the mother we get

a diary of my mother's stubborn resistance to accept help

27 April 2025:

Of course there were bright spots.

Watching my mother dress for a date, singing and shimmying around our apartment in her pantyhose, bra, and strappy black sandals. Watching Laugh-In beside her on the couch, laughing when she laughed because I didn’t understand any of the jokes. My purple bike hidden in the bathtub on Christmas Eve. Reading Winnie-the-Pooh in bed. Running in a park, standing under the redwoods. Eating banana splits, which she loved. My mother was beautiful, full of energy and fun, a terrible cook, killed all the houseplants, sang off key, spent too much money on her clothes, and it was a joy to be in her light. Except when it wasn’t.

There are stories women are afraid to tell. We’re schooled that it is impolite to talk about private pain, difficult relationships, disappointments in the sanctified mother/daughter relationship. I grew up believing it was embarrassing to want too much from my mother. As I’m struggling now between responsibility and burden, trying to figure out where my boundaries land, it helps to remember:

• I was 3 / She was 25: Someone poolside asked her, “Does your little girl know how to swim?” The story is, she was teaching swimming lessons to a small group of children, and I was drowning. I had to be resuscitated.

• I was 5 / She was 27 – In the morning I found her rumpled and tear streaked on the couch. She told me, “I was so sad, Bunny. I was going to take these pills.” She held out a bottle, maybe she rattled it. “I held onto your kindergarten picture to stay alive.”

• I was 6 / She was 28 – Her friends ate psychedelics one night. My mother fell out of a tree and broke her foot. Another family member found me in the middle of the night, woke me up to tell me her face was melting off. “You’re the only one who can keep me safe.” She climbed into my bed.

• I was 7 / She was 29 – “You may as well know, your father left us at the hospital when you were born. It wasn’t you, he just didn’t want a kid.”

• I was 7 / She was 29 – “He left because he wanted a girlfriend, not an instant-family.” The breakup with this boyfriend sent my mother into a many months long depression. She didn’t get out of bed except to go to work. We ordered Chicken Delight and ate in her bed in front of the news of the Viet Nam War – body counts at the bottom of the screen.

• I was 8 / She was 30 – We moved so much I was always seeking to make new friends. I never had birthday parties. My mother surprised me this year with a cake and 2 neighbor kids. I was excited, until I saw the cake, it had a pile of joke shop dog poop in the center. I tried to pretend it was okay—that she was funny.

• I was 9 / She was 31 – On the way to the school bus stop I was hit by a car, grazed on my elbow. I told no one. I thought it was my fault. At school my elbow swelled up so large the teacher noticed and sent me to the nurse. I had been trained to take no space.

• I was 9 / She was 31 – I heard strange sounds, cries and whispers from her side of our bedroom. Listening in the dark I became frightened and began to cry. “Go back to sleep,” she said.

• I was 10 / She was 32 – I was ready to go, excited by the door and she said, “I already know you’re good. Why should I go to back to school night?”

• I was16 / She was 38 – I reached out to a friend of hers, a woman whom I admired, who seemed to be a helpful and engaged mother. I asked this friend to help me consider college preparation. The friend told me that my mother forbade her from talking to me, that my mother felt threatened.

• I was 16 / She was 38 – “When are you going to move out?” She asked me in November. 2 months later I did. I was a senior in high school, working two jobs. At the time I thought it was fantastic!

• I was 20 / She was 42 – The first time I published a story in a literary magazine and read to an audience she refused to come. But then she did show up, and in the middle of my reading she stood, stomped from the room, slamming the auditorium door.

• I was 21 / She was 43 – “You’re not better than me.” (Isn’t that what we all want? Our children to be better than us?)

• I was 31 / She was 53 – “It’s too painful.” This is what she told me when I asked why she never came to see me in the hospital when our daughter was born.

• I was 45 / She was 67 – “Leave me alone.” This she insisted when she retired early, refused to get a part time job, took a reverse mortgage, and set herself on a path for a disastrous dotage. My husband and I begged her to keep working. We purchased Long Term Care Insurance for her.

• I was 55 / She was 77 – “Leave me alone.” This when she began falling, in her home, on the street, and hiding it. Fractured tibia, broken pinky, scabby shins.

• I am 63 / She is 85 – “Get the fuck out of my house,” she yells at us. Until it’s the EMTs who take her away in a stretcher after a fall.

I write this catalogue for me. I write this catalogue because I wonder why I put up with her truculent and abusive behavior today? Was I groomed to erase myself? To field 3 -10 calls, texts, and emails everyday for weeks and weeks? All dealing with her -- rudeness to caregivers at her ALF, lying about her falls, refusing to shower, demanding boxes to pack so she can move—nowhere, after visit summaries from PTs, OTs, and nurses, calls from the bank, texts from friends telling me she hung up on them again, her meds needing modification. Calls to CPAs, attorneys, Adult Protective Services. She is eating my life.

It’s said that every interesting story must have a monster, that everything is copy. Good god, really? Day by day, I chip away. There is no conclusion here. Everything just is.