Dancing Through Midnight: A Memoir by Amy Montana

By Amy Montana

This is the gripping and powerful story of Amy Montana's journey through self discovery. She battles for survival from all that life throws at her. She walks us through abuse, suicide attempts, clinical depression eating disorders, cancer, and death. She struggled with all of this while caring for her mother, who is slowly sliding deeper into dementia. We watch her pick up the pieces of her life with dignity and humor, inspiring the reader to believe that recovery and redemption are possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465348388

Amy Montana

Amy Montana was born in Burlington, Vermont, and along with two older brothers, spent an idyllic early childhood in the country. She moved to Newton, Massachusetts, where she excelled in high school and continued her lifelong interest in writing. After attending Vassar College, where she majored in Psychology, English, and Secondary Education, she returned to her roots and now happily resides on four acres in rural Timberlake, North Carolina. Amy has three grown children and five wonderful grandchildren. She is widely accomplished in many domestic skills and crafts, and her interests include embroidery, sewing, cooking and baking, wine making and cheese making, and other down-to-earth pursuits. She lives contentedly with her three dogs and numerous chickens and adores simple country life. She is a prolific author and has previously published two novels and a memoir. This is her first foray into Children’s literature and will not be her last.

Book preview

Part I

The Prison Years

Justice does not always appear in the form you expect.

You cannot enter a relationship expecting that the person will change. We just become more of who we are.

The only person you have to live with is yourself.

Be the architect of your own life.

Family is created by spirit, not by blood.

Gather all the love you can around you every day, no matter what form it takes: a person, a song, a picture, a dish, a sheet, a dress, a pair of shoes. Whatever it is, gather the love.

Iwoke up in the morning of my fifty-sixth birthday, and all I could think of was that my grandmother died when she was fifty-six. I know this because not only was I there at the time, but also because my mother reminds me, at least every other day, that people in our family die young. Not only the people in my family, but also those who happen to have the misfortune of marrying into our family unbelievably die young as well. My grandfather died from a massive heart attack at the age of fifty-two. My brother Leo died at fifty-two from liver cancer secondary to an addiction to heroin in his misguided youth. My mother’s second husband died of a rare childhood cancer he somehow managed to contract when he was fifty-two. Even my second husband died suddenly and completely unexpectedly when he was fifty-two as well.

When I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at the age of fifty-two, my mother said, Why is this happening to me? I can’t take losing another person at fifty-two. And she always thinks that I think that it’s all about me!

At fifty-three, when I was diagnosed with lung cancer, my mother blithely said, Annie Wah [short for Annie Laurie, her twelve-year-old West Highland white terrier] had the same lung out that you are going to have, and she was up and eating the same day as her surgery, so you will be fine. As I said, it’s not all about me; it’s never been about me. It’s all about her or her dogs.

I’ll never forget when I became pregnant with my first child, Brandon, now thirty. She informed me that if she had it to do over again, she would have just had dogs. I prayed that I would not be the kind of mother that I had had.

My self-doubt regarding motherhood began when I was six, when I would come home from school to find that my goldfish had died once again and my two brothers, Leo and John, would tell me that they had flushed them down the toilet. I questioned my ability to be a good mother when I grew up if I couldn’t even keep a fish alive. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I learned that my fish never did die on me. My brothers had just flushed them down the toilet for fun. Looking back, it’s no wonder that I didn’t grow up to be normal.

I wish that I could call my mother today to celebrate (after all, I hadn’t died yet as my family history predicted), to talk, to share; but she is not speaking to me. In fact, according to her mandate, I am not even supposed to know where she is living. Such is either a punishment or a reward for my spending nearly the last three years of my life taking care of her every want and need as she descends increasingly into dementia. I haven’t yet decided which.

Three years ago when my husband died, the doctors told my mother that she should not be living alone any longer and begged me to return to Massachusetts to live with her. Leaving North Carolina was wrenching for me as my home, my children, and the history of the life I lived with my recently deceased husband all reside there. Even so, I made the decision to do the right thing as a daughter: to put my mother first and dedicate myself to taking care of her. After all, as she kept reminding me, she had taken care of me when I was a baby, so turnabout was fair play.

I then entered what I call the prison years. I can almost feel the scar on my ankle from the physical, mental, and emotional shackles under which I was clamped upon arriving at her home on Election Day 2008. My Rottweiler, Zoe, dragged me across the yard to greet my mother, snow flying as well as myself, to land face-first at my mother’s feet. Quite the auspicious start. Looking back, I should have paid better attention and turned right around to return home, never looking back. Naturally I made the most self-destructive decision. I stayed.

It is so fascinating how my mother chooses to describe the next two years of our lives together under her roof. She loves to tell everyone that she was the one taking care of me, that I begged and pleaded with her to come and live with her after my husband died. She says that I was the one who didn’t want to live alone. She also tells people that I had always had free reign to make and visit friends, pursue my quilting (a hobby very dear to me), and had plenty of what I call me time.

In actuality, we had a very rigid schedule. We woke up at 7:00 a.m. every morning. I would dress quickly then run downstairs to let out our four dogs for their morning constitutional. Next I would fill three strategically placed huge, heavy water bowls for the dogs and then prepare their breakfast, which would consist of roast chicken and kibble in the morning and cooked hamburger, fish, or stew with kibble for dinner. Our dogs ate better than most people, certainly better than I did myself. One did not eat before all the dogs’ needs were met. As I was told and had tattooed on my brain, The dogs come first!

Only after then were we finally able to sit down to our breakfast, which, by the way, was cold. In fact, every meal we had in my mother’s house was cold because something would inevitably arise that required the dogs needing some kind of attention. She would place my food on the table and then attend to the dogs, so by the time she made it to the table, my food was ice cold. Not the way I like it. She would be highly offended if I began to eat before she finally came into the room to sit down to begin our meal together. If I complained about the cold food, I was selfish and ungrateful. If I began while my food was even lukewarm, I was selfish and admonished for my lack of table manners, which I must have picked up from one of my low-class husbands as she certainly raised me better than that. It was a catch-22, and I, of course, could never win or even break even.

Then it would be time to clear the table, wash the dishes, and rush out to the car with her Westie, Edward Buck Bean, and my Maltipoo, Layla. My mother would go nowhere without Eddie, and we only got my poor car-shy Layla accustomed to riding in the backseat of her PT Cruiser because Eddie would sit in front of her, shielding her from any potential danger. He was her knight in shining armor, and she adored him because of it. It was so cute to see her begin to waggle her little tail so very quickly whenever he came near. Once the dogs and we were in the car, we then drove twenty miles to the Newton Library.

My mother had grown up in Newton and insisted that we visit her hometown library at least three times a week to get the best jump on all the newly released books and movies. It was also the place where half of our social life took place because she knew everyone who worked there, and everyone knew her. I had even briefly worked there too right after I graduated from Vassar and couldn’t find a job teaching secondary English as I had planned. There were still some people that I had worked with that were still there thirty years later. My mother was an institution there, treated with rare deference.

If they had only known about the illicit cardboard box covered by an old pink sheet in her downstairs broom closet that contained all the books and movies that were illegally not checked out that my mother would hoard in one of her many cloth library tote bags. No one ever thought to stop her and check her satchels that, at times, I was instructed to carry to help smuggle out her contraband. I was her mule. I wondered if she would part with the money to bail me out if I got caught. I was fiercely instructed, however, that upon her death, I was to immediately return all the illegally obtained media so that her reputation would not be sullied in retrospect.

From the library we would then go to (1) the grocery store (I still think that it is in very poor taste to name a grocery store Roche Brothers); (2) the yarn shop, which was our favorite place to go; or (3) one of my mother’s numerous doctor’s appointments. Since she expected me to oversee her complicated medial management, I thought it only made sense for me to meet with her doctors as well during her appointments. She had other ideas. She threw me out of the examination room so many times that it became a standing joke with the nurses. The joke was really on me because she constantly questioned and berated me for not having the precise answers to questions she posed to me regarding her medical treatment plan to which I was not privy. Again, I was the recipient of inescapable abuse.

We would return home around 1:00 p.m. where my job consisted of bringing in all the bags from the car, as well as the many totes of books, and position the bags throughout the path from the mudroom through the kitchen in a highly specialized order according to some highly organized tactical placement only she could understand. I was not allowed to use my Vassar-trained brain to assist me in participating in this specialized, regulated assembly line. My mother only trusted herself. She thought that she was always right and everyone else in the world was always wrong. She definitely did not trust me.

Next would come the dogs’ snack time when she would delicately give them strips of deli meat (roast chicken, roast beef, and sometimes even pastrami). Half of the dogs refused to eat bologna. Their palates were too rarified. Then she would supply them with slices of swiss, cheddar, or blue cheese. Then it would be our turn to sit down to lunch, which she would fix for me on a plate covered with a napkin, just like when I was in the fourth grade. After that we would retire to the sunroom where we would spend our afternoons watching her favorite soap operas and work on our needlework. She would knit while I would crochet. Don’t be mistaken; these are two very different crafts that have very loyal and elitist followings.

My quilting was highly frowned upon, if not outright discouraged, due to the fact that my mother would always ask, How many quilts can you put on your bed? To my credit, I never countered with, How many sweaters can a person wear? I tried to keep our pettiness to a minimum.

At precisely 3:00 p.m., my Shipoo, Mojo, would provide our entertainment. He would roll onto his side and twitch disturbingly as we would watch bewildered. It looked like an epileptic seizure. Then he would stop and lift his head to see if we were paying attention to him. If we did not respond appropriately to his liking, he would fix us with the evil eye, roll onto his back, and begin jerking all his legs spasmodically as if he were receiving shock therapy treatments. The first time my mother saw this, she was horrified and told me that there was something definitely wrong with my dog neurologically and that we should rush him to the vet’s. I laughed and explained that I had done that very thing the first time I had witnessed this bizarre behavior, but the vet had said that he was just fine. His behavior, although bizarre, was just an attention-seeking ploy. My mother relaxed and said that now it made sense to her, seeing as how the dog was mine!

After this show, I was allowed to take Mojo and Layla for a walk down the shady tree-lined street, but only to the left side. The right turn would lead past Sandy’s house, my only friend close by, and whom my mother thought was a bad influence on me. I am so sure I needed this advice at fifty-four years of age. The me time that she so generously allowed me was when I went to the Veterans Affairs hospital in West Roxbury or Jamaica Plain to deal with my cancer’s follow-up care, my post-traumatic stress disorder, my major depression, my severe gastroesophageal reflux disease, my irritable bowel syndrome, my fibromyalgia, and whatever else would rear its ugly head.

I do confess to making up a few doctor’s appointments to be able to sneak out to visit my favorite quilt store or lounge in Starbucks, drinking what I consider real coffee—a one-shot venti skinny latte with five Splendas mixed in the milk as it is heated, as well as gingerbread or almond flavoring—and talking to strangers. Both of these stolen occupations my mother considered to be an irresponsible waste of money. God forbid I should be a spendthrift as she dropped $500 to $600 at a time at the yarn store.

I did all the cleaning in exchange for most of my food. Anything that my mother labeled frivolous and that I considered good was up to me to buy for myself. It was also made clear to me that I was there mostly to keep her company or, in my words, be surgically attached to her side. She was even quite vocally unhappy with me if I happened to be in another room (usually quilting).

Once I had been ensconced in her home, she confessed that the doctors did not really tell her that she needed to have someone live with her but that she thought it would be better for me in the long run. When I attempted to join a yoga class once a week after listening to her criticize me constantly for not having any outside activities (as if she actually would be willing to let me out of her sight), she greeted my plan with a sharp retort: You are not here to have a life, you are here to be at my beck and call. And so I was.

Our day ended promptly at 7:00 p.m. After a cold dinner, we were all ushered upstairs to bed. The only activity available to me was to read until I fell asleep. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but there were some TV shows that I had become attached to at home that I would have liked to have kept up with. She did not, however, trust me to be downstairs alone, watching TV or being on the phone. It was kind of like being in an institution, and I would know. I had been in enough of those.

Two black eyes of mine, three police calls from her, three bouts of box packing and truck renting, and two years later, I was on my way back home to North Carolina with my son’s blessing.

Waking up that first morning in my own home, alone with just my dogs to answer to, was intoxicating. I fixed myself a huge mug of latte, using my very own espresso maker that my mother had refused to allow me to set up in her kitchen.