Thursday, November 5, 2009

YOU ARE WET MOTHER, COME IN FROM THE RAIN

THURSDAY OCT 29TH


8:50pm

I could hear Mum tootling about in the kitchen first thing today. Normally I'd have gone and checked her list etc, but it was raining so hard outside I thought she wouldn't go out. Yet five minutes later I hear the door go & through a gap in my curtains I glimpse a child-like figure in a pillar-box red hood, never looking back.

It is hours before she returns, drenched to the bone. I meet her at the door,

"You are wet, Mother, come in from the rain". I help her off with her saturated clothes, holding back a laugh, as I have accidentally just quoted from 'motherfather', a poem I wrote when I was sixteen and recorded for an album last year.

I was away playing music in London on Thursday night - I got a rapturous welcome home from Mum, who thought I had been away for days (I had only spent one night away).

Local-sister told me on the phone, earlier today, that Mum had started (or nearly started) a fire in my absence. It was while her friend was visiting, before I got back on Friday. The same sort of thing cropped up last time I was away.

When she can't remember how to do something she has learned that turning to me is a better bet than searching about for it in her head. I can't be here all the time, can I? We are getting closer to the point when she won't be able to be left alone at all.

Apparently it is not uncommon for Alzheimer's sufferers to start 'dogging' their primary carers - following them closely around everywhere, even the toilet, like a lost puppy. This was one sentence I was glad to hear the end of - I had just been told that it was not uncommon for dementia sufferers to wander out into the street at ungodly hours, in their night-clothes, or even undressed, and that this was often a trigger for having them taken into care. This hasn't happened since I've been here, but doesn't seem at all outside the bounds of imminent possibility, now that she forgets how to let herself in with such alarming frequency. Anyway, it seemed a sufficiently stressful and punishing prospect to discover her missing and locate her, before consoling, distracting and cajoling her back home. With the delivery of the sentences qualifying definition I realised that I was to be spared the added indignity of extricating my own mother from illicit sexual encounters in car-parks, though the speaker was not quick enough to entirely spare me a moment inhabiting this bizarre alternate, impossible future. Of course, this could never happen - I would let her finish what she had started! I am not a spoilsport,  nor a prude. Indeed, I wish this was a possible parallel universe into which I could sidestep - the world of sensory pleasures is largely immediate, Mum still revels in the beauty of nature, perhaps all the more so for the lack of a past and future to distract her - it is, after all, my contention that words & reason obfuscate the closest possible connection with noumenal reality. Additionally, despite her failing sense of taste and smell, she is displaying signs of a progressive enjoyment of food and eating - it has been a while since I heard her say that eating is a waste of time and that she doesn't see the point in it, an assertion she made frequently throughout her adult life. It was almost her mantra, a discrete public statement and affirmation of her commitment to service, hard work and sacrifice, over and above sensual pleasure and individual gratification, ends which she viewed with distaste and disdain.

It is good that she is able to enjoy her food more, but I very much doubt we will see any sexual behaviour considered inappropriate, or at all, as Mum has never really been into sex, finding it a bit repulsive, even in nature programmes.

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