Guerilla Tactics for the Care Giver
by Anna Fuerstenberg
I am standing in front of Mama’s medicine cabinet and reading the labels. It is almost dawn, the butt end of February and I have not slept in weeks months years. The pastel pills in different shapes and sizes are singing their siren song to me. “Hushabye and goodnight sleep sleep….”
Care giving takes on a whole other meaning these days. Gone are the extended families, and the home visits by cheerful doctors. The government keeps saying it will compensate family members who engage in care giving, but then there is no tooth fairy either.
The truth is that I had not been thrilled when my then partner announced that my mother was going to move in with us. She was in her late eighties and had been living with a much older woman whose Alzheimer’s was becoming unmanageable. Her coming to live with us would allow us to buy an apartment in a triplex. I did not want to own any property either. I barely got along with my mother, and had left home at the age of sixteen due to irreconcilable differences with my parents. I had also had an urge to travel as a adolescent and my parents didn’t object to my going. They even rented out my room right after I hit the road.
For years my mother had mourned my inability to be the daughter she had wanted, and because she was a Holocaust survivor, she assumed she deserved a daughter who would marry young and give her the grandchildren she expected. When I was about nine months old, my mother threw herself under a truck.. My mother said that she had tried to kill herself because she did not want to go to Israel and that had been my father’s plan. My older brother said that she had tripped. Now that we are all aware of post partem depression, I feel lucky that she hadn’t thrown me under the truck wheels. My father found a truly wonderful Czech woman to take care of me, and I called her OMA or grandmother. Years after we moved to Montreal I still missed her and my mother confessed that she had been bitterly jealous of Frau Trbola because I had really bonded with her.
When I decided to go to university Mama asked, “What for?” It seemed such a waste of money to her, after all I was not going to have to support a family. She told me that all the money she had put away had already been spent on my older brother’s education and wedding. One time when I came to Montreal on a visit from Toronto where a play I had written was about to be produced at a major theatre, she stood on her balcony and yelled, “So when are you going to get a real job?” There were witnesses. So, I was not thrilled to be living with her. A girlfriend of mine, a psychologist said “the only way you will survive living with those two, is to practice serious incompetence.”
Mama and I had a lot of differences and not all of them due to the fact that she was actually two generations older than I, and she had lost over eighty members of her family, making her a very uncheerful sort of person. I am not a very easy character to get along with either. I had decided to study theatre whether there was money or not. I had already married and divorced the poorest Texan in Colorado (graduate school, Boulder). I lived where I pleased, and traveled to war zones when I felt there was work to do there.
(PAGE TWO – Guerilla Tactics for the Care Giver)