Jabberwocky

Over the course of the last six decades I have developed a coping mechanism for enduring an unpleasant or distressful irritant in my life. It’s a fairly simple technique and I find it works well regardless the circumstance. Currently I find I’m using it more and more to deal with the relentless jabbering. She never stops. This new babbling is not exactly the same as “old folk’s redux” which is common among elders. Humans of all ages love their own life stories, but elders aren’t making new stories so they tell the ones they have over and over and over.

No, Mary’s constant chatter is driven by something else now. But it is a disconcerting mixture of her normal well-worn stories sprinkled with odd comments that either do not fit or just make no sense. Sometimes she’ll toss in a question that is difficult to answer because it is constructed in misconception. But it takes me by surprise because it is usually regarding something she should know. This is consistent with both AD and stroke. Basically it’s just brain damage. Parts of the language center in Mary’s brain are broken.

But saying this does not make it less maddening to be subjected to the incessant flow of minutia. My first line of defense is to simply tune out but that can backfire when I am suddenly jerked back into her one-sided conversation with a question, “Don’t you think...?” Since the problem has grown two fold since her mild stroke last week, I had to pull out and dust off my old tricks for dealing with aggravation lest my language center blows a fuse.

First, I have to admit I am aggravated. Yes, yes, yes, I am, I am. When she starts in on how she washes her clothes (mostly jersey knit tops) and “irons” them by taking them out of the dryer still damp and hangs them up and then smoothes them out with her hands, like this, and lets them dry and then doesn’t ever have to use an iron, she hasn’t used an iron in twenty years, and you should do that too and all you need is about two feet of wire rack and some hangers... I want to tell her to SHUT UP! I’ve been doing laundry for FORTY YEARS! But I can’t do that, and I won’t, so long as I still have control of my language center. To maintain that control I have to face the demon in front of me and analyze what exactly it is that is bothering me. Basically I shrink it down to manageable size by breaking it down to the cellular level with close examination.

Here’s what I know:

She is regressing. With every step forward in the decline of her mind, she is stepping backward in the progress her brain made from birth to present. Children gain language first by babbling and trying out sounds and then by repetition of words learned. At a certain stage toddlers have enough words and sentence making skills to ramble relentlessly. Eventually they mature enough to gain control of their word lock. This is the mechanism in the brain that stops the stream of consciousness thoughts from falling out of the mouth. We all think all the time but we only verbalize this unpunctuated river of words when there is a good reason to speak out loud. When the word lock is not engaged, this river flows unchecked, just like a toddler who has learned how to talk but hasn’t learned when and how to stop. This is where she is now. She is an old toddler whose word lock is not working. Comparing this to the way I feel about my two year old grandson’s babbling, I can see why her jabbering bothers me and his makes me laugh.

Expectations. I expect her to be a grown up with all her learned and earned facilities humming properly. I judge her based on where she ought to be, not where she really is. But due to the inevitable process of aging combined with the additional burden of disease, she is becoming a child again. So, really the problem that causes my aggravation is not her, it’s me. She is not doing it to annoy me, it isn’t a conscious effort on her part to make me crazy; she is simply behaving exactly like my grandchild, whom I consider to be exceptional in all ways. So, it isn't her repetitions that annoy me, it's something else. And that something else comes from within me. Perhaps it is the distress of watching her regress or perhaps it is fear of my own future.

This is where the coping thing kicks in and I have to adjust my attitude.