The Bermuda Triangle of Trauma

This whole dementia/Alzheimer’s dynamic is my Bermuda Triangle of mother daughter relations. My mother is eighty-six years old and walks about two miles around town most days. (weather permitting) It’s dangerous, but to deny her this freedom would be a cruel injustice. She lives right across the road from the senior center in Placerville, and has been taking Yoga and Qigong classes for three weeks. It is not just a hearing issue, but the ever-expanding cognitive decline which causes her inability to follow the teacher’s instructions as well as the other, sixty to seventy-year-old students. Am I actually going to have to explain to my mother that she is not welcome at the senior’s center yoga class, because she’s just too old and can’t keep up? One of the reasons I was so excited about these classes was that I had hoped they would replace some of her long and potentially disastrous, up and down hill ramblings. The lack of sidewalks; proper curbs; and the proliferation of potholes and root damage to available walking surfaces in her neighborhood; is heart palpitating. The empathy that I feel for her is heart breaking; my previously hardened heart is breaking free. We are searching for assisted living that will keep her safe, but allow her the exercise that she needs to live her life, her way. The answer to this dilemma is as elusive as the lost city of Atlantis. And the surprising gift of my long-awaited compassion toward my mother, is as magical and mystical as the emerald and turquoise waters of Great Mother Sea. As a child I was destroyed by the abuse and neglect I experienced at her hands. It has been forty years since I fled my family, and I have professed for many years, that forgiveness, compassion and acceptance are the true gifts of the wounded healer’s path. And here I stand, at last, wide eyed in wonder at the literal truth of my proclamation. The compassion and concern I feel for her is striking. But now, how do I help her to navigate the shifting sands and submerged foundations of her life, when all of the familiar structures are crumbling and washing away? It is not wholly unlike the crumbling of the structures built of rage and frustration that I dwelt within for so long; at last giving way under the heady weight of compassion. Perhaps the structures that are crumbling beneath her now are the ones built of her own parent’s alcoholism, abuse and neglect; the structure of the twenty-seven years of abuse she endured at my father’s hand; the guilt and shame of her own lack of parenting skills and methods; and the abuse she watched and participated in as a mother. Perhaps she can transition off of this planet without that heavy load to bear; if it crumbles to dust before she departs? When my mother turned sixty, she took on a mantra that has so clearly come to pass; she would recite her mantra at the first hint of confrontation: “I’m old now, I don’t have to remember anything!” “I don’t have to remember anything.” This was her way of refusing to participate in our family’s healing; her way of suppressing everything. Who’s to say what is actually going on for her spiritually in all of this? It is enough for me to know that I have been called here to help my mother in this transition, and I fully intend to do just that, to the best of my human abilities.

Cathie Jo, March, 23rd. 2019
Pollock Pines, CA