No Longer Allergic to Oxygen

It’s not the shaky hand which she presses into mine in welcome, but rather the glopped mascara under her eyes - which I remember as always having been meticulously applied - that tightens my stomach and makes my eyes dart.

The scene is sad. Tissues on the floor, books and clothes on the bed. I follow her shaky-gait walk with a sinking feeling.

I gulp, and say to the back of her head as we enter the kitchen, “Jody! I’m glad to be able to see you. Kay said it’s been a set back for you these past few weeks. Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner.”

In truth, I’ve just finished “rescuing” a family friend from her off-the-charts spate of self destructive behavior, which nearly killed her, and I couldn’t stomach the thought of embarking on another rescue mission. Jody’s situation seems dire, indeed. It’s a physical challenge, unlike my auntie’s sister Serena, whose mental diagnosis is “disposaphobia” - a component of deep depression. I arranged to have Serena’s house cleaned out of excrement and rotting food, have the rotted floor joists repaired, so she wouldn’t fall through the floor boards again, and we fumigated for fleas, spiders, roaches and silverfish. I shudder remembering the horror of being covered by fleas so my pants looked completely black, when I emerged from a pitch-black room where she'd asked me to retrieve a lamp for her.



Jody is my children's drama teacher, once a week co-worker in the school library and just-getting-to-know-you-better friend.

I set the bag of chicken soup, salad, baked yams and fresh veggie juice on Jody’s kitchen floor, and begin to clear space on the counter to decant it all from the bag. 

“It has been a rough patch, alright, but I’ve got some good new information which is putting all this in perspective.”

Her speech is halting and tremulous. When I look up there’s a remembered light in her eyes, but the facial muscles can’t quite lift the brows and can’t quite smile. Her elbows are stiff at her sides. Parkinson’s is stealthy, sinister and greedy.

“What’s the good info?”

“This Natural Medicine Organization puts out a newsletter. In it I read that an injury to the top of the foot can be the root cause of this shaking phenomenon.” 

The P word seems to be taboo, so I don’t use it either. 

“I had an incident last year when a jar of peanut butter fell out of the cupboard and hit my instep.” She continues. “Remember when  I was wearing a velcro boot for a few weeks? Small bone broke. I’m SURE that’s when it happened. Something about the nerves there in that sensitive part setting up intermittent signals to the brain...”

“Are there any meds that may help steady your hand, Jody?” I stand up and look at her.

There’s a flash of color rising to her cheeks. Her body stiffens with purpose.

“I’m not taking anything those fraudulent, money-grubbing doctors have to sell me. My naturopath has given me some herbs that work just fine.”

For the first time, I see clearly the path ahead of her. She’s forging it herself. There’s nothing to argue, no sandwich board to don. She’s got to do it her way. It’s not my way. I don’t even know what my way would be - were I faced with this same awful offal portion.  I learned quite some time ago: About all we can do is love each other up and hope each of us makes it home with some amount of grace, dignity, and humor still intact.  It’s certainly not my right or desire to counsel an intelligent woman about what she SHOULD be doing.

I put the kettle on, wash some dishes, make Jody and me a cup of tea and, after some heart to heart and listening to how her family is, I slip out the door and out of her life like a shadow.

I’m not proud of disconnecting. It was the best I could do. I didn’t have spare energy to devote to another drowning victim after the Serena case. All I could do was let another mom from the school know what was going on and help Kay make calls so food could be brought to Jody, on some sort of schedule, by other moms from our kid’s school.

The myth of Psyche and Eros serves as a teaching for me. Aphrodite does not want a mere mortal to marry her son, so she sets Psyche a task of such magnitude, to prove her worth, that she is likely not to succeed. At every turn, Psyche is helped by the songs of birds, or the wind blowing through the reeds, which tell her how to accomplish getting into the Underworld to retrieve something for her would-be mother-in-law.

She is warned that during her crossing of the River Styx, she will see people drowning; hear them call out to her to save them. She must not stop to help them. She must keep to her own task of crossing in the small boat she’s given, or all will be lost. Difficult as it is for Psyche to ignore the cries of the drowning, she holds fast and reaches her destination, completes her task and ultimately unites with Eros. Is this not our task in life: to marry our passion to our soul's imperative?

The succinct modern day synopsis may be: Put on your own oxygen mask first.

Recently, my therapist encouraged me to go to a workshop in February which doesn’t allow the participants to “help” anyone in any way, or they’ll be busted. When she told me that, I burst into tears and started laughing at the same time. BUSTED. I am a care-GIVER, not a care RECEIVER. Receivership strikes terror into my heart. She went on to explain that those of us raised by narcissists (is a pedophile narcissistic?) cannot bear to be in receivership for fear the tables will turn suddenly and we’ll be in danger. We can only be on out-put.

Guess where I’m going in February.

I’m hoping I live long enough to model something more evolved for my daughters than I’ve so-far been able to model.