Mother’s Day was two days ago. A lovely day for some, a bittersweet day for others. Honoring our mothers is sometimes filled with all kinds of emotions, not just love. It’s just like everything else in life, always a little more complicated once you get below the surface.

For me, I work out my emotions best by words or paint. All my thoughts tend to jumble up in my mind and it is hard to make sense of them any other way. Mother’s Day is no different.

My mother is always on my mind. Because of her Alzheimers, she can no longer think for herself. As her caretaker and lifeline, I don’t have the option to “not” think about her. She can no longer do most of the things that she used to do for herself. And it is an everyday struggle for me to keep up with doing all those things for her.

My mother’s yard has declined right along with her mind. Her once meticulously cut grass and trimmed shrubs now only get taken care of when I have a spare moment that I am not using to take care of her. It is a big yard, filled oaks and magnolias, palms and pines. Azaleas, gardenias, roses, lilies are planted everywhere, most of them grown from cuttings from my grandmother’s yard.

I was thinking about how her yard parallels her life now. What once were beautiful flowerbeds are being overtaken by vines and wild blackberries. Just like her thoughts, everything is a huge tangle of chaos. Palms sprout up among the azaleas. Gardenias fall over from the weight of their blooms and unpruned branches. The jasmine has escaped the fence and now runs rampant along the brick walls of her home. The Spanish moss that is so prevalent here shrouds all the shrubs and trees and flowers just like the memories that are being shrouded and darkened in my mothers mind.

But there is beauty still in the wild blooming flowers, the vines climbing up through the trees, the ripe blackberries winding around the Easter Lillies planted so long ago. The heavy moss swaying in the trees cascades like a soft beautiful garland. Nature is doing her thing. Maybe, just not the way my mother would have planned it.

My mother’s clothes are sometimes on backwards, her shoes on the wrong feet and she no longer understands the concept of matching her shirts to her shorts. Her gray hair, once curly and thick, is now fine and straight refuses to be tamed. Her words don’t come freely and clearly anymore and she struggles to express herself. Her mind is a tangle of what happened five minutes ago mixed in with what happened fifty years ago. All of who she was most of her life is slowly disappearing. All of her plans have been abandoned but they have been replaced by something else. Like the flowers and the trees in her yard, she is still there, just different.

She laughs much sweeter now. She gets such joy out of such small moments. The light in her eyes is still bright most days. She loves everyone. She tells amazing stories that have no sense of time and very little reality but her imagination makes up for both of those. Even through the tangle of chaos that is her mind now, she still blooms.

Just like her flowers.