Mother Daughter Me (7 page)

M
Y MOTHER HAS NO INTEREST IN RELIGION. SHE CONSIDERS HERSELF
“a cultural Jew,” if anything. I doubt she has ever set foot in a synagogue, and tonight will be no different, though it is Yom Kippur and Zoë and I are going to the synagogue for evening services. However, my mother joins us for our pre-sundown meal, at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks from the house. We set out on foot, my mother moving slowly. She tells us to walk ahead of her, but I don’t want to leave her behind. Zoë is clearly impatient, but she slows to our deliberate pace.

At the restaurant, I order a steak salad, and my mother says she’d like the same. Zoë points out to my mother that she might not want that particular salad, as the beef is coated in a very spicy marinade. So my mother chooses a different salad. Mine arrives in a bowl filled with luscious, chlorophyll-infused field greens. My mother’s bowl is filled with pale romaine.

“Why is your lettuce so much greener than mine?” she asks, eyeing
my bowl. I understand that this is her indirect way of saying that she wishes she had my food. Under different circumstances I’d have offered to swap, but, knowing the meat would be too spicy for her, I hold back.

I’m mulling how to answer her, when Zoë gets there first.

“Because they’re different kinds of lettuce?” Zoë says, ending her sentence in grating teenage up-speak. Since my mother’s remark about the cello, I’ve noticed a shift in Zoë’s attitude toward her—from fondness and protectiveness to occasional short-tempered annoyance.

My mother’s face grows taut. “I know they’re different kinds of lettuce,” she says. She mumbles something about asking for field greens next time, then she’s quiet.

After we leave my mother to go to the synagogue, Zoë is still irritated.

“What was that all about?” she asks.

“Well, Grandma Helen doesn’t always express herself directly,” I say. “And sometimes she even speaks in code, especially when she hopes to be given something that she doesn’t want to have to ask for outright.”

“What?” Zoë, one of the most direct people I know, isn’t familiar with my mother’s linguistic cryptograms.

“She wanted my lettuce, not hers. But she couldn’t bring herself to say that. I’ve gotten pretty good at deciphering her code, but I guess it’s just confusing to you.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

We drop it. I hope everything will be fine once we get home from services and watch the season premiere of
Desperate Housewives
, which we’ve been looking forward to for months. I ask Zoë if she shouldn’t have recorded the show, in case services run long. She likes to watch it as it happens, she says, and even enjoys the commercials. It’s all part of the ritual.

When we return home after services, the house is cold and dark. As winter approaches, it’s becoming evident that the house may be beautiful but, when the wind picks up off the ocean and roars down our street, the single-pane windows on the house rattle, and there’s little in the way of insulation to keep the heat in. Our first utility bill was more than we could afford, so now Zoë and I keep the heat off altogether on our floor,
while my mother tries to regulate hers by climbing her stairs multiple times a day to fiddle with the thermostat. I’ve bought fingerless gloves for my mother and me and a down vest for Zoë. Still, the cold air seems to follow us around the house.

I decide to spring for a little heat for
Desperate Housewives
and go to turn up the thermostat while Zoë races upstairs to change out of her good clothes. My mother intercepts me in the hallway. She’s swaying from side to side, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, and wringing her hands, habits she’s probably had for years but I’ve never noticed. While she stands there, clearly agitated, I find myself examining the top of her head. Where her head was once covered with thick, wavy hair, I see swaths of white scalp, and reflexively I touch my hand to my own thinning hair. There’s so much about my mother that has escaped my notice until now.

She’s brooding about the lettuce incident, mainly about how Zoë treated her. “Isn’t this holiday you’re celebrating all about religion?” she asks rhetorically. “And if it is, then shouldn’t it be about trying to be nice?”

“Mom, you’re against religion,” I reply. “You can’t just pull it out of your hat when it’s convenient. That’s like never praying except in emergencies.”

“My point is that she isn’t nice.”

“Yes, I know that’s your point. But let’s forget about it.”

I leave her in the hallway, and, before long, Zoë and I are on the couch, happily immersed.

My mother comes into the room and seats herself in a stiff chair in the corner. She knows nothing about
Desperate Housewives
, and I hope she won’t start asking us to explain what’s going on. Luckily, she doesn’t. Instead, when a commercial comes on, she asks, “Why didn’t you record the show? Then you could skip all this crap.”

Zoë starts to explain for the second time that night, but my mother interrupts her. “But you could have recorded it. I don’t even remember the last time I sat through a commercial.”

A Sprint commercial has ended and we’re back on Wisteria Lane, but I’m having trouble focusing on the action on the screen. I’m watching
Zoë. My daughter, who has been waiting months for this one television moment, is quiet for a few seconds, then does something that astounds me.

“I don’t have to put up with this,” she says, and she gets up and leaves the room.

MY MOTHER AND I
decide to seek help. We’re only six weeks into this and things are already difficult and tense. There are some basic ground rules we have yet to establish. We live in the same house, but does that mean we should be eating dinner together every night? When I make dinner for friends, is she automatically invited as well? And what about the difference in demands on our time? I have to earn a living, while my mother has nothing but free time and wants my attention. This is problematic because I work from home, where my mother has access to me anytime she feels like chatting—which is often. Money is getting tricky too. My mother has suggested splitting all household expenses down the middle, but I can tell she’s feeling shortchanged with her living quarters, which are dark and a little oppressive.

We make an appointment to see Lia Manor, a family therapist in Berkeley who specializes in helping people and their aging parents cope with new living arrangements. We’ve been referred to Lia through a friend of mine, who, like Candace, had voiced reservations about my rescue operation. My hope is that Lia will help us establish a framework for the future, something that will help get us through this cohabitation experiment we’ve rushed into. I imagine us walking out of Lia’s office with a brochure containing intergenerational do’s and don’ts. I imagine us taping it on the refrigerator, next to our list of San Francisco composting guidelines. And I imagine everything fixed, those initial signs of trouble nipped in the bud.

Lia looks like she’s in her late fifties, hair so gray it’s luminescent, her face open and kind. Her office is nestlike and warm, with an area rug under her chair and family photos. I imagine all the people who have sat in this very pair of seats, trying to navigate their way through similar situations.

“So,” Lia says. “You haven’t lived together in a very long time.”

My mother and I both nod.

“Not since I was ten,” I say, and I meet my mother’s eyes. I turn back to Lia. “Mom was an alcoholic and I was taken away from her.” It’s the first time in my life I have said anything resembling these words in the presence of my mother.

“Yes,” my mother says matter-of-factly. “That’s right.”

That’s all we say, but it’s all Lia needs. Once she has heard this two-sentence version of our history, she declares that she is “leery” of our succeeding at the adventure we have embarked upon.

“Whenever a parent moves in with an adult child, it is a crisis,” Lia says.

At this moment, the word “crisis” sounds a little over the top to me (I’ll change my mind later), but I let it go. No matter what we might think, she continues, we cannot simply act like housemates. Everything that we say and do will be charged with subtext and emotions that are a legacy of the past. Lia clearly knows her stuff. After all, working with elderly people and their adult children is her specialty; she has been doing it for more than two decades.

I’m nodding in affirmation, but my mother decides she’s offended by Lia’s words and tells her so. Offended? She’s taking it personally? Hasn’t Lia explained how difficult this is for everyone, even parents and children who have enjoyed a completely peaceful and harmonious relationship with each other? Even when the change involves just a parent moving from another city to an apartment or independent-living facility near the child? And here we are, three generations—my mother, my teenage daughter, and me—sharing one refrigerator. I look over and see that my mother’s mouth is pinched. This isn’t going the way I had imagined, not at all. In fact, nothing in the experiment my mother and I have set in motion is going the way I had imagined.

Usually, Lia tells us, she’s helping a family adjust to having an elderly parent move closer, not in. It’s very rare, she explains, for parents and children to move in together, as we are doing, which is why Lia pronounces our situation “a crisis.” Having established that as our frame of reference, she tells us there are some basic issues we will need to focus
on, issues that affect nearly every family she sees: time, space, and money. She adds that much of our success will hinge on our ability to define clear boundaries—both physical and psychological—when it comes to these things. All of this rings true. It’s a lot to absorb in one session, and the hour seems to stretch out much longer than that, though I note as we leave that it was the usual fifty-minute therapy hour.

Walking down the sidewalk toward the car, my mother a few steps ahead of me, I look at her and see not a tiny elderly woman but someone else. There’s something about her posture and gait that put me in mind of a cowboy traversing a swamp filled with water moccasins—all on a dare. The very fact that Lia said this won’t be easy has hardened my mother’s resolve. As soon as we’re in the car and the door is shut—as if she wants to be absolutely sure Lia won’t hear us—my mother says, “She was so patronizing to me. She kept saying, ‘You’re so smart.’ ”

“But you are smart.”

“It was still patronizing.”

Then she’s quiet. We’re on our way to a nearby Trader Joe’s, and I savor the silence, wondering if she’s going over her mental grocery list: Lactaid, frozen vegetables, and salmon, which she’ll fret about the entire time it’s in the cart as it gathers warm-air “contamination.” When we get there, she suggests we take a single cart to avoid redundancies but divide our groceries—my items on one side, hers on the other. Then she says, “We’ll make it work.” At first I think she’s referring to the divided grocery cart, but then I realize she means something else, and I’m not so sure I agree with her. If she’s not going to give therapy an honest try—and she seems to distrust Lia already—that’s surely going to make things harder. In no mood to be agreeable, I watch her struggle with her good hand to retrieve a half gallon of Lactaid from a high shelf. Pretending I haven’t noticed, I turn my back and, cruelly, offer no help.

When we get home, my mother pulls from her bag a receipt for something I had asked her to buy for me a few days earlier.

“You owe me ten dollars,” she says.

You owe me a childhood
.

And with that I realize that perhaps I should have sought help before creating this situation. For years, whenever I told people about my childhood but assured them that my mother and I were now close, that
I held no anger, they would ask, “How can you be so forgiving?” I always responded with this: You can spend your life carrying hurt and anger toward a parent, or you can get over it and move on. All that time I had thought I resided safely in the latter category, but now I’m seeing that I’m still in the former.

I’m not over it. Not one little bit.

———

C
HERYL THE DOWNSIZER IS ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO PARACHUTE
into your life just when it’s spinning out of control and perform miracles. Nearly a month after my mother and I started unpacking, we’re still surrounded by boxes, and my mother flies Cheryl up from San Diego to help.

Before becoming a professional winnower, Cheryl spent twenty-five years working as a psychiatric nurse. Helping people sort through mountains of accumulated junk requires some psychological hand-holding, a skill Cheryl possesses in abundance, and her presence changes our overall dynamic. If my mother needs something, Cheryl is there to take care of it. If a decision needs to be made, Cheryl is ready to weigh in with an opinion or simply make the decision on her own. I’m in awe of Cheryl’s patient tolerance.

My mother’s particular and overriding concern is with her car, which is parked on one side of our two-car garage, with stacks of boxes on the other. Since most of the boxes belong to me, I have volunteered to keep my car on the street. Although early evidence appears to indicate that
my mother’s trips in and out of the garage with her car will be infrequent, she is consumed with worry that the driveway will be blocked—by my car, my friends’ cars, strangers’ cars, a garbage truck, a presidential motorcade. And she worries that the dozens of boxes stacked on my side of the garage will inch their way over like characters in a Pixar film, preventing her from maneuvering into her spot. She voices this concern to both Cheryl and me. We try to reassure her that even were someone to park a car in a way that hampered her ability to get in or out of the garage, chances are good that we’d be able to track down the owner quickly and get the offending vehicle moved. But what’s at stake feels bigger than that. She is asserting a right to her space; half the garage is rightfully hers. If she doesn’t keep reminding us of her right to this domain, the boxes are certain to creep over, it is guaranteed someone will block her car. I understand that this need for control is part of what happens when people grow old: They begin to feel diminished or, worse, invisible. But I’m finding it a struggle to be patient in the face of her constant anxiety over small things.