9 months
Why do elderly people do strange things?
Well, to us, they’re strange. Apparently, not to the person doing them.
Case in point: my mother was a scotch tape addict.
I know, right? So weird.
She put scotch tape on everything. EVERYTHING. Every picture in her house, every piece of so-called art on the walls. The plastic placemats on her kitchen table were scotch-taped down to the table. Unmovable. Unwashable because you couldn’t pick them up to get the food crap off them. Whenever I visited weekly, I would routinely wash the place mats with a Lysol wet-one. An entire week’s worth of food crap covered that wipe. My mother would always – always – say, “I just cleaned that this morning.”
Sure you did, Mom.
Sigh.
I had a bitch of a time getting that tape off the table after she died just so I could sell the table with the house. No one was going to buy a kitchen table with TAPED placemats. No one with any kind of home design background, anyway.
Every free-standing item, or item on the walls, possessed scotch tape. Some of it was covered in it.
I’d given her numerous photos in beautiful picture frames over the years of my daughter. The frames weren’t cheap ones, either. The photos in them were secured appropriately as you’d imagine they’d be in an expensive frame, behind glass and with at least two pieces of paper or cardboard behind the picture before the frame was secured.
Some were wall frames, complete with wire hangers to make it easy to place them. Most were desk frames, freestanding with the triangular backpiece that allowed the frame to stand on its own.
When I emptied her house , I pulled everything down off the walls and tossed whatever was on the furniture, in drawers, closets, etc, in several big Rubbermaid containers, intent on going through everything at one point.
One point came last week.
I started with the photographs.
Every frame that had hung on the wall had scotch tape securing the back of it. The frames, as I said, weren’t cheap and they had the little obnoxious closures you can only open with the blunt edge of a knife or something sharp in order to put the picture in place. The perimeter of every frame was secured shut with tape. When I removed it all and then opened the frames, she’d also taped the pictures to the blank paper or cardboard inside of it. And I mean TAPED. Underneath the picture, over it, on it. Some of the photos were ruined because I couldn’t get the tape off easily and wound up tearing them.
I moved to the frames that were freestanding.
Do I need to tell you I found the same thing? In the cases where there was that triangular piece on the back to allow the frame to stand, she’d taped it open so that when I went to fold it closed to store it, I couldn’t.
So much tape.
The weirdest place I found tape – this time it was tan masking tape – was on the counters in her small kitchen area. Apparently, there was a gap between the countertops and edge of the sink and counterboard and they didn’t fit snuggly in place, causing about a half-inch opening. Food and water would routinely drop or drip down into the gap, so my mother had the bright idea to put masking tape along the entire counter, the back wall, and along the drawers underneath. When I noticed this once when she was alive she told me she did it to prevent ants from coming in.
At the exact moment she said this I spotted two ants crawling along the backsplash wall.
I told her I would buy ant spray, spray the area, and that I’d remove the tape.
She forbade me. This exploded into a huge argument with her becoming extremely agitated and verbally abusive, telling me I didn’t live in her home and couldn’t dictate how she ran it.
I tried pointing out how dumb and unattractive it looked having masking tape along the counters. I really should have just kept my mouth shut. I realized this later when she erupted and I mean ERUPTED in a screaming hissy fit. She accused me of always looking down on her and how she lived. She stated I thought I was better than she and my stepfather were because I’d married a man with money. That was an old complaint I’d heard throughout my marriage. It never failed to hurt me.
She accused me of a various list of offenses, starting with accusing me of always hating that we were poor when I was a kid and ending with the phrase, “I should have sent you to your father to live when you were a child.”
At one point she wheeled over to where I was standing by the kitchen sink, inspecting the stained and sticky masking tape and rammed her wheelchair into my leg in an attempt to get me to move away from the offending counter.
It worked.
I left – in pain and furious -without saying goodbye, slammed out of the house and shot off in a snit.
Real mature, I know.
I was 60 at the time.
As I drove the 35 miles back to my own home I realized why she’d reacted the way she had.
All her life her family had looked down on her. On her life choices, her marriage, the fact she never learned how to drive, or traveled, or had any friends. They called her stupid, dumb, moronic. Her mother’s comments when she was alive were always cruel.
My mother interpreted my concern, incorrectly, as just another person in her life denigrating how she lived and who she was.
When this realization came to me, I felt horrible. I hadn’t meant to make her upset – I never did, but so often her inability to control her emotions just boiled over and she reacted without ever looking at a situation with logic and thought instead of hurt and the need to get back, or lash out, at the person.
Years of study as a psychiatric nurse had taught me to recognize and understand why this behavior occurred.
Decades of being her daughter and I still hadn’t learned how to help her control it.
When I got home, I called her immediately. She answered the phone in a subdued voice, fresh with tears. I apologized and tried to explain I’d meant no disrespect. She was right, I said. It was her home and she could live in it any way she wanted. As long, I added, she was safe.
After several sniffs, she thanked me, then, like a light switch being turned from off to on, like the entire emotional situation had never happened, her voice brightened and, in that singsong way she had when she was pretending to be happy, she told me that they had just eaten one of the lunches I prepared for them and that it was delicious.
I told her I was glad. She said, “My love to you all,” and then we rang off.
I took a three-hour nap after that because I was so wrung out.
Peggy Jaeger, Author 