Self Fulfilling Prophecy

*Posted in 2009  Thank god I am not having a girl. I have so many issues about being a mother already, so many issues about my mother, and so many issues that have to do with femininity that I think I would totally screw up a sweet little girl's head. Not to say that I guess I won't do that to my sons. . . My mom always used to make this "sock-it-to-me" cake. We sold it in the restaurant so she would make it at least twice a week (and about 8 cakes a day during the holidays as gifts) and the smell would fill the house. It was a small house, so this smell would permiate the sheets, the carpet, everything. When I was little, I loved the smell. It was a warm scent filled with butter. People loved the cake. It was delicious. But as I got older, the warm smell became cloying. It made me choke and gag. I hated the fact that I could not get away from it. I hated the fact that my mother would slave over the oven all the time making this damn cake. This cake symbolized e...

* Posted in 2009 In my mother's last few years of life, when her  Alzheimer's  progressed rapidly, I vividly remember driving her around and her pointing to a spot on the inside of my car door. She kept saying something about the face in the door and as soon as I could see what she was talking about, I saw it too. At that moment, I realized that she was seeing faces in the pattern of the leather in the door. And it continued with any sort of design she saw, she would see a face in it.  She never mentioned this until she was  practically  incommunicable, until she really began to forget who I was.  What I never mentioned to anybody, mainly because I just did not think of it as a big deal, was that ever since I was little, I always saw faces in patterns, designs, clouds, in the abstract. Sometimes the faces were realistic, some were cartoon-y, but it was always faces.  And now, when my mother was far into the depths of her disease, she was seeing ...

Welcome. I dealt with my mother's early onset Alzheimer's since I was 15 years old until she passed in 2006. This is me trying to makes sense of it all and dealing with all of the guilt, emotions, and feelings towards it.