Ma’s Way

Anne C. Woodlen

When Ma gets locked up, my life goes to hell—and Ma got locked up Friday. Let it be clearly understood that Ma is a good woman—a good wife and a good mother. When her son Mike brought home his 14-year-old friend, Patti, who was having terrible trouble with her own mother, Ma took Patti in. Five years later, when Patti married Mike, Ma was pleased. Ma was—as all people of the North Country are—a hard worker. She worked as a private-pay home health aide in Upstate New York.

New York State is composed of two separate entities: New York City, which is a rich, powerful, megalopolis, and The Rest of Us, who are mostly poor, insignificant and rural. If you exclude New York City—which many of us would like to do—the rest of New York State has an economic picture about as bleak as Missouri’s. We are not a healthy, wealthy state.

Outside of New York City, which is known as Downstate, there is Western New York, also known as Buffalo; the Syracuse area, variously called Upstate or Central New York; and the North Country, where Ma lives. The North Country is occupied in about equal parts by people, pigs and cows. It is occupied in greater part by rocks. It is not easy country to farm, and it is made much worse by the fall of snow, which was so great in 2007 that it made headlines with the Associated Press of Pakistan.

Parish, N.Y., which is where The Weather Channel reported from—probably because it had a motel—got about twelve feet of snow in about a week. Nearby Mexico, N.Y., which is where Ma lives, but which does not have a motel, got more. By comparison, New York City got 27 inches—inches—and declared itself in a state of abject desperation. Upstate, we call 27 inches of snow a bad day at the beach.

So here we have Ma, good woman that she is, working in poor Upstate New York as a private-pay home health aide, which means she has absolutely no benefits. None. Zero, zilch, zip. No overtime, no vacation, and certainly no health insurance. But that’s okay because Ma has a husband, and her husband does have all those things, so she’s covered.

Then Ma’s husband dies, so Ma takes his life insurance and buys a small house. Actually, Ma thinks of it less as buying a house and more as buying land. (“Buy land; they’ve stopped making it.”) The land (with house attached) is across the road from where Mike and Patti live in a trailer with their four children. The children—three boys and a girl—range in age from eleven to one.

Mike is driving truck and Patti is working as a home health aide, too, but, unlike Ma, Patti is working through an agency. This is good because, two years ago, Mike was injured in an accident and was out of work for a long time. That took all their money and then some. Their debt load is ruinous, and he hasn’t been at the trucking company long enough to get insurance, so it is a good thing that Patti can pay an enormous portion of her salary for health insurance while he pays for frivolous little extravagances like food for the kids.

Mike and Patti are young and strong, and deal with it. Ma, not so young and a new widow, develops a severe tendency to get depressed. In some parts of the country, when you get depressed, you see a therapist. In Upstate New York, you shovel snow. If there is no snow to shovel, you go to a bar—bars being the only form of entertainment that is known in rural Upstate, outside of shooting marauding pigs.

What Ma does not know is that she now has bipolar depression. She does not know this because there is only one public mental health clinic in the entire county, and it collects insurance, which she doesn’t have, so she doesn’t go ask them about it. Instead, she goes to a bar, which is what a great many people with bipolar disorder do: they become alcoholics in the process of deadening their depressive pain.

So now Ma not only has depression but also alcoholism, and she complicates the picture by doing what most people in bars do: she brings home a drinking buddy, in this case, Fred. Fred is not working—claiming some sort of disability, whether of mind, body or spirit not being exactly clear. Ma is now in serious trouble, and repeatedly getting busted for driving while under the influence of self-administered drugs for the mistreatment of depression.

Then one day while Patti and I are at the store (I am disabled and Patti is my home health aide), she gets a phone call from Fred, who is not only an alcoholic but also an idiot. He says Ma didn’t come home last night, and follows it with the little tidbit that she’s in the Intensive Care Unit in a hospital in Syracuse. She got drunk, drove home, went off the road, hit a tree and broke her neck, not to mention several other important body parts. Fred was involved in ways that are not entirely clear, but have something to do with him leaving her at the bar to drive home alone, and knowing that she was in the ICU for seven hours before calling her family.

Life as we knew it came to a halt for several weeks. There were Ma’s patients to be cared for. Patti’s children needed babysitters. A Health Care Proxy had to be gotten so Mike could make decisions for Ma. A Power of Attorney had to be gotten so Patti could make decisions about Fred—mostly, whether she would kill him or not. Fred’s main contribution was to make ATM withdrawals for himself from Ma’s bank account.

By the time Ma was medically restored enough to be discharged, she had been properly evaluated and diagnosed with bipolar depression and alcoholism. Syracuse, being a big city and having a teaching hospital, gave Ma the full treatment. Antidepressants were prescribed. A social worker got her signed up for Medicaid. She was referred to a substance abuse group, a mental health clinic, and physical therapy.

Ma came home older, wiser, totally sober, unable to work, relieved of her driver’s license, and in deep shit with the judicial system. Medicaid transported her to therapy, both physical and mental, and to the drugstore for her meds. Her arm was still virtually unusable, and she had trouble using the walker with her head held upright by the neck brace, but women of the North Country are strong, and she not only managed, she did well. She did not drink. Although deeply troubled by the fact that Fred continued to be both an idiot and an alcoholic, when it came right down to it, she didn’t have the heart to kick him out. She prayed for a solution, and God solved it in a way Ma would not have asked for.

Coming home drunk from the bar one night, Fred ran afoul of a NYS trooper who tried to stop him. Instead of stopping, Fred took off. Upstate, having recently had two policemen killed in separate incidents in the line of duty, was not the place to do this. The cops chased, and Fred raced directly for home.

By the time Patti, sleeping across the road from Ma, woke up, Fred’s truck was in the driveway surrounded by seven police cars with lights flashing. The cops smashed out Fred’s windshield and pointed a gun at his head. Some might consider this response a bit excessive for what was, after all, nothing but a stupid drunk, but since Upstate cops aren’t allowed to shoot marauding pigs, they have to find other ways to fill their time.

Fred went to jail, charged with enough felonies and misdemeanors to justify seven cop cars. Having no money to hire a lawyer, he sat in jail for several months, thus giving himself a long time to detoxify from years’ of alcohol consumption. People with insurance detox in nicely padded rehab centers; people without insurance do it in jail.

While Fred learned what it meant to not drink, Ma made frequent and regular visits to the local court system. Her many and varied alcohol-related criminal charges were gathered under a single jurisdiction. She worried and fretted, waiting to hear if she was going to jail or to rehab. Meanwhile, she continued to not drink, to take her medicine, and to work through her emotional problems in group therapy. With Fred in jail, her time at home became quieter and Ma became increasingly settled. She met a new man, Carl, who was sober, and lived in a house he had built in the woods.

Across the road, Mike and Patti had decided that they needed to buy a house. After some consideration, the decision was that Ma would come and live with them. In exchange for rent, she would baby-sit her four grandchildren Monday through Friday, days only, while their parents worked. Evenings and weekends were her own. When Fred got out of jail—if Fred got out of jail—he would continue to live at Ma’s house, which Ma no longer occupied.

Then the good news came: Ma would not have to do jail time or go to rehab. The court saw, and was impressed by, her steady progress in recovery. Ma would go to live with the kids and grandkids, and the probation officer agreed not to make her first home visit until the move had been made. By now, Ma was drinking again, but with total responsibility—never more than one drink, never at a bar, never getting drunk. Ma was a woman of whom to be proud.

Fred, meanwhile, had been released from jail. His felony charges had been dropped, the misdemeanors had been pled down to stupid-drunk charges, and, instead of going to rehab, he was sentenced to time served and released back to the only home he had—Ma’s house.

Then it all began to break down. Ma’s Medicaid ran out. She was kicked out of her therapy group because she couldn’t afford to pay for it out-of-pocket. Committed to recovery, Ma switched from mental health to a straight Alcoholics Anonymous group. Without Medicaid transportation, she began to drive without a license so she could get to group. After while, she ran out of medicine and couldn’t afford to get the prescription refilled.

Medicaid told her that she owned her own home, and therefore her financial resources exceeded the limit to qualify for coverage. In short, Ma was deemed too rich to get Medicaid. There were a couple problems with this. First, Fred continued to not work, therefore he was not paying rent, therefore the house was not an income property. Nor could Ma rent it out even if Fred vacated the property because the house wasn’t up to code. Neither could Ma sell the house because the basement had a dirt floor, therefore nobody could get a mortgage on it.

Ma owned a house that could not be converted into money, nevertheless the state said she had too much money to get Medicaid. Patti said they would have to go to court to try to get health insurance, but Ma didn’t have time.

Out of therapy and out of medication for her depressive disorder, last Friday Ma broke down and got drunk. She went over to her house, where Fred, in his standard abusive fashion, gave her a hard time. She called Carl and asked him to come get her. Carl came, but it turns out he, too, is a drunk, only instead of drinking every day, he just drinks to terrible excess once in a while.

Carl showed up at Ma’s house drunk and with a rifle, which he proceeded to fire into the woods several times, which prompted Fred to call 911, which led Ma to overdose on pills. Consequently, Ma was committed to a mental health facility where she is getting medication and therapy, paid for by the state.

Absent childcare, Patti didn’t come to work and my life went to hell. When Patti called to warn me about her impending absence, she said she thought this was all Ma’s cry for help.

“Do you think it was unconscious, or did she do it intentionally?” I asked.

Patti replied, “I don’t know. She could have done it intentionally.”

Ma has worked hard all her life. She has a treatable illness for which she is denied treatment because she can’t afford to pay. Is this the American way? Or do we want Ma to keep using her way?

Back to the MarkBlum Report

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