Stuck in a moment

During the first couple months of this journey with mom, I was not enjoying it.  It was sad, everyday was sad.  Watching her staring aimlessly at the wall, or slouched over in her Broda chair, or the fear in her eyes at times, well it was heart breaking.  But now that mom is alive again, the days are different.  Mom still has aimless moments but her fear is gone.  She is well aware of where is she and who is around her and what is wrong with her and she seems to accept this.  Yet, at the same time, her mind will travel back.  She travels back to periods of time that she has already lived and things she has already experienced.  It's difficult to explain, so hopefully this post will help to understand what I mean.

With the dementia she gets lost in time.  It's like she can't tell the difference between the past and the present.  This week she was lost in the 80's.  For a day, in her mind, I was a teenager again and when I went to help her with lunch, she asked why I wasn't at school.  The strange thing is, she is well aware  where she is and why she is there, but part of her brain goes back in time and the rest of us are in that moment too.  While I helped with her lunch she talked about my math grades and how she would call Mrs. Crawford and pay for her to tutor me.  Well back in 1982, that's what happened.  My math grades were crap and I went to Mrs. Crawford for tutoring.   So, I let her have her moment of time and although back in 1982 I fought and fought about it and because she wouldn't stop, I reluctantly went for tutoring.  Well on this day, I agreed and she was shocked.

Later we were reading Chatelaine.  There was an interesting article on HPV and the vaccine.  The magazine is dated October 2012 and she read the article intently and the statistics from recent studies in 2009.  When she finished reading it, she gave it to me and demanded that I read it, so I did.  Then she started. 
"Do you see, do you see.... another reason why you shouldn't have sex" and she was off on a rant.   This was NOT a conversation we had in 1982 but the ranting about premarital sex, that I remember.  Mom was determined that I would be a virgin when I got married.  Constantly she would rant on about the evils of premarital sex, the why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free, nobody buys used goods, etc,etc.  Her constant threat was that should I engage in premarital sex, she would send me to the convent.  It actually wasn't a convent, it was a private girls school in Saskatchewan that was run by nuns, but pretty much a convent.  She would rant so much that even my friends would laugh about it and there is an entry in my 1982 yearbook written by one of the Sternloff's and it says something like 'I'm afraid if write anything your mother will send you to the convent, so best wishes'. 

For years I was able to hide the fact that I wasn't a virgin from my mother.  It took some skill.  I had two diaries.  Diary one and then two were compilations of innocuous teenage ramblings and often hidden under my mattress or in a drawer.  Diaries three, four and five weren't diaries, they were journals and from the covers they looked liked regular books or day-timers.  They were never hidden.  The one I was writing in was always  with me or locked in my school locker and when they were full, they were stored in plain view, in my bookcase (I still have every journal, now on my 56th so when I die, someone can write an authentic biography).  So, needless to say, my mother believed that I kept my virginity until I went to Europe, years after the fact.

On this day, since she was stuck in 1982 or around then, I thought it was time to come clean.  When she finished ranting I took her hands and told her that I had something very important to say and I told her that I was no longer a virgin.  The reason I took her hands was because I was fully expecting some loud, angry ranting and possibly a slap across the face.  Instead she was calm.  She didn't rant, she didn't yell, she didn't scream.  In fact, she was eerily silent.  "I suspected as much," she said.  Then she wanted to know who.  Well, I wasn't giving it all up so she preceded to name just about every boy she could think of. 
"One of those Sternloff boys?"
"No".
"One of those Brock boys?"
"No".
"Well not that Seow boy, he's an alter boy".
"No".
"That skinny Blackwood boy?"
"No".
"One of the Eklof boys?"
"No".
"Well it's not that Kitteringham boy because his family moved".
"No".
"That red headed Whelan boy, his parents smoke dope you know".
"No".
And so on and so on and I think she named just about every boy that ever lived in Canmore before finally saying "It doesn't matter, but I'll call Dr. Balharry and we'll get you on the birth control pill and get this vaccine because you don't want to get cancer from sex".

I laughed and told her to call Dr. Balharry and that I had to get back to school.  I kissed her and thanked her for not getting angry.

As I walked down the hall I kept wondering if I had told her 30 years ago, would she have reacted the same.  I think she would have because that is a moment that mothers and daughters should have.  Then I started to cry.  They were tears of gratitude because I just had that moment with my mom.  More importantly,  my mom finally got her moment with her daughter.  Suddenly, I felt closer to my mom than I have in my entire life simply because we got stuck in a moment.