Good For Her Age

On turning another year older

It’s always a variation on a theme.

Did she just get back from a vacation?

Whatever she’s doing, it’s working.

Did she have something done?

She looks so good for her age.

What they mean is this: She looks young, agreeable, unburdened. Buoyant. Bouncy. Botoxed. Hair blown-out and lips glossed.

Today is my birthday and as I enter into a new year of life, I am sometimes confronted with the “good for your age” comment (and, for the record, I love it and keep it coming, thank you very much).

The honest truth is that I don’t always feel so good for my age.

If I look good for my age, it’s not because I’m unburdened.

The last five years have aged me like nothing else. My hairstylist will tell you: beneath the blonde, it is almost all gray, and not the pretty kind. And even that is a blessing because there was a year in there where I was losing hair — shedding it in huge amounts, breaking it when I raked a hairbrush through the ends.

Some 99% of the stress-induced hair loss, I assure you, stemmed from the fact that I take care of my mother.

The toll that caregiving takes is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it shouldn’t be for any kind of heart. It will make a big heart shrink. It will make a small heart wither.

In caregiving — particularly caring for an aging, physically, and/or mentally disabled person — there is no reciprocity. What you invest in someone else, you lose in yourself.

When my grandmother died five years ago — very suddenly, in a car accident — there was no plan in place for what to do with my mom, who sustained a traumatic brain injury when I was two months old. Prior to my grandmother’s death, my mom lived with her. And it nearly killed her, sucking the life and light out of a woman who once exhaled exuberance. She did a good job of pretending like she was okay, but after her death, I came very quickly to the realization that my grandmother had been absolutely depleted from her role as a caregiver.

I know because, after my grandmother died, my mom moved in with me and I became the one who was — and is — absolutely depleted.

My mom has a host of health issues, the most grueling of which (for me) are mental and behavioral. They require constant management, constant reaction. In this line of work, there is no proactive, only reactive — you can never plan ahead, because you never know what to plan for.

Let me give you a funny example. My mom is a hoarder and she has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The two issues compound: She will hoard anything and everything — trinkets, salt packets, coins. She will obsessively spend in order to hoard if she has to — after my grandmother died, someone gifted us a $500 Amazon gift card, to spend on things like groceries or toiletries. My mom intercepted it and spent every last penny on boxes of pens and umbrellas. If she has no access to money, she will find another way to obsess, and another fixation to hoard. Enter: piles of feathers and leaves, which she began to hoard a couple of years ago.

It sounds almost cute, until you realize the feathers are not clean and came via dead bird carcasses. The leaves, meanwhile, have bugs on them.

So, you tell her to clean out her room and to stop hoarding feathers and leaves. But she can’t stop, because she has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. She is now obsessed with collecting the feathers and leaves.

So she keeps doing it, but she hides it from you by sticking the feathers and leaves in the waistband of her pants — beneath her sweatshirt and against the skin.

And some of the leaves, naturally, are Poison Ivy.

So now you have a feather problem, a leaf problem, a bug problem, and a rash that takes up your mother’s entire torso.

If I look good for my age, it’s not because of the feathers and leaves.

There are other oddities — for the first couple of years she lived with me, she would eat only one thing for breakfast: Publix-branded, mango-flavored yogurt. I can’t tell you how much time I have spent going from one Publix store to another, trying to seek out this often impossible-to-find flavor. I attempted, at times, to offer her something even better — a cup of Chobani topped with fresh chopped mangoes and a drizzle of Manuka honey. A different, pricier and organic brand, in a flavor like strawberry. All it took was one look, and the spoon was set down.

That my mom has no sinus cavity, no sense of smell and really can’t taste much of anything doesn’t matter — she wants what she wants and if she can’t have it, there will be a tantrum, or the day will be ruined, or I will be the worst human being alive … until, inexplicably, she will one day forget she ever wanted that thing at all. And we will never mention it again.

And then — like a sick game of Whac-A-Mole you never asked to play — a new obsession will peek its head out.

Throughout my life, there have been many obsessions — Barbie dolls that at one point took up nearly her entire room, from the floor to the ceiling. Mountain Dew — in the bottle, not the can — which she convinced herself she has to have in order to survive. Coins. Autographs. Medical pamphlets. Lists. Scraps of paper. Touching food with her hands before she eats it (even if it’s messy. Even if it’s soup.) One obsession leads to another and when the next is forgotten, a new one takes its place.

Ours is a Hansel and Gretel story, with her leaving a trail of these forgotten obsessions behind her, wherever she goes.

I, then, am the witch — following behind and picking up each and every obsession, desperately casting them to the side in a bid to maintain my youth.

this is still how I feel, like 90% of the time

This morning I looked at myself in the mirror and didn’t think I looked good for my age so much as I looked decent considering the amount of life I’ve lived.

Sometimes — many times — it feels like it’s not even my own life I’m living.

It feels like I’m watching some other woman explain to her doctor that she doesn’t know her own family medical history because, for one thing, everyone on her mom’s side of the family has died early and almost always from some horrific, tragic accident. That her mom has many health problems, but it’s because she was shot in the head, not because of any genetic condition. That she has no idea whether anyone on her dad’s side of the family has a history of cancer, or high cholesterol, or vision problems, because she’s never met them. She’s never met him. Because he shot her mom in the head, and then went to prison for it.

It feels like I’m peering at someone else’s browser history when I see a link to a news article titled, “Man Stabs Woman Several Times Before Stabbing Himself.” And I scan the article and see my own last name because, oh, it was my dad who did the stabbing, and he did it just one day after I penned an essay about the time he shot my mom.

It must be some other woman, then, who reads the news article, calmly clicks her laptop shut, then gets handed a microphone and steps on a stage to talk about How to Find Amazing Things at Thrift Stores at a trade show. Because they paid her. Because she signed a contract and she’s an adult and, just like the rest of us, she has to grin and bear it.

Lights, camera, bitch, smile. Even when you wanna die.

taken backstage at a home show, shortly after I learned my dad had just stabbed a woman and shortly before I went on stage…ahh, the glamour!

When you’re a caregiver (particularly a female caregiver), you have to do it all with a smile. You have to be pretty when you’re plucking the leaves and feathers out of the drawer, and not complain about it, because then you sound like you’re trying to be the victim. Most of all, you can’t be a bummer to be around because then no one will want to be friends with you. (The feather and leaves story is a real Debbie Downer moment at happy hour, let me tell you.)

When you take care of someone else, you lose some of your own identity. There have been moments over the past five years where I’ve felt like I’m not a woman anymore — I’m not a human anymore — I am, instead, a caregiver. I am a machine keeping someone else alive. But who is oiling the machine?

I am well aware of how selfish this will sound to someone not in the business of taking care of someone else but there are moments that I want to beg and plead for someone to ask how I’m doing.

They rarely do.

I remember going to a doctor’s appointment with my mom, just a week after my grandmother died, and hearing, “I am so sorry for your loss, have you thought about talking to a grief counselor?” I almost answered before I realized that they were asking her — a woman who lacks the portion of her frontal lobe that processes complex emotions like grief.

Good for my age? More like good for being buried alive. Buried under feelings of guilt and overwhelm and thoughts that if I don’t make a more consistent effort to reach out to my friends, they will simply forget about me. That I have to make double the effort, because I am not one of them. I am not experiencing the same type of life they are. I don’t have the baby to take to playdates with their kids. I can’t share in the joy of a pregnancy or a family vacation. My “kid” is 60 and, other than her, I don’t really have a family to vacation with.

What I have is leaves and feathers, and I’m buried underneath those, too.

Five years as a caregiver and I worry that my life is passing me by. That as she declines, I’m declining even more, somehow. I sleep well but, on the nights I don’t, I lie awake worried that time is running out. That I’m not living the life I want to because I am paralyzed by my circumstances. I worry that I’m fading away or being erased.

Every day, I tell myself: You’re not cut out for this. But I do it anyway, because I love her, and no one else is going to take care of her, and also: what other choice do I have?

We keep going because we have to. I don’t mean that in a woo-woo, inspirational way. I don’t mean that, against all odds, we can still magically summon the strength and courage necessary to fight another day.

No, instead I mean that we all keep going simply because what other choice is there?

It is exhausting work, being a caregiver. It’s exhausting to be a woman. It’s exhausting to be a human.

But this is it: This is the one wild and precious life I’ve been given. And when your one wild and precious life gives you leaves and feathers, well, you either bury yourself beneath them, or you painstakingly remove each and every one from the drawer in which you found them.

With your teeth gritted. With your eyes full of tears. With your lips glossed, and your hair blown out, and your forehead immovable.

And with gloves on.

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I’ll leave you with this…