Baby steps

“You’re moving out?” my dad suddenly asks me one morning. I guess he’s seen my little note.

I nod back to him.

“Where to?”

I shrug. I don’t really know anyway and haven’t actually committed to anything.

“Why?”

I’ve been avoiding speaking with my dad. I still play my sign language / charades game with him, and after the past week or so, if I have to use words to communicate whatever I’m thinking, i deem it not worth the time and don’t even bother.

But I have no good answer here, and so I open my mouth and make one up.

“I got a job,” I lie.

“You did?”

I nod back. I lean over to him and whisper into his ear. “Mom needs you to take care of her. Can you do that?”

He nods back to me.

And then I walk away. I’ve already said more than I’d like.

We repeat a similar conversation the next day.

“You’re going to move out?”

Nod.

“But why?”

“I got a job.”

“Where?”

I can’t decide whether to pick somewhere far away, or somewhere where he feels I could at least visit. I go with the latter. “San Francisco.”

“So you can still live here,” he says, with a hint of a whine to his voice.

I shake my head. “It’s too far.”

He scowls and grumbles. I think that’s the only reaction he knows now when he wants to express any emotion. He said the same thing when he found out my mom was in the hospital. No matter what he feels, maybe any kind of negative feeling will forever now translate into this combination of being frustration and anger.

And I am now pretty sure, I should expect this conversation many more times before I actually do move away.

I’ve been spending a lot of time rereading some of my own journals and notes from when I first moved in, and it’s surprising how different they really are. It’s been six months now, and the rate of change feels alarmingly fast.

When you raise a baby, you can tell the difference between six months and a year. They start crawling, begin to form sounds, recognize objects, show feelings. You can tell the difference between a year and two years. But at some point you need even more years to notice the same amount of change.

I wonder if my dad is going through the reverse. When I first came back, my dad was a couch potato, but he could move if he wanted to. He would try to walk to the library. We could have a conversation, even if it was a basic, sometimes fractured one.

Now, even that is impossible. His decline feels real, like I can almost reach out and touch it. I just don’t know what the world even looks like to him anymore.

As for my mom, I can tell that she’s fighting her own decline. She’s mostly recovered from her stroke, but there are definite signs that she too, is feeling the weakness of age. She can’t eat as much. We go for walks and now she struggles to do two laps around the park when she used to do three. Despite writing so many things down, she still suffers from anxiety about when her next appointment is, what a certain medication does, or whether or not I have a guitar lesson today.

She still has her rare moments of lucidity, where she yells at me for leaving dirty dishes in the sink and how I’m picking up bad habits and how no one will ever marry me. But they are fleeting, and like my dad, with enough time she eventually forgets about them.

Her mental state becomes the most clear to me when I take her to San Francisco to visit a relative who’s in town on vacation.

“Can we leave now?” she asks around eleven. We need to be there at noon.

“Let’s leave in fifteen minutes. It doesn’t take that long to get there.”

“No…” she says, “it’s San Francisco. There will be traffic.”

I check traffic on Google Maps to prove her wrong, but it turns out there actually is traffic and that she’s right and we should leave now.

“Fine, let’s go.”

The lunch is mostly unremarkable. We pick up her relative’s family from Fisherman’s Wharf and eat in Chinatown, and then drop them off before driving back home. But on the way back, my mom starts to go a little haywire.

“Were we just in Chinatown?”

“Yes.”

“But where was their hotel? It didn’t seem that far.”

“It wasn’t. It was like ten minutes.”

“But aren’t we in San Francisco?”

I’m starting to get confused. “Yes.”

“But then where was their hotel?”

“In San Francisco?”

“Really? Their hotel is in San Francisco?”

“Yes…”

“No wonder it took so long to come here. I didn’t know we were coming to San Francisco.”

I feel some small sense of panic swirling in my head. She’s the one who pushed me to leave earlier because there would be traffic in San Francisco, right? She knows this is where we were coming, right?”

“Their hotel was in Fisherman’s Wharf,” I say.

“Oh…” she sighs, and I wonder if things have finally connected. Or not. “Is Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco?”

What the hell is going on? I think to myself.

And in the moment, I have to wonder if this is what a glimpse of what my mom’s brain is like, what it’s like to be her. As if a bunch of facts simply exist and you can’t link one to the next. Almost like puzzle pieces that seem to morph or disappear and then reappear, right when you go to reach for them. I can’t even imagine.

Not all is lost though.

Despite my parents’ rapid decline, I think my work in bringing the nursing home to their home is beginning to pay off, and that the foundation for me being able to be away is finally in place. Whether due to my mom’s recognition of her new limitations, or just my incessant pushing, my mom is starting to accept many of the changes I’ve been making. This includes the small things, like allowing me to set up even more auto-pay settings on some of her bills, but also the biggest things.

I’ve been fighting my mom on having the lady who comes to clean the house—I’ll call her Kelly—come over more often than the once every other week she does now. I tell her either we bring her in a couple times a week, or my mom has to let me hire somebody else.

Kelly now comes over once a week, which isn’t a bad start.

“How many times do you think I need to go to the post office?” my mom asks me randomly one day. “Two times? Three times?”

The answer is once, but I know that’s an answer she won’t answer accept. So I pick the next best thing.

“Two.”

“Then I will ask Kelly to come over twice a week.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“She can also take me to go buy groceries and maybe see the doctor.”

I say my next words very slowly, very cautiously. “And then if you feel like you need it, you can ask her to come by more often as time goes on.”

I wait for her objection to come flying through the air. That she’ll actually be fine. That the house actually isn’t that dirty. That maybe this will be a temporary thing.

The objection doesn’t come.

“Yes,” my mom says instead, “I think that makes sense.”

This, is an improvement. And I really do have to hand it to my mom. For all her struggles, she’s been adapting and fighting as hard as she can.

I even thought that the way she reacts to my dad is a wash, that it can’t be changed anymore. Just like how when my dad was in the hospital, my mom seemed to deteriorate faster, but once he came home, she weirdly seemed to get better.

But I think she’s also beginning to adapt to the idea I’ve been telling her: my dad’s brain is broken.

There are the small signs that my mom is treating my dad differently. She says a little less to him now. She’s learning to just walk away when he becomes agitated (and perhaps her own short-term memory loss is helping with that as well). She’s even learning to use her written adaptations with my dad creatively too.

“Your dad said he will shower tomorrow,” she comes to find me one day. “He promised.”

I fake a smile, because I know that my dad won’t remember whatever he promised by tomorrow—although it does leave me with an idea.

“Maybe you should write down his promise down. Otherwise he’ll probably forget.”

It might be my idea, but it’s based off of what I’ve seen her do: take post-it’s, notepads, her calendar, whatever, and fill it with notes because the written word is more reliable than her own brain is.

And so that’s what she does. I watch her scribble some English onto a post-it note, write the date, and then walk over to my dad to show him.

“Sign this,” she demands. He obliges.

I don’t know what to expect when tomorrow actually does roll around, except when I pass by my parents’ bathroom at night I hear the shower running. I check around the house to make sure my dad hasn’t turned on the water but hid somewhere else just to make it sound like he took a shower, but the only other person I find is my mom, drying her hair in the other bathroom.

“You actually did it,” I tell her, wrapping my arms around her neck. “Well done.”

I think I see a smile form on her lips.

It’s definitely not the trick I would have considered, and I have to give her some credit. Then again, he is her husband after all.