Well it did my taxes

Which shouldn't have been any big deal at all but somehow I managed to make it a big deal

I talked to one of my mother's doctors

The way it work s seems to be that there's a doctor who's in charge of her care in the hospital

And that doctor is in the same medical group as her primary doctor

Because their group has a couple of different doctors that work in the hospital

And the doctor I talked to today was the same doctor I talked to on Friday who was really nice and made everything clear and was just really kind of a joy to talk to you

And then the doctor who was there over the weekend having talked to her multiple times I've got context for how she is and I if I talk to her again which I'm hoping I won't because I'm hoping she'll be out before the next weekend I would be able to understand what she meant but she doesn't have very good bedside manner and she freaked me out

But I talked to this first doctor again

And she seemed to think there was a good chance she would be out on Wednesday or Thursday

And we talked about some strategies for trying to get her to take her medicine

And I mean the fact of the matter is is that I think she's just been in denial

And so when she cuz she said she'd gained 20 lb over the last couple months and she hasn't really been eating that much

and I know she weighs herself all the time because her weight is one of the things that she would always talk to me about when we would go out to dinner

But in the process of texting her and talking to her everyday during the pandemic there hasn't been any mention of weight

But I'm not fixated on weight so I didn't snap to the fact that she wasn't talking about how she's lost weight

So maybe I should have caught that I don't know but she knew she was gaining weight and she knew she couldn't be gaining weight from what she was eating

And she's still working out with her trainer twice a week they're doing zoom or Facebook live or something I don't know I think it's varied several times

So she knew she couldn't be gaining weight but rather than you know doing something or calling the doctor or going in to see the doctor she just was in denial about it

But the thing is is that I mean she let herself get all swollen up and then it was this big ordeal with you know multiple doses of intravenous diuretic and you know CPAP and you know maybe going to be put on a ventilator and whatever

And if she can just monitor it so that you know if it's been a day or two and she's up 5 lb call the doctor and they can figure out what they're going to do to reduce her fluid levels

Because she's got congestive heart failure apparently even though she claims no doctor has told her that and she claims that this last doctor told her that she's in perfect health and she claimed last year that her primary care no I think she said her cardiologist told her that I'm not sure which doctor she said now told her but basically that she was super healthy and going to live to be 90 or something

But then today she said that since 2012 all of her doctors have made her feel like she was on death's door

So I don't know what they've told her because none of her stories match up

But if when she's up 5 lb in a short period of time and it's got to be water weight she contacts her doctor then the doctor can have her come in or she can have her take an extra diuretic pill or whatever but 5 lb of water weight is not a crisis situation and if they can deal with it when it's not a crisis situation that's better obviously

But I mean this situation was I mean technically life-threatening

But she did her walk test today she walked around for 6 minutes without oxygen and she didn't get tired and her oxygen levels didn't drop below 94 so that's really good and that's an indication that probably she'll be able to get out Wednesday or Thursday

however her nurse told me that when she went to sleep she took a nap when she went to sleep her oxygen levels dropped to 88 and they don't know why that is so that's an indication that she might not get out on Wednesday or Thursday

I don't know I feel very surreal

And I'm sorry I have not paid attention to much of anything today I've been pretty ADD

So I hope you don't feel ignored

I wasn't trying to ignore you

I'm just confused by her

I mean I understand denial I do

But I don't really understand the way she just kind of hands off her health to physicians

Like when they were saying she had prediabetes

she was mad at her doctor because she's like well I've been coming to her all this time and she should have seen the signs

And it's like well maybe

But if you think the signs were so obvious you're with you everyday why are you at the mercy of your doctor to determine what's going on with you why aren't you just you know monitoring yourself

And I didn't say that

and she goes on and on about how incompetent all these doctors are that she's had and now thrown over from new ones

Like not just in passing but like she'll go on a diatribe about that when she can't breathe and she's needing to be telling me something pertinent and she'll just go off on that and it's like you know maybe not right now

I would have said you've only got so many spoons but I didn't want to have to go into the whole explanation of the spoon concept

I don't know I don't trust doctors

My experience with doctors is they're kind of like mechanics if they can catch it doing the thing that's wrong in the right context then maybe they know what it is otherwise they're just guessing and troubleshooting

anyway it's funny she keeps going on about allergies like you know that's the reason why she's having trouble breathing cuz she's having really bad hours she's and whatever

But then today I have just been sneezing and sneezing and sneezing

And sneezing is not a symptom I usually have with my allergies I mean sometimes and I'm not saying I never sneeze but usually if I sneeze it's because there's something you know in the immediate area that is aggravating me and I'm inside with the air conditioning on so that is not happening but when I got up this morning I was sneezing and then later this afternoon I was sneezing and I was like damn is you know they're like a really bad ragweed outbreak or something

So I looked it up and it's a super low pollen day

So I don't know what that's all about

Anyway

There's a bunch of stuff that I'm going to have to figure out a way to find out from her

Because her plan is that if anything happens to her I'm going in her house and starting to sort through boxes of mail to try to find whatever information it is that you need

Which I guess if she's dead I've got a reasonable amount of time to sort through the mail and find whatever it is you need but I don't know what it is you need and if she's not dead and there's a need for something to be found quickly there's not a chance in hell

But I really don't have a good grasp of how long she might be expected to live

I talked to the doctor today like I said and she said that she's got the congestive heart failure but it's diastolic congestive heart failure which is I guess not as bad and can be more stable because basically it means that her heart muscle is not very flexible she's also got the AFib though but she's got the pacemaker for that and she's got a leaky heart valve so that's why they've got her on blood thinners because she gets some amount of pooling or can have pooling in her heart and that can lead to blood vessels which can lead to blood clots which can lead to heart attacks

But this doctor said that some people they get that leaky heart thing and it doesn't really get worse they just have a mild amount of it and they continue to just have a mild amount of it it's not something that always deteriorates it can but you know it just has to be monitored there's no particular reason to think that it's going to get worse

And the contest of heart failure you know I mean it's not good but again she seemed to think that you know she does not have a terminal condition she has something that probably will eventually kill her but there's no reason for it to deteriorate rapidly unless she doesn't take care of herself so I just have to make it very clear to her which I think I have but I don't know that you know if she wants to live she needs to really take this seriously

Because she has a condition that can become life-threatening pretty easily or it can be managed and be reasonably managed

But that last doctor told her or not the last one the current cardiologist told her supposedly that she was not going to have he could pretty much guarantee she was not going to have a heart attack and something else that indicated to her that she was great and you know healthy as an ox and you know whatever so she just didn't take her medicine she caught to me that she wasn't taking the diuretic in the morning and then another conversation that maybe she wasn't always remembering to take it at night either so probably the truth is that she isn't taking it all

And the doctor told me today that she told her that she's not sure she always remembers to take her blood pressure medication

Which probably means she isn't taking that except when she takes her blood pressure and has a number that's high enough to scare her

and I know at one point she was taking her blood pressure at least once and probably multiple times a day but she told me that with the raw food doctor her blood pressure went way down and she didn't even need to be on that medication and so she wasn't taking it at all and so I guess if she is now healthy as an ox she for sure doesn't need to take it

But that doctor said that she thinks the raw food doctor did a lot of damage to her

because he took her off her medication and he turned down her pulse and you know I don't know but initially I was very excited by the raw food thing and then she started telling me things that didn't make any sense

like when she started going to him she was going to be doing the raw food but he took her off for medication on Monday when she wasn't going to get her first raw food meal from his clinic thing until Thursday

And then when she went to her trainer who used to be a nurse she was all swole up and the nurse called that cardiologist and said hey she needs to come in and see you and he's like it's too late in the day just have her go to the emergency room and she's like nuhuh cuz you screwed this up

And at that point I was like well I mean I like that he's raw food but that seems not very good

So I was kind of like well but then she was like oh blah blah blah blah blah I love him he's great and he likes me so much and blah blah blah

and then she would say well he's always doing all these tests but I never get any of the results

And that didn't seem very good

And I would say well you know that doesn't seem very good and she's like oh blah blah blah blah blah blah

And then she said that he wasn't telling her what her condition was he was just saying you know your heart muscles just kind of old and tired

Which is technically true

And then she said that he had that portal that you could log into that had all your diagnostic information on it that you could look up at any time

And I was like oh can I see that and she was like uuuuuuuhhhhhhmmmmmm

And apparently the answer to that was no

and then I was saying well what does that say and she's like well I can't really get on there it's a problem blah blah blah

So but then after she went to the new doctor and he told her she was healthy as an ox

then she said when she was complaining about the other doctor how all his diagnostic stuff on the website or portal or whatever was saying she had congestive heart failure and I'm like wait wait what

but then she claimed that nobody ever told her she had congestive heart failure so I don't f****** know what has happened

and it might be that the only way I'm going to know what is going on is if I go with her to all her doctor visits and write everything down and treat her like she's a child and I don't want to do that

But I'm uncertain if she really knows anything about her condition or if she's really just finding out this weekend that she has congestive heart failure

And what is this crap about she's been thinking she was on death door for 8 years

When the whole time she's been telling me she feels great and she's going to live to be in her 90's

I really hope I'm not like that

I mean I have my fair share of denial for sure

And I don't go to the doctor

and when I have gone to doctors I have often been very confused by what they say and they often do seem like they don't want to tell you what's going on but it just didn't make any sense to me that now two or three cardiologists have supposedly told her that they would write all of her stuff down and mail it to her and then with repeated calling to ask for said letter they've just given her the run around and refused to tell her what was wrong with her

That didn't make a lot of sense to me but I just trust doctor so much that it wasn't completely unbelievable

but it does seem like an odd thing for a doctor to do if what they want their patient to do is take care of themselves and don't do stupid things

So I don't know I I just don't know

I just know that talking to the doctors that I've talked to and the nurses that I've talked to feels like the first actual information that I've gotten

And I kind of suspected she might have the beginnings of congestive heart failure but I mean you know people get old they get congestive heart failure that's a pretty common thing for your heart to get hardened especially if you eat the American diet and live the American lifestyle and whatever it's pretty common

And nobody lives forever and everybody dies of something and so you know if she had congestive heart failure well really all you can do is monitor that you can't fix it

So even though I figured that that was probably the case you know she's going to the doctor every couple of weeks it seems like and she's taking bunches of medications although apparently not well not bunches but several

So I mean I just sort of thought it was under control

And I got some more story about her cardiologist cuz I've been talking to her and so she's been letting stuff slip

she asked the cardiologist again about the letter and he's like what do you mean and she's like you know you promised to mail me a letter and he's like well usually I call people to tell him about their results didn't I call you and she's like well yeah you did call me

But whatever it was he said she didn't listen or she didn't hear it or she didn't believe it or she just couldn't deal with it

So in the story she gave me none of that happened

So I mean I don't know

did the new doctor tell her something that made her feel like she was healthy as an ox and didn't have anything wrong

or was it just that he said he could pretty much guarantee she wouldn't have a heart attack in the next year and heart attack is the only heart condition that she can imagine as being a serious condition based on life experience or people she's known or something and so she thought that meant she was healthy as an ox

I don't know I'm sorry I'm going over and over and over the same thing I just I don't understand

I'm not I'm not blaming her

I'm just trying to understand if she just worked up enough denial to screw herself up really bad

or if there's some way that she just really didn't understand that she had a condition that needed to be managed

And like much of my experience with my mother I really don't know what she's thinking or how she reasons things out or what goes through her head she seems to come to some conclusions that seem pretty illogical for somebody who majored in math that Rice University

By which I mean

But she wanted to be was a math teacher

I don't understand

How that kind of love of math which is all very mathy I guess I think of that as being very concrete thinking in reality based

Like math is supposed to be this thing that's true objectively

Now it never really had that for me it seemed to me like that was always just as made up as everything else was that they just said it was all objectively true but I never really bought that to be honest with you

I really liked math when I was in elementary school then I didn't really have any math instruction in middle school and I got so behind that when I got into ninth grade and I had had really almost no math training since the fourth grade I couldn't really do the math

And I never really did get caught up

When I was in philosophy I had to take logic and it was equation sort of and so I have a block against it and I couldn't do it and I couldn't do it it didn't make sense and then one day just kapowit was language instead of math and then suddenly I could do it easy there was no problem at all

I really really would like to understand her I really have spent quite a bit of time trying to understand her

And I know she taught me when I was a kid when she was wanting me to lie for her that there's nothing wrong with lying to people if it's none of their business

So maybe she knows what's going on and she's just lying to me because it's none of my business or because she doesn't want to worry me or because she can't admit it to herself because she thought she was going to live forever

I don't know I just have no real sense

I've always felt like she didn't have a very good grasp of reality but she's managed to support herself her whole life and she's only had jobs during part of the time she was married to Bob and I think that's because he made her get a job I'm not sure why I know she didn't do that well and she hated it even though for part of the time she was a teacher which is what she had initially wanted to do

She's just terrible at teaching

I mean maybe she's good at teaching art I don't know I haven't taken an art class from her but she's terrible at teaching math because when I would have a problem in high school and I would want her to help me she would sit down and start trying to teach me something and it would frustrate me so much that I would end up having to kind of figure it out for myself just to get out of the situation with her

and when I say she's out of touch with reality I don't mean like she schizophrenic or some or delusional even maybe

And I know that people edit their own stories over time everybody does it some people do it because they brag and so things get inflated over time and they don't really remember what's real anymore they've just made a story

And some people they feel differently now and so the way they look back on the past they've got a different perspective and that changes how they see what happened and that changes their story sometimes a little bit sometimes a lot

and that's human everybody does those things

I can remember when I was a kid there were some things that had happened to me that I had kind of repeated to myself over and over because I wanted to remember them and then at some point when I would think about the things that happened it wasn't like I was experiencing it it was like I was watching a movie and then I was not sure if it was really true and I found that disconcerting like I have this story of my life that I've been retelling to myself so that I can be sure that I remember it correctly but now the way I'm seeing it is from a perspective that I know couldn't possibly have been the perspective I saw it from so is it just made up

And I was maybe seven or eight

And I know there are stories that I have told you more than once that when first I told them to you they were one way and when I told them to you again years later they were another way and they don't seem the same to me but I feel like they're both true

And I can't really reconcile that with reality

And I know recently I've had this whole like shift where I'm like you know they're all these things that I thought I was good at and that I was really proud of doing a good job of related to management most specifically

and now I think well maybe you weren't really all that good at that stuff maybe that was your perspective and maybe the people you were managing would not have felt that way and I'm like well you know I tend to base those things on the reactions I was getting from people but if I'm honest the reactions that people had to me were different based upon the relationships I had with the people and which of those people were right I don't know so probably I was good at some things or for some people but you know it's not like I'm some kind of great golden god of management it's not like I'm the world's best coach

And I've kind of reassessed that and said well you know also I feel like there are some ways in which maybe from perspective of 2020 after the me too and Black lives matter movements maybe from my perspective where I am today there's a lot of stuff I might have done better

You know not saying that I was an a****** or whatever but and I'm not beating myself up and saying oh you suck blah blah blah that's not what I'm doing what I'm saying is there was a way in which I was very connected to those stories and I painted myself as the hero of them

And now I'm no longer connected to those stories and so it isn't so important if I was the hero or not and I've come to the conclusion that I can't really say with any objectivity at all how actually good I might have been

and I also don't really care I'm coming from the perspective of you know I've made a lot of mistakes and oh well

I love myself whether I've made mistakes or not

I am kind of like you know if I'm a bad person then I'm just a bad person I'm not trying to be a bad person but you can certainly look at me and say from some perspectives

And fine

I'm not saying that I'm always right or have ever been right or whatever

And this is kind of a perspective that I've been developing over the whole pandemic thing

And so I guess now I'm just feeling like

why can I still not understand what the f*** is going on in her head

And she will say things to me

And I don't know it's like

It's like her story changes constantly

Like she said something to me about how I raised myself and I was like huh

Because generally you know she was the world's greatest mother and you know blah blah

But now she's coming at it from this You raised yourself perspective and I'm like I don't really get this new angle

but she's like well I always let you make all your own decisions within a framework of safety and that's why I'm such a good mother because I let you raise yourself

And to my credit I did not laugh at her

My first thought was about the you know corporate model where you're having your assistant manager do all the work for you and you're saying that you're developing them which you know I mean it does develop them but

That isn't what it primarily does

And I thought back cuz I'm just thinking you let me make all my own decisions and that's why you're such a good mother but you didn't give me the information or the assistance for the resources to make a lot of the decisions that would have helped me become the adult that I wanted to be but yes now that I'm thinking back you did like let me make decisions about what books I was going to read or you know what I don't know little stuff stuff like that Deborah wouldn't have let me make decisions on Deborah would have just told me this is what you're going to do and my mother let me make those small unimportant decisions

But I don't believe I don't believe that that was the thing that made me raise myself and I'm not really sure I have raised myself to be honest with you maybe I'm not raised

I don't know I have kind of an open perspective on it and I guess you know it's pretty rich for me to be saying she's out of touch with reality

But no I feel like I've adjusted for that too

I mean I know that I don't know a lot of stuff

About you and me and us and whatever and I've just decided that ultimately I'm in it so however it works out is however it works out I don't have any particular beliefs anymore about what might actually happen I just I'm going to see

And so I don't know if this is a more realistic viewpoint I think that it is

I mean when it comes down to it

I'm just like yeah

Absolutely right great mom

Because what the f*** I'm never going to get some kind of acknowledgment that she always put herself first that it's entirely possible entirely possible that she seduced me away from my father just to f*** him over because when she would come and get me for visits she would be so nice she would be on such good behavior and all summer when I spent the summers with her she would be so nice she'd be on such good behavior she never yelled at me she was always sweet and then when I went to live with her she was just not that far from Deborah and I was like oh my god my father was consistent in his choice of women and I just lost it and she would I mean oh my god so you know the things that I think of as being markers for motherhood she didn't meet

And maybe I'm unfair maybe

And I mean I knew it hurt my father's feelings when I left him and he tried to tell me that you know she was just doing this she had told him that you know she was going to take me back when I got to be old enough to be useful but you know even though I knew that I heard was hurting him I could not deal with Deborah and I could not deal with his continual not protecting me from her I didn't leave him I left her and then he made me suffer for that and he was and I didn't understand it I didn't understand it until I was driving home from Santa Cruz the first time and somehow I had an epiphany on the road in the dark about my father's perspective on my leaving him I can't remember exactly why I had that epiphany or exactly what it was about but somehow it just became so clear to me what his perspective was how I was like you know the person who had always looked at him with complete faith and adoration and I was his true love and I left him I didn't believe in him anymore and I think that hurt him probably more than you know any of his wives or divorces

So you know that's on me or whatever

But I was 10 and a half years old

And so maybe maybe the thing that I just can't get past is you know when she would come to pick me up for visits my father would go out and they would bicker and fight and it would upset me and I would say can you please not do this it really really upsets me and they obviously cared more about bickering with each other than they cared about whether or not it upset me because they still had some sort of energy you know and then I went to live with my mom and I reminded her of him and I smiled like him and she would yell at me for it and you know it was just a lot of yelling and looking like she was going to explode her eyes would bug out and it was so so scary and then I wanted therapy and she said I was just trying to find ways to spend her money

and there's just all these bad bad memories and we've had periods of time when we got along pretty well I mean it's not like it's all been bad but there's just so much

and I guess I just want some kind of an acknowledgment from her that she always put herself first and she didn't really care about me that much but she doesn't see it that way so that is never going to happen and there isn't any point in pushing for that to happen because it's not going to

She's going to live for some more amount of time and we don't know how much that isand I never really felt like I had something I needed to resolve with my father I always felt like you know I just couldn't resolve it it wasn't going to be resolved

And maybe it isn't going to be resolved with her either but

I don't know if it makes any sense that somehow I have to resolve it in myself when I didn't seem to need to resolve it in myself with my father I don't know whether that's because I hurt him and here hurt me or whether it's because I don't know I don't know why I just have always felt like he loved me and she did not well no I haven't always felt like that only since I went to live with her but I think she probably does love me and I don't know exactly what it is I need to resolve in myself but whatever it is it doesn't require me anymore to try to extract from her Mia culpas so it's like yeah fine You were a great mother

And I'm doing something that is either a really good idea or a really bad idea and I'm not sure which

There are a lot of problems

And they all so clearly dovetail

So I'm going to be working with her

She has been trying for years to develop a brand I guess she wants to be well she wants to be a famous artist whatever that means but she wants to sell art she wants to have she used to sell art we had a great business she made pretty good money but it was based on selling a particular type of item that seemed to go out of popularity and then when that all kind of fell apart I guess was a little while later she got the job and whatever she had a really bad midlife crisis everything all went to hell I don't want to go into all the stuff that happened but she had she had a bad midlife crisis

Whatever I'm going to work with her and try to help her achieve some of the things she wants to do and that has made her so happy that she is all enthusiastic and happy and excited and has a new renewed energy for life

And right as my hope that in the process of helping her do this stuff I can figure out my business and she can teach me whatever she knows about the whole running around business thing and I can monitor her a little more carefully a lot more carefully and I can get all the information maybe that I'm going to need to get access to so that when she dies I don't have to go spend two months digging through boxes and boxes of mail to try to find her accounts

And whatever it is that I need to reconcile with her or with myself about her I will have to do it

So the out of all this will come some kind of closure

Because realistically the monitoring is going to have to happen and I may have to move in with her which I really don't want to do but maybe maybe I can make that not happen and I'm not saying I'm going to work for her until she dies I'm just saying you know right now there's a situation where the kind of work I am actually qualified to do is work I don't want to do I don't want to do it because I don't think it's safe and I don't want to do it because I have lost money desire to do that kind of work anymore

And there are some reason why I have not done this thing that everybody who has ever had much close contact with me has felt like I should do which is to have my own business there are some block or some something

Maybe it's just some version of what she does you know maybe it's just another form of being completely out of touch with yourself although I don't think so

But they're s*** wrong with me for sure

and I realized that in a way we're all just you know trying to make it through and very few people really have their s*** together it's more about momentum

Anyway I don't know if this makes any sense it makes sense from my perspective but I'm not 100% sure where exactly I'm coming from right now I just feel like this is got to happen and this has got to be awesome you know like I have to just let it go just let it go

Like I'm at a place where I need something

And I'm going to try to get it from her and I'm going to try to help her with something that she needs help with and maybe in the process we can just heal whatever this is

And you know it's kind of funny I was thinking about it cuz you know there's been the Pluto and Capricorn thing and then there was a Saturn return and there's all this you know theoretical blah blah about you know tearing yourself down and building yourself back up and Saturn return is supposed to be this big you know lesson year thing and then Aquarius Capricorn went into Aquarius and then it retrograded and so there was supposed to be this one last push to learn whatever you were supposed to learn and I was like man I don't know if I learned anything I think I was supposed to leave that place years ago and I didn't and now I have but what am I learning you know but even though I know this whole pandemic thing is theoretically the time when I should have done all these things you know and I couldn't really look at anything I was doing and say well that's productive and useful you know I felt like I was doing some work emotionally psychologically and maybe you know and then I was like well yeah maybe or maybe that's just b******* I don't know

But then I'm looking at this and I'm thinking well this is either right about when Aquarius is coming back and it's all supposed to ease up maybe it doesn't maybe that doesn't happen till next month I don't know but it's soon and it's not like I was thinking about that but I'm thinking about it now

And maybe there is some way in which I've learned important lessons and and moving on to another step and it's all going to be great

Maybe I'll at least come out of this understanding her I don't know I kind of doubt it

But I guess whatever

Maybe I'll understand me better

Maybe I haven't understood myself nearly as well as I thought I had I don't know I feel very strange very aware of the non objectivity of everything

And I mean I always am kind of aware of the non-objectivity of everything but very aware

But less childlike

Which wasn't really the goal somehow