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I woke
from my dream with that southern hill-country woman’s voice in my ear. The
voice,
the memory, from past years, was triggered in that non-linear way of
memories, by a phone conversation with my daughter the previous day.
My
oldest granddaughter is in a precarious place in her life. A baby with babies. Jessica
is young, alone with two babies, lonely, no job, no direction and thinking biologically
instead of using her logical brain. I remember those feelings; I was young
once.
Harper’s father sent her train
tickets for a visit. Harper is Jess’s older daughter, my great-granddaughter. Jess wants to leave three-year old Harper for
a few days with her Dad, whom she has not seen in two years, while Jess goes
off with old friends and has fun. I say this with complete understanding of and
compassion for Jess’s need to escape fears and uncertainties she lives with
daily.
What we know of the father’s family
is that Jess would walk into a situation fraught with high risk that the other
grandparents could snatch her child, among other dangers.
My daughter’s quandary, of which her
sharing has given me ownership too, is, where are the borders between
interfering, helping, and enabling? Jess is an adult. Well, a baby adult. We
know. We understand. We once were all-wise baby adults too, making decisions
with body-parts disconnected from brains.
Dee Dee gave Jessica a home when
the baby, born to a mother flying high, was a mere six hours old, adopted her
and raised her. Jessica is a beautiful young woman and a good mother. But we
don’t forget the years of work with a severely fetal-alcohol damaged child, the
lack of understanding the consequences of her actions, the areas of brain
damaged beyond repair.
We know the dangers. We know the
consequences. We know the pain which has no end. We’ve walked that road of bad
decisions, my daughter Dee Dee and me, separately and together.
We cried, slobbered on the
telephones. Jess is an adult. She’ll make her own decisions, good ones and
otherwise and we cannot control her, only love her.
So I took that to bed with me last
night and in that night-time anti-logical way, mixed family worries with recent
X-Rays of my own body, riddled with arthritis throughout.
Dreams and memories merged into
horse-back riding across the plains, miniature blue buffalo, and a visit with
my own mother when she lay dying in a hospital in southern Indiana. Dreams are
another anti-logical mechanism.
My mother was committed to the
hospital and left my life when I was four, back when there was small
understanding of mental illness and treatment thereof.
The visit, when I was in my 40s,
was no dream. My mom was a shriveled up little thing, I could have held her on
my lap. We spent hours just loving each other without words, forgiving and
accepting forgiveness.
Across the hall an elderly man lay,
also silently dying. He had a stream of relatives in and out his hospital door.
One morning I overheard his wife complain. “Ah don’t right-ly know, “she said.
“Hit might be the Ar-thur-i-tis.”
I’ll always remember that scene.
When nothing seems to work, when life is a muddle-puddle, when faced with the
impossible, I think, Hit might be the Ar-thur-i-tis.
Sondra Ashton
HDN: Looking out my back door
July 26, 2018
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