Feel it in My Knees, Part 1

Every time i get tense, I can feel it in my knees. So right now, when I'm feeling that funny "oh-crap-my-life-sucks" feeling in my knees, I know I'm tense. All the shit really hit the fan this weekend, and what I was hoping would be a nice break from the tough times at school has turned into a nightmare.

First, grandparents. You have to understand, this goes back to when I was thirteen. At least, that's when I date it back to. 2001-2002 (seventh grade): The Year My Life Turned to Shit. Nothing wrong in school or friends, just everything else when wrong. Bat Mitzvah (huge stress), brother got sick, Mom got sick (as in cancer sick, but don't worry, they caught it very early and she's fine), Dad lost his job, I got my foot run over, and all through this a hellish renovation. And Grandma starts to fall apart. That was seventh grade.

But all those problems I noted above got solved by the end of the year. The renovation ended. Mom's cancer was solved very quickly--it was very tiny, just beginning, so they zapped that tumor to nothing. Dad got another job. Jacob got better. I was wearing thick shoes and socks when my foot got run over, so I came out okay. But Grandma didn't get better.

Turns out she'd had a series of mini-strokes. She couldn't function so well anymore. At first, it was (relatively) minor--I mean, she could still keep it together, though she was notably fragile. But over the years it's just gotten worse and worse. She can't order from a menu anymore. She doesn't know how to make choices. She gets disoriented very easily. She can't follow conversations. She has a hard time forming sentences. You get the idea.

This is hard enough to watch by itself, but to make things worse is the situation with my grandfather. All this time my mother and uncles have been fighting it out with my grandfather over how grandma should be treated. They wanted to put her in assisted living, where she could be taken care of. He wanted to keep her at home. But they were worried (for good reason) that he wouldn't take care of her. Senior neglect. Like he wouldn't make sure that she was eating, bathing, things like that. I could go on and on. Like when he got upset because she lost control and urinated on herself. There's more, but I don't want to go into great detail. It feels like airing family secrets. But you get the idea.

And the thing is, as we got deeper and deeper into the fight over the years, all this stuff came out of my mom. I always knew she didn't really have a great family life growing up--I knew, for example, that as soon as she graduated she just piled her stuff into a friend's car and drove off, and never came back (not permanently, at least). But all these ugly stories started coming out, all these reflections on her family life, just started coming out. It was like a revelation. I never thought of my mom as coming from one of those SERIOUSLY dysfunctional families you hear about, with manipulative parents and mean siblings and everthing. And it was depressing, to impose this image onto my grandfather. I mean, he's my grandpa, right? I'm supposed to love him. But how do I deal with these stories?

And the thing was, it wasn't just hearing these awful stories from mom, it was seeing the way grandpa acted about grandma. Because grandma was really going downhill, and grandpa simply wouldn't accept that. She hunches over, and he would tell her to stand up straight. She can't stand up straight! It's miserable. And every so often there would be a crisis of some sort, and then I'd come downstairs on weekends to eat my cheerios, and there's mom having this scary conversation clearly about my grandparents over the phone. Depressing. Seriously sad. And this has been going on for years.

I should mention at this point that I always regarded my grandfather as very healthy for his age. He regularly swam at the local JCC--even boasted about the number of laps he could still do. Very healthy. Good shape. I just want you to understand that before I go on.

Now you see, in the past year or so I've slowly become aware that grandpa isn't doing so well himself. Getting, well, a little senile. But I never thought it more than that.

But this Friday, we get this call from his doctor. Apparently grandpa went somewhere and got seriously disoriented, had no idea where he was. So he called his doctor and told him the problem. The doctor called us to tell us that there's probably something wrong with his brain. As in, defintely not able to take care of grandma. As in, maybe Alzheimer's? Mom mentioned that as a possibility, I dunno. How scary is that? But there's definitely something wrong. It's finally reached the breaking point. The shit has really hit the fan. I guess it's not much of a surprise. Only, instead of the problem being about my grandma, as I expected, it's about my grandpa.

So mom comes into my room today and says, things are going to change. They're finally taking grandma away from granpa--sending in a sheriff to take her out of there. And so she'll be with us for a few days. I took it in silence. I already knew about the troubles; this was just a new development. And Uncle Leonard will be coming up from Houston after they take this action. He's a lawyer. He'll know how to handle the situation.

I just took the news blankly. It's weird, but whenever I get these Life-Shaking Revelations, I never react that loudly. Not usually. I guess I just shut off, detatch myself. I felt empty, in a way--like I should have some dramatic, Hollywood reaction. But I felt nothing. Just like I should comfort my mom. And also, "Oh shit."

Because you see, I've come to dread seeing my grandparents. There, I've said it. I feel like I should. It's my duty, isn't it? Like you hear all these old people complaining their kids don't visit them--well, I'm not going to be one of those people. And yes, I love them, but in a way that make it harder. It's so depressing, to see Grandma all falling apart. Almost smothering. I get tense and unhappy. I can't stand it for long. And as soon as I see them, I want to leave. I don't say any of this to them, of course, though I've mentioned something like this along the lines to my mom. Not as an insult. But you have to understand, I've got a pretty good relationship with my mom.

And now my grandma is coming to live with us. Not now, but in the future. Probably. God. I don't know what I'm going to do.

I'm sorry if this post is a little scatterbrained and grammatically incorrect, but I think you can understand that I'm not very together at this moment.