I told myself this was temporary for approximately fourteen months, which is how long it took me to stop pretending.
The job was the first thing that had to change. I couldn’t work a regular schedule anymore. My mother’s days had become irregular in a way that made regular hours nearly impossible. She slept at odd times. Her confusion spiked without pattern. On good days she was lucid and funny and she cooked dinner and we played cards and I almost forgot there was a problem. On bad days she couldn’t remember what month it was and she’d set something on the stove and walk away and I’d come downstairs to smoke and the smell of scorched pot handles.
I moved to part-time bookkeeping, contracting through a small agency that matched me with businesses that needed someone for fifteen or twenty hours a week. I took jobs I could do remotely, or in morning blocks, or on a schedule that could flex when it needed to. I made significantly less money. I had significantly less of a career.
I want to be honest about what that period was actually like, because in the years since, I have watched my own memory smooth it into something nobler than it was. It wasn’t noble. I resented my mother sometimes. Not for being sick — I understood that — but for the particular ways the sickness rearranged my life without acknowledgment. She was not always gracious. She was Ruth Bennett, which meant she was stubborn and opinionated and she did not like to feel dependent, and when she felt dependent she sometimes directed that discomfort at the nearest available person.