B-largh

Well, tomorrow I take my mom and dad to the bus station, they hop on a greyhound, and then I'm all by myself.

Now, on some level this is very sad for me. It gives me that lonely feeling I've had many times--like when I sat in my apartment in Columbus watching mom and dad drive away, or when I left them at the gate to fly off to Hawaii. It's that voice that coughs in your head and says "yeeeeppp. . . they're gone now. It's just you and me here."

But on another level, it's such a relief to have them gone. The whole of our little trip has cycled from great adventure--like trekking 12 hours on the open road, taking turns driving and chatting--to moments of supreme tension--where mom has screamed in the backseat behind me that no one listens to her, that the truck rental station was RIGHT THERE. . . .

The hardest part of this move wasn't what I anticipated. I had thought it would be the overwhelming change in lifestyle; the move from dependence to independence. Or maybe just the move to a new city, permanently. But in the end, the hardest part has been my mother.

Because mom had brain surgery 4 years after I was born, she's had to take anti-seizure med's for the rest of her known life. Over the years, there have been mixups in the medication which meant drastic changes in mom. Once the pharmacy messed up and gave her heart medication, and she collapsed into a gran mal seizure in the kitchen while only I and my brother were home. For a LONG time, mom had been spacy and generally forgetful. Then they switched her to medication, and we got a focused mom who remembered details she thought she had forgotten long ago. And life was GOOD. For most of the summer, mom has been a good deal of fun to be with. I mean, she's driven me crazy as only a mom can, but that's par for the course.

But as the trip has progressed, always around lunchtime and dinnertime she starts getting spacey. Her face droops and she gets very quiet and somber, for no particular reason. And, the worst part, she gets passive aggressive. Like today, we ate lunch at a Thai place that we ate at the day before. She really wanted to go there so we went. Then she said she was thinking about looking for a Thai resteraunt for dinner, and I said that maybe we could try someplace else, because we'd just had Thai for lunch.

That's ALL I said.

From then on, whenever I brought up the topic of dinner, she'd get very quiet and say things like "what I want for dinner is insignifcant. it doesn't matter" Later, when we got back to the apartment (we had been on campus), I asked her if she wanted to go to the Thai resteraunt nearby that she expressed interest in earlier. I thought, hey, I really don't mind if we go again, so I'll ask. She just gave me another "I don't care, it doesn't matter" response, acting though like she someone had beat her into submission to going where dad and I wanted to go.

So, since she said she didn't care, we walked down and had a nice dinner at a local restaurant. Through the course of the dinner, she didn't talk. I'd ask her questions about the day, and she'd weakly smile and reply, and then go back into staring vacantly. She looked out the window, or otherwise looked like she would break down into tears at any moment. She took the keys and went to the apartment, while dad and I went for a walk around the block.

Dad and I talked about the whole thing. What could be done? How could we make it better? It's hard to say. We both thinks it's the medication, because the weirdness happens regularly when her medication dips to its lowest levels. But really, there isn't much you can do.

I mean, you can't call her on it. You can't tell her she's being irrational; often she's convinced that you've called her something or yelled at her when you haven't done anything close to it. And if you say anything about it, she just boils over further. Mainly, you try to ignore the weirdness, hoping that she comes out the fog and acts like Mom again. The person you love and enjoy having around.

The hardest part is watching dad deal with it. Tomorrow I get to say goodbye to the problem. But dad's been dealing with it for most of his life. We all love mom, and that's what makes it hardest. You don't want to treat her like she isn't capable of controlling her own emotions. You don't want to ignore the weird behaviors, and you don't want to reward them.

So what do you do, exactly?