12/13/2004 10:41:03 AM|||Amy|||Whenever I've tried to login lately to post, I haven't been able to connect. It's been kind of a drag/frustrating/pain in the ass.

In any case, it has also kept me from writing long, maudlin posts on why and how my life is in chaos.

Since last Wednesday, my mother has been in Intensive Care. She's getting better bit by bit, but her improvements are very small. As she gets better, she talks more and the more she talks, the more evident it is that she is the throes of Dementia. My sister has come home, my brother is blaming my father and I for the state of my mother's health, and I am doing my best to blanket my children in Christmas wonderment but also trying to shelter them from the tragic circumstances of their Grandmother's life.

I don't know how long my mother will live. I don't know how to explain what is happening to my children.

My father has been caring for my mother day and night for the last several years. He told me last night that for the last 42 years she has been his heart and soul, and when she dies - he will go back to being the aimless basket case he was when he married her at 23. He says that he doesn't know what will happen to him when she dies, but perhaps, he told me, he will sell their house and go live in a "30 foot Airstream in Arizona with all the other old, retired, discarded Q-tips."

So, as to avoid the long, maudlin post and instead try to place a thumbprint on my absence - I will go off now and immerse myself in work so that I can go home tonight and not indulge in semi-panicky worries about what is still laying on my desk.

I have dual priorities and that is to spend as much time with my mother as I can, but also to be with the kids as much as I can. Work is the respite. As selfish as it may seem, as long as I am at work I am relieved from the balancing act at home.
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