Transitions

I haven’t posted in a while. The last two months have been full of stress and tears and uncertainty. A lot is changing in my life and I haven’t been handling it all that well. These feelings are exacerbated by this time of year, when everyone is looking forward to the holidays and family and it’s just a reminder of what I’ve lost and continue to lose. I don’t want to talk about Thanksgiving because it was an incredibly painful week and I definitely don’t want to think about Hanukkah/Christmas.

My relationship with my mom has entered a new phase. The doctors suspect that she has dementia, which is devastating but not surprising. This is not the version of my mom that I grew up with and I’m trying to cope with that. I’m grieving the loss of that relationship and struggling to find some connection with this new version of her. My mom has never been into makeup or anything like that, but today when I visited, I took some nail decals in the hope that it would at least be something we could do together. She watched me as I carefully placed each decal on her nails and used the nail file to cut off the excess. When I was done, I looked up at her and she smiled. It’s certainly not how my mom would have reacted in the past, but I was grateful for that moment.