Anderson plugs are the heavy-duty extension leads of the 12-volt world. I’m learning all about connection. There’s a good chance I’ll need a thicker cord. Resolution of opposite charges is a much nicer term than divorce. I don’t even know where you live anymore.
I’m doing better and making plans. Mum and I are in a rhythm now. Days start with pills at seven thirty. Breakfast at eight every day. The key to regulation is strawberry jelly, instant pudding, porridge and roast sweet potato. Mocha coffee sachets as medication, two sachets at a time.
I bought you dignity cups and now you tell me they were too small. “I need more coffee” and now you can hold your mug again. I respect your motivation. I love how your body memory remembers its clock when the one on the wall loses value.
For a while you were critiquing the meals I cooked you. It was after you watched MasterChef. You’d roll the food under fork and look for the texture.
“Not enough salt.”
Rolling the food around your palate. “Get me a dessert spoon, dear.” I hear the scraping of your plate with metal on plastic and I can tell when you’re done by the rhythm. I have started giving you onion rings just to watch your eyes go large.
“Hmmm. This is delicious” when I make you Instant Pudding. I tell you I make it from scratch as it brings you comfort. Your body digests love born of sachets better these days.
“You’re a great cook, you know” and I hear the amazement in your voice. You have developed a love of tofu mixed with ginger which makes me proud. The judgement of my caregiving is real and I have to rise to the challenge. Clean hands, clean bench, clean home.
Ten percent bleach seven days a week.
I watch your suspicion of me grow. There’s a sideways glance you’ve adopted since Ridge Forrester is trying to oust Eric, his father, in The Bold and the Beautiful. Eric can still design fashion. Ridge should know better! How dare they try and take away the business he spent thirty years building.
“He’s old, he’s not stupid!”
“Leave him alone. Stop being a little minx.”
How can you still have energy for betrayals? No wonder you watch me with those what-is-she-up-to-eyes until evening. I wonder if I should watch along so I know what I’m doing. I leave you to your headphones and murmurings.
“Don’t you listen to him!”
You sit in your chair and you look like a toddler. You have a green cardigan on and I roll up your sleeves for you. Chubba bubba arms and legs with pink glowing cheeks. Your vital signs are better than mine. 120 over 70 and good sugars. I make you eat protein for breakfast. Your body trusts me when your mind can't follow the straight lines.
The nurse comes once a week. I joke when I ask her to ‘check my work’. Medication of two honeycomb bites in a zip lock bag is given to nurse as she leaves. Dignity includes being able to give back sometimes too.
I’ve been making your favourite Rumbledethumps. Creamy mashed potato where I heat the milk and butter and infuse it with the green pungency of spring onion. The garnish makes it fancy. Translucent cabbage and onion is still in the pan and the butter makes a luxurious sheen. Mixed together with baked cheese in the oven your whole body relaxes before me.
Tonight, you looked me in the eyes with a big smile. Dinner is about to be served. Blue plastic plate and dessert spoon, tea towel around neck applied. Your eyes sometimes have a mother of pearl quality from your cataracts when you look up at me. I know you can’t see me. We pretend that you can, anyway. $75,000 had just been lost on Deal or No Deal.
Tension is high. I put your plate down on the table in front of you while keeping my eyes on the TV. The $100,000 is still up there. “Here you go”, I say.
“Thanks, Mum!” is your reply.
“This looks delicious. Yummy, Yummy!” you exclaim.
You start eating and I go back to the kitchen. I look at you and you keep smiling at the TV. “Oh No!” as he loses the $100K. I exhale. And then again. My body is winded and my mind is wiped clean.
I remain in the kitchen silently. How funny that my world is literally turned upside down in a moment.
Two words and reality has given me the finger.
I’ve been waiting for this. Dreading it. Not quite breathing out enough to register the passing of time. I'm holding together whatever atoms, oxygen and soul stuff I can find. I'm trying to keep the circuit closed. I would like to keep the idea of you fixed. The little girl in me would like control.
I need to let it go. Let you go. Let you be as you are. Clinging would turn solid and thick within me. I feel like I’ve been shot in the chest though. It’s physical. There’s a deep pain that seems to reach into a depth that I can’t see. I feel it though. It’s warm with cold edges and it’s the cord link of mother for daughter.
I excuse myself so that you can’t see the devastation on my face. I know it’s now my turn to lead.
I sit at my keyboard and play C chords way too much, for way too long. I don’t look at the time. I’m sitting here breathing through the hurt. Not taking it personally. It’s a disease, right?
All I want to do is sit here and sulk and feel sorry for myself.
“Katie!” you yell from the other room. This is why I keep researching Anderson plugs. I have to research a future without you. In real time and while you’re still in the other room. It’s called anticipatory grief. In the dictionary I would expect the definition to read “it sucks”.
I can’t plan too much. I plan how to be off-grid and self-sufficient. I learn compliance so I know the rules about something. This journey is getting real so I will keep following our connection. That’s why I will keep researching connections while I save my best lies for you.
“Isn’t it exciting, Mum!”
“This is great.”
“Everything’s OK”
Can the heart get tinnitus?
I keep breathing out. The exhales keep me calm. You keep me safe in your prayers and we do the best that we can. We are all we’ve got and that’s changing. I want the pain to stop too. My aches and your arthritis, the loss of dignity and the loss of control. I’m trying to adapt and stay your daughter.
“I’ll be out in a minute”, I yell.
I need to make myself a little breathing room.
The physical metaphor of the Anderson plug framing this piece is brilliant. You take a stark, technical object—a symbol of heavy-duty connection, current, and off-grid survival—and weave it seamlessly through the tender, delicate circuitry of dementia caregiving. The opening line hooks us immediately, and the final return to connection and 'breathing room' completes a hauntingly beautiful narrative arc.
Wow. So moving. I had to remind myself to breathe. You both feel so real - as if I'm standing there, watching you watching each other. Your pain, too, of witnessing a soul-crushing loss in slow motion. What courage you have!
My mom's been gone fourteen years. I still search for her presence.
Hugs to you for sharing your pain so eloquently.