Sometimes I’m not sure why I put myself through so much drama. I took mom to the DMV on Friday, did my regular Saturday with her and then visited my aunt, mom’s sister, on Sunday. I must be some kind of masochist. 

The DMV visit has already been described, but the visit to my aunt’s house was no picnic either. I’m honestly not sure if my aunt suffers from dementia of some sort too, but she suffers from paranoid delusions, which is a behavior of middle-stage Alzheimer’s . She is also hard of hearing and doesn’t wear her hearing aids so can’t hear or participate in a conversation. I also suspect she doesn’t take her meds as she should or that she had been hitting the sauce before we arrived. She was belligerent concerning her former partner, again, and insulting concerning my husband’s mother, whom she had been friends with for 30 years but who she fell out with when my mother-in-law told her what a fool she was being over an imagined affair my aunt’s partner was having with her boss. 

Sound complicated? It is.

But all family dramas are complicated misunderstandings or involve some sort of mental decline, right? It’s words or deeds taken out of context or accusations or interpretations made by someone who isn’t quite balanced and takes personal insult or slight and can influence others to believe the same. It’s often not even a deliberate manipulation; it’s that they themselves are mentally ill in some way. 

This is demonstrated in my life by my mother’s behavior. In addition to depression, my mother always had low level paranoia. Not off the rails like she is now with her belief that someone is entering the apartment to steal things, but a conviction that my father’s family disapproved of her because she was foreign. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t. We’ll never know, but she always suffered such low self-esteem that she could have easily imagined it. 

It wasn’t her appearance. She was beautiful, my mother. Truly. I really don’t think this is nostalgia, but it’s not dispassionate either. She is my mother, after all, but I have the pictures that prove how beautiful she was. 

Mom is lucky in her body, if not in her mind. She has the infirmities anyone has at her age, but she doesn’t have joint issues, for example. She can still walk a good distance – a mile? Two? without support. If we have to rest while walking through the park, what of it? We’re not running a race and part of the pleasure is people watching (Oh! If only we lived in Italy where people watching is an art…) and taking in the surroundings. In fact, I watched her walk away from me on Saturday and was a little astonished by how fluidly an 89 year old woman can still move. I’ve seen many people who are much younger who are not that fortunate.

However her beauty could never overcome a lack of self-esteem or confidence. Who knows why? Personally, I think she came out of the womb that way. I know this is a strange comparison to make, but I’ve had pets in my life for 30+ years and the personality is the personality. They have it from the get-go. Things alter a bit over time, but they are feisty or docile or inquisitive or… throughout their lives. Mom always had determination, even if she was lacking in self-esteem. She had, and still has, a stubbornness (pig-headedness?) that carried her through. This has always been a part of her character. 

It’s been a long day, and as noted above, I must have been a masochist to do all this kind of crap over three days. I’m still processing my aunt’s world and don’t know what to do to help her. That’s the instinct, after all. To help. She has few others in terms of blood relations, clearly it can’t be my mother and her brother lives in Miami, but I often think why that matters anyway. Relationships are what you make in life, and that doesn’t mean blood, necessarily. But she and my mother were always close and I feel that tug of obligation, if only on my mother’s behalf.

But I still don’t know what to do.