I couldn't do with money, or actions, or sheer will: give her back something of herself and her dignity and her happiness. She cried several times throughout the day and each time, I found myself crying with her. I hate that I can't do more for her and I hate that I can't protect my mother from the things that hurt her.
So, this morning I'm tired. Worn out and beat from having to do so much for her to help yesterday. Saddened that she couldn't do it for herself. And, more then anything, wishing she didn't have to do any of it in the first place. This is never how she imagined her retirement to be.
~ flowers bloom near Memory and Dream
at 2/25/2002 03:24:57 PM ~
~
