They Call Me Baba Booey (34 page)

“Hi,” said a voice at the other end. “I am calling from the hospital. We just wanted to let you know that your mother is improving and—”

So many times during my life I had expected a call telling me that something had happened to my mother. Maybe it came with her volatility. I worried she’d hurt herself—or make someone so mad they’d hurt her. But as she got older the fear subsided. She was around fewer and fewer people to piss off. I had relaxed. I shouldn’t have. Or so it seemed.

“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “I don’t have any idea what you are talking about.”

“No one told you?”

“Told me what?!”

Earlier that day my mom had been in a serious car accident in Boynton Beach. She pulled out of a strip mall parking lot into a busy road, tried to make a left, and never looked to see if another car was coming. She got hit. Hard. The injuries she sustained were so serious she needed to be helicoptered to a major trauma center. She had a broken leg, a broken wrist, and severe head injuries. The administrators handling her case mistakenly thought I had been called right away. “She is out of danger,” I was told. “But she will need to be here for several more weeks.”

On the phone, her situation sounded bad. When I arrived at the hospital the next afternoon, it looked so much worse.

She was in the ICU, connected to miles of tubes, a bandage around her head, her limbs immobilized. As soon as I walked in, I choked up. I said, “Hey, Mom.” It seemed like she recognized me, but she couldn’t speak. There was pressure on her brain. The doctors kept repeating the same phrases to describe her condition: “There was bleeding around her brain … she suffered a hematoma … she had a severe head injury.”

“What does all this mean for her life?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” they answered. “The brain is a tricky thing.”

“When will she recover?”

“We don’t know. The brain is a tricky thing.”

“Will she ever walk again?”

“We don’t know. The brain is a tricky thing.”

They also didn’t know how tricky my mom’s brain was before the accident. I worried about how she would be rewired.

After a couple of days she became more aware, but she was still struggling. When I asked her a question her answers were barely audible grunts. She had no memory of the accident.

Anthony had flown in from Texas and he and I beat ourselves up after getting her full diagnosis. Just a few weeks earlier we had talked about making her quit driving but didn’t act on it, so we were feeling guilty. She had always told us, begged us actually, to keep her out of a nursing home. Now we were told she’d be in the hospital for three weeks and after that, she wouldn’t be able to take care of herself for some time. Or possibly ever again.

Now we were facing the fact she wouldn’t be able to drive and would be living alone in Florida, potentially addled. She might not even be able to make a cup of coffee for herself. Anthony and I looked into the options for post-hospital care. The only acceptable one—other than one of us moving to Florida—was hiring around-the-clock nurses, for six thousand dollars a month.

When my mom was released she still was far from herself. Anthony had a great word to describe her:
pliant
. My mother had never been pliant in her life. She had made reinforced steel look soft and flexible. But he was right. In the hospital we noticed that she had developed a very strange smile, fake and clownlike, plastered on her face. It would spread across her cheeks when we’d walk into the room.

At one point, while helping her settle in at home, Anthony asked her if she was comfortable and she emptily replied, “Oh yes.” Her demeanor was sweet and light and accommodating. We assumed it was the painkillers and the lingering effects of the head injury. We tried to appreciate it—she was acting like the mom we had always wanted—because we knew it wouldn’t last. Eventually her senses would return.

That first week, I knew the home health aide wasn’t going to work. My mom’s nurse was a three-hundred-pound Haitian woman who had been on the job for years. It seemed like she’d lost interest in taking care of people. She was supposed to be walking my mom around every day, but whenever I called all I heard in the background was Rachael Ray. I’d ask my mom if she had been out and she’d cheerily tell me no, as if she couldn’t be happier about it. It was all very strange and frustrating, especially trying to gauge what was happening from Connecticut.

A couple of weeks later I got a call from someone at the company that managed the nurses. The representative began apologizing profusely. I didn’t understand why, and then she told me they were replacing my mom’s aide. Apparently there had been an argument. My mom had called the aide a bitch. The aide then threw something at my mom.

I called my mom. “Did you call this woman a bitch?”

“Yeah,” she said, as bright as sunshine.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. Then she started laughing.

Part of me couldn’t have been happier. The outburst made me feel that she was on the road to recovery. But I also realized that twenty-four-hour care wasn’t going to work out. It was costing a fortune and, if my mom was getting her pepper back, I wouldn’t be able to manage it over the phone.

I knew she needed to go into a home. If you’ve got more money than Warren Buffett there are plenty of options, but
none of us did. We couldn’t find any places we liked near Austin, Texas, by Anthony, and only saw one place that was in the right price range near me, in Connecticut.

It was a gut-wrenching decision. I knew in my heart that she needed to be closer to one of us. Neither Anthony nor I could monitor whether she was getting proper care if she was down there alone. But when I told her she’d be moving to a facility near me in Connecticut, part of me felt like I was breaking bad news to a child. “We are going to keep your house. It may be temporary,” I said. “Or it may be permanent. We are going to have to wait and see.” Two months earlier she had been completely independent, living alone, driving to do her errands, living a full and healthy life in a house of her choosing. Now she was being taken to a strange place where she’d live in one room, with a roommate—the exact scenario she had begged Anthony and me to avoid. We felt like we had no other choice.

Yet when I told her, she didn’t resist, for which I was relieved. But I also thought she was acting strange. She had been out of the hospital a month and, except for the flare-up with the aide, her personality had vanished. There was no pepper, no anger, just placid acceptance. I called Anthony and said, “Man, what’s up with Mom? She’s still not herself. She’s being way too nice.”

He had noticed it, too. While we liked it at first, the dramatic makeover was starting to freak us out. We weren’t used to her being pliant. I had spent my life managing difficulty and rage, waiting for the mercury to get to the tip of the thermometer and explode.

I braced myself for the explosion the day she moved into the home. But when I picked her up at the airport—I had paid an aide to help her fly up from Florida—she was thrilled to see me. At the home a team of people met us at the door and greeted her as if she were an arriving dignitary. Complaints were kept to a minimum.

I installed Sirius in her room and showed her how to find the Sinatra station. The old cabinet from our house with the built-in record player fit snugly against the wall. She lined the shelves with pictures of me, Anthony, my dad, and Steven. Pictures of her grandkids and drawings they had made for her were scattered on top of her dresser. During our visits she smiled, the same empty smile I first noticed right after the accident. All she did during the day was watch TV, despite the efforts of the staff to get her out. The home organized field trips to the beach nearby and to baseball games. For entertainment, an organist visited the home and played songs from around the world—a Mexican hat dance one minute, “Volaré” the next. Some days the staff invited a guy named Nick the Balloonatic to come in and make crazy hats out of balloons. I’d walk into the lobby and see all these people in wheelchairs with wacky balloon hats on their head. It reminded me of a five-year-old’s birthday party.

I had actually been worried that my mom would think the social life at the home was beneath her. But she just didn’t participate in any of it. It’s not that she had lost her will—she was happy, laughing and reminiscing during our visits—she just seemed to have lost interest.

Anthony and I started calling her robomom. She was no longer recovering; she had changed. A couple of months after she moved into the home, we sold her house in Florida. We knew she wasn’t moving back.

The difference in her personality was never more obvious to me than the Memorial Day after she had moved into the home. Mary, the kids, and I had gone to a parade in town in the morning. Afterward I went to visit my mom. She asked me what I had done that morning and I told her, “We went to the parade.”

A look crossed her face; a darkness filled her eyes that I recognized from when I was younger. “I like going to parades.”

“I know, Mom,” I said. “But we were running late and I just decided it would be easier if I came to see you this afternoon.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

That was it. Before, in another, more chaotic life, the answer would have been a full-throated “I like parades, too! And I am stuck in here all day by myself and you take your family to the goddamn parade and leave me here!” It would have been an afternoon of guilt and bitterness. Now, it was all just okay.

I’ll ask her now if she remembers beating our neighbor with shrubs or throwing Chuck Taylors at a sales clerk and she’ll wave me off with a smile and say, “Oh yeah, that,” as though it was a one-time incident, not the moments that shaped me.

It’s times like these when I think,
I miss my mom
. And there’s the rub. I spent my entire life praying for the mom I have today. The one who doesn’t cause any drama, the one who smiles and says okay to everything I do.

But I don’t want her.

The accident knocked the crazy out of her, but it also knocked out the good. She’s missing the fire and spunk and wit and sarcasm that made her so great, if also volatile. I actually miss the theatrics. I miss hearing her use swear words so creatively that Richard Pryor would blush. I miss the challenge of negotiating her moods. That’s why, whenever I kiss her goodbye and walk out the door of her building, I thank God I grew up the way I did.

Otherwise you’d be calling someone else Baba Booey.

No, this is not Bettie Page. It’s my mom! Ellen Cotroneo, circa 1946.

Papa Booey, Sal Dell’Abate, from his army days.

My mom and dad on their way to a PTA meeting.