Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: sorrow

How dementia ruins everything, part two

I know that I can only change myself. I mention that because I’ve been musing about family and getting frustrated with my parents. Different reasons for each one, but frustration just the same. I don’t bring any of it to my father because he can’t help how he is (dementia), and it’s just how he was before, but worse. Actually, that’s the hardest part. He’s hitting me in all my sensitive spots, but I have to just remind myself that he’s not himself. But he is. But he isn’t. Before I get to that, here’s yesterday’s post.

Here’s the problem. My father before his dementia was a selfish, or rather, self-absorbed person who never thought of anyone else. He was also deeply sexist and said sexist shit to me all the time. Here are some brief examples. He was always scolding me for not putting on a jacket when he was cold. He never asked if were cold, which I rarely was. Now, one of the things he asks about often is the weather. And he gets stuck in the loop of being concerned that I’m cold.

In general, he doesn’t think women can do anything for themselves. Or rather, that’s what he tells himself even while my mother does everything around the house. This was even before his dementia, by the way. He’s been like this all my life. I know it’s a self-protective mechanism, but it’s so ugly and distasteful.

Fortunately, the explicit sexist shit does not show up, but it does rear its ugly head in sly ways. Such as, him repeatedly asking me how I get places. He knows (or knew) that I drive, but he has somehow forgotten that. To be fair, I can’t say that’s for sure a sexist thing, but it certainly feels like it. Also, his harping on my health might be because of the medical crisis, but I have a hunch it’s more a neg than anything else.

That’s the problem with my father–past behavior has shown me not to give him the benefit of the doubt. I know who he was in the past, and it’s hard not to apply that to the present. But he’s not resonsible in the present for…how do I put this? He’s not of sound mind (dunno about body). So he’s not trying to be offensive on purpose, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a quick flash of ‘not this shit again’.

However. The cruelty of the dementia has far outranked the impatience I feel when he hits one of my buttons. It’s really sad what’s happening to him and since I only talk to him for five minutes (at most ten) at a time, I can deal with the bullshit that comes with it.


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Watching as the city burns

I know what I titled the post, but I’m going to do a little bait and switch with this post. I’m going to touch a bit on the protests, but the post is going to be more free-form, stream-of-consciousness about what is on my mind during these times. So, apologies ahead of time when I jump all over the place.

We need to start with Amy Cooper. She’s pretty infamous by now, but I’ll summarize. She was walking her dog off-leash in Central Park when Christian Cooper (no relation), a black man who was birding, asked her to put her dog on a leash. She refused, and he started recording. She told him to stop recording or she’d call the police. He invited her to call the police, which she did. She then told the police that there was an African-American man threatening her, and she begged them to come protect her.

There has been plenty of ink spilled about her and why her actions were so profoundly disturbing–and, yes, racist. Both Aya Gruber and Aymann Ismail from Slate wrote about it from different perspectives, and I would recommend both reads highly. The thing that stood out is that afterwards, she both ‘apologized’ and claimed she wasn’t a racist. She also said she didn’t intend to harm Christian Cooper. I call bullshit on all of that. Or rather, I’ll say that it doesn’t matter if she’s a racist in her heart or not. I don’t give a shit if she has a million black friends and listens to rap in her spare time.

I don’t care who she is–I care about what she did and to a greater extent, how what she did affected someone else. Also, I care about the broader context in which she made the decision to call the cops and knowingly use ‘African American man’ as the whip to goad the cops to racing to her protection. There’s a whole history of white woman fragility and black man scariness that Gruber touches on in the post above, so I won’t belabor the point. I just want to say that it beggars belief that Amy Cooper meant no harm. I mean, come on! If you watch the video, she was the aggressor the whole time. He remained where he was, and his voice is calm and polite. She’s the one who goes towards him and points angrily at him.

I will say one thing–people have discounted her claims that she felt afraid. They say she was angry, but why can’t it be both? I think she was afraid, but it’s because of the endemic and enduring racism that is interwoven in every fabric of our society–black men are dangerous, especially to white women, not because Christian Cooper was threatening her in any way. This is something I don’t want lost in this incident–she’s not the problem in and of itself–the systemic racism that allows her to be this way is. She was obviously also angry at being called out by a black man as well.


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Creating a New Normal

king of all he surveys
Raven on top, Summer of 2011

The best two seconds of my day are when I first wake up, before I remember that Raven is dead. In those two seconds, life is as it was before. Me and my two boys, living a cozy life together, forming our own little family. Before I open my eyes, I can pretend Raven is still with me, and then the grief floods me once again. To the outside eye, I probably appear as if I’m handling it well. I rarely cry about it, and I don’t talk about it except with my closest friends. Even then, I don’t mention it much, but it’s because it hurts too much. I still feel it all the way to my core, even if I don’t show it. It’s the little things that jar me the most. Reaching up to pet Raven who loved to perch on the couch above my head and patting the empty air. Going to the bathroom and not having to turn on the faucet for Raven to drink from it. Feeding only Shadow and not having to guard Raven’s food for him because he’s a slower eater and Shadow is highly food-driven. Listening to Raven growl at me and growling back because I found it amusing. We used to do this for several minutes, though only if no one else was present.

My mother asked me if I’ve accepted that he’s gone. Of course I have. I knew it the minute I looked into his glassy eyes right after he died. My dear, sweet Raven was gone, and he was never coming back. I was never in denial about that. By the way, the boys’ foster mom sent me an article on grief after I told her Raven died. We’ve all heard of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and her five stages of grief, but what we’ve gotten wrong (I learned from the article) is that she was studying terminally-ill people when she came up with her theory. The stages are what terminally-ill people go through after learning their diagnosis, and suddenly, it made much more sense to me than applying it to the general population. I couldn’t make the five stages fit what I was going through concerning the loss of my Raven, and after reading the article, I was relieved that I wasn’t a freak for not going through the stages. My mom then said she hoped I would get over the loss soon, and that seemed like an anathema to me. I don’t think there’s a ‘getting over’ a loss–only finding a new normal. When Raven first died, Shadow would cry for a long time after eating his breakfast as he wandered around the house. I knew he was looking for his brother, even though I had explained to him that Raven was gone and wouldn’t be coming back. I didn’t know why he did it at that specific time, but I decided it was because that’s one thing they always did together–eat. So, it made sense that Shadow would feel the loss most strongly then. It broke my heart to hear his mournful howl as he tried to find his brother, and it was frustrating to know that there was nothing I could do to help him.

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