Just Is

 Since I wrote last, we've had snow that didn't stick around and some very cold temperatures--though nothing that made me think I needed a heavier coat than my zip-up hoodie. (It's not like I spend a lot of time outdoors though.)

Dave moved his mother into a new facility last week and I spent a couple of nights helping him clear out his mother's former place. The old place turned out to be not great--understaffed, unclean, poor food, etc.--but Dave's mother was adamant at the time that she wanted to move in there, I'm pretty sure she liked the place because when you walk in, the front looks very nice, with a marble front desk and nicely decorated seating area; a gilded nightmare. Dave's mother was glad to move anyway from there and she seems to be getting more and better care in the new facility. Of course all the hard work of finding the place and moving her in fell to Dave. His sister helped a bit with paperwork from afar and of course she handles all the money aspect of it, something I'm glad we don't have to think about. I tried to help Dave a bit by helping with packing up the old place. Dave's mom was in this place, a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette--for a little over a year and she had accumulated a lot of stuff, most of which she wasn't able to move into her new single room. What she didn't take largely went into garbage bags to be thrown away. We don't need her old silverware or bedding and though we could have donated it, that would be yet more work. Dave is pretty exhausted and I'm over it.

A lot of my feelings about this whole thing are complicated by my feelings about Dave's family in general. I spent about ten years trying so hard to get them to like me and they never did. They definitely excluded me and I felt a lot of time like they were either just tolerating my presence or laughing up their sleeves at me. So after ten years--ten years!--of prioritizing the maintenance of a relationship with them, I finally realized that it was doing no good and I told Dave I was done. Since then, he's been responsible for maintaining his own familial relationships. I help out if it will help him out, but I don't do anything for any other member of his family. I know it makes me seem unfeeling or uncaring to cut off contact, but sometimes you have to do something that extreme to maintain your self-respect.

I do feel sorry for Dave's mother now that she is getting to the end of her life--she's speaking to a hospice care specialist today--and she's not in great shape from the Parkinson's. I've even come to some understanding of her treatment of me, which I sense comes from her own insecurity about her position in life and in Dave's extended family--shit rolls downhill--though understanding that does not lead me to excuse her poor behavior toward me over the years. Dave says she asks about me from time to time but I find that more manipulative than anything else. She's certainly never acknowledged her poor treatment of me, if she ever even recognized that she was doing it.

There's a lot of complicated history there, I know. But we're all doing the best we can in one way or another. And not doing great at any of it. There is no better or worse at this point, I think, it just is. 

Right now Dave is at the new facility getting his mother's TV and a bed alarm set up. I'm home doing some chores, laundry, etc. In between times, I'm watching John Wick on Netflix. I've never seen it before but I like Keanu Reeves. I skipped past the dead dog part and am just watching the violent parts. I can handle watching people get killed, not animals. (I even had to stop watching How to Train Your Dragon the other day because of some implied meanness toward the dragons.) I've been not sleeping and while I'm not sleeping I've been watching things on Netflix, or trying to anyway. I tried to make it through Downsizing, the old Matt Damon movie, and gave up about three-quarters of the way through because it was just so blah. I also tried to watch a movie from the 70s called The Front Page. I made it a bit more than halfway through. I gave up on another 70s movie called The Lords of Flatbush. I only got about ten minutes into that but maybe I'll give it another try. It stars Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler playing, what else, fifties style hoodlums (a pre-Fonz role for Henry Winkler, whom I really like). 

It's almost five o'clock now, so I think I'm going to go start some dinner. Nachos tonight.