Not a week into living in our new place, my mom started saying things on the phone like, “So … have you started building that new mother-in-law addition to your house?” Or, “Is that cabin in the woods ready for me yet?” After a few months of saying, “Ha ha,” I finally said, “Mom, we are not ever going to build onto our house or start a cabin project. But, I would love for you to live here if there is a place. Do you want me to go out today and see what’s available?”
“Uh … well … sure!” she said.
Out I went, and that day there just happened to be the most incredible rental you could ever imagine—the bottom floor of a three-story house that was literally hanging over the ocean, held in place by beautiful trees—for less per month than she was paying for senior housing in a lifeless land of mini-marts, vaping stores, and concrete! Eat your heart out, Post Ranch Inn! (That’s a comment my family—or anyone who’s been to Big Sur—will get.) The million-dollar view was stunning, and yet again her dream to live in the trees and look out over the ocean was about to come true.
Even though she’d lived the dream for many years, my practical engineer dad ended up taking some drastic risks in the stock market in his older age. He got so deep into it that he gambled their savings away. After losing all their money, he went looking for work as a senior citizen untrained in modern everything and could only find a job assembling heaters for $6.50 an hour. Sadly, they had to move back to the state we originally came from, where it was much cheaper to live, and again my mom had to embrace the hot, concrete life they had known for so many years before. He died several years later of congestive heart failure, leaving very little but Social Security benefits for my mom to live on. This wise, consistent, white-sheep-of-the- family kind of dad, who had so reliably taken care of every one of us, died close to penniless. I inherited his flannel jammies and blow dryer.
“Mom, there’s only one catch about this place,” I explained on the phone after running home to call and tell her about it, “you’d have to get rid of almost everything you own. It’s just one big room, a small kitchen, and a little bathroom overhanging the ocean.” I wasn’t sure how that would fly, considering that my mom keeps everything that comes her way.
But, like my husband, she did it. She came here with nothing but a car packed to the ceiling, and I found her some used furnishings here and there. She was in heaven. Again.
What extremes I experienced with her here. She is the polar opposite of my husband—happy, fun-loving, vocally caring, sponta- neous, and flexible. She goes with the flow. She finds every excuse to share laughter. She excitedly shares anything she has with others. She couldn’t care less about tedium or negativity; there is absolutely no purpose for those in her life, so they are nonexistent in her world. She takes every opportunity to say kind things to everyone. When I spend time with her, I’m home. I’m loved for who I am, I’m conversed with, and I experience care constantly, verbally and nonverbally. There isn’t a moment of judgment, anxiety, fear, or constraint. She’s the easiest person to be with in the world. Even though my husband was evolving into a more available spouse, I welcomed the deep love my mom’s presence provided.
The minute she moved here, we instated movie nights every Friday night at her house, while my husband and the boys had their own “Boys’ Night In” at home, a bonus for all five of us that came about thanks to my mom.
Over six years, she and I had over 350 dates, just the two of us. I can’t believe it when I do the math. We watched six seasons of Downton Abbey, two seasons of Call the Midwife, three seasons of Victoria, two seasons of Father Brown, two seasons of Poldark, two seasons of This Is Us, hundreds of Jeopardy! episodes, and more crappy movies than I can count.
I’m not the type to vent my problems to other people. I prefer to work them out on my own or let time do its thing. When I’m desperate, I seek God’s help. So, when I was hanging out with my mom, it was a time to relax, to set aside the hard stuff, to lie back in her comfy leather chair and enjoy a night free of momming. We luxuriated in other people’s dramas on the screen, thanks to library videos, and in the wonderful peace of each other’s company.
I suspect the reason she is always so cared for by the world is that her personality is easy therapy for anyone who stops in to visit her. Chaos and drama don’t exist around her, and what a breath of fresh air that is! People drop off soups for her, the mail brings goodies from old friends, and people of all walks of life do things for her that continue to surprise me.
Life had dramatically improved. My mom brought with her the feeling of childhood warmth I had growing up in my original family. My home life with my husband was much more relaxed in this wonderful place that gave us both such joy. And raising two children who were eager to learn and explore gave me deep fulfillment.
However, about four years into being here, I knew little things in my mom were starting to shift. One day, our little boy came home from a date with her. “Granny gave me cough drops instead of candy.”
“Cough drops?”
“Well, she said she knows you don’t want me to have candy, so she gave me cough drops instead.”
I called her. “Mom? Cough drops?”
“Well, at least they’re healthy!”
“Healthy?”
My reaction was part laughter, part bewilderment.
I had already been trying to figure out how to approach her latest habit of not cleaning her dishes. I noticed they would pile up in her sink during the week, and on Fridays when I came over, the last thing either of us wanted to do was fiddle with dishes. We cooked frozen pizza, popped popcorn, and thoroughly enjoyed our time together.
The next Friday, I would see twice as many dishes in her sink. Not wanting to become the enabler, I encouraged her to get them done little bits at a time so she didn’t feel overwhelmed. The next Friday, three weeks of dishes would be there. I would then scold her a bit, or poke fun at her. Always self-effacing if it meant a laugh could result, she’d play along. But I’d leave with instructions that she do her dishes the very next day and be done.
I didn’t want to see the irreversible pattern that was developing. I didn’t want to do her dishes every time I stopped by midweek, or else I knew I wouldn’t want to stop by midweek at all. I didn’t want her to lean on my cleaning services in that department, lest it expand to all others.
It didn’t matter what I was trying to avoid. It all happened anyway. From then on, she never did another dish. A few times, the pile in her sink would take me two hours. There were gobs of dishes and the stuck-on residue of each one was almost impenetrable. Most daughters would probably stop by every other day and do a few dishes. I knew I’d see visiting my mom as burdensome if it meant I was always cleaning. I didn’t ever want to feel that way about her.
Every time things got too far, I’d go in and do a deep cleaning. I’d do the dishes, mingle with forms of mold I’d never seen at the bottom of the pile, set a live trap to catch the persistent little mouse who sniffed out her location when things got ripe, release it a few miles away, and spend eight to 16 hours over two days de-junking her piles, organizing her bills, vacuuming every inch of carpet—half of which was under her accumulated stuff—dusting everything from her wooden blinds to her dozens of knickknacks, crawling under her bed to organize everything that got shoved under there in a hasty moment, and loading up bags and bags of recycling that she never dealt with. Considering that my mom lived in a tiny space, it was a little baffling to realize just how long it took to clean up after her. But when a person begins to relinquish every tiny daily act of maintenance and home care, you can’t believe how it builds up. She used to be a home health aide, going into people’s homes to care for them and coming back to tell us the stories of what some of those homes looked like after being neglected all of the time. Now it was the story of our lives.
I’m all or nothing. When the place was done each time, I was totally spent and it was positively sparkling. I would leave no job undone. Every several months I did a deep clean, and the first several were satisfying. With each passing year, the deep cleans became a little more overwhelming.
I had one extreme at home and the other extreme at my mom’s.
One day, my sister and I were talking on the phone and she said, “Lila, did Mom tell you about when she went to the store the other day?”
“No,” I said, curious to hear what she was going to say.
“Well, she got what she needed real quick but there were a lot of people in front of her in line and she didn’t have the energy to keep standing there, so she walked out of the line and over to the table area, sat down, opened her bourbon and poured some in a cup, and opened her cooked chicken and started eating it!”
Thankfully, the small town we’re in is very forgiving. Had a cop come in and seen her drinking, he probably would’ve shot the breeze with her and she probably would’ve offered him a cup of bourbon too. (Not that he would drink it.)
As time went by, I could see the writing on the wall. So I started getting her out once a week for what I thought were short, easy, very low-expectation walks. On what was to be our last of those in that fleeting phase, we sat down on a driftwood log at the beach. Ragged and exhausted, she was bent over, breathing heavily, unable to sit up. When she finally caught her breath, she sweetly said, “Lila, you know how much I love all of this beauty; but I hate this. I don’t ever want to do this again!” She never talked with negativity, especially in nature, so I knew she meant it. That was our last-ever beach walk.
At a certain point, my mom stopped showering altogether. I didn’t even notice because she never looked or smelled unclean. Hair is usually a dead giveaway. When you hug someone who hasn’t washed their hair recently, the sebaceous odor wafts into your nose. I know; I used to live with river guides. It wasn’t until my sister visited and stayed with her. She said, “Lila, there are spider webs all over the inside of the tub, and the tub is completely dry.”
Over time, we didn’t have much choice but to let it go. She was perfectly happy, she seemed clean, and she didn’t want us fussing over solutions about it. I soon learned that a lot of older people no longer shower when they get to a certain point in life. Who knew? I rationalized by figuring that lots of people in other cultures don’t shower daily, monthly, or even yearly. I just hoped the latter wouldn’t be the case with her just yet. My mom was keeping clean in her own alternative ways, and my sister suggested that she get her hair washed at the beauty parlor every now and then.
Still, things were morphing over time to the point that more than a few of my mom’s tendencies were a mix of laughable and concerning. My ever-bubbly extrovert of a momma now had only one goal: instant gratification. Whatever felt good, she did, and whatever didn’t, she didn’t, regardless of how counter-cultural it was. With each passing night, she stayed up later and later, watching the news and reading books. She’d go to bed anywhere from 1 to 4 a.m., then wake up anywhere between 1 and 5 p.m. to drink her “morning” coffee and start in on the news again. Because walking and moving had gotten harder, she curtailed movement as much as possible and began calling me with her grocery list: bourbon (always first on the list), Fresca, cheese, cereal, and cream (for the cereal).
“But Mom,” I’d say every time, “give me some ideas of food food that you need. You know, things you might eat at mealtimes.” She’d gotten to the point that she couldn’t even dream up anything remotely nourishing because she lacked the energy it took to stand up and make it. The only time she left her place was when her friend picked her up for a coconut shrimp dinner at a restaurant a block away. One day when I stopped in to see her, she asked if I’d bring in the huge pack of toilet paper that she kept in her car trunk. “Wait, didn’t you just say the other day that you were almost out of toilet paper? That was two days ago. What have you been doing for toilet paper since then?”
“I’ve been using paper towels for two days.” Her car was only 15 steps from her front door.
She wasn’t going to the store, the post office, church, or anywhere, not even to her car for toilet paper. I laughed with her about how she forced us all to go to church every single Sunday until we were eighteen. There was no way out of it. I don’t think she missed church once in her life. She never got sick on Sunday and she never allowed us to be sick on Sunday. It was one of the core disciplines she never gave up in a long life of happy spontaneity. So now, the fact that she wasn’t going to church meant that something significant—perhaps gargantuan—had shifted.
Even so, it was baffling to be in my mom’s presence. Though she didn’t have the energy to move around a lot and thought cough drops were a good substitute for candy, she was still so youthful and lighthearted. She oozed with positivity; she had the same exuberant spark for life; she still had common sense for the most part. Most people my mom’s age are on lots of medications, complain about their aches and pains, and just plain feel old. My mom, on the other hand, was the same carefree fun-seeker she’d always been, minus the energy to stand up. Regardless of her limitations and the looming implications of them, you’d never know there was anything to worry about. She was always happy as a clam, determined to remain oblivious to the writing on the wall—that she would soon be physically unable to stay where she was. It was hard for me to accept, too.
In the meantime, we continued to laugh together, cry with the characters of This Is Us together, and enjoy the sparkling ocean outside her window and its sunset reflections jittering psychedelically on her ceiling. Though moving here caused my husband to make some huge changes in his demeanor, he was still a very different type of human being than what I was used to. Spending time with my mom had reminded me that my kind of normal—embodied in a love-based, rather than control/fear-based, person—was still something I could experience, just a ten-minute walk from our house.
Weekly dates with my mom were a respite for me—a night for lightheartedness and conversational ease, a break from superficiality and obsessive cleanliness, and simple enjoyment. In my mom, I had someone who always cared about me, someone who never in a million years cared about a mark or a spill or a bruised banana, and someone who communicated love in every way possible. Her love looked in my eyes, her love asked me about me, her love gave me her comfy chair to sit in and made me popcorn. What I lacked in a mate, I was regifted in a mother who lived nearby. Who knew how to love instinctively. Who knew what I was coping with. Who hated how her son-in-law neglected her daughter but chose to show him love nonetheless.
Even though it was wonderful to have a break, when I came back home late at night on Friday nights, I loved being home too. I went in to look over our boys, sleeping silently in their comfy beds, the dog nestled next to our older son. I would walk through the living room and listen to the silence. I would feel grateful that I had a family of my own.
When I realized that my mom—however gay and cheery she was in her present state—would only worsen in her mobility and motivation, I knew she could easily have a fall like the dreaded broken hip that forever debilitates older people. If she wasn’t going to church—the one thing she never missed—I knew that just about the only thing she would get up for was the bathroom. If she were to fall and get hurt, she’d be flown to the nearest city and be far from our little out-of-the-way town, where no family member could easily visit her, including us.
After a few sibling discussions on a five-way phone line, we were all in agreement about the fact that she’d better move while she could still walk. The tough thing would be breaking the news to her.
She’s easy and flexible but moving away from her heavenly haven overhanging the ocean in order to return to a place she couldn’t wait to leave years ago seemed like a cruel joke. But that’s where three of my siblings would be able to visit her every week. That’s where she would have quick care if she needed it, in any and every form. Our quiet community couldn’t offer that.
She understood, but she ached inside. Never the type to dwell on difficult thoughts, she vocalized all the positives. Never the type to allow herself to cry, she mourned on the inside. But every now and then, she’d say to me, in a fun little undertone and a sparkle in her eye, “What if I just stay here?” Deep down, I know she so hoped we would acquiesce. That we would call it all off and forget about all the things that old age requires you to consider. I never had a good answer. I wanted to save her, to reinstate her security in living out the rest of her life in her little paradise. But, like a child forced to reluctantly parent her mother, I very inarticulately stumbled around the idea that it just wouldn’t work. It felt like a lousy thing to have to say, but she and I both knew I couldn’t take the other route and sugarcoat the reality of where she would be moving. Those were hard things that had to be communicated by a daughter to her ever-loving mother, the mother who rescued her from reality many a Friday night in order to laugh and love and be merry; words I didn’t want to say, no matter how lovingly I could say them. If I ever needed rescuing, my mom would figure out a way. I felt that with the shoe on the other foot, I was letting her down, taking her away from the few simple things she loved and lived for. I felt like a schmuck.
Here I was, once again, in the middle of an emotional quandary, even though I knew which option was for the best.
My sister secured an apartment in the same senior living housing complex that my mom had been in before moving near us. My siblings came to help me pack up her belongings and load them in a U-Haul for my brother to drive her back to where most of them still live. Rather than dwell on sadness, we decided to make a fun week out of it and send her on her way in the most positive light that we could—to make her departure a party rather than a funeral. My mom always loves a party.
One afternoon when my sister and sister-in-law stopped me in the middle of packing and asked how I felt about all of it, I started to cry convulsively. I didn’t want my mom to be out of my life. I knew it meant rarely seeing her again. I wanted to keep her near me. I wanted to stop by her little piece of paradise and visit her anytime. I wanted to sit with her in her little garden piazza on the weekends, the perfect air wafting up from the sea and causing her flowers to dance, the dazzling sparkles off the water like a scene from a movie. I wondered how I would cope with the only other adult in my daily life being my husband again. In that moment, I mourned the symbolic death of my mom in my immediate world; the fact that I would see her again only if I flew several states away to visit her for a few days; the fact that I would hear her voice only on the phone after she left.
She and my brother made it safely to her new abode. It was miraculous, considering that she had to get herself in and out of a U-Haul several times a day for nine days, with the help of a stepladder and my brother’s strong frame. She’s always been a trouper, up for the next big adventure. They barely beat the incoming season of cold and snow, which trailed a day behind them in their last several hundred miles. She never would have been motivated to move her body again had she remained here in her recliner for six months of cold, dreary winter, in front of her comforting heater.
When everyone flew home after my mom and brother drove away, I was left to clean her place one last time. They had all offered to help, but I wanted them to enjoy their remaining time sight-seeing rather than scouring her vacant shell. I had deep-cleaned her place before they came, so for one final day, I looked out her windows as I vacuumed past them. I smelled the lingering scents of her candles. I stood in her piazza, looking out over the view that she so deeply cherished. I felt that soft, dark gray carpet in between my toes, the last time I would ever feel it. I stood in what had for many years been filled with her presence, now still. Now quiet. Never to be filled with her again. I emptied her trash and recycling cans for the last time, peeked once more into her place, and locked it for good. Most things in life aren’t certain. But one thing I knew was that I would never again be in the daily presence of my mom.
Neglect’s Toll on a Wife: Perfection’s Grip on My Husband’s Attention © 2023-2024 Lila Meadowbrook
