Today's NYT carried a story about a woman with fronto-temporal dementia who became especially creative after becoming ill.

Wish I could say my mother's experience is like this.

Labels: FTD, mom

Among other things, Tove Jansson's Moominland Midwinter is a sweet, funny fable of winter giving way to spring. In other words -- in more clinical or medical words -- it can be read as a story about depression and its ending. Which, perhaps not surprisingly given the pharmacopeia in my cupboard, is something I'm thinking about a lot these days.
It's winter in Moomin Valley, and all the Moomins are asleep. All the summer toys are stowed in the bathing house; sheets cover the furniture to protect it from dust; the stove is cold; the pantry is full of jars of Moominmamma's strawberry jam, waiting for the first spring breakfast. Moominmamma herself is snoring. The sun dips below the horizon and stays there.

A typical depressive, Moomintroll bolts awake in the middle of the night. The winter world is terrible. It's dark, it's cold, there's no one to play with, the sun is gone and it seems like it will never come back.

Moomintroll ventures outside. (Apparently his depression is not the agoraphobic kind.) He meets some funny characters in the shuttered bathing-house -- notably the steady, practical, if somewhat unimaginative Too-Ticky, who spends her time ice-fishing, and the irrepressible if somewhat self-seeking Little My (pictured, left), who responds to the apparent frost-bite death of a squirrel by observing that his tail would make a wonderful muff.

In their company, Moomintroll learns lots about the peculiar winter world of Moomin Valley, whose inhabitants, as charming as they are, correspond in various ways to the less charming bits of oneself. For instance, there is the fearsome Ancestor who is locked in the cupboard and should not, under any circumstances, be let out; there is the mysterious, cantankerous Dweller Under the Sink. Moomintroll must deal with these characters; they are either the keys to his release from sadness, or they are important distractions from that sadness, things to keep him busy while he waits for spring, just as one does wait, in a sort of antic hope, for the anti-depressant to kick in.

At the height of the winter, the creatures gather for a bonfire, a signal to convince the sun to come back. Too-Ticky asks Moomintroll to help, by sacrificing the "garden seat," a bench of which he is for some reason enormously protective, as fuel for the fire. Reluctantly, he relinquishes it, in exchange for a promise he has extracted from Too-Ticky: He will be allowed to meet the Ancestor.

But the Ancestor is not taking visitors. Frustrated, Moomintroll complains to Too-Ticky. She introduces him to the Dweller Under the Sink. Good-natured Moomintroll compliments the Dweller on his enormously bushy eyebrows. The Dweller takes offense, in a language that Moomintroll is dismayed to discover he cannot understand. He repeats the Dweller's words, in an effort to make things better that only succeeds in making them worse. The garden seat goes up in flames. A large cold creature named the Groke accidentally sits on the fire, extinguishing it. All the sacrifice is for nothing.

"Such things happen," says Too-Ticky, philosophically. Moomintroll is not convinced. He retires to a corner, frustrated and stuck. At this point, he might take some Prozac, or see a therapist.

Who should arrive next but -- the Hemulen! Blustery, vigorous, the Hemulen is a dynamo on skis who is suspiciously addicted to fresh air and physical thrills. In an effort to shake the group out of their winter blahs, he cheerfully recommends exercise, especially swims in freezing water. Naturally, everyone hates him -- except Little My, who sticks by him long enough to learn how to ski, and then, having no further use for him, skis off on her own.

The Hemulen's ambiguous success with Little My notwithstanding, the group decides they must free themselves from the Hemulen. But no one wants to be mean. So Moomintroll is given the task of kindly and tactfully sending the Hemulen on his way. But Moomintroll's nerve fails him. He finds he just can't do it. (Nobody said psychotherapy, which also includes resistance to psychotherapy, would be easy.) In the end, this is just as well: The Hemulen makes himself useful after all, by saving the life of the least of their community, a sad creature named "Salome the Little Creep." (Might the name be a clue to the psychoanalytic schema I'm claiming is at work here?) For this good deed, Moomintroll makes the Hemulen a gift of the last jar of Moominmamma's wonderful strawberry jam, a great prize, and the Hemulen leaves, on good terms with all, followed by the dog, Sorry-oo, who has finally found a master he can tolerate.

Inevitably, spring comes, the sun returns, and, crucially, Moominmamma wakes up. The house is a mess, all her jam is gone, so is her silver tray (Little My used it for a sled), some rugs, her furniture. She is delighted -- there is less to clean, less to worry about. Far from misbehaving, Moomintroll has done everything right.

"Mother, I love you terribly," says Moomintroll, grateful for Moominmamma's loving, skilled and discreet transformation of bad things into good.

"I love you terribly."

That is, of course, exactly what one wants to say and to hear. Among other things, the story is about two mingled wishes: the wish to offer a love one knows is flawed and terrible, and the wish to be made the object of love in return, despite or perhaps even (oh, terrible hope!) because of one's terribleness. Jansson's free, generous genius gives form to both wishes -- and then, bless her, she gratifies them fully. It's probably worth noting that Jansson dedicated this volume of the Moomin series to her mother. Can stories cure depression? Can lost mothers be brought back to life? No, and no. But there's something to be said for the comfort on offer here, for such consolation.

Labels: books, depression, mom

My mother has been in and out of the hospital since October. Right now she's in a nursing home, recovering from her broken knee, and the subsequent infection she got somewhere inside RI's labyrinthine system for the care of the elderly and infirm. Today, for the first time since her dementia diagnosis, and in between terrible bouts of vomiting, she asked me for a paper and pencil. She wanted to make a list. Here is what she wrote: Things necessary.

I left some time later, & spent the afternoon with Jane, doing certain very necessary things, like taking a walk in the woods, shopping for summer dresses, and eating cones of vanilla chip ice cream. I did not write, although I thought about it, in between remembering my mother, working at her easel or the typewriter during the long summer afternoons, or driving me around, trying to distract me, on the night I didn't have a date for the ninth grade dance. The ice cream parlor where I sat with Jane was also where I worked my fifteenth summer, and as I looked out at the village center, time stopped, briefly, and then went backwards. Everything was just the way it was twenty years ago, right down to the trees and the grass and the robins in the shrubbery. I pressed my lips to Jane's head; she licked up the last of her ice cream; and it seemed that my father was still waiting in the parking lot with the engine running while I polished the last of the silver ice cream bins.

It is hard to reconcile this sadness and nostalgia with what I also know to be true: that during my childhood and adolescence I was alone and silent a great deal; that school, which might have been a refuge, was violent and frightening; and that my mother, also, was violent and frightening.

Labels: mom, travels with jane

This year's Booker prizewinner Kiran Desai reports that her mother, the novelist Anita Desai, helped her write the novel that won the Booker, and I do not doubt it. One of my treasured possessions is a copy of the very first short story I published, marked up with Anita Desai's handwritten notes, in delicate purple pen; she was indeed a wonderful teacher. My own mother -- also a writer, also a teacher, also my teacher -- broke her knee last week, a problem that required major surgery under general anesthesia to correct. She is recovering in a hospital not far from her old house, where I, too, spent a portion of my childhood. The place figures in my novel the way it figures in my dreams -- crabgrass, poison oak, swing shifts, linoleum. I am tempted to say, dismissively, You get the picture, but I don't because it isn't true. In Joyce Carol Oates' new collection, High Lonesome, Oates does get the picture -- she has her finger on something important that otherwise resists lyric description, & fits better into the more familiar and more distanced and antiseptic discourses about jobs, economic insecurity, mandatory overtime, minimum wage. A place where reading novels (let alone writing them) is suspect and barely tolerated when there is so much else to do. I read Oates' stories with a tight chest, thinking about Oates' childhood (she was no stranger, I bet, to linoleum), her hunger for books, and about the books she has written, the sheer quantity of them, as if, finding the world lacking the books she wanted to read, she simply made them herself, as you might make furniture to suit an odd-shaped room. Also thinking about the fact of Oates' childlessness. Kiran Desai says she won't have children because then she would have to break her writerly solitude and "be sweet" , which gets in the way of her writing. Her mother, I want to remind her, wrote wonderful books with four children underfoot, along with teaching duties and office hours, including one session in which she gently insisted that yes, I had talent and yes, it was not only worth developing but probably the most important thing I could do -- and her encouragement made all the difference.

Labels: mom, writing

You go looking for trouble, you find it. That's true enough, I guess. Last week, noodling around with some writing I did way back when on breastfeeding, I was startled to discover, or rediscover, some distressing reports about environmental toxins and breast milk. In Europe, where breastfeeding is widespread, and maternity leaves are more accommodating of breastfeeding mothers, testing of breastmilk for toxicity is, evidently, commonplace. Not so here, and the toxin load in American women's breast milk reflects this lack of monitoring. I've got more to say about this problem, but not now. As a result of this reading, I got interested in toxin loads and rates of cancer incidence, and this brought me to SEERwhich has statistics on incidence rates of different kinds of cancer around the US.

Can we take, as writ, that some kinds of cancer -- cancers of filtration organs, like the kidney and liver, and fatty tissue, like the brain and breast -- are directly related to toxin exposure? We know toxins accumulate in fatty tissue, like the breast and the brain, and in the filter organs, like the liver, the lungs, and the kidneys. We also know that childhood cancers are becoming more common, and that children -- due to their size -- are uniquely vulnerable to toxin exposures. They are, perhaps, sentinels. And so I notice, upon looking into SEER's database, that the incidence of bladder cancer in Rhode Island (29-30 cases per 100,000) is significantly higher than the national average (21 cases per 100,000).

Rates of bladder cancer are important because the bladder, as a kind of holding tank for ingested fluid, is continually exposed to the environment. If it's out there, it's in here, too. The chlorine in drinking water -- that's a carcinogen. By itself, it poses enough of a problem. But it can also interact with other organic contaminants already present in the water, producing organochlorines including known carcinogens like trihalomethanes (e.g., chloroform).

So the watershed feeding the Scituate Reservoir, which supplies most of Providence's tap water, better be pretty pure. But I don't think it is. First of all, roads run all through it. Those roads are reasonably well-traveled and they are liberally de-iced in the winter. The sodium and chloride run into the water. I don't know how this material reacts when undergoes routine chlorination, but it would be good to know.

Moreover, the reservoir's drainage basin includes parts of Cranston and Johnston, towns where there's a lot of industry, and a lot of toxic chemicals. Some of them have been reported. It's not hard to find these places on a map; some are close to bodies of water that (though I'm no expert on the state's hydrography) seem to be part of the reservoir's drainage basin. I don't know how many of these chemicals leach into the water system, and I don't know which, if any of them, turn into organochlorines when the water is chlorinated. I know the water from the reservoir is aerated, which would in theory reduce the amount of toxins in the water by allowing them to vaporize -- but only if the aeration happens after chlorination, not before. (Plus, aeration sends these compounds back into the atmosphere where we can inhale them instead of drinking them.)

I know I'm looking for trouble. And I know that I used to live not too far from the Gowanus Canal, which might as well have glowed, it was so polluted. That didn't bother me, but the reservoir does. The cancer rates do. Hmph.

Labels: home, house, mom