Coffee with Mom

by Mike Glenn

  You can’t watch them twenty-four hours a day, and if you don’t, they walk off or drive off. They open drawers and doors and get into things that can be harmful to them. It’s the old, “I took my eye off of them for one moment . . .” and somebody gets hurt. That’s a lot harder to live with than placing them in a facility.

  We learned to keep journals. We found out that while we may not feel like sitting down at the end of the day and writing everything down, we couldn’t rely on our memories. Things happen too fast to keep it all mentally catalogued. Too many things happen for you to remember every detail. When they happen, you don’t think you’ll ever forget this moment, but you do.

  I used to use the plural “we” when I talked about Mom having Alzheimer’s. “She” didn’t have Alzheimer’s, “we” did. I found myself unable to remember anything from one moment to the next, and then, when I got to the doctor, I couldn’t remember Mom’s symptoms or how the medicine had helped. Too many times, I just ended up telling the doctor everything was fine. I was just too overwhelmed to remember anything.

  The changes are too subtle, too numerous, and happen too quickly. One day you’ll notice one thing. The next day you’ll notice something else. In between those days, ten other things will happen. How will you keep it all straight? How will you notice the patterns? The only way you’ll be able to do this is to keep a journal.

  Not only will you need to have a place to write down the details of your loved one’s care, but you’ll need a space to write down what you’re going through emotionally. There will be days when you get so angry you will think you’ll explode. My mom would say some outrageous things to me. She would accuse me of crimes and misdemeanors. More than once, she told me she was going to report me to the police and have me arrested for elder abuse, burglary, robbery, and fraud. She told me that giving me her power of attorney was the worst mistake she ever made.

  What do you do with all of this emotion? You write it down. If you don’t write it down, the anger, grief, and frustration just circle around in your head and your heart. You won’t be able to think about anything else. If you write it down, you’ll give your emotions somewhere to go. You’ll be able to recognize patterns, and yes, you’ll be able to recognize the ridiculousness of some of the things that have been said.

  And you’ll be able to remember some good things as well. Inevitably, when I would start writing about my conversations with my mom, I would remember another time and another place. I would find myself smiling. There were things I had forgotten, and other things I hadn’t thought about in a long time. I wrote them down as well. I got back a lot of family stories doing this. Reminding myself of who my mom used to be gave me a little more reason to take care of her one more day.

  And yes, you’ll need to take some breaks, but be warned, don’t go too far if you do. One time Jeannie and I took a Mediterranean cruise. I got to see all of the historical places, statues, and works of art I had always read about and studied. During the cruise, we got an emergency phone call saying my mom had been taken to the emergency room. By the time we had run everything down and found out what was going on, Mom had woken up that morning telling everyone she was deaf in her right ear.

  She had always been deaf in her right ear.

  The acoustic neuroma had taken her hearing four years before. For whatever reason, she had gotten up that morning and forgotten she was deaf, so her not being able to hear was a totally new experience for her. Trying to handle all of that through international long distance was a nightmare.

  Here’s the thing you have to remember: this is a marathon, not a sprint. This is a long journey of countless days, cloudy skies, and sometimes thick fog that makes it impossible to get anywhere. But today, you do what you have to do. Tomorrow, you’ll do what has to be done on that day.

  And every day, you’ll remember your pain. It never goes away. This is the price of love. You can’t do anything to make it go away, but you can keep it from swamping your little boat. If you go under, so does your loved one. You have to learn to keep your head above water.

  Coffee with Mom: What feels like exhaustion is actually grief. There’s a weariness to grief that drains you of all of your emotional, physical, and mental energy. Be sure you handle it before it handles you.

  When you get on an airplane, the flight attendant will inform you about how the oxygen masks will deploy in case of an emergency. They will then tell you that if you’re traveling with someone, put your oxygen mask on first, then put the mask on your loved one. If you don’t, you’ll both pass out.

  Your loved one is counting on you just like my mom counted on me. Put on your oxygen mask first.

  Chapter 2

  Meet My Mom

  When I was growing up, I thought my mom was normal. Every child does. You don’t remember the day you met your mom. You just opened your eyes one day and there she was. Every other day you opened your eyes, she was there, and so you grow up assuming that every child had a mother like yours.

  Coffee with Mom: (after I reminded her I was taller than her) “Makes no matter. You’ll sit down for me to slap you.”

  It took me a few years, but I began to understand my friends didn’t have a mother like mine. No one had a mother like mine.

  There were enough clues in my early life for me to pick up that I was the son of a very unique mother. For one thing, she never let me win at anything. If we were playing checkers, Mom wouldn’t let you win. If we were playing “Go Fish,” she wouldn’t let you win. If we were playing basketball in the driveway, Mom wouldn’t let you win. She lettered in high school basketball, and she was known to slam you if you were driving toward the rim. “When you beat me,” she said, “it’ll mean something.”

  To understand my mother, you’d first have to know my mother had no adolescence. She was never a teenager. Whatever experiences and changes you go through between childhood and adulthood, my mother never made. The event that defined my mom’s life happened when she was twelve years old. Her mother died of breast cancer. When she was diagnosed, my grandmother was sent to Jackson, Mississippi, for treatment. At the time, cobalt radiation was usual protocol. Years later, my mother could still describe in vivid detail how the radiation treatments burned her mother.

  And she would also describe in great detail how her father looked when he came through the door that night to tell my mother and her three sisters that their mother had died.

  My grandmother was a musician, and she was the one who had taught my mother to sing and play the piano. My grandmother had insisted my mother take piano lessons. Music was something my grandmother and mother shared. My mom would tell me about listening to her mother play the piano when she was growing up. Funny, but I grew up the same way—listening to my mother play the old hymns and gospel songs on the piano. I’m not sure I ever fully appreciated what my mom lost in the death of her mother.

  I don’t know what happened in that moment after her mother passed away. I don’t know if someone said something. Something people usually say without thinking at a time like this, such as, “Well, Barbara, your sisters will be depending on you now.” I don’t know if my grandmother had said something to my mother about taking care of her sisters, but whatever it was, my mother instantaneously became an adult.

  My mom became mother to her sisters overnight.

  She dressed them for school. She took them to church. One of her friends told me she remembered the Bustin girls walking into church like four little ducks and sitting on the front row while Mom attended choir practice.

  One afternoon, Mom thought the sisters had been particularly good during the week. She wanted to buy them a treat, so she piled them all in the car and drove them to the local ice cream parlor. When she got there and parked, the sheriff walked over to the car and asked to see her license. She told him she didn’t have a license, and the funny thing is the sheriff knew she didn’t have a li
cense. He also knew what was going on in her family.

  “Tell your father to get you a license,” he told her.

  “I can’t. I’m not old enough.”

  “You were old enough to drive over here. You’re old enough for a license.”

  That was my mom. She didn’t give one thought about whether or not she should do or if she could do it. This was what needed to be done, and she was going to do it . . . even if it was against the law.

  My grandfather worked at the Masonite plant in Laurel, Mississippi, and although they lived in the middle of extended family, Mom felt like she became responsible for her little sisters from that moment on. That dynamic made growing up among the Bustin girls interesting. My mom was their older sister and their mother, and her little sisters treated her that way well into their adulthood. All the resentments, dependencies, jealousies, anger, joys, secrets, love, and loyalty that happen between daughters and mothers, big sisters and little sisters, happened with my mom and her sisters all at the same time.

  My grandfather remarried, and it wasn’t a good situation, so my mom got a job at the local department store and moved into a small apartment. Even then, her sisters would come and stay at her apartment rather than being at home with their father. That was just the way life was. Mom took care of her sisters. Life isn’t fair, my mom would later remind me, and once you understand how unfair life is, you’ll be fine.

  My grandfather’s second marriage ended in divorce, and he married again. This marriage was a very stable one, and the sisters were able to experience a normal life. Yet, even with my grandfather’s remarriage, the sisters always looked to Mom as their mother. When one of the sisters went through a painful divorce, she moved to Huntsville where my mother lived. She didn’t move to Mississippi where the family was.

  When one of the sisters got very sick, Mom flew out and took care of her. Okay, maybe I said that too nicely. My mom flew out and took over. Doctors and nurses were reporting in to my mom. Physical therapists were informing my mom about my aunt’s progress, and if Mom wasn’t satisfied, they redid the therapy. My aunt got better. She was too scared of my mom not to.

  If I could only tell you one story about my mom, I would tell you this one. When my brother was sixteen years old, his best friend was killed in a car wreck. This was a devastating time for our family and community. I was at college, and by the time I got home, everyone had gathered at the funeral home. When I walked in, I’ll never forget what I saw. My brother was standing by his friend’s coffin and crying. My mother was standing there with him, crying too. That was my mom. Life was hard. Life wasn’t fair. She knew that. But you were going to get through it, and she would stand right there with you until you did.

  But Mom had another chapter in the adventure of her life and that was her marriage to my dad. They were married for more than fifty-seven years and grew so close they literally became one name: “JohnandBarbara.” You never saw one without seeing the other. The great love story started one night when my mom and her friends went roller-skating. While they were skating, the girls—especially my mom—were being harassed by a lanky, skinny-legged skater who would circle them on one lap, and blow past them on the next lap. Eventually, he tripped my mom, and that’s how my mom and dad met. When my mom would tell the story, she said she got up off of the rink floor and told her friends, “He’ll pay for that. I’m going to marry him.”

  Coffee with Mom: “Your dad and I were married fifty-seven years. People say that’s a long time, but it’s not. It’s not very long at all.”

  And she did.

  Chapter 3

  Don’t Mess with John

  Coffee with Mom: “Did Alabama win? Good. Your daddy was miserable to live with when they lost.” (I know. I got that from him!)

  My dad was twenty-three, and my mom had just turned nineteen when they got married. I was born when she was twenty. Mom and Dad were married so long and grew so close they literally became one person. I know you think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. Where Mom was strong, Dad was weak. Where Mom was weak, Dad was strong. Dad was the visionary, and Mom took care of the details. Dad would do the sales at the store, and Mom would take care of the books. Dad would run for political office, and she would run his campaign. The challenges and struggles of their lives welded them together in such a way that not only couldn’t they be pulled apart, but most of the time you couldn’t tell where one stopped and the other started.

  For most of their lives, they only had each other. Dad joined the Air Force to escape the poverty of south Mississippi. The Air Force trained my father on radars, and from Alexandria, Louisiana, to Gulfport, Mississippi, and finally Huntsville, Alabama, my mother followed my father out of Mississippi to the booming city of Huntsville, Alabama. My dad left the Air Force and became a civilian instructor for the Hawk missile at Redstone Arsenal. With both NASA and the Army missile command located in Huntsville, the city began to grow at a frenetic pace due to President Kennedy’s desire to put a man on the moon and the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The rocket technology used for the space missions was then appropriated by the Department of Defense to bolster our nuclear arsenal at the height of the Cold War. Werner von Braun lived and worked in our town. People were being assigned to Huntsville from all over the country.

  This made Huntsville a great town in which to grow up. Our teachers, mostly the spouses of NASA engineers and career military personnel, were highly educated, well-traveled, and interesting teachers. I had extraordinary teachers, and science was especially challenging and fun. We had rockets that blasted off in our science fairs, and the study of the universe in our classes was challenging because it was what our parents really did for a living.

  Dad was an instructor of the radar system of the Hawk missile. Any nation using the Hawk system came to Huntsville to be trained, and my dad would be one of those who trained them. He was good at what he did and was commended for his excellence on numerous occasions. He would begin teaching at 7:30 in the morning, and he’d be done at 3:30 in the afternoon. That left half of a day for Dad to do something else.

  His lack of a college education limited his ability to be promoted within the government services. So, Dad found other ways to provide for his family. He started repairing televisions in our garage. For most of my life, we never parked our cars in the garage—it was always filled with rows and rows of televisions my dad was repairing. People would bring over their televisions, and Dad would fix them. Most of the time when I went to bed, Dad would still be in the garage working on someone else’s TV.

  Mom and Dad were great partners. He was the creative visionary that came up with the ideas, and she was the nuts-and-bolts thinker that made things work. They built a very successful television and appliance business (Ray-Mar TV). Dad was the salesperson, and Mom was everything else. He was a successful community leader, and she was the one who made sure he made all of his meetings on time and rehearsed his speeches before he left. My dad was very self-conscious about his lack of education, so Mom would coach him about how to speak in public and how to make sure his verbs and nouns matched. Sometimes it helped. But most of the time, Dad was just himself. He couldn’t help it. Mom would get so angry when he misspoke in public, especially if it was something she had coached him on. Dad was going to succeed. Mom would make sure of it.

  Ray-Mar TV opened when I was in grade school and operated as a successful business until after I was married. Even then, Dad reluctantly sold the business when Mom told him she wasn’t working anymore. Without his HR director, CFO, VP of Customer Relations, and Executive Assistant, my dad was forced to let the business go. As my father said at the time, “Son, your mama has made up her mind, and once she’s made up her mind, there’s no changing it.”

  She wouldn’t change her mind, and she never apologized. She would just pick up and go on like nothing had happened. That was my mom. No excuses. No whining. No apologies
and no self-pity. Life wasn’t fair. Life wasn’t easy. If the going got tough, bow your neck and get tougher. Find a way to get through. That was her answer to everything. Her philosophy was to grab the problem by the neck and shake it until an answer fell out.

  Growing up, we learned to never complain to Mom. My dad would have sympathy for you, but Mom never would. If things weren’t going your way, either let it alone or change it. Either way, make up your mind quickly and get to it. Just stop complaining. That was my mom.

  For the most part, this philosophy of life served my mom well.

  Mom became a fierce protector of my dad. My dad was a genuinely loving and trusting man. As a result, he was taken advantage of in business deals and political situations. Nothing would make my mother angrier than seeing someone take advantage of Dad.

  One morning when Dad and I were at breakfast, he mentioned how Mom could never let anything go. Dad went on and said Mom should just forgive this person we were talking about. I told Dad that would never happen. He asked me why.

  “Because,” I said, “Mom only has one rule: ‘Don’t mess with John.’ Break that rule and Mom will have nothing to do with you.”

  Dad looked at me as if he wanted me to explain what I had just said. I mentioned two people’s names. The first was a political enemy who had betrayed Dad in a key moment of his political career. The second was a trusted ally and friend.

  I named the first man. “Mom won’t have anything to do with him,” I said. “Why not?”

  Dad said, “Because he lied to me.”