Change of Pace

I kind of love how unimpressed he looks with the whole Halloween thing. This poor kid has been so manipulated and overextended and alternately neglected and harassed...he really is just about the best sport in the world. Maybe it's my guilt for giving him such an unstructured, drama-filled life, but I certainly didn't deny him a few bites of chocolate. He seems to understand that it's a treat and still happily gobbles down the fruit and veggies that I collect for him from the hospital cafeteria. Oddly, he really, really seems to love the combo of cubed beets and peas.

I also allowed myself to indulge in a little bit of parental pride after our trick-or-treating foray last night. Nate managed to collect ten pieces of candy from only three houses and the first thing he did when we got home was to dump it all out of his plastic pumpkin and sort the various packages by type. I know kids do that, but I didn't think he was developmentally there yet. THEN, he picked out one little Hershey bar, set it aside and carefully dropped all of the other candies back into the pumpkin. Gripping the chocolate in his sweaty little fist, he crawled over to me and held it out to be opened. I held a square out for him to nibble the corner of and he managed to get about half the chocolate piece in his mouth. Definitely his parents' son.

My grandmother isn't doing quite as well as she had been, so we're settling in for the rougher haul that we should have expected from the beginning. She's really tired and sad and hates what is happening to her. The doctors are trying to get the right combination of medicines to balance fluids and blood pressure and various other bodily statistics, but it's a tricky game to master. We'd hoped to have her out of the hospital and into a rehab facility by now, but it looks like it's going to be at least a few days more before that happens.

As in, "time flies" since we won't actually be flying back to Ohio this time. We got to spend a couple of weeks back in St Louis catching up on house cleaning and doctor's appointments and the like, but on Tuesday we'll be renting a minivan and driving back to Columbus with Jack for Thanksgiving. He'll stay for the holiday festivities, but then he has to head right back to Missouri and Nathan, my mom and I will follow sometime later. I still need to figure out how long we'll be staying this time around. It really depends upon how my grandmother is doing and how helpful we can be for my aunt Brigid and cousin Kim, who are shouldering most of the day-to-day time commitment right now.

We've gotten occasional updates on my grandmother's condition, but I'm not really sure how significant her improvement has been since we left. I'm hope all those incremental improvements that don't seem all that dramatic on a daily basis, will end up seeming really dramatic to us after two weeks away.

I worry that this back and forth puts a noticeable strain on my mother's condition, so this trip will be a test as to how often we can get to Columbus to help out. I want to be able to support Brigid as much as possible, but if it's at the expense of my mom's health, then it's kind of counter-productive.

She's been okay the past couple of weeks here in St. Louis, but not great. We've had a lot of evenings where she's been basically non-responsive and getting her ready for bed on those nights takes FORever. She's exhibiting signs of depression and despite increasingly profound difficulties with communication, she's actually seemed to express on several occasions that she's not happy living here. Unfortunately she has NOT been able to engage in any kind of cogent discussion about the other choices available to her.

I'm sure this kind of conversation stirs up all kinds of anxieties in her, which tends to inhibit her fluidity with language. This leaves me guessing most of the time as to what she wants or what she is feeling and I'm sure I'm probably wrong as often as not. I really do think I do a good job at being patient and giving her opportunities to try and do things herself before jumping in, but while trying to help her through a difficult situation yesterday, she really shut down on me, physically and emotionally, and wouldn't even make eye contact with me as I tried to coach her through the necessary motions. When I asked at one point, I'm sure with some frustration, "why won't you look at me?" She said, "I'm scared of you."

I try not to take things like this too personally, but it leaves me wondering what I'm doing wrong and what I could do better or if maybe just the inescapable intimacy of the parent-child relationship makes it impossible for the caretaker relationship to ever feel completely comfortable.

All of these dramas, of course, usually occur with Nathan either screaming in the background, climbing on the dog, climbing on me, turning on the hot water to the tub, trying to take my mother's medications, playing patty-cake in the toilet bowl...the list could go on forever. I juggle the two roles as gracefully as I can, but it's impossible not to wonder if I'm just short-changing everyone, including Jack.

Over the last week, we've been trying to work on Nathan's sleep habits with an eye to getting him to finally start sleeping through the night. I went to a talk by a pediatric sleep specialist last week and came home with some good ideas and new motivation to make it happen. We actually have made some progress towards making the mid-night snacks go a little faster and end with him in his crib and not in our bed, though it's complicated a bit when Jack's daughter is with us since she shares that room too. I just hope this next trip to Ohio doesn't undo all the productive gains that we've made so far.

Really, all I want for Christmas is eight hours of uninterrupted sleep and I think that would be a sure thing if not for all of this inconsistency in our lives. As it is, maybe it's more realistic to hope for it as a Valentine's Day present.

Okay, so the cousins are painfully cute and tons of fun to watch. They don't exactly play together, but they do interact and occasionally give each other hugs and kisses that make the grown-ups in the room just keel over and die from the ridiculous adorableness.

On the flip side, it's been tough to watch my mom and grandma as they struggle with the physical and mental challenges that come hand in hand with their health issues. My grandma has made great strides since we were here two weeks ago, but it's still not clear how much of an understanding she has of what happened to her or where she is. As her ability to speak has returned, she's definitely able to express a strong desire to go home. We're staying with her in shifts at this point so that she always has family in the room with her while she is awake, but I don't know how long we'll be able to keep that up.

Even though it doesn't require much physical effort to hang out in a nursing home room for a few hours a day, it still seems to take a real toll on my mom. She becomes increasingly passive and non-responsive over the course of the afternoon and by evening, it's really difficult for her to participate in the bedtime routine. She's also showing a lot more resistance to accepting help from me and I've been seeing more flare-ups of anger and resentment.

Intellectually, I know not to take these words personally, but it's still hard to know what to do when this happens. I just can't leave her half-dressed or tangled up in the sleeves of a shirt even when she tells me she wants me to go away and leave her alone. And I understand her resistance to letting me assist with the most intimate parts of her hygiene, but if she can't do these things and she won't let me do them...I don't know what to do. Sometimes I can deal with the situation by helping her to take a shower right there and then, but last night we'd just gotten the babies to sleep, so that simply wasn't an option.

So, that's where we are right now. Mornings with the babies getting everyone fed and dressed, afternoons at the nursing home watching tv, trying to engage grandma in conversation and chasing after bored toddlers and evenings scrambling around for dinner and getting everyone bathed and to sleep. (And for some of us, that amorphous fourth shift of late night wake-ups, feedings and screaming fits.)