My Ma is something close to amazing. Unhappy with the care my Old Man was receiving, out of love she went and fixed up a kidnapping. After multiple occasions of being left to soil, being found on floor by carers, not being given or afforded any dignity, after her being treated by some as pariah and nuisance for being his loudest and most loving advocate, she took him out for a walk in a wheelchair and took him wheelchair and all right back home. The link of love between those two is incredible. Neither are happy unless both are. And at home there’s more chance of that happening.  

She got here, he got home, they got here. Nurses and social workers be damned. Now they’re here where I live in that granny flat of theirs, where I moved to while I get on with studying. Now for a man who was told he would die in a weekend, then a week, then who’d spent four months in bed or being karted chair to chair, he is just something spectacular.

‘You’ll never walk’. Hold my beer. ‘You’ll never go home’. Just you watch. ‘You’ll never read or meaningfully communicate’. Go on and suck a sack full of lemons. None of this would have happened without her. But it comes at a cost and we live cheek by jowl and I fear for her more now than for him. She’s his care giver, bather, his sheet washer, dresser, his changer, his link to the world. All while her links to the world have been cut. She now has one job. Gone are the chances to create and meet friends, sing, watch a film or listen to radio. Her time is now entirely dedicated. Seems there’s no rest for the loved nor the wicked.

And cheek by jowl I panic right along with her. When he falls, when he needs shaving, when he has TIAs, when he has seizures, when his face twists in shapes that slice deep into dreams, when he’s frightened, confused, or frustrated… I have a fraction of her responsibilities but I’m pretty sure we share the same worry. Whatever she gives will not be enough, and however I help between jobs and studies, it won’t lift a single gram of weight off her.

It’s only been month. And I know everything is always a month. I am beat. She is beat. And navigating this while I navigate me while I navigate her while she navigates him, thinking of myself seems an N’th degree selfish. So I worry, she worries, guilt sets in. Hers is for my Old Man and me and my involvement. Mine is for them and me second. And while writing, the scalp tingles its tingle. There’s a crash coming soon, I can feel it. If there’s an order for things to get fixed in, none of us can quite find the blueprint.      

(And just how we got to this post, right here is where it all started….)