Anti-Blessings

As she reached to pull the door shut, I wondered to myself, “Did she lock it? Does she have a key?” Instead of vocalizing either question, I trusted that she was on it. Surely mom could navigate a neighborhood walk without any intervention from me. So she pulled the door shut and we went on our way. These sidewalk-less rural roads are harder to navigate now that mom’s in her early 80s and less steady on her feet, dragging her left leg along while her stiff hips resist. With the increased traffic from the new housing complexes that have sprouted up on what used to be farmland, my attention was on safe movement. Do I walk on the inside where the ground is more uneven or closer to the street where I can be the one who has to jump out of the way if a car comes too close? I opted for the outside track and a friendly wave to every driver with half an eye on the terrain at mom’s feet while we chatted about the changing landscape, former neighbors, and the evolving life of this tiny corner of the world where my parents have lived for more than 50 years. As I intuited, when we got back to the house, the door was locked and the key was not in the little pouch mom had tucked into her pocket for the walk. We were locked out. Mom either doesn’t realize or resists acknowledging the marked decline in her memory and fluid thinking over these past few years. But at moments like these, she sees it all too clearly. Her confusion quickly pivoted to upset, at herself, for how dumb she is now, an expression of her frustration when she can’t miss the disconnect between who she is now and who she used to know herself as, still wants to be. Oh to lose your own sense of competency, of fully there-ness! We took a few deep breaths and turned to problem solving. Is there a hidden key? Yes, unhelpfully locked in the garage. Which now has a key pad! Does she know the code? A frown. A guess. A fail. We try every relevant four number combo we can think of, going through family birthdays, birth years, phone numbers, zip codes, in different combinations, before I give up. We try all the other doors to the house in case something might have accidentally been left unlocked (which would only indicate there was something wrong with my father, and there isn’t). Mom briefly considered breaking a window pane to unlock a side door and I quickly dissuaded her. My dad would be out golfing for another two hours. My phone was in the house. Miraculously my dad now carries his cell phone but since I mostly call the landline (the same number that I’ve known since I was 5), I have no idea what his cell phone number is. There will be no calling him from a neighbor’s house. Here’s the good news. It’s a perfect summer day, soft and comfortably warm. We ate breakfast and neither of us needs to use the bathroom. There is shade on the front step. And we are together. Amen. Our plan for the morning was to spend it together, and now we will be doing that outside. Kate Bowler, author, podcaster, professor of religion, cancer survivor, has a gift for claiming the divine in the difficult. Resisting our insta-posting, #blessing, faux presentation of the blessed (often carefully curated and filtered) moments of our lives, Bowler sees the concept of blessing as useful “for naming that strange mix of awful and lovely experiences in our lives. […] This is beautiful. This is awful. And all of it can be called true.” Without even the smidgiest of delusion about the awful being awful, the unlucky being unlucky, Bowler suggests we can look for the anti-blessing, the beautiful, funny, sparkly thing that is there anyway, and claim it together with what is impossibly hard. I can’t think of the last time I just sat still with my mom and gave her my full, undivided attention. Naturally our conversation started with stories about key mishaps. The call I received from the cat sitter just a week prior while I was in the airport picking up my rental car and she was at my front door with the wrong key, at the start of our 10-day trip (oops!), and how we solved for that. The time my brothers broke the basement window to get into the house after I dropped the extra key into a spot from whence we could not retrieve it. It turns out mom’s not stupid, just human, or at least that’s the case I’m making. Because mom’s conversational capacity is impacted by her memory loss, our conversation meandered and at regular intervals it stalled. Those silences were best of all. We watched the hummingbird come and go from the feeder. When was the last time I was still enough to notice a hummingbird’s tongue darting in and out as it sipped up nectar? I studied the clematis climbing the trellis next to the stoop, noticing some blossoms had four petals and others six. How strange! When I reached for my phone to find out how that’s even possible, my phone wasn’t in my pocket and I was just left to be present to the wonder, to the wondering. I watched a daddy longlegs walk in the flower bed and remembered how right in that spot my brother used to pull off their legs leaving just two (one for him to hold and one for it to point) and asking the spider, “Which way is daddy coming home?” A bizarre and horrible thing to be sure, but a core memory of summer, my brother’s courage (I hated spiders), and a peculiar kind of childlike inquiry into the natural and the mystical and where they meet. After about an hour, mom and I…