Happy Father's Day 2010!

Happy Father's Day. I also published a post about the day at the Urban Mother's Book of Prayers and included a link to an old poem about my father written in 2005. The picture of him in this post is the one I used with the poem, and it was taken in 1990 when my son was born and my dad came to Georgia to help us. My former husband, our daughter, and I had just moved into a new house, which is why there's a bed in the living room. I had a c-section.

I also wrote a poem related to him in 2006, "The Mermaids Singing Hush." As men get older, they fight loss of controlling their own destinies, and back then my dad lived with my brother and his wife. My mother did as well, due to Hurricane Katrina flooding their home. My brother didn't want him to drive anymore.

My dad is now 89 and living with me. He went to church this morning with my brother and his wife. Today he uses a walker. He can be bossy and ornery, and yes he still drives. However, I've been thinking that should end soon since he almost drove off the Twin Span Bridge a month ago.

He pops up often enough in my posts or essays. For instance, he's in the one recently published at BlogHer.com, "The Cylons Cometh: Human-machine hybrids and our impending immortality" and the one about the possibility of war between North and South Korea. And he's in "Life as A Sandwich Generation Mom," written four and a half months before my mother died in 2008, his wife of nearly 50 years. She died two weeks shy of their 50th wedding anniversary.

In February I told a story about him waking up and thinking a white man was in the house. And I tweet about him often. I think the last time I tweeted about Dad was a few weeks ago when he woke me up around eight in the morning to ask me about dinner that night. I'd had only three hours sleep. Loss of sleep is a small price to pay for how much his presence has benefited his grandchildren.

Thinking about how often I mention him, including this poem, "Dusk," that I'd forgotten, I guess it's time to give him his own label here.

White Man in the House

My father, 89, lives with me. Right now it's 11:15 p.m. or so, and I'm half-watching that "scary" movie, The Ruins, with white people imploding because they're someplace they don't belong. So, I hear my father coming with his walker down the hall, and he comes into the living room and the conversation goes like this.

"Nordette, you know I've been sleeping most of the day?"

"Yes, Dad. I saw you sleeping in the easy chair when I went through earlier today," I said.

"And yeah. Then I went and got in the bed."

"Uh-hm," I said.

"Well, when I went to sleep, I had the television on. Must have been the news. Police were arresting somebody. And you know where my television is in my room," he said.

"Yes." He has a 32-inch HDTV at the foot of his bed.

"Well, I just woke up, and I saw this man and I thought, Now you know this is something. This white man done broke into the house. Because I saw him coming toward me. And then I realized it was on the TV. Now you know that's something! I think it must be this medicine."

It could be his medicine. I'll be going to the doctor with him this week, but medicine or not, I laughed at the vision of him, an 89-year-old black man in Louisiana, waking up and being that calm about the possibility a strange white man was at the foot of his bed.

Dusk (poem)

Dusk
By Nordette N. Adams

My father's walker clatters
on cold tile in my house.
No one can fix the broken wheel.

Scraping noise and clacks
rattle me to winces.
Mortality pokes my heels.

© 2010 Nordette N. Adams

More on Joan and Melissa Rivers and Codependency

This post is not about comedian Joan Rivers winning Celebrity Apprentice, even though it was good to see a 75-year-old get hired, not fired. Neither is it a treatise on whether reality TV is real or not, scripted or improvisational, nor an analysis of whether Joan and her daughter, Melissa Rivers, were acting the night of their foul-mouthed meltdowns. This posts is about spotting unhealthy codependent relationships between parents and their adult children. Do you know the signs and symptoms?

I don't watch Celebrity Apprentice regularly, but I saw it a few times this season, including the night comedian Joan Rivers and her daughter Melissa went nuts on the show after Melissa was fired, and I also saw Joan Rivers win, beating poker player Annie Dukes. I like Joan. I'm not always fond of her kind of humor, but the person. And while I suspect much of what viewers saw was spectacular acting from a funny lady and a natural drama queen, I still favored her over Annie Dukes and Dukes' BFF on the show, Playboy pinup Brande Roderick.

Nevertheless, the night Donald Trump fired Melissa Rivers, I ... Please continue reading full post at BlogHer.com

Bruhaha Over First Grandmama or the Place of Mom-in-Chief

Below this post, I'm posting Campbell Brown's report on the possible role of First Lady Michelle Obama, who by the way visited HUD today. She's not going to be the stay-at-home-mom the way some people have envisioned that role, which we should have expected.

Nevertheless, over at BlogHer I've published a related piece to get more women's opinions on Marion Robinson's decision to live at the White House while the Obama family transitions, "First Grandmom Goes to Washington: Is Michelle Obama Dodging Mom Duty?" Some people have suggested the First Lady is pushing too much responsibility onto her 70-something mother, Sasha and Malia's grandmother, Marion Robinson aka First Grandmom/Grandmother/Granny. Others complain that American tax dollars should not go toward Robinson residing at the White House and First Lady Michelle Obama should hire a nanny or take care of her daughters herself.

So far, no one commenting at the BlogHer post agrees with this idea that Marion Robinson should go in a corner and knit or something in her golden years or that she'd be better off at her home in Chicago. Many women like the idea that Robinson will be with her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren in the White House? Read the post at this link.

Here's Brown's video report:

Thanksgiving at My Mother's Passing with Cheer from Father Guido Sarducci

Father Guido Sarducci explains the meaning of life and the forgiveness of sins while I recall my mother and mourn her absence this holiday. We each have our own way with grief.

I'm not sure why Father Guido Sarducci is hot on the web suddenly. When I first saw him pop up in Google trends, I thought perhaps Don Novello, the actor who plays Sarducci, had died, but he's alive. And it can't be this IReporter linking Gov. Sarah Palin's geopolitical skills to Fr. Sarducci's school of thought because the reference is obscure and Palin's moved on to pardoning turkeys.

So, I was tempted to say, "Never mind" as Emily Litela, played by the late Gilda Radner, did frequently on vintage Saturday Night Live, sometimes even in the presence of Fr. Sarducci himself, but I can't. Even his name, Father Guido Sarducci, makes me smile.

I associate the dear father with not only my youth as a 1970s Saturday Night Live viewer, but also with my mother, Fannie Naomi Adams, who died on Nov. 12 of this year at age 81. Surviving stomach cancer, which had been in remission for more than five years, she lived past life expectancy, and our lives were enriched to have her longer. However, in her later years, she was not the mother I knew. She suffered from Alzheimer's and possibly dementia due to a series of mini strokes. In the last two years of her life, she did not recognize me as often as I hoped she would, but she knew me in her last days.

As she lay in the Intensive Care Unit, I held her hand and she looked at me with what I feared was the farewell gaze, that startling, intense stare through which the dying impart a gift to the eyes of the living, and she said, "I love you."

I knew she knew me as she had known me a few days before transfer to ICU and asked, "Where's your daddy?"

If she saw me and recognized me as her daughter, then she had a husband who was also my father. Otherwise, I was a friend, perhaps, or a "nice lady," and she'd ask her husband's whereabouts using his first name or wonder aloud, "Where's my husband?" At other times I was some stranger's "pretty child," and he was "that man" she didn't want in her room.

This last visit to the hospital was about my mother's fourth since I moved back to Louisiana in the summer of '07. In the winter of '08, my parents moved in with me and my two older children. So strange, it seems now, to write of her passing and know she will not be with us for Thanksgiving or Christmas. You know your mother must die yet think she is eternal.

Neither did she linger to celebrate her and my father's 60th wedding anniversary, which would have been later this month. A few days ago my dad began to grasp her absence. He stopped putting out two plates for breakfast and two plates for lunch and dinner. Yesterday we dragged him to a family dinner at my aunt's house, the home of one of my mother's sisters. He surprised himself and enjoyed the visit, and some of us told amusing tales about his wife, their aunt, a sister, their grandmother, my mom.

At the funeral Saturday before last, I watched him. He weeped briefly. Today he left the house on his own for the first time since her death, a short distance to the dollar store in search of cookies and to stretch his legs. When he returned, he told me that he's sleeping through the nights better, not waking to check on Mom or making sure she's not up and wandering.

I have weeped in short fits, mostly unseen by others. Mourning's been my loss of years with her when she lost memory of me. I don't know that wild fit of sorrow, but moments of sober reflection and the dry heaviness when waking. During the funeral, I almost released that gush of grief for which church ushers stand on guard, a daughter's sobbing or collapse as the coffin shuts, but my heart was disinterested.

The congregation sang "Blessed Assurance." I saw my mother and I riding in our family's old white Plymouth Fury down Jefferson Davis Parkway in New Orleans, as we often did, returning home from my grandmother's house, and she was singing that hymn. I heard her singing like I was with her on the road again and recalled how calm she looked driving and speaking to God. Then I remembered that I'd sang that same hymn to her in the hospital while she battled death in ICU. I almost cried then, but started smiling at both memories, grateful for our time, happy I'd moved back home.

My mother was the daughter and grand-daughter of United Methodist ministers, a spiritual woman who required that we attend Sunday School and church services each Sunday and if we claimed we were too ill to go, then we were too ill to go anywhere else that day. She was the kind of Christian who'd chide us if we set any object on top of our personal or family Bibles. "You must have reverence for God and His word," she would say. To this day, her words poke me if I spot a Bible in my house with another book on top of it.

My mother was also a former social worker who had visited the darkest caves of human nature in Memphis, Tenn., and following that career she'd become a certified school teacher for more than 30 years in New Orleans public schools. Consequently, she corrected my brother, my cousins, and I regularly in our use of the "King's English," and had stern warnings against the mess we could make of our lives if we didn't straighten up, act right, and be our "best noble selves."

She was a woman who'd come of age in the 1940s south and raised a daughter who came of age in the 1970s south. That was the decade finding itself after the free love 60s, after Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor had revealed that white southerners could be loons, and the Civil Rights movement snatched away the cloak of respectable injustice. But my mother, while in full support of revolution, wanted her daughter to be god-loving and chaste, and I was not blind to her wishes. When I was 18, she spotted a "hickey" on my neck, evidence of making out, and perhaps a badge in my mind of a rite of passage I'd read about in books or heard about in school. Not so by my mother. Spotting the redness she announced that men who sucked necks were perverts and by extension so were the girls who let them. I dared not laugh, but my mother was a funny woman.

That night in the late 1970s when she stopped to watch a few minutes of Saturday Night Live with me, Jimmy Carter was President of the United States of America, and he seemed monthly to have heaped on him embarrassments delivered through his brother Billy Carter, who died in 1988:

Billy Carter was neither the first nor the last brother to embarrass a president, but he was surely the most colorful. From the time Jimmy Carter started running for president to the end of his term in office, his younger brother was never far from the spotlight. In 1976 he provided humor and a charming contrast to his straight-laced candidate sibling. But by 1980, Billy's act had worn thin, ... (PBS)

Billy stayed in the news, supplying exceptional material for comedians, taking his brother down a notch, hoped Carter's opponents, reminding the nation that our president, who my mother loved, was only a Georgia farmer.

So, on SNL that night, Father Sarducci gave a sermon about Jesus and his obscured brother Billy that no one would follow because he was, well, just "Billy Christ," which brought Sarducci to Jesus's miracle of walking on water. Possibly it was this mention of Jesus that caused my mother to stop her trek through our den to watch the television. That name always caught her.

Unfortunately, I can't find a transcript or video clip of Novello's monologue as Sarducci that evening, but after his set-up of Billy getting no respect, he explained Billy's value to Jesus's work. In truth, Fr. Sarducci elaborated, that while Jesus wowed the crowds on shore by walking on water, his brother, Billy Christ, trudged the lake floor holding the Savior's feet.

That was the punchline and I'm sure it would be funnier if I could recall Sarducci's set-up or if you could see the clip, but for me, my mom made the evening. She burst into uncontrollable laughter until tears streamed down her face, and in the midst of her laughter she squeaked, "Oh, God, forgive me! That is ... that is so-Wa-hahahahaha--sacrilegious."

She belonged in hell for sure, she intimated. Its fires gleamed in her glistening eyes. But thank God for his mercy. I believe her eyes shine today with heaven's light.

So, I selected the above clip, Vita est Lavorum from 1980, a YouTube video featuring Fr. Sarducci that has the same spirit of his monologue that made my mother laugh. Appropriately, it's about the afterlife and possibly funnier to people who came up through church, even the Protestant church as did my mother and I, and I suspect those under rabbis and other spiritual leaders may chuckle as well.

Oh, the guilt! Laughter is a blessing.

Blogger Note: This post possibly should have been about coping with grief during the holidays, but it turned out to be more personal. However, Mata H. has a great post on surviving grief and the holidays.

Cross-posted at BlogHer.com

First Grandma Goes to Washington

Hello! This post is not about President Obama's grandmother. It's about the First Lady's mother. If you want to know about the president's grandmother, click here.

Thanks to President-elect Obama's winning the election, we now have not only a black First Family and First Lady, we also have a visible First Grandmother in Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson, who helps take care of Sasha, 7, and Malia, 10. She will join the family in the Washington, but may not necessarily live in the White House, reports new sources. (The woman in the red shirt in the picture above is Robinson.)

We saw Robinson with the family throughout the campaign, and here is the beginning of a profile from this spring on the future First Grandmom from The Boston Globe that shows how critical Robinson is to The First Family:

CHICAGO - She is the linchpin of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and yet she does not raise money, plot strategy, lead conference calls, or carry a BlackBerry, which, in her day, was an unassuming fruit that grew on bushes.

Marian Robinson does, though, carry an exalted title in this race: mother-in-law. And from that perch, she makes the whole thing run.

A steely 70-year-old matriarch with a raspy voice and seen-it-all laugh, Robinson manages the family while Obama and his wife, Michelle, venture to the far reaches of the campaign trail. (Boston Globe, May 2008)

You may also watch this video of the profile from the paper and hear Robinson speak herself. The interview reveals that she is very much a typical grandmother, tempted to spoil her granddaughters with foods of which their parents disapprove.


Also, ABC News ran a story today about the grandmother-effect and the Obama campaign, discussing Obama's grandmother, the recently deceased Marilyn Dunham, and Sasha and Malia's maternal grandmother, Robinson:

Now that the Obamas are headed to the White House, Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson, will be making the move as well. Family friends have told the New York Times that the Obamas relied on Robinson to care for Malia and Sasha Obama while their parents were out campaigning.

Robinson, a widow and retired bank secretary from the South Side of Chicago, will follow the Obamas to Washington D.C. to support the first family, according to the Obamas' family friend Verna Williams.

None of this is anything new or unusual to American families who have integrated grandmoms and granddads into their households, especially to assist with or sometimes take over child care.

Of course, the Obamas are by all accounts an intact and nurturing family, and they don't use a nanny to take care of their two young daughters -- they use grandma. (ABC News)

I read in a British newspaper that Mrs. Obama persuaded her mother to move into the White House. I'm sure that's a better solution than having her live elsewhere in D.C., but Robinson will miss her Chicago home.

Michelle Obama's mother has reluctantly agreed to leave her lifelong home on Chicago's South Side and move to Washington to help smooth the transition for the grand-daughters who dote on her.

... They will move in to the White House after Barack Obama is inaugurated on January 20. But President George W Bush and his wife Laura will greet their successors at the South Portico on Monday before giving them a tour of their new home - giving them the chance literally to measure the drapes.

It is the first time in living memory that three generations of a new presidential family have moved en masse to Washington, although Mrs Robinson has not yet decided whether to take rooms in the White House itself or live nearby. (UK Telegraph)

Without my maternal grandmother available to look after me, I don't know what my mother, a school teacher in New Orleans, La., when I was younger, would have done. As I watch the Obama family supported by a loving grandmother, I remember my own MaDear.


Marian Robinson, far right, sits with her son-in-law, President-elect Barack Obama, her daughter, Michelle Obama, and her granddaughters Malia and Sasha, awaiting election results Nov. 4, 2008.

More ways to strangle the human race

I suppose it's newsworthy that a 70-year-old woman, Omkari Panwar of Muzaffarnagar, India, has given birth to twins. On the other hand, last year the story was that a 60-year-old woman from New Jersey gave birth to twins. We talked about that at BlogHer back then, and so, we've had the "what is too old to bear children" debate already.

Both of these women conceived through in vitro fertilization, big help from medical science. The shimmer of news in this recent birth is that the age ante has been upped. If these women had conceived naturally, then that would be even shinier news.

The real news in this story, however, at least news worthy of deeper thought, is why this 70-year-old needed desperately to try for another child. She and her 75-year-old husband already had two daughters. But the elderly couple wanted another baby because they needed a male heir. Here are some of the reasons Charan Singh, the father, said a male heir was critical: ... Continue reading this post at Blogher

Tags: [India], [gender], [parenting], [babies], [fertility]

How a black snake almost ruined my day

I came home Monday afternoon to a strange house. A confused woman who does not know me had been wandering its rooms, but now sat quietly, staring into space. Another woman that I barely know busily cleaned one room, shaken by what she'd witnessed, and a little old man hobbled in the living room. In the back bedroom, a young giant slumbered in clutter, and the family cat did not peep from behind the kitchen's bay window curtains to see who'd come to visit. Neither did the family dog bark in the backyard as he usually does when anyone arrives.

As I parked my Toyota Corolla in the front drive and left the car, I spotted our cat, a little, tortoise shell, house kitty, outside, creeping across a ledge in the garden, her tail slightly puffed. Not all that surprised that she'd escaped from the house, I called to her, but didn't expect her to come. However, she took a few steps toward me in consideration.

I mused that the Louisiana sun might cook me and registered that the cat looked spooked, but I figured she'd come home later looking for water. More than likely my 86-year-old father left the door cracked when he went to pick up the daily paper, the cat had slipped out and had since seen something she didn't like.

I unlocked the front door, walked inside, and a stench accosted me. I saw my father walking away from "his side of the sofa," and I figured he must've gotten up when he saw me pull into the driveway. He headed out of the living room toward the the back of the house, limping slightly, his skinny, frail, 5'6" frame partially supported by his steel cane. His bony brown thighs protruded from the wide circles of his khaki Carpenter shorts, and he could easily wear a smaller size of the navy blue golf shirt he wore. He'd purchased both items of clothing at the dollar store around the corner the day before.

"I see the cat got out," I said.

"Yep. You had a black snake in your yard, V.," answered my father.

"What!" I'm no fan of snakes and thought I wouldn't see any now that I no longer lived in New Jersey next to a nature reserve. Well, let's say I hoped I wouldn't see more because I'd moved back home and since I grew up in New Orleans and never saw a snake then, I'd hoped not to see any now, at least not around my own house. But I'm not quite in the city anymore. Denial paints powerful delusions.

I considered, then, that the cat's puffy tail and the black snake may be related.

My mother, 81, sat quietly on "her side" of the sofa. She wore one of her sweat suits, the plain gray one.

"Hey," she called to me, "I was just wondering where you were." It's her common greeting. I think I look familiar to her, but she has no idea who I am. She suffers dementia. "You always look so good," she said.

"Thank you, Mom." I smiled. My mother started complimented people more after her dementia worsened.

I concluded my dad was the source of the smell. He usually is, and he raced, I thought, as best he could, toward the bathroom.

Looking around the room and seeing no one else, I thought the caregiver had not reported to work, which happens sometimes. I didn't recall seeing her car when I drove up or when I called to the cat, but now I saw her large black purse on the love seat opposite the sofa.

Nervous about the source of the smell that was getting stronger, I followed my dad as he made his way through the tiny den. The den is an oddly-placed room with a door that leads to the back yard, and we only have a few items in it, a cherry wood chest of drawers, a small TV atop that, a large, deep blue recliner, and my dad's exercise bike. You must traverse this room before entering the hallway.

From the den I saw light streaming from the bathroom into the dimly-lit hall, and I cringed at the fecal smell strengthening. I hoped my dad would make it to his destination. If he didn't, I would lose at least an hour of my day to a duty I dreaded. Then I heard a commotion coming from my parents room and assumed Cece, the caregiver, must be in there.

Before I could draw any other conclusions, my father turned the corner and stopped in front of the bathroom. I stopped behind him, still in the den.

"Cece," he yelled, "Why aren't you getting ready to clean her up?"

Cece, a sturdy black woman of average height, stepped from the bedroom into the hallway. She's the caregiver who comes for five hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and unlike the caregiver who comes for five hours on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday--Sue, a short, white woman wears jeans and cute tops and whose husband pilots one of the river ferries--CeCe wears her nurses' aid uniform when she reports. Today she wore one with a floral print top and pastel pink pants. She also wore latex gloves.

"I thought I'd better clean up in here first and then I'll finish cleaning her up," said CeCe.

"Because I cleaned her up already some as best I could," said my dad. "But she needs to get cleaned up more."

"Did mom have an accident?" I asked, thinking that's a rarity.

"Well, we saw that black snake," explained my Dad. "Cece got all excited, and we were out there looking."

"How big was the snake?" I asked.

"Oh, it wasn't that big," said my Dad, approximating a foot length with his hands, one still holding his cane.

"Oh, it was big!" Cece said, taking a step toward us. "I went to get something from my car and that thing reared up at me." She threw up her right arm, and curved her gloved hand, imitating the shape of a snake about to strike. "Scared me to death!"

"What!" I couldn't stop my voice from going up in pitch and felt my eyes stretch wide.

My dad said, "And while we were out trying to see about that, the cat got out, I guess, and when we came back in your mother wasn't in the living room and we went to look for her. I just didn't hear her leave." My dad is hard of hearing, but hasn't yet looked into hearing aids. He only spends money as a last resort.

"We found her in here." He pointed to their bedroom, the room that used to be the den before my parents moved in with me, my teenage soon, and adult daughter. "She went to use the bedside commode instead of going to the bathroom," my dad said as though my mother knows who and where she is. "I cleaned her up some. CeCe's going to finish ..."

"But I had to get to this first," said CeCe.

My dad took stepped into the bathroom to let me through. I walked past him, and CeCe moved so I could look into the bedroom. Full frontal stench. My mother had not lifted the bedside commode cover and had stooled on top of it. Apparently she'd eaten something that didn't agree with her because more feces, a loose mound, formed below the commode on the carpet.

I amazed myself with calmness, realizing that my father had gotten up from the sofa when I arrived because he wanted to show that he was taking care of business. At his previous residence, a fury of yelling would have ensued in a situation like this and someone would've accused him of not looking after mom. He would've been blamed because she managed to go off unseen and create a nauseating, unsanitary, carpet-ruining, mess.

"I guess she missed," I said. "CeCe, do you have what you need. I think I've got Pine Sol in my bathroom. And my son can go over the carpet with the spot remover when you're finished." I glanced toward the closed door at the end of the hall. Silence. My son was asleep and apparently had not even put the dog in the backyard yet.

Looking back at CeCe, I recounted how I stepped once on a black snake, near its head, in New Jersey. It was dusk. I felt something under my foot, and looked down to see the thing writhing in pain. My daughter said she's never seen me move so fast. I leapt yards away off the creature toward my doorstep, it seemed.

CeCe laughed, and I went off in search of more cleaning supplies, wondering how my teenage son could sleep through commotion in his junky room, and hoping the cat was still alive. I doubted she'd like black snakes, and if they're poisonous, how would I ever explain to my daughter what happened to the cat?

Post Script: The cat came back during the night before my bedtime. Also, my dad said some snakes move the way CeCe described the black snake moving, but that doesn't mean they're poisonous or going to strike you. Maybe he's right. He grew up in the country. I, however, did not, and have no desire to test his word. I looked up Louisiana black snakes, and generally they are not poisonous. Photo is from a Maryland site.


Technorati Tags: [black snake], [pets][louisiana], [elderly parents], [midlife], [family], [parent]

I Don't Want to Sound Sexist But Woman-Up, Son

I'm going to tell you a truth about life, and in order to do that, I'm putting my revelation in context with the comedy of Russell Peters and his commentary about our racist world. In the piece, Peters draws laughter pointing out a snippet of reality we've probably observed, and he begins it telling white people how much he admires them.

White people, my white American friends, I'm here to tell you something. I like you. And I'm not just saying that, you know, to say it. I'm telling you for a reason because I think white people have done some major things in the past 30 years. They've really taken some strides. ...

This post continues at BlogHer.com

Technorati Tags: [racism], [Russell Peters], [elderly parents], women,[caregiver], [gender]