Mother Daughter Me (2 page)

For the past thirty-five years she has been living with a bland accountant named Norm, their routines carved with exacting precision into every hour of every day. Over time my mother became not merely unadventurous, her world became smaller and smaller. She seldom left her house except to go somewhere she’d already been—hundreds of times. Yet I’d always known that a worldly, interested person lurked in there somewhere, waiting for a chance to break out. Now she seems to delight in everything she sees. For here we are, a seventy-seven-year-old woman, her adult daughter, and a dozen rolls of Scott one-ply Choose-a-Size paper towels, sailing toward a new life. With each mile we clock, I see her body relax, her face soften.

In the car, my mother talks. She talks a lot about the urgency with which she felt she needed to leave San Diego after so many years. She talks about what happened with Norm, whose confusion “presented,” as a doctor would say, in the usual small ways at first, then escalated. But it was Norm’s sudden and intense allegiance to his fifty-six-year-old daughter that ultimately drove my mother away. Of course, she’s rehashing a drama I lived through right alongside her—all within the past few months. I’m familiar with every twist and turn of the tale, yet I understand that talking about it for the umpteenth time is something she needs to do. So I nod a lot and punctuate the ends of her sentences with sympathetic sounds and the occasional “Yes, it’s unbelievable” or “I know. Crazy.”

During a bathroom break at the halfway point—break number five, I’m guessing—I receive a text from Zoë, my only child and for the past sixteen years my main reason for getting out of bed every morning. Where are you? (Somewhere in the Central Valley, I respond.) Will you be home in time for dinner? (No.) Is it okay if I use your Visa card to buy flowers for Grandma Helen? (Of course!)

As I drive, my attention toggling between my mother’s Norm recap and my own freeway-induced series of free associations—mostly about Zoë, who is soon to be a junior in high school—my mother suddenly changes the subject.

“I’m going to take driving lessons,” she says.

“But you know how to drive.”

My mother explains that she is in fact scared of driving, particularly on freeways. She confesses that she never learned how to parallel park. “I never needed to learn,” she explains. “No one in San Diego parallel parks.” Besides, when Norm was still in possession of his faculties—and even after he began to fall apart—he did all the driving. I tell my mother I’m impressed by her pluck. Driving lessons sound so enterprising, so independent.

It’s nearly 9:00
P.M.
when we approach San Francisco from the East Bay, and as we pass Oakland’s baseball stadium, we see fireworks. My mother is spellbound by the show.

“Stop so we can watch!” she insists.

Stopping isn’t an option. We’re not ambling down a country road on horseback, taking in a full moon. We’re in the farthest left lane of a six-lane freeway in Northern California, 1.2 tons of metal traveling at 75 miles an hour. But I do slow down a little, just in time for the finale.

“Mom!” I say. “They knew you were coming!” I look over and she’s smiling. For a second, I think she believes it.

An hour later, we’re in my neighborhood of Lower Pacific Heights, and I turn each corner slowly so that my mother can take in the lovely old houses. My mother has been to San Francisco only once in her life, and although it’s dark I hope she can see how beautiful it is here—the silhouettes of the mansions against the night sky; the Golden Gate Bridge shimmering just beyond the hill’s crest.

We pull in to the garage and I unload the car. We’ll be spending a couple of weeks in my apartment before we can move in to the house I’ve found for my mother, Zoë, and me, an experiment in multigenerational living that I’m embarking on filled with high hopes. As I walk through the back door, I see to my amazement that my soon-to-be-sixteen-year-old daughter, who has never tidied so much as a square inch of her own room, has cleaned the entire 950-square-foot apartment. The place sparkles. Not only has she decluttered, dusted, and scrubbed (how did she even know where I keep the cleaning supplies?) but, knowing that I was intending to give my mother my own room until we move, she has made up my bed on the living room couch, complete with slippers set out on the floor. At the center of the dining room table, Zoë has placed an extravagant bouquet of
roses, lilies, and peonies from a nearby flower shop I seldom dare enter for fear of its prices. Propped against the vase is a handmade card: “Welcome Home, Grandma Helen.” My mother is overcome. And so am I.

I’m disappointed that Zoë’s door is shut, with no light showing underneath. But within a few minutes, having heard us come in, she emerges from her room, rubbing her eyes. She greets my mother with a long hug.

“Hi, Grandma Helen. How was the drive?”

My mother squeezes her granddaughter hard. “Hi, sweetie! The flowers are beautiful. And I love my card!”

I’m thrilled. I thank Zoë for the superlative cleanup. She acts as if it were nothing and excuses herself to go back to bed. After showing my mother to my bedroom, I settle into my makeshift bed and drift off. I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep when I’m awakened by the sound of someone’s tread against the hardwood floor in the kitchen. I open my eyes and, with a clear line of sight to the refrigerator, I see a brief burst of light with the opening and closing of the door, followed by the uncorking of a wine bottle. It’s my mother. I hear her pour herself some wine, then pad away. I’ve known for many years that she still drinks at night, to help her sleep, but I don’t know when, exactly, or how much—and I’ve never asked her. My senses are on full alert; a whorl of emotions—fear, helplessness, panic—streaks through me.
Stop it
, I tell myself.
You’re not ten. Those years are long past. Everyone’s safe. It’s all fine
. I will myself back to sleep.

The next morning my mother and I are in the car and, as I have learned to do when broaching a delicate topic with my teenage daughter, I stare straight ahead as I speak. “There’s one thing that’s nonnegotiable for me,” I say to the steering wheel. “Excessive drinking.”

I see out of the corner of my eye that she has turned to look at me. Her response is immediate. “It’s nonnegotiable for me too.”

———

M
Y MOTHER AND NORM HAD NEVER MARRIED, FOR WHAT MY MOTHER
explained were “tax reasons.” They owned a large and comfortable tract house in a drowsy middle-class neighborhood near UC San Diego. They had few friends, but they had each other, and their dogs. For years they had been slavishly devoted to a series of large German shepherds—usually two at a time—which they took for hikes every day at a nearby dog park. And they had Costco, which, near as I could figure, was the only place they shopped.

In their odd and insular world, my mother and Norm weren’t merely glued at the proverbial hip. My mother micromanaged Norm’s every move. When he went to the bathroom, she all but paced outside the door until he was back in her hovering presence. His health was basically sound, but she monitored his mild cardiac condition so closely you’d think he’d had a heart transplant. She planted timers strategically throughout the house, set to chime or beep or ring when it was time for Norm’s blood
thinner, or cholesterol medicine, or whatever other drug he happened to be on at the time. As suffocating as such a relationship appeared from the outside, it clearly worked for my mother, and Norm seemed to putter through his days happily enough. He had the love and undivided attention of an intelligent, lively woman who brought
New Yorker
cartoons and balsamic vinegar into his life.

As the two of them grew older, doctors’ visits occurred at least twice a week, knees got replaced, teeth crowned, skin cancers lasered away. The dogs became too much to handle, and my mother resignedly placed the last remaining dog in a new home. Then one day Norm strained a muscle in his back while lifting a flat of plants. He was in terrible pain and from then on grew increasingly anxious about being left alone. Whenever my mother tried to leave the house, Norm panicked and asked her to stay. There were innumerable other small red flags that popped up along the way, along with a few doozies, like the time he accused my mother of getting his socks “all wet” when he had in fact opened his bureau drawer and sent a stream of pee straight into it. Overwhelmed, my mother called me several times a day for support and advice. The support was easy, but having never been the life partner of an eighty-four-year-old man who was unraveling, I could offer little advice.

These are the stories you hear about the elderly. One thing happens and it triggers a cascade of other debilitating incidents, the seriousness of each new event compounded by whatever preceded it. And now my mother and Norm were living a textbook case of this downward spiral.

One afternoon a few weeks after Norm’s back sprain, my mother called me with surprising news. Norm’s daughter, Paula, a penniless classical pianist and dancer, had just moved to San Diego from New York and had driven Norm to the doctor that morning. On the way back she called my mother to say her dad wanted to go home—not to his own house but to the house Paula was now sharing with her mother, Norm’s ex-wife. My mother’s voice was subdued, as if she couldn’t quite lend credence to the words she was speaking. I told her I was sure everything would soon settle down, that Norm would get better and go home. In my own mind I had never considered any scenario other than
one in which Norm and my mother would navigate advanced old age together.

Sure enough, after playing caregiver to her father for a few days, Paula called my mother to say that Norm was too heavy a burden for her. But this was an egg that couldn’t be unscrambled. Just a few Normfree days were enough to give my mother some perspective. With Norm in constant pain and his mental state growing worse, my mother understood that she wasn’t up to the task of caring for him either. And now she didn’t know what to do.

I had landed a role in the
Aging in America
script as we have come to know it, part of the sandwich generation of middle-aged adults caught between teenage kids and aging parents. I enlisted a friend to stay with Zoë and flew to San Diego. In the absence of Norm or any large canines, the house felt empty when I arrived. My mother, thin and frail, was doing all she could to appear chipper. Still, within thirty seconds I could tell she was in no position to take care of Norm, even if he was to decide to return. She was still hobbling from knee-replacement surgery a few months earlier. On top of that, she had developed severe carpal tunnel syndrome, making her right hand numb and weak, and would need wrist surgery for that sometime soon.

We needed a different arrangement not only for Norm but for my mother as well. For several months, my mother and I had been discussing the possibility of having both of them move to San Francisco. While my mother had resisted the idea at first, her attitude toward her progressive disabilities was shifting on the Kübler-Ross scale, from denial to acceptance. But Norm was opposed to the idea of such a big change and had grown even more reluctant since the arrival of his daughter. Now, within hours of my walking through my mother’s front door, she told me she had made up her mind: She would be moving to San Francisco, Norm or no Norm. She had made a bold decision, and I was relieved that she would be so close to me, eliminating the need for frequent trips to San Diego.

Shortly after hearing this news from my mother, Paula made plans to install her father in an assisted-living place called the Cloisters, where she was now occasionally performing her “therapeutic healing dances.”

Norm himself had nothing whatever to do with determining his own fate. Paula was in charge. And my mother was so determined to get out of Dodge that she was willing to cede control of her partner’s life to his daughter.

Within a few months, my mother’s quiet life of carefully prescribed routine had become a clanging mess. Impressively, she kept her head high. She called Norm at the Cloisters frequently, but she could tell he wasn’t always in possession of his faculties. My stalwart mother even paid regular visits. But whenever she went, Paula was in Norm’s room, protecting her father as if my mother—the man’s constant companion for thirty-five years—were a mortal enemy. To top it off, soon after Norm entered the Cloisters, Paula went to court for conservatorship of Norm’s estate, which was worth a surprisingly hefty sum. Since my mother and Norm had never married, she had no claim to his estate.

My mother decided to sell the house, which Norm had deeded to her several years earlier for one of their unfathomable tax reasons. She hired Cheryl the downsizer to help her sort through four decades’ worth of accumulation. The house hadn’t reached a level of pathological clutter, but there was certainly no shortage of stuff, all of it relatively well organized and much of it a testament to hundreds of hours spent at Costco: roll after roll of paper towels, dozens of flashlights, reams of paper and file folders, and countless tools and canned goods.

A dozen steel file cabinets were spread around the house, jam-packed with pay stubs, credit-card bills, receipts, work documents, and health-plan descriptions. Norm wasn’t merely bland, but also creepy, and this side of him was revealed when my mother found in the cabinets black-and-white snapshots from the 1960s of young women wearing nothing but high heels. She also found a rich collection of skin magazines,
Playboy
mostly, going back decades.

A couple of weeks later, a meeting was held to divide the possessions in the house. As my mother recounted the scene to me, Norm, now wheelchair-bound, was rolled into the house by Paula, followed by her lawyer. The court-appointed conservator arrived soon after. They all seated themselves on one side of the dining room table. My mother, her lawyer, and Cheryl the downsizer, who by now was more friend to my mother than employee, sat on the other.