![\"momandpursuit\"](\"http:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/momandpursuit-207x300.jpg\")
My mother and I are craning our necks towards the big flat screen on the wall of her board and care home. We are watching a police pursuit weaving through the streets and freeways of Los Angeles. I know what is happening. She does not.<\/p>\nMy mother and I are craning our necks towards the big flat screen on the wall of her board and care home. We are watching a police pursuit weaving through the streets and freeways of Los Angeles. I know what is happening. She does not.<\/p>\n
These chases occur with stunning regularity. You wonder why the soon-to-be felons don\u2019t think things through more carefully. The helicopters are hovering overhead; the police vans with their red lights flashing are looming large in rear view mirrors. You just don\u2019t get away. Harry Potter\u2019s cloak of invisibility is not going to save you now. The escapees will get nailed and let\u2019s hope they don\u2019t nail anyone else in the process. \u00a0But we keep watching as the drama unfolds. It\u2019s like passing a car wreck on the highway. \u201cDon\u2019t look, don\u2019t look\u2026<\/em>\u201d My higher angels implore me not to participate in someone else\u2019s suffering. The angels usually lose\u2026<\/p>\n I\u2019ve just wheeled my mother back into the living room of the big airy house after our\u00a0sidewalk excursion in\u00a0this quiet neighborhood. She hugs one of the stuffed dogs I have given her. It\u2019s a sun-shiny day. Memorial Day… And she goes along for the ride without mustering one ounce of drama or angst. This is not the mother I know.<\/p>\n There she is smiling at the jasmine blossoms I snap off a vine and place in her out-stretched hands. She kisses her stuffed dog and looks up at the sky when I point to the little plane. But she\u2019s happy to go back inside again and that\u2019s where we watch the pursuit.<\/p>\n Dementia is an interesting thing. I sing and play ukulele in memory care units for people who respond to a familiar melody or tap along with a steady beat. They smile and laugh sometimes. They scream and paw at themselves. Their stories are gone. Their histories\u2014dropping, dropping precipitously into a heavy mist. But something is left. An essence. And I try to honor that and meet them where they are.<\/p>\n Not so easy with my mother\u2026<\/p>\n As we watch the erratic driver racing down the 105 freeway towards Los Angeles International Airport, Jinna, one of the caregivers, asks me if my mother liked to drive on the freeway. I chortle as memories of my mother unspool in my head like a really bad movie. My mother was a nervous driver, but as a passenger she could have won the Gloria Swanson Award for melodrama. She\u2019d smash her right foot into the \u201cimaginary\u201d brake pedal on the floor. Never mind that she was in the backseat.<\/p>\n I tried to reason with her. \u201cMom! Don\u2019t scream! It scares me when you scream. I\u2019m not a good driver when I\u2019m scared.\u201d But my mother is a troubled woman. The\u00a0Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde type<\/em>\u00a0and playing the “reason game” doesn\u2019t work. She tells me she can\u2019t help it. And today I know that\u2019s true because that is how mental illness is.<\/p>\n When my mother was behind the wheel of her own car and another driver did something that pissed her off (which is casting a very wide net), her face went all\u00a0Exorcist<\/em>\u00a0as she shouted \u201cGO TO HELL…<\/em>\u201d Then she\u2019d flip them off. I tell my mother it\u2019s not a good idea to do that kind of stuff\u00a0in Los Angeles. There\u2019s that \u201creason\u201d thing again. She\u2019s lucky to be alive.<\/p>\n Then something happened: Dementia. When my mother no longer knew what pills she was taking, we added Zoloft to her colorful array of capsules. It helps modulate her moods. Within two days she had morphed into a sweet old lady. Fricking Betty Crocker. The caregivers say she\u2019s so nice. She smiles a lot, laughs, kisses her stuffed dog.<\/p>\n And I\u2019m thinking \u201cwho the hell are you?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s been a long hard road for my mother and me. How different things would have been between us and in all of her relationships if she had been taking Zoloft, or something like it, the last ten, twenty, thirty years. And now folks who meet her for the first time are enchanted. It\u2019s an ongoing challenge for me to reconcile \u201cmy story\u201d of my mother with what is true today.<\/p>\n Like the people I work with in memory care units, I try to meet her where she is. YES, my mother was an angry and sometimes vindictive woman. YES, today she is mostly kind. YES, she has forgotten the people who were on her “hit list.” “I will destroy them,” she’d snarl. Red lights flashing. YES, she has forgotten I was on her hit list too. YES, her eyes get all sparkly when she sees me and we hold hands.<\/p>\n What is true? All the above, of course.<\/p>\n So many memories. So many stories. And no answers. Except to trust this moment to shine a little light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My mother and I are craning our necks towards the big flat screen on the wall of her board and care home. We are watching a police pursuit weaving through the streets and freeways of Los Angeles. I know what is happening. She does not. These chases occur with stunning regularity. You wonder why the soon-to-be felons don\u2019t think things through more carefully. The helicopters are hovering overhead; the police vans with their red lights flashing are looming large in … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","kt_blocks_editor_width":"","_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[131,132,133],"class_list":["post-1619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogentry","tag-dementia","tag-music-therapy","tag-personality-disorder"],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":2,"label":"blog entry"}],"post_tag":[{"value":131,"label":"dementia"},{"value":132,"label":"music therapy"},{"value":133,"label":"personality disorder"}]},"featured_image_src_large":false,"author_info":{"display_name":"Cali Rose","author_link":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/author\/crbauthor\/"},"comment_info":29,"category_info":[{"term_id":2,"name":"blog entry","slug":"blogentry","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":2,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":138,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":2,"category_count":138,"category_description":"","cat_name":"blog entry","category_nicename":"blogentry","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":[{"term_id":131,"name":"dementia","slug":"dementia","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":131,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":1,"filter":"raw"},{"term_id":132,"name":"music therapy","slug":"music-therapy","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":132,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":4,"filter":"raw"},{"term_id":133,"name":"personality disorder","slug":"personality-disorder","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":133,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":1,"filter":"raw"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1619"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1637,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1619\/revisions\/1637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"images\"](\"http:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/images.jpeg\")
But I could live with that. It was her screaming that scared the hell out of me. Blood curdling screams. I\u2019d feel the adrenalin let lose in my body in classic fight-or-fright fashion. Once she agreed to wrap her favorite leopard scarf around her face so she couldn\u2019t see. Or scream. But then she put her big-rim eyeglasses on, over the scarf, so \u201cI don\u2019t look strange.\u201d By then \u201cstrange\u201d followed her like day follows night.<\/p>\n![\"momandpuppy\"](\"http:\/\/calirose.com\/wackyworld\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/momandpuppy-225x300.jpg\")
By now the crazy dude on television is driving south on the 405 Freeway. He will soon run out of gas and the police will throw cuffs on his wrists and haul him to jail. Thankfully no one else is hurt in this pursuit. My mother is napping in her Lazy-Boy, clutching her polyester puppy (that fortunately survived its first ride in the washing machine and dryer).<\/p>\n