Mother Daughter Me (29 page)

What should we do for lunch? Lunch at Ikea is always fun, I tell her, as we pull in to the parking lot. My mother loves the idea of an Ikea meal and says she’ll treat me to lunch. Once we’re inside the cavernous store and eating our birdlike meals of salad and salmon, I can tell my mother is eager to start shopping, so we finish our lunch quickly and set off with our cart. She’s delighted by the low prices. Around the first corner, she picks out three 99-cent cutlery trays.

She’s just getting into the swing of being on a penny pincher’s spending spree when Candace calls to say that her mother, Ramona, has taken a turn for the worse. While Candace was out of town for a few days, Ramona lost all the weight she had so painstakingly gained. She didn’t shower or change her clothes. Candace has made an appointment for Ramona to have a memory assessment, but now Candace’s sister wants to have a conversation with Ramona about helping her end her life. After I hang up, my mother, who has overheard snatches of the conversation, wants to know how Ramona is doing. I give her a brief rundown.

“Is she in the hospital?” my mother asks.

“I think she’s headed for the hospital.”

“I think she’s headed for the grave, sadly.”

Ramona has become a reference point of sorts for my mother, the yardstick against which she gauges her own deterioration. Hearing how badly Ramona is doing reminds my mother how well she is faring by comparison. But she also sees herself—sometime in the future—in Ramona. The physical effects of advanced old age, something she got a preview of in that anguished moment on the hill outside Carolyn’s house when she discovered that she was unable to propel her body up the sidewalk, are undeniable. Since then my mother has often voiced her fear of falling (geriatricians call this “anticipatory anxiety”). What she really fears is a broken hip resulting from a fall and the downward spiral
that often follows. She’s aware of the frightening statistics: The chance of an elderly patient dying in the year following a hip fracture is one in five. My mother’s anxiety is all part of the process of coming to terms with her limits and, ultimately, her mortality.

I tell her about the conversation Candace’s sister has suggested having.

“I hope that’s a conversation you’ll have with me,” she says. “I’m only going to bring this up once, but I want you to know I have a lot of Darvon.”

I’m not entirely sure what Darvon is, but I know this is not something I want to discuss while pushing a cart through Ikea. “Mom? Can we not?”

I see she’s already well distracted by a small butcher block on wheels, the perfect answer to a problem with her new apartment that has been nagging at her—kitchen counters that are too high. She hits on a salad spinner and dish towels, glasses and just the dirt-cheap stainless steel she’s been looking for. She can’t contain her delight.

“I’m like a kid in a candy store.”

“That’s what Ikea’s all about.”

At the checkout counter, my mother takes extra newsprint to protect her new glassware and triple-wraps each one-dollar item.

Driving back through San Francisco, we’re waiting at a red light on a dicey stretch of Divisadero Street when we see a crazy guy in earmuffs riding an imaginary bike while conducting a phantom orchestra. Six months earlier, my mother would have locked the doors. Now, having gotten the hang of living in this city, she just laughs.

———

S
YLVIA PLATH, THE PURVEYOR OF FAMOUSLY DARK POETRY, RESERVED
some of her cruelest imagery for her dead father. But to the day of her suicide in 1963 at the age of thirty, she loved her mother with a devotion that permeates the piles of letters she wrote to her over the years. The fictionalized mother portrayed in
The Bell Jar
is a darker figure, to be sure, but in Plath’s letters home, which rolled out of her typewriter at a steady clip, she confided in her mother endlessly. And for all we know, she did not regret doing so.

Epistolary evidence suggests that Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen, also adored her mother. In 1921, Blixen wrote to her mother from Africa: “For me you are the most beautiful and wonderful person in the world,” she gushed. “Merely the fact that you are alive makes the whole world different; where you are there is peace and harmony, shade and flowing springs, birds singing; to come to where you are is like entering ‘heaven.’ ”

I’ve just stumbled upon a stack of letters to remind me of how deep inside a dream of unassailable mother–daughter love I once was.

Cheryl has already been here for a couple of days and has packed most of my mother’s belongings for her. I come downstairs to find both of them already at work in the kitchen. Kieran the mover shows up at about 9:00
A.M.
with three of his Irish helpers, and my mother starts supervising them. Kieran, who is also a friend, has been amused by our living experiment from the start. He calls himself the Voice of Reason. Having hauled my mother’s possessions from San Diego to San Francisco only seven months ago, he is well aware that something must have gone wrong to warrant moving everything out again after such a short time. “It wouldn’t be the first time three chicks moved in together and they all started in on a cat fight, y’know?” he says in his charming brogue.

My mother is amused by this remark. “Kieran probably just summed it up better than anything Lia could say.”

The loading goes swiftly, and once the truck is filled, I’m amazed. The contents of her 2,500-square-foot house in San Diego have been pared down to what will fit into a sixteen-foot moving truck. My mother has taken her upright piano with her; the Steinway remains in the living room. For now.

After they’ve all taken off for my mother’s new place, I go down to the lower level to survey what’s left to be packed. Among my mother’s things I see a large manila envelope marked Katie Letters. Picking up the envelope, I see that it contains a few dozen letters I wrote to my mother on thin blue aerograms in 1977, the year I spent in Germany as a junior in college. I was nineteen years old.

I’ve taken the envelope and walked down to Starbucks to read the letters. The lightweight single sheets are all addressed to both my mother and Norm, by then two people breathing as one. The letters are filled with youthful angst, which is consistent with my memory of that year. They also contain a constant outpouring of love and warmth, along with dozens of requests—for soaps, shampoos, and assorted other practical items (I have no idea why I didn’t just buy these things in Germany, and the letters don’t explain it). By November, several months after Candace had entered my life, I was asking for care-package items for her too. And judging
from my expressions of thanks, my mother must have filled every request. Soon Candace was also writing to her, even calling her “Mom,” telling her she loved her and that she couldn’t wait to meet her and Norm and accompany them to Bully’s, their favorite prime rib restaurant.

My letters chronicled a pilgrimage I made to Prague to visit Kafka’s old haunts and confided my ups and downs with a handful of men I met in Germany. I’m taken aback by how ardently I had expressed my dreamy, romanticized love for my mother. Many of the letters were signed “your little one.” In one letter, I told her about one of my off-the-wall dreams, involving my sister and my father, and ended by saying, “If getting analytical, you might say I dreamt about everyone whose feelings I question or feel unsure about. Glad to know you weren’t in it.”

Candace’s parents were going through a rough patch, and in one letter I wrote, “Candace … points out the difference between my going home and her going home. Were I to go home I’d have loving arms to cuddle up in, someone who understands. And she has nothing really to go home to.” I find this one particularly puzzling, since I have no memory of having cuddled up with my mother as a young adult. Now that I’ve become aware of how much I have invested in a fantasy version of my relationship with my mother, as I read through the stack of letters, it occurs to me that the fantasy may have much older roots than I remember.

I was setting myself up for disaster. When I returned from Germany, I got sucker punched. My mother convinced me to give up my cozy bungalow in downtown La Jolla and move in with Norm and her for my senior year at the University of California, San Diego. Of course, I should have known better than to consider living with her (and the irony in the fact that I would repeat the mistake three decades later has not escaped me), but she had made the suggestion while sober, and her entreaties had been wrapped in such warmth, filled with such hope and promise, I couldn’t resist.

Being under one roof with her became a nightmarish déjà vu. My mother’s drinking seemed worse than ever. Late one morning when I was home, I heard the jangle of keys, which put me on guard. She had run out of liquor and, visibly hammered, was on her way to buy more. I intercepted her on the staircase. I pleaded with her not to drive the car.
The only compromise we could reach was that I would do the driving. I was old enough to drive but too young to buy alcohol, so I remained in the car, shrunken with shame and embarrassment behind the wheel, and watched her stumble into the store to restock. Though I was unaware of it, my actions were those of a classic enabler. At the time it seemed like the best outcome I could hope for. I felt stuck, trapped. I guess I could have taken the keys, then refused to drive her, but I feared her wrath too much to do that. Norm checked her into a detox place to dry out, and I visited her. For the thirty minutes I was there, we spoke of everything but her drinking.

One day earlier that same year, 1978, Betty Ford’s husband and children confronted her about her pill and alcohol addiction. Each family member was armed with a script and a list detailing specific instances of the former First Lady’s behavior while drugged or drunk. President Ford spoke of times she had slurred her speech or fallen asleep in a chair. The Fords’ son Steve told his mother of a painful incident that occurred when he cooked dinner for her while she sat in a daze in front of the TV, drinking. Mrs. Ford went in for treatment, and her public confessions—first to the pills, then to the alcohol—made headlines. I don’t know how many families of alcoholics were spurred to action by Betty Ford’s brave disclosure, but my guess is that the number was high. Yet who knows how many other people, like me, heard the news and didn’t listen? When I could have been reciting to my mother a painful litany of incidents as a prelude to telling her that she needed real help—not the quick fix of a detox center—I stood at the foot of her bed, chitchatting about trivia and wanting nothing more than to get out of there.

I went to see a therapist at UC San Diego, a graduate student who was young but insightful. I had never been to a therapist before and sat in her office feeling self-pitying and tongue-tied. She helped bring me to the realization that I needed to move out of my mother and Norm’s home, which I did.

Shortly thereafter, Candace came to visit from Berkeley, where she was now finishing college. And just as Candace had dreamed of doing, we went with my mother and Norm to Bully’s, a dimly lit, red-upholstered throwback of a restaurant. My mother was into her third or fourth drink when the verbal bile started to pour out of her mouth. Somehow the conversation
had turned to the custody hearing from eight years earlier, and my mother railed against the dirty tricks my father’s lawyer had pulled.

I remember none of what happened next, but Candace does. According to Candace, my mother then directed her bitterness at me. Candace remembers not my mother’s words but my reaction to those words. I melted into the blood-red leather booth, disappearing behind a curtain of long, dark hair. Norm, Candace recalls, sat quietly and said nothing. And neither did Candace. She still remembers feeling horrified and protective yet powerless. She remembers putting her arm around me, not knowing how to make the outburst stop. “It was the way you feel when you’re watching a car crash and you can’t do anything,” she told me recently when we were recalling the visit. “Your mother was either unaware of the impact she was having or else she didn’t care. You had given me this image of your mother as a loving, generous maternal figure. And I was dumbstruck by how this person you had been telling me about was now being so verbally abusive.”

As I sit in Starbucks reading these letters, I’m overwhelmed by the memories they bring back. I’m struck by how much I longed for my mother’s love. Candace had been writing from Germany to the mother I wished I had, a mother who didn’t exist. And the fact that my mother saved all those letters could mean that she wished the same. When I get home, my mother and Cheryl still haven’t returned from their trip to the new apartment. I place the manila envelope back where I found it.

———

M
Y MOTHER HAS BEEN IN HER NEW PLACE FOR JUST A FEW DAYS
when Carolyn invites us to her Passover seder. The dish Carolyn assigns to me is tzimmes, a sweet vegetable casserole made of diced carrots and yams. While I’m cooking, my mother calls to say she’s made up her mind; she won’t be returning to see Lia.

“It takes me about a week to recover from one of these grueling sessions of feeling so guilty and not knowing what on God’s earth I can do about it,” she says. “If you want to keep lashing out at me about what happened fifty years ago, okay, but I’m opting not to know.”

I, too, know that therapy isn’t working for us. Every time we step into Lia’s office, I feel as if we’re entering Kafka’s closet. It’s an image from
The Trial
, Kafka’s novel about an accused man in search of his crime. In the midst of his travail, Josef K. opens the door to a small storage room and sees a man poised to flay two others with a rod. Sometime
later, he opens the same door and the three men are still there, in precisely the same position. Were anyone to open the door to Lia’s office, there we’d be, week after week, in the same chairs, torturing each other. And getting nowhere.