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So...Are
You Two Together?
You share a home and a life with your best girlfriend.
What do you call that? |
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MS.CELLANEOUS
- What?
- Just the Facts
- Word: No
- Women to Watch
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Uppity
Woman
A puppet maker on a mission. |
HEALTH
- Unconscionable
Care
- Cardinal Sins
- Healthnotes
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Life
and Death in Iraq
Our reporter goes inside Iraq to learn firsthand what
sanctions have done to the lives of women. |
Did
the Women's Museum Wimp Out?
While many have raved about the new Women's Museum in
Dalls, others say it soft-pedals the details of the struggle
for women's rights. |
Portfolio:
Eyes of the Beholder
African American women photographers turn the "gaze"
inside out. |
ART
Breaking from Tradition: Two Great Singers from Mali.
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POETRY
My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell by Gwendolyn
Brooks |
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Ms
News
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| Editor's
Page: Mothering Our Mothers |
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Books:
-A History of the Wife, by Marilyn Yalom
-Freedom's Daughters, by Lynne Olson
-Kamikaze Lust, by Lauren Sanders
-Manmade Breast Cancers, by Zillah
Eisenstein
-Smell, by Radhika Jha
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-First
Person: Slut, Interrupted
-Columns: Daisy Hernandez, Patricia Smith and Gloria
Steinem |
Call
for Woman of the Year
Tell us who you think should be recognized in this special
issue. |
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Like so many women, i am at that bittersweet stage of life where
I'm now the caregiver for a parent. My mother is sliding into
the murky world of fading memories and mental confusion that
marks Alzheimer's disease. A year ago, when she celebrated her
86th birthday, she was a feisty self-sufficient woman; a trifle
forgetful but able to drive her own car to the supermarket,
prepare her own meals, and handle her bills and banking. But
all the signs were there: she was quick to anger, more withdrawn,
more frail. She had had a series of part-time aides who came
to clean and do the laundry, and she had found fault with them
all. As her mental deterioration became increasingly evident,
my sister and I decided that she needed a regular caregiver.
Increasingly enraged about losing control, angry with us for
insisting that she needed help, Mom seemed determined to sabotage
every effort we made. We'd hire someone and she'd lock her out,
or verbally abuse her. My mother's fear was that we wanted to
put her in a nursing home. Our fear was that we would have
to place her there.
I took control of her bank account. She accused me of stealing
her money. We took her car keys and made sure that the car could
not be started, just in case she had hidden away another set
of keys. I, the daughter who lived closest to her, deluded myself
into believing that she only needed someone to come in during
the day, that she had in fact prepared her evening meals, that
she was taking her medication. I'd call every day and race out
to see her on weekends, bring special treats, and pay her bills.
Some part of me refused to acknowledge that her conversations
were becoming increasingly disjointed, facts giving way to fiction,
and that she was off the page more often than not. I didn't
want her life to change, and I didn't want mine to change either.
So off I went on business trips that kept me away for two weekends
in a row. And then I got a phone call: Mom had been found disoriented
and wandering the halls of the seniors' complex where she lives.
Our lives had changed.
I packed my bags and headed into the unknown. Seemingly overnight,
the woman I had known as my mother had disappeared. In her stead
was a very frail old woman, increasingly trapped in dementia,
who had stopped eating regularly and taking her medication,
who was losing control of her bladder and needed to wear adult
diapers. Suddenly that phrase "once an adult and twice a child"
was all too achingly real. The time had come for my sister and
me to mother our mother.
So here we are in a bittersweet period. There are a plethora
of articles and books addressing situations like ours. But no
matter how much you read, nothing truly prepares you for the
frustration and the pain and the guilt and the fear and the
slow mourning. And yet, with the bitter comes the sweet. I catch
glimpses of the little girl my mother once was. I've come to
savor the waves of unconditional love that well up at unexpected
moments when we are together. I'm humbled by the reversal of
needs that takes me back to my childhood, when she was my rock
and my refuge. I'm blessed and strengthened and surrounded by
a support circle-friends who open their arms, acquaintances
who have either gone down this road before me or are also finding
their way in this unknown country. My faith has deepened, as
has my appreciation of the importance of being in a community,
and in my bleakest times I've called on the spirits of my female
ancestors and have been renewed.
And I find myself looking in the mirror wondering, is this the
journey I, too, will take one day when I am old?
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