I’m imagining that you all are out there tapping your fingers on your computer screens impatiently awaiting my next post here, since it’s been so long.  Such imaginings give away my tendency to think I’m the center of the universe. Well, I AM the center of my own universe, after all, so it’s a natural progression that I would be the center of everyone else’s as well. But no, I realize that probably a whole three people have noticed I haven’t updated and everyone else is getting along with their own lives, being the centers of their own universes.

The reason it’s been so long since I’ve darkened the door of this here blog has to do with my mother.  Oy, my mother.  My mother has a nasty and particularly cruel neurological disease called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy.  It’s extremely rare so you probably haven’t heard of it. Suffice it to say that my 65-year-old formerly vibrant, law-practicing mama is now a helpless old woman stuck in bed, who depends on someone else to do absolutely everything for her, and who, if she declines the feeding tube she will soon need, will probably die before the year is over. A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit her. She lives 3000 miles away, so it’s difficult for me to get out there often enough. And although it makes her desperately happy when I do visit, it’s stressful beyond description, given our fractious past, my own guilt, the relentless expectations of my extended family (and our resulting near-estrangement), and the fact that I seem to have a bulletproof wall separating what’s happening to her from my emotional core. Stress notwithstanding, I have yet to shed a tear. I do what needs to be done and try to show her as much love as I can, but the grief that I should be feeling is locked away and I have yet to access it.

So why am I telling you all this? It’s probably TMI. You don’t even know me, after all. Why should you care about my sick mother? Well, because many people (most, even, I would wager) have some sort of difficult relationship with one or both parents, and many people have to deal with the slow, gut-wrenching deaths of loved ones. What I’m going through is not all that special or unusual. I sense that it is a situation readers might relate to. Also because the complexities of my relationship with my mother growing up, and the way it affects what we’re going through together now are central themes to almost everything I write. It is certainly a central theme of my memoir, even though the memoir is humorous and I spend most of it telling stories about my relentless dorkitude. While I can look back at my many missteps as a child and laugh (and they were truly funny in the way only the very sincere and dramatic child’s behavior and thoughts can be), the fact that my socially-perfect mother disapproved of my whole persona much of the time is a key part of the story. Writing about that time and poking gentle fun at myself is my way of re-parenting myself with less disapproval. (I don’t have a degree in psychology, but I’m pretty sure I could play a therapist on TV.)

The point is, I got mired in it all after the visit, and then it was my birthday, which I like to celebrate for an entire month instead of just a day, and next thing you know it’s been weeks without a blog post.  (Also, I am still a poet and was overcome with the compulsion to spend a day writing a poem about my husband’s love of a C.K. Williams poem featuring the low-hanging balls of a basset hound. When the muse calls…)  My apologies to you three people who have been waiting for an update.

The good news is, I’m back now. And I’m getting back to the bad fashion memoir chapter I started before the trip to Seattle. My writing buddies were promised it at least a week ago and I have a lot of catching up to do.