Escape to Taos, and Reflection

After three weeks, a lot of good, hard work helping set things in place for my mother, and a few encounters with the sharp stick of my mother's temper, I opted to get a little break up in Taos before my final push in Santa Fe.

It has been snowing in Santa Fe and Taos. New Mexico in the snow is glorious--the glitter of cold dry snow like a blanket of diamonds softly limning the trees, the adobe walls, the mountains.

The allure of skiing is huge. The allure of seeing my dear friend, CT, up in Taos, is also huge. And TK from Santa Fe and Kathmandu was going up on Thursday, so I booked an AirBnB in the Ski Valley and set out with eagerness and relief to meet him and get in a few runs together too.

My mother is groping to hold information in her mind, and is ever less able to. So we have looped through the trip over and over, now at least ten times. Once or twice, she was OK with it, understanding that I would be returning after two nights, and cheerily requesting that I ski a run for her. Mostly, though, the loops are fearful and she has trouble holding on to where I am going, who I am seeing, and when or even if I will be coming back.

We went through it over and over, as do the caregivers now that I am not there. The first afternoon (of two, mind you), I had a phone call from her to loop through it again, in which she reverted to the most familiar extortionary tactic of the past few years: "Can't you see I'm dying? How can you abandon me when I'm dying?"

There are so many layers to this one.

On the face of it, she is right about the fact that she is dying. However, the glide path is MUCH less steep than it seemed when I first bolted down here. In fact, I can say that the use of that claim as a weapon makes me feel more skeptical of the imminence of said event. It is a tactic that she has employed in an attempt to get me to behave in the way that she wants. She uses it whenever I demur on staying longer, or on staying at the house overnight (which I won't do), or, really, when I just hold any boundary whatsoever. It's been that way for eight or more years now, since she was first diagnosed with colon cancer.

Which I have to say just makes it a bit like the boy who cried wolf.

I won't lie, I have occasionally muttered, "well then, get on with it" under my breath. I'm not proud of it, but I am a human, and my heart isn't always brimming with metta. Affection simply cannot be wheedled, coerced, or beaten out of a person--not for any length of time, anyway. This is something that my mother has never understood, even before dementia.

The flow of accusations and recriminations stayes consistent, with slight variations. Sometimes she makes them through implication only; sometimes through comparisons to other people, accompanied by arch looks held for just that moment longer to make a point, or a sidelong glance that could be read from the back row of a Broadway theater. Sometimes she is more direct in her accusations of my being uncaring and disrespectful: "I took care of my mother for two and a half years when she was dying." "I never would have talked to my mother that way when she was dying," etc.). Occasionally, it includes screaming and name calling: "YOU STUPID BITCH, CAN'T YOU SEE I'M DYING ?!!?").

It's all the same stuff I have heard before, but now her internal editor is so frayed that she can't really restrain herself in front of other people. She just erupts with what she is feeling. So everyone around her is left staring at the metaphorical pile of steaming cat vomit on the carpet, while the cat stalks off, trying to look collected, swishing her tail indignantly.

One day, refusing to accept my impending departure for the evening, she let loose as we were sitting at the kitchen table with a caregiver, "I," who pulled out her phone and really looked like she just wanted to crawl through it to safety... Completely oblivious, my mother kept feeling around to find a chink in my armor--"But I don't understand WHY! You never tell me WHY you won't stay with me in this house--when I'm dying! Don't you like the house? If you don't, I will leave it to someone else!" Classic.

There is a predictable escalation path, a fixed flowchart of responses. I usually start with the fact that a caregiver stays overnight, in the only guest room.

When she goes harder, I can respond that it helps avoid the conflict that can ruin a visit OR, worse, prompt her heart to go into AFib (which has happened a few times).

More queries for why, and I gesture back and forth between us: "This. This dynamic is really unpleasant. Let's please just enjoy when we are together instead of spending that time fighting."

More pushing. Which gets to my explanation that I draw a hard line at physical violence, and that after she took a swing at me one night during an argument years ago, I simply don't stay in the house, because I need to feel safe and comfortable in order to have any relationship. She denies it all, and eventually relents to say that, IF she had, it was only because I was leaving. Which transfers the blame right back to her unloving and selfish daughter.

But back to poor "I", staring down her phone and willing it to whisk her away. Getting nowhere with me, my demented mother turns to her and speaks to her in Spanish. Now, I am not fluent, but I have enough Latin and French and Italian to know that she is ordering her to call the person coming for the night and tell her not to come, so that I will be forced to stay overnight. Awkward and uncomfortable, I demurs and looks to me.

So I step in and ask what my mother is saying. She tells me she is talking to her friend here and that it is none of my business. She is sullen and retreats within herself to consider the next line of attack. So it is clear that the time has come for me to take my leave for the day.

And now, I will go and ski the soft, buttery moguls and weave between the trees and make the little yip yips of joy that I learned from an Austrian Mama years ago. I will feel joy and ease and dance with the mountain.