Wednesday, April 07, 2010

eye exams can trigger nightmares

teapots in red



Last week I went to the optometrist. I needed new glasses. It's been five years (shhh...). I was actually scared I would fail the eye test at the DMV (I didn't). And truth be told, B rolled over onto my glasses the last night we spent in Chicago (over 3 years ago). It was time. Beyond time.

I've been wearing glasses since I was five-years old. My eyesight is bad. I haven't been able to see the big "E" for decades (without my glasses, of course), so it didn't come as a surprise that my eyes would get dilated so the doctor could really look inside my eyes. What did surprise me was waking up screaming the next morning. I hate nightmares like that.

I'm sure it wasn't just the bright lights being shined into my eyes. It was deeper than that. Going to the eye doctor is now part of that memory. I thought that if I went to a different eye doctor maybe it wouldn't matter. Although as long as I have put this appointment off, maybe not.

I had an eye appointment scheduled for the day after I found out my Mom had died. Obviously I didn't schedule it that way. It just happened. And I did consider canceling the appointment, but I didn't. Mostly because I didn't want to have to explain why I was needing less than 24 hours notice, and also because a small part of me thought my Mom would be mad at me if I did. (You must understand that the mind of someone who has recently been hit with such a loss, has all sorts of weird thoughts.)

That day after was intense. B insisted that we go take the car in for a check up, but he didn't realize they weren't open on Saturday. I was not amused having driven by myself over there in my car, and then having to drive back alone to the house.

From there, we headed downtown for lunch and then a stop at the office. B had to work. I didn't want to be alone. Plus, I had to go to the eye doctor later that afternoon.

At lunch I used the pay phone (it was 1999) to call my therapist to see if he could see me. I got his voice mail. I just said 'something bad happened' and asked him to call me at B's office number.

Meanwhile, I got to go into the CEO's office and tell him what was up. I had been hired part-time after being let go about a month before from my previous job by my friend. Oh yes, it was a fun month and a half. Needless to say, I learned that saying those words in front of someone was much harder than doing it over the phone. I feel to pieces in front of him. Just started tearing up, and then couldn't control it.

Shortly thereafter, B's phone rang at his desk. It was my therapist. He could see me. I explained that first I needed to go to the eye doctor, so asked if he could see me around 5pm. He agreed. And then he asked me what happened. Somehow I got the words out.

B finished up and then we headed over to see the eye doctor. They were pretty busy. It was Saturday afternoon. I got put in the room by myself with the door closed. I started crying again. Tears just started rolling down my face. Thankfully I managed to regain my composure and wipe up my face before the doctor came in. I didn't want anyone to know.

Somehow I got through the exam. The doctor decided to dilate my eyes. I tried to look at frames while I waited for the dilation drops to work, but really couldn't focus. In the end, I think I came back at another time to pick a frame. We also had to head to the south part of town for my next appointment.

Driving over I looked in the mirror and saw how big and dilated my eyes were. I looked freaky. I remember explaining that it was because of the drops the optometrist put in my eyes - I wasn't as bad off as I appeared.

I got through the session and drove home. There were a few fun messages waiting for me on the machine. I was beyond exhausted at that point. It all becomes a blur from there.









on the night stand :: A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg.

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Monday, September 28, 2009

another birthday passes

who are you



Today my Mom would have celebrated her 60th birthday. She died just shy of her 50th birthday. It feels odd that there have been these ten years of birthdays she has missed. You see, the dead don’t age. My Mom will always be 49 years old.

One of the things I often got my Mom on her birthday was a Van Gogh calendar. It has only been during the last couple of years that I stopped searching them out in bookstores and stationary stores. I never bought them, but would often find myself looking them over, trying not to cry.

Another birthday tradition of long ago was going to the L.A. County Fair. The last weekend was usually near my Mom’s birthday, and we would hop into the car and trek to Pomona, usually returning with an oversized stuffed animal my sister would somehow always manage to win.

There was one year when we returned to discover our dog, a black cockapoo named Scooter, was very displeased that she had been left out of the festivities. It would seem she decided to have a little pity party on her own.

As we walked inside the house, we were greeted by a trail of garbage that she had managed to drag from the kitchen across the entire living room. Once we passed the garbage, we found my Mom’s present, a cactus plant, dug out of its pot, dirt all over the floor. By this point my Mom was ready to strangle the dog. Then she saw her cake.

We had left it on the kitchen table. Scooter had managed to get up on the table, and licked most of the chocolate frosting off the top. My Mom wondered how the dog had managed to get up on the table.

This is when one of us confessed that sometimes when my Mom didn’t come home for dinner, we would let Scooter eat at the table. Now my Mom wanted to strangle us. We were sent to our room, with the dog, before she did. Well, as soon as we cleaned the mess up, of course.

It is hard to imagine what celebrating my mom’s 60th would have been like. There are so many if’s in the equation. Would she still be living in San Francisco? Would we have gotten together? Would we have gone to the Fair? Or maybe Disneyland? Would she have been sober?

Birthdays were a big deal to my Mom. She always tried to remember everyone’s. She sent cards, or at least called. She often left messages of her singing, “Happy Birthday” on people’s answering machines (my own included).


on the night stand :: Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

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Sunday, April 05, 2009

35 days until mother's day



I realize I probably should finish start my wedding announcements, but am already thinking about my annual Mother's Day Project. Of course, if you don't know, my Mother has been dead for nearly a decade, and I am not a mother myself. So why would I bother with a Mother's Day Project?

Several years back, I was completely overwhelmed by Mother's Day. I had decided I would just stay inside all day, and try to ignore it, but it didn't work. So I did something about it. The first year I sent cards to a couple of my friends who had recently had babies, and one to a friend that was a nun, and a bit like a grandmother to me. She was the first person I called after learning about my mother.

The next year, I did the same thing again, but added a few more people to the list. I was buying cards back then. Then I got the bright idea of putting my photography to work. I found these cool postcard papers that let you easily adhere a photo. The list kept growing. I think last year I came close to 100 cards sent. They went all over the world.

So the question becomes do I grow the project? Thanks to Twitter, I know a lot more moms. Or do I do something different? Would love feedback.


on the night stand :: The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker


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Saturday, June 21, 2008

3288 days later

black and white


Nine years ago today, the SF Coroner's office took possession of my 49-year old mother's body. It isn't clear exactly when she died. Phone records indicated she called her father for Father's Day. It took them a few days to find me (I had moved to Austin, Texas and my mother did not update her emergency contact information), so June 21, 1999, was just another day to me. I got up, went to work, ate, and slept in ignorant bliss. I remember making this argument to my therapist - that because I didn't have a reaction to the event when it happened, then it was really senseless to have a reaction now. Grief makes you say (and do) crazy things.

I found out on a Friday night. It was probably around 9pm. I was watching AbFab on the couch in my nightgown. I was tired from a long week at work. My house needed some tidying. What would have otherwise would have been a forgotten night, changed when the doorbell rang. It was the police.

B said he knew right away why they were there. But even when the officer said that it was in regards to my mother, I never went there. I figured she was in trouble of some sort, maybe locked up in a mental hospital at worse, but not dead. I hit the first phase of grief before the words were even out.

And once the words were out, I lost it. I started screaming. Wailing, almost. It was so bad the officer asked B if I had asthma, and was having an attack.

That insanity was broken by the phone ringing. Who could be calling at this hour, on a Friday? It was B's mother. For some reason I answered the phone. I must have been nearest or somehow thought that someone was going to tell me this was all a joke - a very bad one. This was the last person I wanted to talk to. She asked me how I was. I managed to say, not good and passed the phone to B. He took the call in the other room, never telling his mother was was going on in our living room. Yes, he did not mention that my mother was dead.

The officer left. He was accompanied by a woman who I guess was a social worker. I don't know. Her job was basically to give me the information I needed to deal with the body. She said that I could talk to the coroner's office if I had any questions. Actually I had to call them. All I wanted to ask, but didn't, was what kind of questions might those be? I had lots of questions, but I didn't think they were probably appropriate for the coroner.

In talking with this woman, whose name I don't recall, and who most likely I could not pick out of a line up to save my life, my sister came up. In irony of ironies, the last piece of correspondence I received from my mother was a postcard with my sister's address (and the request that I send my estranged sister money for an air conditioning unit). This woman explained that she could have someone go and share the news with her. What she didn't say was that said person would go post haste. My sister was in the eastern time zone, and ended up be awoken by the police at 3am local time. This caused her to call me quite pissed off about the whole incident (not that our mother was dead) as soon as they left.

By this time I had spoken to the coroner's office. I learned that I needed to make arrangements for my mother's body. I also talked to my mother's brother in California, who agreed to tell their father and other siblings. I also talked to his wife, my aunt, who had been friends with my mother since they were 13. She lost it on the phone. My first call was actually to my friend, and former high school teacher, who is a nun. She knew my mom too, and was able to help me figure out a plan of attack, so to speak.

My sister passed over the fact that we hadn't spoken to each other on the phone in about a decade. It didn't even phase her that the last time she had contacted me, she sent me email pretending to be an adopted 17-year old girl from Maine. I actually had a hunch that it was a hoax, but when I told B he said I was paranoid. He wasn't overly amused when my hunches turned out to be correct and she revealed her identity over IM. She was plain angry that I gave her address to the police. This was the purpose of her call - to tell me off!

When I was able to get her on track - our mother was dead, remember - things went downhill pretty quickly. She felt that the body should be cremated and the ashes scattered on the Golden Gate Bridge. [That is totally illegal, by the way.] My mother had disowned my sister when she was 15 and sent her to live with her paternal grandmother. They hadn't seen each other since she was 17 at a lunch which I also attended. They had made some contact recently, but my mother's brain was so pickled, that it is hard to call it a reconciliation. I can't recall how the call ended, but by that point I was completely spent. Life as I knew it would never be the same, and now I had to deal with all this craziness to boot. I wanted to just stay up all night, but B insisted I at least try and sleep.

I woke up the next morning, and B insisted we try and take his car in for service. I followed him in my car, and was not thrilled with the idea of being alone. I remember asking not to be left alone. As it turned out the service center was closed, so we went back to the house and carried on with the day in one car.

We also needed to stop by the office (he had to work), and I had an eye appointment later that afternoon. I believed that canceling it would anger my mother, so didn't call and try to reschedule. In truth, I didn't want to have to say why I needed to cancel.

First, though, we had lunch. We went to this sort of Irish Pub called Faddo. It is actually a chain. There is one in Chicago too. I remember going to the pay phone and calling my therapist to see if he could see me. I had to leave a message, and just said "something bad happened". I didn't have a cell phone, and so had to leave B's office number.

After lunch, which I didn't eat, we went to the office. Technically I worked there too, but part-time, as a contractor. Still, I had no idea what to do with myself. The CEO, my boss, was in, so I went to his office and broke down. I couldn't get the words out before the tears were streaming down my face. He handled it well. He said I could take any time I needed. I think he was a little surprised we were there, but also grateful as there was a release deadline looming. Somehow word did not spread, and so despite it being an office of about a dozen people, many of them had no idea that this happened while I worked there. Ah, life at a start up in the days before the dot boom.

It was then time for the eye doctor. It was a busy Saturday. They left me in the exam room by myself for a few minutes. I just sat there and cried. I was so afraid someone would ask what was the matter with me. Thankfully no one did, because I think I would have lost it.

I arrived at my therapist's office with my eyes still dilated. I remember the first thing I told him was that I had just been to the optometrist, and that I didn't look this bad because I had been crying uncontrollably since I learned about my mother's death.

Over the course of the next few days, things went from crazy to insane. My mother's siblings on the east coast had at one point tried to steal my mother's body. They felt she should be buried with their mother in a Catholic cemetery in New Jersey, and that I should foot the bill for an Irish wake complete with free-flowing alcohol. I guess they forgot that my mother had just lost her life to alcoholism. What they didn't even take into account was that my mother was converting to Judaism. I was never able to determine how far she had gotten, but at one point she had made arrangements at a Jewish cemetery. She later asked for her money back, and when I called in inquire was met with "you don't have a Jewish name" and basically told to get lost.

In the end, my mother was cremated and buried in the same plot as her mother (and her father and his second wife and possibly my sister). There was a funeral at the church of the Catholic school my sister and I attended for a year. This was the same place where after meeting with the principal, and learning what my sister (who was in first grade at the time) was up to, left the meeting and passed out on the front steps of the school, blocking out what she had been told because it was so awful.

I did not attend the funeral. I can only imagine what this group of people said about a woman they didn't know. About a woman who when she was able, helped out her siblings in every way she could, but when she tried to get her life back, they turned their back on her. I am sure it was a giant guilt festival -something my mother would have hated - but I felt like she probably wouldn't have attended unless it was for the humor of it all.

My aunt and uncle in California did go to the funeral home, but didn't attend the funeral either. They pushed the button for the cremation, and then went across the street to an Irish pub to toast her. I ended up in that same pub when we returned to the Bay Area after B got his MBA. There was a gathering of the interns summering in San Francisco, and we met up at a bar in North Beach . When that got too crowded, we moved the party. We walked a few blocks to Green Street, and as we turned the corner, I realized where we were, even though I had never been there. And there we were in the bar my Aunt described. I freaked out a bit, but somehow got though that night too.

on the night stand :: Motherless Mothers

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Wednesday, November 21, 2007

thanksgiving is the fourth thursday in november

so posh


I didn't do it. I just couldn't bring myself to cook the turkey today. Perhaps I am more of a traditionalist that I will admit. But that is entirely it either.

If I am going to admit something, then I should confess that I feel like I am drowning. And this really makes no sense as I really have no pressure being put on me, beyond the pressure I put on myself, of course.

There will be no family or friends coming to dinner tomorrow. There is no one to impress or worry about. This should be easy, but it isn't.

I hate to say it, but I think I am becoming one of those people who hates the holidays. I hate that they remind me of my losses, and what I will never have. Of course some will argue that I never had it to begin with, and really I should just get over myself already.

But when at every turn it seems there are images and sounds telling you how things should be and they aren't, tell me it wouldn't drive you mad. And yes, a part of me is very, very angry, although I am talking more about madness in that last sentence than anger.

That first Thanksgiving after my mom died, as crazy as it sounds, I kept hoping the phone would ring. My logical side knew that it would never happen, but that hopeful part held out and kept thinking that nothing is impossible.

This grief will never go away. I get that. But it seems to build at this time of the year. It reminds me of the abomination of my family and mocks me. You see, one of my big issues was that I never felt wanted and now somehow here I am without them. And the lingering question of why does battle with me every day.

Tomorrow I will get up and make a turkey. The stuffing is my grandmother's recipe. One that was never written down, and could only be learned by watching and practice. I will reflect on all that I am grateful for as I busy myself in the kitchen, and try not to let this grief get the better of me.






on the night stand :: Martha Stewart Living Cookbook : The Original Classics

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