By Alfredo Botello, California, USA
“I can’t get it together.” Mom was staring at the paper calendar on the fridge, the 8.5” x 11” document which had organized her life for years, and suddenly she couldn’t make sense of her own notes: a doctor’s appointment, or a visit to the hair salon. She anxiously turned to me and said again, “I can’t get it together.”
I wish I could tell you I put my arm around her and gently replied, “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out together.” But I didn’t. I sniped back, “What is wrong with you?” She could no longer find her car in parking lots, she didn’t remember if she took her meds ten seconds after she took them. She began putting her groceries away in the bedroom. I scrambled to plug the leaks.
I felt blindsided and overwhelmed. I didn’t understand the changes in mom, and I certainly didn’t like them. Even after the diagnosis of “likely onset Alzheimer’s,” I still wasn’t a paragon of compassion. I was still snippy, still impatient. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I muster a little kindness, a little patience?
After the resentment and impatience came the guilt, the crushing guilt. I was ashamed at my behavior. I felt alone. In desperation I wrote Spin Cycle: Notes From A Reluctant Caregiver. I know that when I read anything that resonates with me, be it graffiti on the wall of a bathroom or a line in a highbrow novel, I feel comforted. I feel less alone. If one person reads Spin Cycle and thinks, “that character is feeling, doing and saying exactly what I’m feeling and doing and saying – thank god I’m not alone,” then I’ve done my job.
Spin Cycle is my story, but it’s also fiction. A novel afforded me the chance to meditate on being a caregiver not just from my own vantage point, but from the vantage point of a dozen or so other characters, misfit students in protagonist Ezra Pavic’s ad hoc storefront school/support group, APPA (Adults Patiently Parenting Adults). He opens the school in an attempt to help others and also to learn from them. The novel is aspirational, about one man’s journey to regain his ability to be compassionate after the spin cycle of being a dementia caregiver has overwhelmed him and hardened his heart.
Compassion. It’s everything. On my best days with mom, I have it. On my worst days, well, I know, like Ezra, like his students, that I am not alone, that we are all works in progress, trying inch by inch, moment by moment, to be a little better.
About the Author
Alfredo Botello is a novelist and screenwriter who has worked on projects ranging from the indie Sundance Global Short La Revolucion De Iguodala to the studio tent pole Fast and Furious 9. His debut novel, 180 Days, has garnered multiple literary awards. His second novel, Spin Cycle: Notes From A Reluctant Caregiver, was published by Koehler Books on 1.14.25. He is a Fulbright Fellow in architecture and a Nicholl Fellow in screenwriting. In addition to screenplays and the novels, he contributed a chapter to the Amazon bestseller Wellness Through Words, and has written for The San Francisco Examiner Magazine, Metropolis, Diablo, Surface, The Utne Reader, Style, The East Bay Express, and The Monthly. Botello co-owns a cocktail bar in downtown Oakland, Little Bird Bar, and at home dotes on his two Corgis, George and Dotty.
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