Rebellious Daughters (10 page)

And yet I had chosen to forget that my mother, while disapproving of my midriff tops, had actually bought me some revealing dresses to live vicariously through me. Or that night back in my teenage years, when I came home late to find her alone in the darkened living room watching a semi-porn German TV channel. And there was my visit to New York some years before our Sexpo excursion, when I had bought the memoir
The Sexual Life of Catherine M
, which recounted the author's adventurous sexual history, including her willing participation in gangbangs. I had conveniently supressed the memory of my mother snatching that book from me and finishing it in one day. Then she had gone back to her staple reading –
The Book
of Psalms
(interestingly, allegedly authored by King David, one of the most oversexed of all biblical characters).

Perhaps, like me, my mother had always struggled against her upbringing, trying to understand what she wanted and whether
she
was missing out on anything. Yet, instead of considering her humanity, her internal battles, like a proper writer and daughter would, I had often tried to reconcile the different women residing within her, merging them into a coherent, one-dimen-sional character. Such a version of my mother, after all, made her an easier target for my rebellion.

But if my mother wasn't the ultimate prude, then, if I am really honest, I wasn't the ultimate, unabashed rebel I fancied myself as. Not dissimilarly to my mother, I have often been baffled by some aspects of current sexual mores: that
Dolly
magazine can advise girls on how to perform fellatio while wearing braces, the increasing popularity of labiaplasty, the widespread practice of ‘hooking up'. I am way too romantic for all that. For me, courtship that delays sex has often felt the most erotic. Gradual seduction a la
Dangerous Liaisons
is more my thing. Which is not to say I have always connected sex with love. But I have always wanted even my brief affairs to be imbued with infatuation, roses, champagne, poetry – any romance really. My erotic desires and Sexpo were hardly compatible. So what had I been thinking when I had decided to bring my mother
here, as if
this
was my life?

Half an hour or so later, when the penis puppeteer had extricated his poor member from yet another complicated knot yet again, I suggested again, this time rather meekly, that we go home.

‘But, Lubochka,' said my mother, ‘the program says they have some new show on every hour.'

For the next few hours my mother closely monitored the performance schedule. We watched pretty girls twist their bodies – not dissimilarly to the penis puppeteer – around poles, Chippendales flex their muscles, porn stars discuss their artistic visions. ‘What
gadost
, filth,' my mother would occasionally remember to say. However, this word which had so darkly dominated my youth, now acquired a ring of sheer exhilaration in her mouth. In fact, the day turned out to be one of those very few times when I saw my mother let go of her daily worries and enjoy herself with gusto.

As the evening was drawing close, my mother at last consented to leave. On our way out, she suddenly stopped.

‘Wait, Lubochka. I want to buy a souvenir for your father.' At that she purchased a pair of handcuffs decorated with leopard-fur. Now, she said, she was finished.

JUST BE KIND

ELIZA - JANE HENRY - JONES

Grandmothers

I shared a bed with my mother until I was 13 years old. I had my own room, but I refused to sleep there. I was scared of my grandpa's ghost; he'd died in my bedroom, collapsing where my bed now was. Scared, also, of the ghosts of other family members who'd died or had overnight vigils in the house, their coffins in the middle of our small, still rooms. I was scared of the dark and the house creaking, of people breaking in through the large windows near my bedroom door. I slept with a knife slipped under the mattress.

Mostly, though, I was scared of my grandmother. She had Alzheimer's and we lived with her, my mother and I.
And the Alzheimer's had taken her, piece by piece, until most of the time we were living with a person who could only be described as insane. Gone was the woman who wore silk blouses and finely cut pants and walked my scooter up to the primary school each day so that I could ride it home. Gone was the woman who laughed so hard at my jokes that her eyes crinkled shut, walked everywhere at high speed and cooked chicken soup so perfectly I still dream about it when I am sick.

Alzheimer's had turned my grandmother into someone who would urinate on the bedroom floor in the middle of the night. Someone who would pull her blouse on over her pyjamas and pace the house, murmuring and huffing to herself. More than once, I woke up to her standing beside my mother's bed, staring at me. Sometimes, half asleep, I mistook her footsteps for a ghost or a thief and my fingers fumbled for the handle of my knife.

She would often cry. She would cry because her feet were too big. Cry because she missed her mother. She forgot how to use the toilet and would leave poo tucked into teapots and in the kitchen sink. She would forget where the front door was and smash the windows. Trying so hard to get back inside.

Forget is a strange word. You can forget your keys. Forget to feed the dog. But you can also forget your family. You can forget who you love. Where you are. Where you've
been. Even who you are.

We cannot shape our sense of who we are without remembering.

We
forget
. The word scattered so thinly across so many different meanings. My grandmother was imprisoned inside a forgetful mind. My mother and I now knew my grandmother more than she knew herself.

Living with people who forget, you carry their stories as well as your own. Do you tell your grandmother that the mother she's calling out for has been dead for 40 years? Do you tell her that the pile of papers she's just thrown out, thinking she was tidying up, was actually your homework? Living in the face of such fierce forgetting is unsettling. It dislodges you. As a teenager, I developed social anxiety. I missed out on great swathes of school. I had panic attacks. I became obsessed with germs. With cleanliness. My grandmother vomited in strange places and never washed her hands and I imagined germs closing in on all of us until we suffocated. I would stand outside the bathroom door and yell in at my grandmother – insisting she wipe, insisting she wash her hands. With soap. Hot water. No, wash them
again
. I would spray every surface with Glen 20. I tried to convince my mother to get a second washing machine just for my clothes. I rewashed dishes and refused to sit on the couch.

So, I sprayed until I felt lightheaded, until even the street outside reeked of Glen 20. I sprayed and I wiped
until my arm hurt. Doorknobs and the kitchen bench. The sink and the coffee table and the soaked fabric arms of the couch.

It's not the loss of memory that strikes hardest in the experience of Alzheimer's. For my mother and I, it was the erratic moods that were the most painful. How my grandmother, who we loved, who loved us, would call us awful names, haunting names, would spew vitriol so sharp that we physically hurt. Sometimes she literally did throw things at us or hit us in the face.

And then she'd forget.

‘Oh, what's wrong darling?' my grandmother would ask me, two minutes after calling me a bitch and slapping me across the face because I locked the front door to stop her wandering off. She often got lost. She would go out with her handbag stuffed with tissues and not much else. Sometimes it would be to find my mother. Or her mother. To find her brothers, who, too, had died many years before. She would strike out the front door, purposeful, and be found hours later curled up and teary. Once we found her near the beach, five kilometres away.

On this night, after I locked the door and blocked it and she hit me and screamed in my face, she reached for my hand and stared at me. My grandmother's eyes always grew slick when she saw someone upset.

Having a memory means, at least hypothetically,
having a power over those who don't. As always, I had two choices. To force a smile, shake my head. ‘Nothing, Gran. I'm fine.' Squeeze her hand. ‘Let's go watch some tellie.' My other choice, the one that I usually made, was to shake her off and stalk past her. ‘You just called me a bitch! See my face? It's red because you just hit me! Go away!' I did the same that night.

My mother expected me to be compassionate. And yet this happened less and less. I was cruel. I became rigid. I took aim at my grandmother ferociously. I paced the house, as she paced the house, my disinfectant spray clenched hard. My mother watched us. She watched me. Sometimes she would take me aside.
Just be kind
. She made it sound so simple.

One day, when I was 15 or 16, I slammed the car door on my grandmother's fingers in our driveway. I always tried to get out of the car before her. To be standing next to the car and have my door closed before Mum had unbuckled my grandmother's seatbelt. Then I had the chance to be impatient, frustrated at how slow they were. This time my grandmother had her hand braced in the gap between the two open car doors. I wasn't looking when I slammed mine shut.

She cried – it was the cry of a little girl – and that made my mum cry too. Mum fumbled with her bag, trembling too hard to clench her fingers around the car
keys. Once she managed to open the door, my grandmother cupped herself around her swelling hand.

Mum looked at me. ‘Aren't you sorry?'

‘Yeah. I'm sorry.' I stared at my crying grandmother.

But I didn't feel anything. She wasn't my grandmother anymore. Not really. And, in the shocked moments after, I couldn't quite comprehend that she still had feelings. I watched her sob. I watched my mother soothe her. I watched my mother watching me and eventually I went inside.

It was not until two years ago that I encountered the term
disenfranchised grief
when studying a counseling course. It was a relief to have a name for what I had experienced, for what my mother had experienced, too. Grieving in a way that society does not accept, does not acknowledge. Disenfranchised grief is the grief people aren't really meant to feel. In my case, it was grieving ‘too early', before my grandmother had gone. I grieved over those disappearing pieces of her; I grieved all the ways she had shifted into someone we didn't know.

Throughout it all, I refused to be kind.

During the 12 years my mother and I lived with my grandmother's worsening Alzheimer's, there was an element of rivalry between me and my grandmother. I would start arguments with her and demand my mother judge. I would pick topics I knew my mother would side
with me on. Silly things. Like estimating how tall I was. Or arguing that Mum was
not
my grandmother's mum. Or recounting what we had had for breakfast.

I stuck hard to things factual and truthful. Things in the here and now, which I knew my grandmother could not understand. I refused to bend anything – I refused to give her the illusion that she still had some grasp on reality.

My grandmother disappeared slowly and in pieces. The part of her that stayed intact the longest was her compassion, her urge to nurture. To be kind. When I cried because she'd pooed in my favourite teapot, she would rub my shoulders and tell me it would all be okay. These were the moments, scattered and few, when I would sometimes choose kindness over truth. When I would stop waging my rebellion against my mother's expectations (
Just be kind
…). When I would squeeze my grandmother's hand, tell her that her mother had just popped out, that she is indeed taller than me.

But as the years went on and her illness progressed, my grandmother was no longer kind to me in the way that grandmothers are meant to be. She would narrow her eyes at me distrustfully, tell Mum on me for things I hadn't done, such as hiding her belongings or running away. Or, as I'd read in the room I refused to sleep in, my grandmother was prone to opening the door, glaring at me, and quickly shutting it again, as though I was an
unwelcome visitor in a house she still considered solely her own.

My mother ended up mothering two children, one aggressive and demanding, the other ill and slowly declining. I fought against the Alzheimer's more than she or even my grandmother. I fought Alzheimer's by fighting with my mother over everything she did for my grandmother. I would take her to task for helping my grandmother do up her shoes or preparing her food. My mother did everything for my grandmother, from her make-up to making her blow her nose to feeding her (during her worst times when she would try and eat with her fingers or not eat anything at all) and everything in between. Mum always cuddled her, held her hand, laughed with her. I became convinced that her kindness did my grandmother no good, that it hastened her decline. ‘She'll stop doing it herself if you do it for her!' I'd yell, as though Alzheimer's was as simple as that: that people just needed the opportunity to do things for themselves. ‘Stop it!' I'd scream, if I caught my mother doing up my grandmother's blouse, or trying to convince her to spit out her false teeth to be cleaned. ‘You're making her
worse
!'