My Smiling Daughter

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These years here with my mother have not brought the connection I dreamed of when I moved across the country. But today, as the sky lightens, I lie in bed realizing that my love for nature, and even for adventure, is born of my mother. The recognition is a beginning, and time is not up.

I rise and move to the chair in the corner of the living room. My coffee mug on the table beside me, I pick up my journal to write from a prompt to start the day. As it usually does when I follow the pen, the words come around to Mama and wondering why, for so long, we didn’t see each other. The pen travels back in time with a force that transcends conscious thought.

For decades, in cross-country phone calls, Mama greeted me with, “Is that my smiling daughter?” I don’t know why it began to irritate me several years ago, but it did.

I have heard the story of my babyhood many times over the years.

Your crib was in our bedroom. When you woke up—early—you stood motionless in the crib until one of us moved a muscle. Then you jumped up and down, rattling the crib, laughing. She decided my identity back then and she was sticking to it. I didn’t have permission to be in a funk, so I chose not to include her in my life when I didn’t tell her over the phone I was ready to strangle one or the other of my children, that their father was out of town again and I was tired of doing it all, that I was lonely, that my period had started and I felt like shit. I wanted empathy, I wanted compassion. But had I told her how I really felt in that moment, she would have been worried about me, given me unwanted advice, and sent me magazine articles, dragging my bad mood farther into the future than its natural life dictated as she tried to fix it.

One day, a few years ago, I had had enough. I couldn’t live up to her expectations and I angrily asked her to stop calling me her smiling daughter. And she did.

As I write this, I realize with a start that when I walk into her room at the assisted living facility now, and she asks who’s there, she doesn’t know what I look like. Me, her smiling daughter! Her eyes see light and dark against the opposite background, and that’s all. I’ve heard her say countless times to visitors: “I can see your shape, but not your face,” but it hadn’t crossed my mind that she can’t see my face. She doesn’t see that my face is aging, that I’m looking more like her every day. Whatever static picture of me she has in her head is all she has. I don’t know what that picture is. Am I smiling?

She did see you, my pen writes. Of course she knew I had bad days back then; but I am generally a happy person, an optimistic person. That is my identity. She has known you from the womb, watched your ebb and flow, and seen you return to your Self again and again. “Is that my smiling daughter?” was her way of reminding me of who I am. It was her way of telling me she had faith that no matter what was going on in my life that I probably wasn’t telling her, I would reach into my core and find my strength. Just as she does. It was her way of being my cheerleader, the mother I wanted.

“Is that Gretchen?” she says, unsure of her accuracy in distinguishing my voice when I enter her room and greet her. I wish she would ask if it’s her smiling daughter.

 

All the Time in the World, Part 2

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All the Time in the World, Part 1

I try to remember my mother wasn’t always old. When George returned from Europe in 1946, he and Stellajoe could finally begin their life together. The world was their oyster, waiting to be discovered. . . . (Continue reading)

Part 2

December 2015

My mother’s hopes and dreams of the future are all far behind. She has no projects, save sorting her clothes—or thinking about sorting her clothes—and trying to record her mother’s story. During my childhood, she never took time for herself, developing her own interests and hobbies. “I don’t have time to read,” she would say, when my sisters and I urged her to go sit in the living room with our father after dinner so we could do cleanup without her telling us how to do it. I don’t remember ever seeing her read a book for pleasure. She dabbled with a variety of crafts in her 70s, but the idea of engaging in anything for shear pleasure wasn’t ingrained in her over a lifetime, so she didn’t stick with it then and she has nothing to sustain her now.

Her interests remain confined to the kitchen and obsessing over her health. And she can’t do much in the kitchen anymore.

“I was lazy,”or “worthless” she says when I ask how her day was. Relaxing is not okay, even when listening to a recorded book. She sets the kitchen timer for 20 minutes for a nap, as if she has something to do, places to go, people to see when she gets up. She berates herself when she sleeps through it, getting up two hours later. “I wasn’t asleep,” she tells me, as if sleeping is a personal failure.

I didn’t know that young woman, but now I know this old one better than I ever dreamed I would, and yet I can’t figure her out. After my father died, she reclaimed her fierceness, caring for herself with no one’s help. She never asked her daughters for assistance in making decisions. From across the country, I had no idea what she was up to. I read about studies, based on Maslow’s theory, showing that as people age they focus on being rather than doing. Not Mama; she still wants to do, and here I am doing it for her. I wonder if she is stingy with expressions of gratitude because she resents me for being able to do what she can’t. Telling me how to do things is a desperate attempt to stay in control; and to remind me—and herself—that she is competent.

Her dreams now are nightmares. She struggles to dress herself. She slowly stirs on the stove the maple-favored Malt-o-Meal I measure out for her the night before. She doesn’t go outside alone. She pushes her walker through the rooms of this house she has lived in for 55 years, running into furniture she once used as markers as she walked with fading vision through the rooms. She won’t move them or eliminate them to make space for her current needs; she can’t imagine anything other than the way it’s always been. The walker bumps through doorways not built for such conveyances. I smile as I see three-year-old Rebecca in my mind—who never walked but ran—racing on her short legs down the hall through the same doorway into the kitchen, running into the same jamb as she wheeled around the corner. It’s a house of ghosts, dead and alive.

My mother is utterly alone in spite of those of us walking this journey with her. Her love is gone again, forever this time. Hope is gone. All that is left is the waiting. Waiting to leave this good life she has had and has no more. And stubbornly hanging onto control, even when it doesn’t serve her. Maybe it’s what is unwittingly keeping her alive beyond her desire to be here.

This morning, as I transcribe another letter from 1944, I watch Mama over the video monitor, fumbling in her bedding to find her talking clock to see if it’s time to get up or still the middle of the night. Getting up for what? How does she keep going?

Someday I won’t climb mountains, travel alone, dream of the future, either. Like my mother, I am stubborn and independent. I have the opportunity right now to choose how that manifests itself. If I hope to be more grace-filled, more accepting of the way things are, kinder to those who care for me, I should start practicing. I probably won’t lose my vision, or be as anxiety-ridden; but whatever life throws at me, I hope I will be as brave as my mother.

“I have seen in you what courage can be when there is no hope.” May Sarton

Transition: Traveling Across the Country to My New Old Home

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Summer 2012

As spring in North Carolina gives way to summer heat, as it always does before the calendar declares the change of season, I pack up my little house. It was no surprise to anyone that it sold quickly, still I am shocked to already be doing this. From my empty attic bedroom, I watch professional movers load my winnowed belongings into the end of a huge truck and try to swallow the lump in my throat. I thought there would be more time here. Emma and Rebecca will meet the truck in Washington in a week or so and oversee its unloading into the mini-storage unit I rented over the phone, where most of it will remain—like me—on hold.

That night dear friends sit with me on the floor in the bare, candlelit hearth room and share the last of our many meals together as they help me say goodbye to the house. I have saved each of them something from my belongings: a folding saw for one who has embarked on her own single life, a bird’s nest for another, an antique canning jar, a flying pig from the top of my gate, a tin garden chicken for another. I can’t believe I’m leaving these dear women. Doubt begins to crowd my heart.

I move into a friend’s guest room so I can continue to be a wage-earner while I wait for my second grandson to be born across the state. Three weeks later, I load my 14-year-old Honda CRV with a few clothes, a cooler with food for me and insulin for my twelve-year-old diabetic cat Smudge—traveling in a dog crate behind the front seats—the oil painting a friend made of my beloved house that I didn’t trust to the movers, a used Rand McNally US Atlas with a tentative route marked, and my newly upgraded AAA Gold Plus membership card. I say one more goodbye to friends and co-workers who celebrate my 60th birthday with me the night before my departure. Driving to the house and restored gardens that are no longer mine one last time to pick up mail—left for me by the new owners at the door I had painted Bittersweet Orange before I knew what that would mean—I breathe a namaste to my life here, get back in the car, and head west without looking back. It’s time to discover what’s next.

Smudge is none too happy in the crate. I feel her pain. We howl together as we drive out of the city that has been home for 24 years and turn west down US Highway 64. I am pummeled now with doubt. What the hell was I thinking? My sister is there at the other end, clearing her leftover things out of the rooms she had moved out of five years earlier in the basement of my mother’s house, readying the space for me; but beyond that there is nothing to prepare me for what I am getting myself into. I’m panic-stricken. I’ve moved across state lines before, not knowing what I was heading into, but always I had a partner—and later, children as well—with whom to face the unknown. They were my life then, not what I was leaving or going to. This is not what I thought my sixties would hold. I was supposed to be keeping house with a for-life partner, waiting for children and grandchildren to visit and fill it with noise and laughter. I surely never thought I would be living with my nonagenarian mother in my childhood home in Nowheresville. But as the miles and my old life roll away, I slowly let go of my grip on what I thought would be. I am ready for a new venture. I begin to look through the windshield, rather than the rearview mirror.

When I left the West coast for the Southeast in 1976, it was by car. I’m glad to be returning state by state now as the miles roll by under the tires, leaving my whole adult history behind. I need time to feel the transition. I travel on the two-lanes, the road like scissors neatly clipping my life into the time before and the time after. I travel over the Appalachian Mountains of my Tennessee-born mother’s childhood that I have grown to love, pass through small towns unnoticed by all but those who live there, through fields of soy beans undulating in the stifling hot breeze.

I get lost after leaving my used atlas locked in my niece’s home in Nashville. I eventually replace it with a glossy new one. I turn to Phoebe—the GPS voice I added to my non-smart phone plan—for help. I named her for an ancestor who had traveled 160 years ago by covered wagon from Ohio virtually to the same place to which my parents migrated a century later. In spite of our genetic connection, she isn’t always helpful. It doesn’t matter, really, I’m time traveling. Routes and schedules are not important.

Switching to Interstate 40 across the dusty plains of Oklahoma and Texas, I visit the sobering empty chairs of the Murrow Federal Building memorial in Oklahoma City and the ridiculous graffiti-covered cars planted headlights up in the dirt at Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo. I marvel at the beauty of the enormous hi-tech white windmills that stand sentinel on the smallest of rises in the landscape, in contrast to the creaking wooden ones on long-deserted farms, providing power to no one. A lump forms in my throat as I imagine the impossibly desolate lives of people who fought to survive on the windswept dry earth. An occasional tumbleweed bounces across the road in front of the car, escaping the leaning orange snow fences erected to keep them from the pavement, punctuating the loneliness of both the landscape and my heart.

I climb to Red Rocks amphitheater in the mountains near Denver and sit by a mountain lake in Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming. I buy Rainier cherries in the Yakima Valley and finally head over the Cascade Range with Mt. Rainier rising to greet me. I am home. The mountains and trees of the Pacific Northwest is where my soul is at peace in a way that it never was in the Southeast, even after 36 years and three states. Like a pentimento, a trace of an earlier painting visible under those layered on top of the canvas, I have layered several lives on top of this childhood home. Now, scraping off the richness of those years, I am back to my first love.

Two weeks, 4000 miles, twelve states, five homes of friends and family scattered across the country, a fall on a slippery sidewalk resulting in a shoulder injury that will remind me of a grocery store at a barren crossroads in Arkansas for months to come, one car repair in a dust and wind-whipped Wyoming town, and a panic-stricken two hours when I thought I had lost Smudge from a motel room, I arrive in western Washington to begin life with my mother in my new old home.

The Unreliable Narrator

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Mama has cognitive dysfunction, or brain fog. As the years go on, gradually more of her brain succumbs to the fog, while other parts continue to fight it—and me—in every way it can. While dementia is advanced cognitive dysfunction, and Alzheimer’s a type of dementia, I still don’t believe she has those more debilitating diseases. But the synaptic failure she does have brings those of us who care for her to our knees in frustration.

Arguably, the most frustrating thing is her invention of facts to help herself over the fumbling for what is lost in her short term memory. The cognitive dissonance between what she has made up, erroneously perceived, misremembered, or pulled from distant memory, and what I am telling her is truth, stresses and agitates her. She fights to reconcile them and come out on top.

“I don’t think the nightgown I had on last night is mine. It didn’t feel right. I couldn’t sleep.”

“The one hanging here is yours.”

“Which one is it?”

“It’s pink, with bright flower fabric sewn on the bottom.”

“There’s a new night aide. She said it was bright purple. I don’t have a bright purple gown.”

“You do have a purple gown, two in fact.”

“It’s lavender. Maybe she’s colorblind.”

“Maybe.”

It’s impossible to know if this conversation even happened, let alone what was said. She tells many tales I know are not true, though, and her insistence that they are decreases her happiness quotient. It’s not possible to talk her into the truth. Add to that the stories that may or may not have happened and she’s a very unhappy camper. And it’s all because she is living in a place she doesn’t want to be. It happened when she lived at home too. She doesn’t remember that.

The food is swill, though she liked it when she arrived three months ago. Everything has gravy. She hates it. We were walking the halls the other day and passed her table mate just before lunch time. “See you at gravy time,” Mama said to her. In fact, at my request, she (supposedly) hasn’t been served gravy for the past three weeks unless she requests it. But I can’t know she’s not getting it unless I attend every meal with her; I can’t rely on her to tell me. She didn’t like the food at home, either. She doesn’t remember that. True, it had no gravy, but she wanted gravy then, or sauce of some kind.

“Lorrayne told me the dessert at lunch was pumpkin pie,” Mama tells me. “It tasted like gravy.”

“The menu says it was applesauce pie,” I say. (I’m quite sure her table mate didn’t tell her it was pumpkin.)

“It tasted like chocolate cake,” she says. I roll my eyes.

I don’t know how to fix this. I know she wants to come home, because life was perfect at home. Except there was her bratty daughter, she had no visitors, she couldn’t do anything except sit, her caregivers irritated her. And she didn’t get what she wanted to eat prepared the way she wanted it, which was based on her unreliable memory of the way it used to taste.

I feel sure people think I am a terrible person for not being able to keep my mother at home.

All the Time in the World, Part 1

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December 2015

My mother wasn’t always old, I try to remember. She once had a straight spine and strong legs. Legs that rode a bicycle and climbed mountains. She met a man, fell in love, and survived the war years without him, writing and reading hundreds of letters that traveled for weeks to cross the ocean. She drove a box of a car with a manual transmission and cheap retread tires—rubber going to the war effort—to a paying job every day. She navigated a world of ration stamps and shopped store-to-store looking for scarce products like a Schick razor to send her love in England. She bought war bonds with money her new husband sent her along with a good portion of her own $2000-a-year income. For their future.

She once could see both what was right in front of her and the happiness well ahead. She had an independent streak that gave her the courage to rise above the poverty of love and economics of her childhood. Her mother modeled strength for her, though she didn’t realize it when she was younger, just as I haven’t recognized it in my mother until now.

As I stare into the past through my father’s letters, I struggle to reconcile that young woman I never knew with the middle-aged mother who raised me. She married the man her father could never be. Had that been enough? She let go of her fierce independence and took care of him, her children, and our home. She was housewife, mother, Girl Scout leader, and Sunday school teacher. Amen. At least that’s how I saw it.
At the beginning of a marriage during wartime that forced her to maintain her autonomy beyond the vows, I wonder if she sensed a coming conflict between making her own decisions and going along with her husband’s. A conflict I didn’t know dwelt in her until shortly before she died.

 

May 21, 1944
,  Sunday Evening

George, my dearest –

This has been a good weekend. Two letters from you on Saturday – enough to last until Monday. They bring you close to me. Especially when I realize you’re thinking about the things that are also going through my mind: the things we need to do – the things we’re going to do.

And the things you dream about for the future are just the things I’ve thought much of. And like you I don’t know which is most inviting: the West (northwest, or Colorado), the Tennessee Valley, or a place in the shadow of the Smokies (on the other side of the mountain). I’m pleased with all your ideas — they seem to be same as mine.

I never spend a lot of time thinking about where we’ll spend our time when you get back. But I dream a lot about just being with you forever. It won’t matter much where we are—we’ll be happy together!

I’ll love you always, Stellajoe

 

Life, love, hope. The world was their oyster.

Cookie Conundrum

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Mama is on a mission to find the best chocolate chip cookie, and Michelle is her unwitting accomplice. Can she make them the same way—per Mama’s instructions—using the same ingredients, and have them come out different? No. Today was cookie day, and Mama isn’t happy with the outcome.

“What was wrong this time?” I ask when I come to the kitchen to start dinner and she launches into her complaints. I’m determined to let her get it out without getting involved, and without mentioning there are two bags of cookies in the freezer and why did she need more anyway.

“They were too sweet!” she exclaims, like I should have known.

“They are cookies,” I say lightly. She ignores my comment.

“I told Michelle to use a teaspoon less sugar, but she doesn’t listen to instructions.”

“A teaspoon isn’t enough to make a difference,” I say, filling two pots with water for two kinds of pasta and putting them on the stove to boil. “If the recipe calls for half a cup of white sugar and half a cup of brown sugar, leave out all the white.” So much for not getting involved.

“Maybe you should make me cookies,” she snips, the since you know so much implied in her tone.

“Not a chance,” I say. She isn’t going to rob me of cookie-baking joy by hovering over me and then complaining about the outcome.

“I want Tollhouse cookies,” she says, pulling the brand name recipe out of her memory bank where everything is better than real life.

“Then use the Tollhouse recipe!” I say a little louder than necessary. I’m getting testy. I should drop it. I get the angel hair pasta out of the drawer for her and the penne for me. Angel hair is the only pasta she will eat, except when she won’t, and I didn’t get pre-approval.

“Maybe it was the chocolate chips,” she muses. “I like other kinds better than Ghirardelli.”

I take a deep breath. “Then stop putting Ghirardelli on your grocery list.” I’m going to lose my mind. I open my mouth to tell her that taste is one of the first things to go when the brain gets old, then clamp my lips shut. She is no longer interested in information, at least from me. Nothing will move her off her conviction that someone has failed her; arguing truth or rationality is futile, as is suggesting that something, though different from her memory, might still be delightful.

“What are you cooking for dinner?” she asks, as I drop the pasta into the boiling water.

“Pasta with chicken and asparagus.”

“I don’t think I can eat pasta tonight. And asparagus is out of season; it’s probably not good.” Finally, I am silent.

Walking with My Mother at the Mall on Super Bowl Sunday

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My mother never stopped being keen about walking, even when she could no longer walk in her beloved woods. The safest place for her to exercise is the Lewis County Mall, where she picks up a cart outside the Sears store and pushes it around and around the mall’s small interior.
On Super Bowl Sunday, I take her to walk. The mall is dark, the main doors locked. Let me explain the Lewis County Mall. There are only two stores: Sears and the scary “sporting goods” store, with dead animal heads on the walls and a pink t-shirt in the window sporting a knock-off of the Starbucks logo that says, “I love guns and coffee.” It was closed for the game. Other than that it’s all county services offices, also closed on Sunday. Hence the lockdown.
We enter through the Sears’ doors, past the clerks wearing Seahawks shirts, calling “Go Hawks!” to us.
“Who are the Seahawks playing against?” Mama asks me once we get a cart and begin our slow ramble.
“I have no idea,” I say.
She laughs. It’s a sound I rarely hear anymore.
“Does the winner go to the Rose Bowl?” she asks.
“I think so,” I say.