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I've returned from my trip to Wisconsin to visit family. I don't like road trips that much, I like them in winter even less, and I love being back home now. That being said, I am glad I made the trip up there, but these infrequent visits to the place of my birth always have a uncomfortable sense of obligation about them, and an emotional unease that should not still persist at this point in my life. The major features of the trip:
Driving for seven hours: Not a fan. I don't mind it so much if I can listen to an NPR affiliate on the radio the whole day (I lack things like XM radio or the ability to play podcasts on the car stereo), but this was thwarted during a long stretch of central Illinois (the state that lies between St. Louis and Wisconsin) where the affiliate station plays nothing but classical music in between the hourly news updates. Not to knock classical music or its listeners...but damn.
Winter: Totally frakking sick of it. It came on brutally this year and does not improve, and it's only January 10. In Wisconsin, it's generally about twenty degrees colder than it is here. The temperature was 2 degrees Fahrenheit when I left this morning. 2! I was told years ago that I have seasonal affective disorder, though this was not properly diagnosed and I doubt. It is true, however, that each year I never really reconcile with the cold season, but my level of unhappiness with it seems tied more to my level of happiness over other things. This year it's actually not bothering me as much as it might if I weren't as happy as I am with most non-weather-related things.
Family: It was good to see my dad, and that was the main point of the trip. It remains, however, a somewhat awkward exercise with long stretches where it feels like we really don't know what to say to each other. This has always been the case. I wish it were not. I promised myself that I would actively try to make this visit different and better in that regard. I didn't. I spent some percentage of the time there wishing I was back home, which makes me feel bad because I know he really liked having me there and would have been happy if I'd stayed longer. But still, the awkwardness, the poor communication. I saw my mom and her husband as well, which was also nice for the fairly short period of the meeting. She's a great and well-meaning person in many ways, but she is getting to be a real crackpot politically. She has long been a conservative with whom I disagree on many things (I wrote about this in a dream journal post a few months ago after I dreamt that she was running for governor and I decided to publicly oppose her candidacy). But it used to be possible to talk over most things in a reasonable way. But now she is becoming addled by conspiracy talk on TV and Tea Party-ism. She states things as facts that are just factually untrue and very easy to debunk with almost no effort. It worries me a bit. A lot of her current world view is couched in bigotry, too. It's a bigotry of a very particular and insidious kind displayed by white midwesterners who don't live near any non-whites. While she'd never use a harsh racial epithet or state directly a prejudice, she will ascribe characteristics to whole groups of people based on actions of one of them. If a black person or a Hispanic person or a gay person does something she doesn't like, then their bad behavior is somehow related to that person being black or Hispanic or gay. So when a white str8 person does something bad? Nothing to do with race at all, of course. I wonder what this will be like when she gets really old. Speaking of getting really old, I paid three visits to my grandmother who has lived in a nursing home for about three years after grandpa died. I was very close to her during my childhood, having spent a great deal of time at her house. She's 93 years old, and is in reasonably decent health. She lives in a room and passes her time much as she used to with reading and knitting and half-watching TV, and says she is quite content with it all. But it's not easy for me to see her now because it's obvious that her memory has severely declined. She does not have strong symptoms (nor a diagnosis of) of Alzheimer's or other dementia. I know these conditions well from my couple of years in working in an assisted living facility for people with these diseases, and she is not yet in that kind of state. But her short-term recollection is very degraded. It's best to bring up topics and thereby direct the conversation a bit because if she is left to do that herself, then she tends to return to the same anecdotes again and again or ask questions that I just answered a couple minutes earlier. Her older memories are still very good, but she will rehash stories from as long ago as eighty years as if they are new to whomever is listening, and occasionally I get the feeling that she thinks the events she is recounting are a lot more recent than they are. She remembered my ex-wife, from whom I've been split for over a decade, and thought that I was still with her last time she saw me. She twice told the story of how she once had to collect her mother from a train station in a distant town when her mom came back from a long trip to Canada. Dad pointed out to her that this event was over 60 years ago and she seemed to doubt that. It seems like a real rip-off to make it such an old age but then lose so much as far as one's mental functioning. But she seems happy and is being well cared for both by the facility in which she lives and my dad who visits her every single day.
Home: I'm so happy to be back with J and my kitties.
Driving for seven hours: Not a fan. I don't mind it so much if I can listen to an NPR affiliate on the radio the whole day (I lack things like XM radio or the ability to play podcasts on the car stereo), but this was thwarted during a long stretch of central Illinois (the state that lies between St. Louis and Wisconsin) where the affiliate station plays nothing but classical music in between the hourly news updates. Not to knock classical music or its listeners...but damn.
Winter: Totally frakking sick of it. It came on brutally this year and does not improve, and it's only January 10. In Wisconsin, it's generally about twenty degrees colder than it is here. The temperature was 2 degrees Fahrenheit when I left this morning. 2! I was told years ago that I have seasonal affective disorder, though this was not properly diagnosed and I doubt. It is true, however, that each year I never really reconcile with the cold season, but my level of unhappiness with it seems tied more to my level of happiness over other things. This year it's actually not bothering me as much as it might if I weren't as happy as I am with most non-weather-related things.
Family: It was good to see my dad, and that was the main point of the trip. It remains, however, a somewhat awkward exercise with long stretches where it feels like we really don't know what to say to each other. This has always been the case. I wish it were not. I promised myself that I would actively try to make this visit different and better in that regard. I didn't. I spent some percentage of the time there wishing I was back home, which makes me feel bad because I know he really liked having me there and would have been happy if I'd stayed longer. But still, the awkwardness, the poor communication. I saw my mom and her husband as well, which was also nice for the fairly short period of the meeting. She's a great and well-meaning person in many ways, but she is getting to be a real crackpot politically. She has long been a conservative with whom I disagree on many things (I wrote about this in a dream journal post a few months ago after I dreamt that she was running for governor and I decided to publicly oppose her candidacy). But it used to be possible to talk over most things in a reasonable way. But now she is becoming addled by conspiracy talk on TV and Tea Party-ism. She states things as facts that are just factually untrue and very easy to debunk with almost no effort. It worries me a bit. A lot of her current world view is couched in bigotry, too. It's a bigotry of a very particular and insidious kind displayed by white midwesterners who don't live near any non-whites. While she'd never use a harsh racial epithet or state directly a prejudice, she will ascribe characteristics to whole groups of people based on actions of one of them. If a black person or a Hispanic person or a gay person does something she doesn't like, then their bad behavior is somehow related to that person being black or Hispanic or gay. So when a white str8 person does something bad? Nothing to do with race at all, of course. I wonder what this will be like when she gets really old. Speaking of getting really old, I paid three visits to my grandmother who has lived in a nursing home for about three years after grandpa died. I was very close to her during my childhood, having spent a great deal of time at her house. She's 93 years old, and is in reasonably decent health. She lives in a room and passes her time much as she used to with reading and knitting and half-watching TV, and says she is quite content with it all. But it's not easy for me to see her now because it's obvious that her memory has severely declined. She does not have strong symptoms (nor a diagnosis of) of Alzheimer's or other dementia. I know these conditions well from my couple of years in working in an assisted living facility for people with these diseases, and she is not yet in that kind of state. But her short-term recollection is very degraded. It's best to bring up topics and thereby direct the conversation a bit because if she is left to do that herself, then she tends to return to the same anecdotes again and again or ask questions that I just answered a couple minutes earlier. Her older memories are still very good, but she will rehash stories from as long ago as eighty years as if they are new to whomever is listening, and occasionally I get the feeling that she thinks the events she is recounting are a lot more recent than they are. She remembered my ex-wife, from whom I've been split for over a decade, and thought that I was still with her last time she saw me. She twice told the story of how she once had to collect her mother from a train station in a distant town when her mom came back from a long trip to Canada. Dad pointed out to her that this event was over 60 years ago and she seemed to doubt that. It seems like a real rip-off to make it such an old age but then lose so much as far as one's mental functioning. But she seems happy and is being well cared for both by the facility in which she lives and my dad who visits her every single day.
Home: I'm so happy to be back with J and my kitties.
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-11 06:45 am (UTC)We've talked a bit on Twitter about your mom going all bat-shit crazy right wing. Did her transformation from reasonable conservative to ultra right wing crackpot happen over time? Do you think her husband has been an influence?
I'm really sorry about your grandmother. I can't imagine what it's like (haven't seen my grandparents in almost 20 years). I've always had a fear of losing my mental faculties as I get older. Especially since my mother's father was CRAZY for years before he passed away in 2007. My father's father wasn't too mentally stable either. If I'm to succumb to some sort of dementia, I hope I'm ignorant of that fact and continue upon my merry way until I die.
One more thing...
YOU WERE MARRIED???? WTF???
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-12 02:47 am (UTC)