This is really, really hard to write. So hard, that I've started, stopped and started writing it again multiple time over the past month.
When I first started this blog more almost nine years ago, I did so in part because Jude and I had so many friends and family who seemed interested in her pregnancy, doctor's appointments and our preparations to become parents. It was easier to provide an update once, in a blog post, as opposed to having innumerable telephone or in person conversations with those we love.
Having lost my father at an early age and subsequently spending a lifetime chasing his ghost, I wanted our son, J.P., then later Joe, too, to have a record of our lives when they were babies and toddlers. I wanted them to know a little bit about me, how I felt and how much they meant to me at a time when they were too young to have a lot of memories. In truth, I never planned to keep this blog alive as long as I have, nine years later.
Shortly after I started the blog, it took on a life of its own for me, in part because my mom took so much pleasure in reading every word of every post. In those days, she devoured every bit of news and every note on the blog about J.P.'s life as a baby and toddler and our lives together as a family. After reading a post, she never failed to complement me on my writing and tell me that if I wanted to, I could be a writer. Of course, this pleased me to no end. I even arranged to have the first year of the blog bound - complete with photographs - so she would have a copy to show her friends. She displayed it proudly on the coffee table in her den, where it still sits to this day.
If I hadn't posted in a few days, my mom invariably asked me why. I feel a little guilty admitting this now, but there were times when I felt annoyed if work or some other series of life events had kept me from updating the blog for a few days and she asked when she could expect a new post. As I reflect back, though, one of the things that kept me going and that kept the blog alive was knowing that my mom was reading and enjoying each and every post. And, too, that she was proud of me and my efforts to be a good father. That was a huge part of it, actually.
I realize, now, that I was blogging for her, too. I think, on some level, my mom treasured getting a chance to see, in me, at least a partial view of what my father would have been like with Tracy and me had he lived past the age of thirty. I also think that when she read my most intimate thoughts and feelings on what being a father meant to me, it brought her closer to my father or to her memory of him and what might have been. I don't know that, of course, but it's what I think.
I should have known something was wrong, two or three years ago, when after posting on the blog I didn't receive an immediate response from my mom. More and more, I found I had to remind her to check the blog to see what I had posted. Roles had reversed, as I began to nag her about reading my latest post. Still, I was too self-absorbed to give it much thought. Also, I think I was afraid to give any serious thought to why my mom wasn't keeping up with the blog anymore. My head was buried in the sand. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. Other time, ignorance is an expression of fear and an avoidance of reality.
Slowly, over time, I realized my mom wasn't reading the blog at all anymore. When I asked why, she always made an excuse. Her computer wasn't working (we bought her an new one), her computer had a virus, she had been too busy, etc. What I know now, of course, is that my mom had stopped using her computer at all. This vibrant, social creature, for whom e-mail and the internet had been a an exciting portal to her friends and the world, had lost the desire or ability to operate her computer.
And it broke my heart.
My mom is struggling, and has been struggling, with daily life activities that she could perform without a second thought two or three years ago. It's all happened so fast, or maybe it hasn't. I don't know for sure. I do know that I want to cry and, in fact, when I see my mom limping around her house with her cane simply trying to get from one place to the other, I almost do. Or, as so often happens now, when my mom repeats the same question to me two or three times in a brief telephone conversation, after I hang up at the end of the call, I want to yell at the top of my lungs at the injustice of it all.
More than once in the last month or two, I have walked the streets of my neighborhood after the boys and Jude are in bed, in tears, trying to make sense of why this is happening to my mom. What kind of a world is this when a woman who has given her heart and soul to others her entire adult life is faced with back and hip pain that prevent her from walking normally and a mind that seemingly fails her a little bit more with each passing day.
I am ashamed to admit this, but for the first time in my life, I am questioning my faith in God.
I just do not understand how after all my mom has been through - losing her husband at such a young age and raising Tracy, Alice and me as a single parent; losing both of her sisters; losing her father; caring for her mother for years and later, her mother's sister (Aunt Sara Dickson); working nights at Baptist Hospital for 17 years; being the rock upon which our family has been built - that the life she is left with is the one she has now, in pain and unsteady when she walks and cursed with an ever fading memory.
Nothing I have been through or learned in my life has prepared me for the maelstrom of emotions swirling in my head and in my heart. I am so conflicted. I feel terribly guilty when I haven't seen my mom in a few days. Then, when I pick her up and take to our house for dinner or stop by her house to spend some time with her, I feel so depressed afterwards because I cannot help her. I feel so fucking helpless, so fucking useless at a time when my mom needs me to be so much more than I am, as a son and as a man.
For as long as I can remember, my mom has been my best friend. Over the years, we laughed and cried together. We argued and fought with each other, at times, too. But she was the constant in my life, the one person I talked to on the telephone almost every day of my adult life.
On countless occasions, I called her late at night when she was working at Baptist Hospital. I called her on my way to work or on my way home from work. She reveled in calling me in the afternoon at work when a story broke in the sports world. We talked about sports, politics, family and so often, she steered the conversation back to my life, to what I was doing at work, to my exploits on the softball field or, later, to my boys.
This is what is ripping my heart out, when you get down to it. I am losing the best friend I've ever had - she's slipping away from me a little bit more each day - and I can't do a damn this about it. And it's absolutely killing me.
