Contaminated

   Staring at old photos of Mom's childhood has heightened my awareness of how much time has passed already, how quickly it is always passing, to the point that at our nephew's christening party potluck on Easter, my mind framed up future old family photos when I looked at other people's kids.

Cousin Junie (?), Aunt Kip (?), Mom (?)

Snap!
   Here's little Katie wearing something on her head: Someday, she will be an old woman.
   Here's little older brother Kevin teetering sideways on one heel while antique ladies inexplicably give him a hard time over asking for an apple: Someday, he will look at this old photo and not recognize himself.

   I am not fit to observe reality any more. There is too much determination in me to make sense of mom's dementia. I am looking for explanations where no explanations are.

 ...

   Mom greeted me yesterday with a brave question: "Are we getting married?"
   One of the nursing home aides is getting married in June, and Mom has become a bit obsessed with her. I didn't know whether she meant "we" as in she and I or we as in me. It might have been either. She's fluid.
   But I went with me as in I and answered, "I'm already married, to Michael Storey."

   She was agog. "You are?!" But then Mom thanked me.
"I learned something I did not know," she said. "So you're married to Michael."

   We had a lovely conversation for more than an hour during which she repeatedly learned that I am married to Michael and was repeatedly grateful to have learned something she had not already known. Michael called my cellphone, and she listened and grinned while he and I were witty back and forth on speaker, as we do, to the exhaustion of everyone around us. And she even read his name aloud off the phone, many times: "Michael Storey." But I am sure she did not gather that the voice joking through the phone was the Michael I had told her I am married to or that I am her daughter.

   She had no idea who I was — and she knew how to behave. She behaved very well. I was talking to a smart little girl.

   If her child self is still contained within her and so well preserved that it reappears now, is child me still inside me someplace? Underneath all the oldness and the duty and the getting by, is young brat me still in here?
  I have put a great deal of effort into outgrowing young brat me. I wonder if Mom put that much effort into outgrowing Little Julie the smart student?

   I know she put a great deal of effort into it, because one of its consequences, pride of intellect, blew up her first marriage — or so she told me a few years ago. But being always a student was a virtue in her, it made her an outward-looking person, resilient during hard times, resourceful, a good problem solver and a most tactful teacher.
   If Mom really has forgotten not wanting to be Smart Little Julie and if that's who she is now, then Smart Little Julie wasn't such a bad little girl. Because today she is sweet. She is polite and sweet.