Relationships/Dementia/Happiness

The Dementia Chronicles: Life Lessons Through My Mother’s Lens

Don’t Let Her Biggest Regret Be Yours

My mom has dementia.

I take her out every Saturday and Monday, but for about the last ten years, before we started this twice-weekly routine, we hadn’t spoken much.

My mother and I always had a strained relationship, and my textbook narcissist father actively made it worse.

Then one day, my uncle died.

He’d been renting my parents’ basement apartment and was a great friend to my mother.

She was eleven when he was born and practically raised him; those memories are some of her fondest.

She wasn’t a “girly girl” and didn’t play with dolls or do “girl” things. She was a tomboy. But one thing she did love was taking care of her little brother.

Her real-life doll.

He’d moved into their basement apartment after an unexpected layoff and divorce.

He was a lovely man, sensitive and sweet. When his world fell apart, my mother took the opportunity to rekindle their relationship.

It was nice for both of them.

And then, one day, he was gone.

There was a celebration of life, and it was there my older sibling told me my mother had dementia.

If she hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have noticed.

My mother looked great and was as chatty as ever, but she and my father looked much older.

With my uncle gone, I thought they might need extra support, so I started dropping off food and checking in once a week.

One of my sisters was already dropping by every Wednesday, and I added a Sunday food delivery so they’d be a little more covered.

During those visits, I noticed my mother wasn’t doing very well.

She’s in excellent physical health, was an avid walker in her day, and can still walk for hours at age 78, but she was unhappy, and it showed.

More than just her mind, her overall mental health seemed to be suffering.

I soon realized that being home with my father over Covid had taken its toll on my social, chatty mother.

My dad is fun and chatty with everyone except her. With her, he’s always deliberately withheld love, affection, communication, and everything else that makes a healthy relationship.

When she was younger, it didn’t matter. She made her own life and had friends, jobs, and hobbies to keep her occupied.

When Covid hit, she still had my uncle to chat with.

But after my uncle’s death, being stuck at home with someone who willfully neglected her had been damaging and toxic.

The lack of stimulation and caring had taken a toll.

It didn’t help that my father, who had never been particularly nice or kind to her, was now openly irritated by her. She’d become a burden, and he didn’t like it.

During those early visits, she would sit and recount the same childhood stories over and over.

Skating to school in the winter in her hometown, the paper route she shared with her older cousin, who was quiet but so funny, how she loved and cherished her extended family, and the day her parents packed the family into a car and moved six hours away from all of them with no warning.

She also remembered her uncles who had gone off to war and come back broken and different, how nobody talked about the war, but it hung in the air like a ghost. None of the men who returned were the men that had left.

These stories were on a loop in her mind.

She’d forget that my uncle had died and then remember the pain fresh and new every time.

My father returned to his weekly routines soon after the restrictions were lifted. He still drives and can go about his business, but my mother is trapped. The only way she can go anywhere is if someone takes her.

One of my sisters had taken her to a senior center to see if she’d be interested in going to activities, but she wasn’t ready.

She didn’t want to be dropped off and left with strangers.

My father was also starting back up with his weekly cribbage league at this time and was worried about her being home alone.

Sometimes when he goes out, she forgets he’s gone.

So I offered to go by the house and hang out with her on Monday nights, and I soon realized that she wanted and needed to get out of the house.

I started taking her out on Monday nights.

We enjoyed our outings so much that I added Saturday afternoon to our repertoire.

One thing I’ve always thought about my mother is that if only we could erase the baggage of the past, we’d probably get along great, and it turns out that’s true.

I think of all of my siblings; I’m most like my mother.

Come to think of it, that’s probably where our problems started; we’re too much alike.

It’s been over a year, and we go out twice a week like clockwork.

It’s been a lot of different things — interesting, triggering, healing, insightful, and so much more.

Dementia has given me a last-minute gift — a chance to get to know her in a way that would never have been possible before.

It’s been good for her as well. Her memory, mood, and overall functioning have improved.

I think the stimulation of just being out for a full day (we have lunch and then do some light shopping — usually thrifting — and then we fart around until dinner time doing whatever), chatting and talking about stuff, and just being a normal person does her good.

She has her limitations, though, and one of those is the topics of our conversations.

She has a set number of conversations in her repertoire, and we talk about these things repeatedly.

I don’t mind, and when she asks me if we’ve talked about things before, sometimes I say no, and sometimes I say yes, but let’s talk about it again, and then we both laugh.

My mother is a cheerful soul with an internal optimism that got her through a difficult marriage — that and denial.

But now that dementia has wiped away the denial and baggage, she’s become very honest.

The loss of past mental and emotional baggage has also allowed her to listen to and acknowledge my experience in a way that’s never happened before.

And I understand why.

I got lots of therapy in my twenties, which was a revelation, and it saved my life as I was deeply depressed and suicidal at the time.

Once I understood the dysfunction in my family, I thought that if I just laid it all out for her, she’d have a huge epiphany, and everything would be magically better.

I didn’t understand that my trauma and rejection served a purpose, and having it validated by the people it benefited was impossible.

Nonetheless, I shoved my healing journey down her throat. I wanted to save her, but that was impossible. It would have been too painful.

But now we can talk about it.

She shares honestly and openly.

We have long talks, and her honesty heals me.

But it also makes me sad.

She remembers an overview of her life.

She talks about it as though describing a movie she saw long ago.

She can tell me the theme but needs help with the details.

She fixates on a few things, the main one being that she’s wasted her life married to a man who never loved her — who couldn’t love her.

He was her first love, and she fell madly in love with him.

He was 24, handsome, funny, and smart; she was barely 18 and had only had two other boyfriends.

It was a blind date that she didn’t even want.

She often tells me that she wasn’t looking for a boyfriend; she was having such fun with her friends, going out at night, freshly into adulthood, and having the time of her life.

And then, one of her friends talked her into a blind date.

She didn’t want to go, but her friends convinced her.

The friend said, “If you don’t like him, we’ll switch.”

So she agreed to meet him, and her goose was cooked after one look.

She was in love.

Her very first love.

The kind of young love that makes you stupid and high.

That first love should be the first of many because even though you’re in over your head, it’s not quite right.

It’s the kind of first love that should be that painful first lesson that gets you on the path to the right person.

But in her day, women didn’t have the luxury of reliable birth control or personal freedom.

And in the early 1960s, a girl who gave it up before marriage was still considered damaged goods, and god forbid she got pregnant!

The friend took her into the bathroom halfway through the night and asked the big question, and my mother said, “We’re not switching!”

And that was it.

But he was and is a full-blown narcissist.

He charmed the pants off of her.

Three years later, the good girl in her knew she’d have to marry him if they wanted to go further.

So, they married, and nine months and nine days after the wedding, Baby Number One came along.

But he’d kept his true personality under wraps.

Because it’s easy to hide your real self when you don’t live together, and the only interactions you have are in public.

Unfortunately, as soon as she moved in, he let his guard down, and his true colors came out.

But by then, it was too late.

She was stuck.

Four babies in six years.

She was fertile.

He was mean and neglectful and had a sick, twisted mother.

One time when my heavily pregnant mother was crouched down, changing one of us, she surreptitiously walked by and knocked my mother over.

Why?

Because she could.

That’s the kind of person my grandmother was.

My grandmother was one of the meanest, cruelest, sickest people I’ve ever had the displeasure to know, and my very young, naive mother became trapped in the madness.

She was as mean to us kids as she was to my mother, and my father stood by and let it all happen.

He did what he wanted when he wanted. He spent the family money on gambling, leaving my mother to fend for herself.

He turned us kids against each other and turned me against her.

Our family dynamic is a toxic soup, but in true narcissistic style, he made sure he looked good to the outside world.

Then somehow, I escaped.

No wonder she hated me for trying to make her address it.

No wonder she couldn’t bear the thought of facing it. She was exhausted and emotionally burned out, and I was an exhausting child.

I understand now why she actively avoided dealing with me.

Why she had to let me go.

But now that all that other stuff is gone, we’re friends.

She doesn’t remember how I was or our past.

She likes me for who I am today.

And I’m learning to let go of the bitterness and anger that’s been the bedrock of my adult self.

Seeing her life through her eyes has been a revelation.

This is how she remembers it:

Her childhood: Her mother wasn’t really into kids, but she wasn’t mean, and her father loved her, and she loved raising her brother. She had a large extended family and loved her cousins and their adventures. Her grandparents on both sides were strong, loving, and kind.

Her children: She loved having kids. Her pregnancies were easy, and she loved being with us kids. She was a fun mom and took us on many walks and picnics. She was often left alone with us but tried to make the best of it and have fun with us.

Her career: She always loved her work. Whatever jobs she had, she excelled at and enjoyed. When she remembers those times, she beams. She can still talk for hours about her work, a source of pride. She was a groundbreaker in her field and helped build an industry that sustains our area. She was well respected and well known, and she rose to the top just by being herself in every job she ever had. Smart, cheerful, interested, and creative. I’ve always admired that about her, even when I didn’t like her.

Her hobbies: My mother is incredibly creative and excels at anything she puts her hand at. She was a good watercolor painter; she knitted beautiful sweaters, made us dolls that were better than anything you could buy, and made pillows for fun that she ended up selling at a boutique in a tourist town nearby. The last thing she was doing was making jewelry. It was like meditation for her, and she made beautiful, unique pieces. I’m sure there were more projects over the years that I don’t remember, but I do remember that she was good at anything she did.

Her life should have been happy.

But she married someone who didn’t love her, and that was her biggest and most painful regret.

And I’m not saying everybody needs to fall in love or be with a partner.

To my mind, the center of it all is self-love.

You need to love yourself enough to ensure you’re not wasting your life on non-love.

I’ve known women who married the next guy who came along because they were lonely or just wanted to have kids. As though, somehow, just being with anyone for either of those reasons was better than being true to yourself and trying to figure out and fix the reason you’re so desperate in the first place.

Because having kids doesn’t fix anything, neither does latching onto someone out of desperation.

But my mom accidentally tethered herself to someone who chewed up her heart and spat it out. She got tricked, and by the time she figured out she’d made a big mistake, it was too late.

And then there was just no good time to leave.

She got hoodwinked by a charming narcissist at a time when good girls didn’t, and she loved him so much.

And then the babies came one after another. She didn’t have much wiggle room to do what was right for herself.

She had about 15 years of hard labor with us kids (basically doing it alone); there was no good time to leave.

If she’d left with four small children in tow, there was no way she could raise us. My father would have been even less helpful and more spiteful, and we theorized (my mom and me) that he’d have probably started over with someone new (because he was good-looking and successful). He could have snagged a new wife easily.

He would probably have done the combination of abandonment/turn the kids against the mother. Why do I think this — because that’s what he did inside the marriage.

Instinctively, she knew this too.

It was hard enough for her to raise us alone inside the marriage with at least a roof over her head and the appearance of a normal life.

She was part of the movement of women who were testing the water for all of us, and she erred on the old-fashioned side.

She knew she’d drown if she tried to go it alone.

I don’t blame her for that.

In retrospect, how could she have done any different?

Her only crime was that she fell madly in love at a very young age tethering herself to the first guy she fell for before she knew what was happening.

I’d have been way worse off if I’d married my first love.

My saving grace was birth control pills and the attitudes of the 1980s that saw my Gen-X sisters and me doing whatever the hell we wanted. My mother told me never to rely on a man, and I never understood why.

Now I do.

Birth control made the life I have now possible. I had the luxury of time and the freedom to make mistakes.

I made terrible choices for most of my life.

It took years of hard work and therapy to finally bring me to my husband at the ripe old age of 37.

If I’d stuck with any of the first few guys I loved, I’d have either ended up an alcoholic, dead, or both.

So can I blame her for trying to escape into denial?

Now, I can honestly say no.

And that’s been healing and freeing.

I can tell her many of the painful parts of my life without her becoming defensive or dismissive.

She cares about me now because I’m not blaming her anymore — I understand.

And she doesn’t blame me anymore because she understands.

We can both let go of the resentment and bitterness that had built up.

I know her now, and she knows me.

We both see each other.

And when she talks about my dad, her cheerful, resilient soul shines through because no matter how painful the conversation, I know it will end with the line…

“And then I say to myself, at least he didn’t beat me. And then I laugh and say to myself, well, that’s a high bar!”

And then we both laugh, even though it’s not really that funny.

It doesn’t matter, though, because she’ll forget our conversation, and I think there is some mercy in that.

She doesn’t have to remember the painful things I’ve told her, and I can handle what she tells me, so we both get some relief.

When I first started taking my mother out, I did it without expectation.

I didn’t expect redemption or healing. I was doing it because she’s my mother, she spent many years caring for me, and I wanted to return the favor.

I wanted to do my daughterly duty.

But the longer it goes on, the more connected to her I feel.

I feel seen and heard by her, and even though I told myself for many years that it didn’t matter, I didn’t need her to care about me.

I was wrong.

I did need to be seen and heard by her.

I did need her to care about me.

Because now that she does, my soul feels lighter.

A broken part of me is healing.

My only hope is that I’m doing for her what she’s doing for me.

I hope I’m helping her on her healing journey.

I don’t know if our estrangement left a hole in her heart, but I hope if it did, it’s healing now.

And I hope she finds someone who will love her deeply, care about and cherish her in her next life.

Because when you don’t feel loved by the people who are supposed to love you, it leaves a hole in your soul that overshadows everything else.

It all boils down to love.

If you have a senior loved one or neighbor that you look in on often and/or care for, you may want to check out this book I created to help me keep track of my parent’s well-being.

It’s a prompted journal/health diary that I make quick notes in every time I visit so I can keep track of how my parents are doing. I made this with people like me in mind who don’t need a full-blown medical journal but want to be able to keep simple detailed records of the things they notice when they visit.

It’s been very helpful for me. It might be a helpful tool for you as well.

I hope you enjoyed that story. I look forward to sharing more of my journey with my mother with you all. Please follow me if you enjoy this type of content.

Here is the previous story in this series:

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Erin King is the author of the book “How To Be Wise AF: 30-Day Guided Journal For Women” and other health, wellness, and well-being resources.

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