Underwear Wars

As Mom’s dementia progressed, many things stopped making sense to her. One of the oddest dilemmas was when she would go through her underwear drawers and lay out all her panties on her bed. She would try and match them up and then become confused when she noticed some looked different. She would then decide the odd pairs were undesirable, so she would summon me to her room, show me the different piles laid out and explain how some underwear was not hers, but perhaps mine. 

“No,  none of these are mine.  They are all yours.”

“No, they are not.  Maybe these here are yours.”

“ No mom , I don’t wear underwear like these. They are not mine. They aren’t even my size. They are yours. Some are just different styles. They were in your drawer because they are your underwear.”

“No, these are not mine,” she would insist, sometimes angrily, and then continue obsessing over them. Sometimes she would bring a pile of underwear out to me to examine more closely, and then she would wait hopefully for me to recognize them as mine.

“Not mine, ” I would say, and she would huff off to her room, only to return a short time later to repeat the process. Sometimes these absurd underwear wars could continue for the entire day. Or reappear days later. One night she left a pile on the stairs outside her closed door like rejected room service items, most likely having the last say.

Now that I have learned more about dementia, I know I should have said, “Yes, these are mine. Thank you.” That might have settled the matter. But I didn’t know not to argue back then. Instead, I would impatiently tell her she was being ridiculous in thinking that her underwear were not hers. Of course they were hers. And I didn’t understand looping – where a person repeats words or ideas over and over until they get an answer that makes sense to them. At the time, I didn’t realize that Mom was losing her ability to think logically, so it was futile to try and make her understand. Ultimately, I would tell her that since the underwear were neither of ours, I would take them to the Goodwill. Horrified, she would snatch them up and take them into her room, and the matter was closed. “Let’s take them to the Goodwill,” became a magic response.