Stanley

Mom and Brother, Stanley

I have purposely not mentioned my youngest brother much in this blog. He is a thorn in my side, a pebble in my shoe, most of the time, and so I leave him out of the discussion, perhaps in that way to make his looming presence fade a little. But he is a fact in my life and my mother's life and because of his proximity to my mother, very much a fact of life right now.

This blog is not worth anything to me if I can't be honest in it, as if it was my personal journal. It won't be as brutally honest as my hand-written journal, as I suspect there are people who are reading it and they don't really want to know ALL my warts, read all the curses. Since my brother is paramount in my mind at this moment, I am going to lay it out here.

Stanely was born when I was twelve. Because of family circumstances at the time, my Dad's new business, Mom away from home helping Dad with it, I became like a second mother to my little brother. When he was three years old and I was 15 my Mom would go help Dad out as soon as I got home from school, and I was Stanley's "Mom". He was an odd duck, even then. He became "little bird", "little airplane", "little car"--he had a vivid imagination which we all indulged because he was the baby. At 15 my maternal instincts were in full gear and I was even making dinners for the family, always the little helper. After a few years my Dad's business failed and I became a normal teenager with dates and highschool to think about, but Stanley still seemed like more of a son to me than a brother--my first experience with a child.

I got married early and started my own family and Stanley tried to succeed in grade school and didn't do well there, and then tried to succeed in junior high and didn't succeed there and dropped out at 16. He took up drugs, probably as a way to deal with being "different", which he certainly was. He was an artist and a musician and that personality that caused him to be little car and little airplaine made him take up numerous other personas along the way. It was difficult to tell who he really was. at one point in his life he affected being a black man with white skin. He adapted the black swagger, speech, mode of dress. Because he didn't know what else to do with himself and something was expected of him, he joined the Army. He was still in his AfroAmerican personality and the real black men in the Army didn't take kindly to that. He found out the hard way that if you are not black, you do not try to BE black. He was discharged for fighting. He came home, lived with my parents for awhile, tried to live on his own, took more drugs, came back home, tried to live on his own again, painted amazing pictures, came back home.

I guess Stanley came back home again for good when he was in his early 30s. He is now 52. He continued to paint until my Dad died in 2001, exhibiting at Metropolis and Amy Burnett's gallery a few times over the years, but he lacked the ambition and drive to go any further. He sank into mental illness of a type that is managed by taking anti-psychotics, anti-depressants, and anti-anxiety medications. He also smokes pot. He lives upstairs in my mother's house, makes motor-cycle models, doesn't paint anymore, lives mostly at night, sleeps during the day, watches television, goes out to a movie occasasionally with his one friend, Pat, who is also an artist but, unlike Stanley, a working man with a family. He gets a small income from Social Security Disability Insurance, which he spends mostly on pot and take-out pizza. Up until recently I have seen him about once a week, if he happens to be downstairs when I have been visiting my Mother. We talk about television shows and movies he likes. He is intelligent and an entertaining conversationalist for a short period of time, but the television obsession can be too much after awhile. Once a week visits are enough.

When Mom fell and broke her arm and her kneecap I knew I was going to have to ask my brother to step up to the plate and take on some responsibility. He had done it before, when Mom broke her ankle two years ago. I had asked him then to sleep on Mom's schedule rather than his own, to sleep downstairs, rather than in his rooms upstairs and to help Mom get from her room to the bathroom in a wheelchair. He also had to make her meals. He did a decent job of it. It was stressful for him, I knew that, but he did it.

So I expected him to be able to do it again this time. I might be wrong about that. I brought Mom home Tuesday evening, after an afternoon fraught with tension while my brother waited at home for the wheelchair to be delivered and I waited at the nursing home to get confirmation that the wheelchair was there, ready to transport her into the house. Stanley nearly folded under this small pressure, calling me three times to report that the chair had not yet arrived, in a fury because he thought he saw a van going back and forth on the street and maybe that van was the wheelchair van and why weren't they stopping?! When the chair arrived and I got Mom home finally, Stanley was in a frenzy, hair flying in all directions, trying to tell me about a program he'd seen on television while my husband and I tried to get Mom in her bed and take care of other details that had to be done right then. He would not shut up or calm down. I did my best to ignore him. Before I left, I made a list of chores I needed him to do--empty the dryer, take the dishes out of the dishwasher, give Mom her pain pill at 9:00. Then I went home hoping that he could take care of these small things and his Mom. I figured it was his duty, after all the years she had been taking care of him.

Wednesday, after getting groceries for Mom, I arrived at noon to learn that she hadn't had any pain medication the night before, that Stanley had given her Tylenol PM instead, which is what she has taken at night for several years in order to sleep. He had not fed her yet, she was still in bed. Okay, I thought, this is the first morning, he's tired and tense, he hasn't gotten his act together. I spoke to him firmly but gently about the importance of food and the pain pills and about getting Mom in an upright position. I went back into the second-mother mode and he seemed to respond. He helped me cut back the wisteria that was hanging over the sidewalk, though keeping up a constant monolog about his television shows. That night I called him to make sure food and medications were being administered when they should be.

Thursday was better. I arrived in the morning to get Mom ready for her doctor's appointment. She had eaten her toast, had her pill and her daily medications and was ready to get up and have me help dress her. Stanley was calm and seemed on top of things. He helped get Mom down the steps and into the car. It was a pretty good day, all in all. Good news from the doctor, Stanley got a break, Mom got to get out into the fresh air. I left that day feeling pretty good about things.

Friday I started slowly, watching my recording of the Democratic Convention, cleaning the bathroom, answering email. I got to Mom's at 12:30, with a new pain medication prescription, a new bag of licorice and hope in my heart because today was the first day of Abiding Care. We were to meet the aid that would be helping Mom twice a week. As I came in the front door, Stanley rose up from the couch in a start--he had been asleep. When I remarked that he'd better get going as he had his own doctor's appointment in a couple of hours he started to whimper about what a "bad night" he'd had, his stomach upset, in the bathroom many times. I ignored him but tensed up because I didn't want to hear complaining from him when we had an 86 year old mother with two broken bones, who was bedridden. I checked on Mom--she was in pain, she hadn't had lunch, she hadn't had her daily meds, she was in disarray and looked so helpless and in need that I nearly broke down crying. I got Mom's lunch ready and got her out of bed, put a shirt on her (she was STILL wearing the slacks she'd had on the day before when I'd left her) and made some coffee. I wheeled her out into the livingroom to eat.

Again, I began to tell my brother how important it was to feed Mom and get her pain medication to her on a regular basis, not to mention getting her out of bed and in an upright position. This time the lecture was met with hostility--"I'm going to tell you one more time and I'm not going to tell you again, I had a bad night!" Well, second-mother, big sister, whatever I am to him, sane person to crazy person, I don't know what relationship I have to him anymore, whatever it is I came back swinging. He got the angry speech I've been wanting to give him for years: "You had a bad night. Poor you! How would you like to have a broken arm and a broken leg and be helpless in your bed and in fierce pain? Your mother has taken care of you for 52 years. It's time for you to take care of her now! She can't walk, she can hardly feed herself, she can't go outside without help, she can't drive a car, she can't get out of bed, she can't even get to the bathroom and you are complaining because you had a bad night?!" He came back with, "Well maybe I should just leave!" I said, "Go ahead. Go out into the big world and see how far you get". He knows he could never leave, that he couldn't make it in the world.

In a sense this is very sad. I would love to have a brother who has a wife, a family, a job, a life. But I don't and that's a fact of life and has been for decades. There is nothing I can do about the way he is. I told Bookworm that I can't be angry with him all the time, I just have to work with what I have. Trouble is, I'm not sure it's workable.

The Abiding Care aid started yesterday and she is like that white tornado in the commercials from long ago. She helped Mom and when Mom napped she tackled the kitchen and cleaned it until it shined. She put laundry in the washer and I'd bet she remembered to put it in the dryer and emptied the dryer before she left. She was making dinner when I left at 4:00. She is 22, she is tall and strong, she's smart and interesting, she will be wonderful for Mom and when she is there 4 hours a day, two days a week I will have confidence that Mom is well cared for. But what about the other 5 days a week? I know Mom wants to be in her own home, but would she be better off with me? I know she would get better care from me, more consistant, more constant. Part of me wants to bring her to my home and part of me wants Stanley to take his turn, to be a man for once, to take responsibility. I may be asking more than he is capable of. I am going to give it a little more time. If he can get into a routine, like he did two years ago during the broken ankle time, then it might be okay. Maybe he will want to impress Alyssa, the aid. Mostly I want to have some relief myself and live my life for at least part of every day.

Six weeks more in the leg brace, 4 weeks more in the arm brace. It sounds like such a small space of time. It's only been one week and two days since Mom fell. It seems like so long ago. As some comedian said in some movie years ago, "There's been so much stuff under the thing".