My Disappearing Mother by Suzanne Finnamore

Author:Suzanne Finnamore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2023-09-09T17:08:08+00:00

verschlimmbessern, To make worse by “improving.”

I can see that trying to make things better for my mother—A new blanket! A new music tape! More chocolate!—is only moving things in the opposite direction. She gets overwhelmed. She gets indigestion. She gets angry. I resolve to try to do more by doing less.

I think of what Bunny would say about that. Don’t push the river, she would say. An apt saying, as it’s easy to see how you can’t push a river. If you try, not only will you fail; you will be swept away.

Dr. Barney Rubble

Dr. Barney Rubble retired, so I have stopped taking the half a milligram of Xanax I was taking at night to sleep. But due to the generosity of Dr. Barney Rubble, I still have a bottle of sixty tranquilizers. So, I can only have sixty really bad things happen to me.

Xanax depresses the central nervous system, and I am tired of begging for them. Now that Dr. Barney Rubble has retired, this is a perfect end point.

I see my new doctor today—a woman—and will tell her the Xanax is out of my system (it only takes twenty-four hours). It’s a huge relief. But I also feel junk sick. So, I was a junkie.

Still taking the Prozac, as without it I fall into depression. I have to take it for a while longer, maybe the rest of my life. Zero side effects on that. I still get one Sonata every fifth night, for sleeping. But I was boosting it with a baby Xanax, and so now I am wide awake.

I will be wide awake for a couple of nights because this is the peak withdrawal time. I am looking forward to dreaming again. Because Xanax sort of stops that. It stops libido, too. And—hi ho!—it can lead to Alzheimer’s, and I don’t want to go there before I go there. I have to parachute straight into my life without a parachute. It’s honorable but also hateful. I liked the Vaseline smear that covered my lens. But that’s all over now.

Dolls

In her sixties, Bunny started collecting dolls and stuffed animals at yard sales and dressing them in tiny clothes, placing them in wooden highchairs and itty-bitty rocking chairs. Rabbits and teddy bears were a theme, but she would take anything and make a family out of it, make an imaginary being out of it; first a small group in the corner of the bedroom and then branching out into the living room. A teddy bear in spectacles and overalls. Two identical bunnies with long brown ears and red tartan sweaters.

Did she talk to them, call them her babies? If she did, I blocked it out.

She was roughly my age.

I don’t have dolls, but I do keep my son’s stuffed rabbit on my desk. Its stitched black eyes are looking at me right now. Once again, I see life as the big surprise party you insist you don’t want but which happens anyway.

FaceTime

Saturday morning, I FaceTime with Ron. We

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