Mineral Point (Part 7)

From what I was told, Susan's father also died of Alzheimer's and she spent some years taking care of him before he was shipped off to a care facility. Us kids had a contentious relationship with Susan that eventually ended with Susan selling the farm to a stranger. Of the three of us, I was typically given the job of talking with Susan on our behalf. Plus, my sister, post-law school took a clerkship in DC and my brother had just started teaching school in Brooklyn, thus I felt like I was the only one of us who was free enough, i.e. not tied to anything resembling a real job, to go back to the farm to help out. Though I can't confidently characterize the tension between Susan and in particular, my sister, I believe Susan resented that even after my father's diagnosis us kids had been of relatively little help; the whole, Mother Hen thing, that if one does not cut the wheat or grind the flour, one is not entitled to eat the bread. The bread in this case being having a say in what happens to my dad. That, and her previous experience with her own dad. That one can only bear so much, to watch the people you love deteriorate, to forget your name and their own. That care takers need also to be taken care of and even now I respect what I'd characterize as her decision to not let my father's illness consume the later years of her life. That as an American I grudgingly accept the trope of looking out for number one. 

Susan and my dad married when I was thirteen years-old. The wedding was held at the Jones House, an historic bed and breakfast that tourists would stay in when they came to Mineral Point. Adam and I were tasked with the job of throwing rose petals from the balcony above the bride and groom during the "I do" moment. Susan and my Dad knew each other in high school in Pikeville, Kentucky and started seeing each other following a class reunion, both of them now divorced with three children, Susan's youngest daughter older than my older sister. During the lead up to the wedding Susan would come up from Kentucky to stay on the farm, the house on top the hill. One evening my dad had taken us to Dairy Queen and on the way he mentioned that Susan was coming up yet again from Kentucky for the weekend and to stay the week. Naïve and young, I asked him why she had to come up to Wisconsin since she doesn't seem to like us kids. From my perspective, eleven years-old, Susan didn't act particularly motherly. When she was there my dad was more or less with her, doing things one does when one is in love. Thus, Susan coming up to the farm meant that my dad would be unavailable and occupied. Of course I was too young to understand that my parents were also human beings. My dad responded to my question with anger and no answer, sending me to the car and no ice cream.

That dynamic, of Susan politely demonstrating that she was not our mother and my dad enthrall to the task of keeping her happy, was present at the beginning and continued to the end. My role as I saw it when I was a kid then and even to a degree now, thirty some years later, was to serve as a bridge between warring parties. I took on the same role with my step-dad J at my mom's house when she remarried a few years before my father, that when my brother and sister were being hostile or dismissive that it was my job to do the opposite, to show that that in fact this person was appreciated and welcome. Not that Susan needed that from me, or J, or that I was even in a position to make someone feel welcome, these projections of what someone needs an obvious marker of what I must have been feeling myself, at least that is what an analysis via psychology might come to. Simply though, I tried to be nice even though her role in our family was confusing, that if she wasn't a caretaker to us then who was she? Why was she there? My coming to the farm during Spring of 2001 was an attempt by me to do the right thing, to empathize with the other in hopes of smoothing relations between those with the power to act, which in this case was my sister and Susan. When I left Mineral Point, around four months after I got there, it was because Susan had told me that one of her sons was coming up to stay for a while and that I'd need to leave the Barn to make room. I was not kicked off the farm but politely shown the door.