Home

“When I think of home I think of a place where there’s love all around me. I wish I was home, I wish I was back there”…but there is no there, there.

All Dorothy had to do was click her heels in the movie or on the Broadway stage and there she went, back over the rainbow safe and sound to a familiar place.

Great sentiment and a wonderful feeling I’m sure but I haven’t felt at home for some time now. I left my life to join Miss Cathy in hers in her home some time ago but it’s never felt like “home” to me.

I told an ex of mine once that “home” is wherever your mother is-not the address or the physical place. But now, as Alzheimer’s has started to claim even a fraction of my mother’s mind she’s less “mother” and more “patient”.

Alzheimer’s has turned what used to be a safe place into a battleground; full of land mines that have to be avoided less they blow up into harsh words and tension.

These days I find that it’s easier to isolate myself in my little bedroom to avoid conflict. So, I inhabit the different areas of the room or “zones” as I call them as I move through my day, always having an ear out for when the coast is clear to go to the kitchen or use the balcony.

I don’t think I’ve sat in the living room in months, and if I have it’s just for the few moments it takes to relay some information to Miss Cathy or to listen to a request of hers.

Things have gone downhill since my last post which is the reason I haven’t been writing. It’s gotten too real to relay. I found that (unlike before) it wasn’t therapeutic or helpful to write about what’s going on because it was too painful emotionally to relive it on paper (on online as the case may be).

So, I don’t feel like I have a home and with no home you have no foundation and with no foundation you have no support and without support you’re all alone and that is a lonely place to be, “especially in a crowd” as Marilyn Monroe says in Gentlemen prefer Blondes.

But, what I have learned even in the face of no home, no foundation and no support is that I have “me” and that’s a pretty good start. I think of me as being a brick, and my “will to continue” my mortar so with brick(s) and mortar I can start to construct my own foundation, my own support and ultimately my own home.

Or maybe…just maybe, because I’ve always had me- like Dorothy I was (am) home already.