Caring-for

Dearest Nancy:

I’m back from traveling some miles and days and states and during all that time I’ve carried your last letter around with me, thinking it and rereading it and holding this one sentence in my mouth like a sweet and salt-tasting sip of wine:   “A loved one is sick, and care-taking is falling to me, and frankly I am not graceful with it.”

Care-taking.  I come from generations of it.  That’s what my people do, and I am proud of that heritage.  Families live next to one another, take relatives in when they’re sick, take them a plate, do for them, sit with them when they’re dying.  My mother lived with and cared for my grandparents until their deaths: fed them, shaved him, dressed her, combed and wiped and complained at them.   I remember my father telling me how, as he aged, I’d be the one to care for him, and yet I have not done that.  I live states away, and I’m not even very good at letters and phone calls.  Like you, I have not been very good at the caring-for.

I remember well visiting my mother when she was still in her own home and trying to bathe her.  She had a bathroom the size of a postage stamp and a low tub, but I undressed her, walked her, lowered her.  Her tub had a hose and I sprayed her, soaped her, scratched at her thinning scalp with the shampoo.  The getting her up again was another matter.  I’m a strong woman, but to hold on to her slippery body and try to lift her up, all the while she was begging me not to, was one of the harder things I’ve ever done.  She was deep into her dementia, even then, and she accused me of who knows what.  Trying to hurt her.  Being someone she didn’t know.   I fumbled and heaved and raised and grew angry in the process.  I remembered the stories about her, her voice rising in anger at my grandparents, my uncle tells me, enough that he could hear her all the way up the hill at his house.  I was just that angry my own self right then, and none too gracious, later, when she asked me to rub lotion on her scaly back.

I have not been a good care-taker.

What I realize, all over again as I write this letter, is that I come from a family, at least my primary one, where caring for was wedded to a kind of fierce and weary duty.  I remember once when my grandfather grew sick enough to be hospitalized for some weeks, then after came to stay with us in our subdivision home.  What would we do, she asked.  She raced to vacuum, change sheets. What trouble it all was.  My mother often equate that word with love.  Trouble.  I myself was trouble, the care I required.  Feeding, dressing, tending to.  Sit down and don’t you make a sound.  That was the message I got, over and over and over.  I wrote in my diary.  I read books vast years too old for me.  I learned to be quiet and serious.  The world inside me grew enormous, my only safe place.

I did not learn that care equaled love.

And here we have it, the hardest part of this letter.  The part I’ve been sipping at and swallowing and sipping on some more over these last two weeks.  I hear you when you say that your mother “was trapped….in a system and society that, at that time stranded a lot of middle-class white women in suburbia, with only a pot of peas and a passel of demanding children for fulfillment.”  My mother was trapped too.  She never learned to drive.  Had one job, at a Cato’s clothing store.  Her idea of power equaled a clean floor and her powerlessness was so great that cleanliness grew monstrous in our home.

And yet.

I grew up with such uncared-for-ness that I long for care.  I long to understand what it is I missed somewhere in all the harsh love I saw and received.  I long to love and fix and mend and water and tend.  I am living now in the first home I’ve ever called my own.  I’ve scattered wildflower seeds on a hill and am planting herbs.  I have a puppy who is driving me nuts and I kiss her nose a million times a day.  I love this man named John.  We came to one another late in our lives and I will, I know, see him pass.  Or I will myself pass, having had only a decade in this thing called a family.

I want to learn to care for.  To care for myself and know how it is to do that.  I want to learn to love my own body as it ages and bends.  I want to enter the luminous skin of another person and walk around in there, knowing what empathy means.

And this.  I want care to come back to the pages I make.  I am not sure how and the pencils I am using are in bad need of sharpening.  But I want it.  Words made from love and light.

Yours always,

Karen