Revelations

Over at the Busy Black Woman blog, I wrote a couple of pieces about how certain recent changes in my personal life had kept me from keeping up with the blog.  And I promised that I would talk more openly and candidly about those changes here...

But first I need to mention that I just had a birthday, and I attribute some of these changes to the reality of getting older.  For the record (so that there is no doubt), I am ok with aging.  Not only do I prefer it to the alternative, but I appreciate the fact that if I live long enough, I might might actually become that fabulous person of my daydreams.

So here goes: the other changes in my life are due to my mother's recent diagnosis of dementia.  She is 64 years old, which puts her in the category of early-onset.  And since the fateful day when her diagnosis was confirmed, she has been driving me crazy.  Correction: this situation has been driving me crazy!  Between her daily drama, my family, my past-due student loan bills, and all of my Busy Black Woman ways, I have been dancing on the head of a pin.

Since her diagnosis, my life has not only changed, but it feels as if it came to a screeching halt.  I am not so sure how true that is for everyone else in my family...and though I am not suggesting that they are unphased or unaffected, I would say that I have made things easier for them (but that is a rant for another day). 

In the meantime, I have more pressing concerns.  Because we have an incomplete diagnosis, I am unsure if my Mom has Alzheimer's or some other specific form of dementia.  And so that means that we are in a holding pattern of sorts wherein nothing is certain except that she is not the person she was when this all started back in 2009 after an argument over a cake.

Yes, a stupid cake.  And that story will also have to wait for another day to be fully told. 

I have so many stories, and that is why I decided that my saving grace will be blogging.  I have few other options for expressing myself short of taking up some really self-destructive bad habit like smoking crack.  And I mean that because there are days such as the other day when she got mad at me over something trivial and I was tempted to put her out of my car.

This has been the hardest challenge of my life, replacing law school by light years.  If I were in law school right now, I might still be as clueless as I was at the end of that first semester so many years ago, but at least I knew that there was a point to my misery. 

Unfortunately, I do not see any point in this.  If this is God's way of testing me for something great, then I've already failed.  I am angry, frustrated, depressed, exhausted, and just about defeated by this.  But then I remind myself that I survived law school, I survived working for those bosses from hell, and I have survived most of the other challenges I've had to face. 

So a periodic series in this blog will be the Dementia Diaries.  In these posts, I hope to offer some perspective on the disease that has been taking my mother away from me.  I will express my frustrations, my fears, my anxieties and everything else that has become a part of my life since September.  I promise not to make that the sole focus of this blog, but it will become a key feature as I come to grips with my new reality.