Buddha Mommy

Many of you who know me know that I have been practicing yoga for over a year now. While I had intended to learn about yoga for quite some time, it wasn’t until I found my self in pain that I became a serious student. I have also been thinking alot about retirement (not for at least 5 years) and what I will do during retirement. Yoga seemed like a perfect fit with my medical training. I feel that in retirement I would like to do something that still helps others.
I am now searching out yoga instructor courses for 2009. This month, my teacher Cindy (see her link Middle Way Yoga) asked me to teach a class for her so she and her son could take a short (well deserved trip). While a stretch for such a new practitioner, but previous teaching experience was helpful. I had seven yogis. We focused on breath, balance and heart openers. I used Lovingkindness as our meditative focus for the class. I hope this is the beginning of a new direction for my life.

We are madly preparing to host Thanksgiving this year! Even so, I want to take some time to reflect on what giving thanks means. I found this quote which I feel, sums up my feelings about Thanksgiving of the heart.
” Gratitude…goes beyond the “mine” and “thine’ and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as agift of love, a gift to celebrated with joy”. Henri J.M. Nouwen

Today I was given a rare gift…my mother had a moment of clarity. I don’t know what others call it, but is a brief crack in the confusion/delusion that is Alzheimer’s. It is when the person connects with you, has an understanding that their perceptions are clouded by something, and can clearly hear and partially process both new information and old memories. If you have seen the movie “The Notebook”, you will understand that precious moment. My Mom is in a nursing home for a week while my Dad is having a week of respite, well deserved. Our conversation began with her crying, and ended with her asking me to tell my Dad “Thank you” for all he is doing for her. She said he didn’t deserve this to happen and she wished she could stop it. I can’t express what having her spontaneously offer this meant to me. It is so hard to hear her rants about him, knowing that while not perfect, he has more than risen to the situation. He has had to learn new behaviors and ways to think, which is never easy, no matter our age.
While at times I feel sorry for myself because I am the one who has to hear the terrible things she says, my gift today made it all wothwhile. I got to see the person my Mom was, not only her disease. Alzheimer’s teaches each of us many things…gratitude was not something I was bargaining for.J

For those over the age of 50, I think the idea of blogging in especially odd. We are used to journals or diaries in which our inner most thoughts were recorded, and rarely viewed by others. While blogging, I think, is meant to be viewed by others by its nature of availabilty on-line, can serve a dual function of a journal and a source of information. My point here is sharing some of my thoughts and feelings as I watch my mother progress thru her Alzheimer’s disease.
I became a aware of sutble changes in my mom’s mentation about seven years ago. Small things like mis-addressing letters, to big things like relating stories of marauding teenagers blowing holes in the side of the house at nite. I kept my suspicions to myself. When my mom called me in January of 2004 to tell me she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, all I could say was, “Yes, I know”. Although she had willingly stopped driving (because she felt herself a danager to others), she didn’t see the things I had been seeing in the same context.
Here we are seven years later, and most of the time, she doesn’t recognize me. Every time I see her, she’ll ask, “When did your mother die?” in the way one concerned person would ask another. She is always terribly shocked when I tell her, “You are my mother”, but cannot hang on to the relationship for long. I am that nice lady who comes to see her, have her hair done and go out for small trips. I find the question so piercing because she died for me last year when she lashed out at me in anger over a perceived intrusion in her life and held that anger for months. At the moment of her outburst, watching her rage, I realized the woman I knew as my mother was gone. This person in her body, needed and deserved care and understanding, but it was time for me to begin to grieve. More to come….

Be loving, be kind
And follow the ways of goodness.
Committed, and longing for the goal,
Always keep going with courage.
To dally or delay will not help you.
But to be ardent is sure and safe.
When you see it, culitivate the path,
So you will touch and amke your own
The Deathless Way.
Psalm of the early Buddists

With the help of my son, Rob Rohan, I am slowing getting this web site up and running. I used my old site to post pictures of our adventures and to blog a bit. Not sure how this site will be used. I do hope that those who know me, old friends and new, find this site and use it as well.