My Mother, My Child

In 2011, when my mom moved from assisted living to skilled nursing care, I continued visiting her as a daughter, depending on her attention and our relationship of comradeship to lighten the focus of my life as I learned to live as a widow. She was the anchor I clung to as we shared those memories that only someone who had known me for forever could share. She held my childhood in her heart. I needed those memories because the middle years of my life had gone dim and were being dispersed into thin air by the loss of too many people and the death of my husband.

I paid a small price for this as I pretended to be the person she wanted me to be. I consciously dressed in a way that she approved, which was far more formal than what I wore in Laytonville. I kept my hair short and sculpted, staying vivacious and flirty, yet deeply empathetic with all her friends, so she could bask in the praise she received from them as to how wonderful her daughter was. I performed for her, and for myself, so I could have an identity despite the confusion I was feeling from too many changes in my life.

When she fell again, I realized she was getting confused. I continued our charade to give her stability. What had been a mild form of dementia requiring me to take over her finances began to thicken, like a fog solidifying around her intellect and memory.

At one time, I enjoyed her forgetting all the reasons she had been displeased with me. She seemed to have forgiven me for marrying two different men of whom she and my dad had disapproved. We had a grand time, and I didn’t mind that she asked me, “And how are you doing?” every half hour. I would answer again and again, just grateful that someone was asking.

But the forgetting continued to creep, like cement pouring through the cracks and crevices of her brain, making walls between the synapses of her perceptions. She became demanding and very negative. She insulted the nurses’ aides who were trying to help her, called them foreigners. I heard her accusing my grandmother, her mother, of gallivanting around Europe with a younger man. I would try to point out that her mother would have been 130, if alive. She didn’t like to be corrected. Whenever anyone came close to her toes, she screamed. She shouted and cussed when someone wakened her from her sleep, which she did most of the day. Calling out every 15 minutes for someone to take her to the bathroom during the night was also a common occurrence.

I searched for a way to survive this change in her and took the caregiver class in Ukiah. I learned that most everything that a dementia patient speaks is in the language of metaphor. I began trying to decipher her stories.

Late one afternoon, while trimming her fingernails, I handed her a nail file. I watched as she tried to remember how to do something that had been, for her, a daily activity. I had seen my mom do this from the time I could observe and remember. This day, however, she couldn’t figure how to file her nails. She tried and tried while sitting in her special rocker. In that moment, I saw my mom as a woman struggling to keep her life together, of trying to survive with some dignity the best way she could. She was just a little girl again, about five, trying to learn a new skill.

I realized I had to truly change my perspective. I had to release us from our pretend game of my being her daughter and she being my mother. Because I had depended on her for so long to be my mom, I had perceived hurt from her scattered words, believing she uttered them intentionally. I had told myself that she no longer cared, that I was doing things wrong, and that I was no good.  None of her actions or reactions had anything to do with me. They were all metaphors for her feelings about her life.

Her screaming illustrated her fear. She screamed as a kind of protection for herself, her body. This sounding was all she had by which to call attention to the fact that she was in a bed with strangers all around her because staff had rotated out and then rotated out again to better paying jobs. No one knew her anymore or had seen the pictures of her I purposely had brought in five years before to show staff that she was a real person, as a bride, as a sexy sunbather. But, on the afternoon I had brought them in, my mother, sobbing, had asked me to take the pictures away because she couldn’t stand to be reminded of her lost happiness. I left a montage of pictures on her wall, though, so I could point to them and tell the new staff who she had been and what she had done in her life. And the mad she held for her mother for being absent? I finally realized that she meant she felt abandoned

I think she didn’t realize she was frightened. When she often said that she wanted to get into her old Chevy sedan (“parked right over there in the garage”) and go home to Oakland, I then understood that she wanted to see her family again. Her prevailing anger was a metaphor that said she was mad because she wanted out of this life, but the reality was that she was still here. In those last months, when she still claimed she wanted to stop eating, all she had to do was see chocolate ice cream, potato chips, and her beer, and she would forget her resolve.

By January of 2018, she had turned another corner. She didn’t answer to the names I had called her for forever. She only answered to her first name, the one that staff always called her, Sylvia. She began to lose the memory of who I was, and, like Benjamin Button, she began returning, not just to her childhood, but past that and into the space where she was living before life itself.

During her last three months, I had to learn how to mother myself, while she cared for her life the best way she knew how. I was that periphery support person, that observer of her process of letting go as she discovered just what that meant. When she let me, I was grateful to be able to love her by holding her as if she were my child.