My father calls on a Friday afternoon in early September: “Mom’s in the hospital again. You need to come home and visit her.”
“Dad, I can’t. I finally found a job and my first day is tomorrow.” I graduated from college in the spring and it has taken me most of the summer to find a job at the local supermarket.
“Tell them you’ve had a death in the family. They’ll let you start on Monday.” I can’t believe my father is telling me to lie to my new employer.
“Dad, I can’t risk getting fired. I’m completely broke – I need this job.” I don’t mention the fact that he has not offered to help me financially, even though he knows about my situation.
I try a different tack: “Why should I visit? What is the point? She won’t even talk to me. Sometimes I think she doesn’t even remember who I am.”
My father explodes with fury: “You should visit because she’s your mother! You should visit because she gave birth to you and has cared for you your entire life, and now she’s sick and needs you to care for her! You should visit because that’s what a decent daughter would do!”
“But Dad, how can I care for her? She won’t let me close to her. She ignores me. I don’t know how to help her.”
“Stop thinking about yourself and think about your mother for a change. The way to help her is to just listen to her.”
“But she barely talks to me. And the things she says are really scary. Or they don’t make any sense.”
“Karen, I want you on the next bus. I’ve got the schedule in my hand. It leaves UMass in an hour. I’ll be at the Natick station to pick you up. You WILL visit your mother.”
I give up. I call my new boss and tell her that my grandfather has died and I need to go to his funeral. She’s very nice and tells me I can start work on Monday. I toss a few things in my backpack and hitchhike to the university. I sit on the stone bench until the next Peter Pan bus leaves for Boston. I get off at the Natick stop and head for my father’s car. I get in without saying hello and we ride home in silence.
After dinner, I take my mother’s station wagon and head to the hospital for visiting hours. My mother is on the psych ward. When I get to her room, she’s lying in bed. She doesn’t look at me when I come in and doesn’t answer me when I say hi. I ask her how she is, but she doesn’t respond. I ask her if there’s anything I can get her, but she doesn’t respond. I talk to her for a while about my siblings, the family pets, anything I can think of that might interest her, but she doesn’t respond. Eventually I stop talking and just sit quietly by her bed until a nurse comes to tell me that visiting hours are over.
I’m grateful that my mother is still alive, but I can see that she’s not really here any more. She’s no longer present. She no longer sees me. She no longer seems to remember that she once adored me. I feel like I will lose my own mind if she doesn’t get better. Without her I’m completely lost.
I spend Saturday cleaning the house and doing some laundry. That evening, I visit my mother again, with the same results. On Sunday, my father takes me back to the Natick station so I can catch the bus back to Amherst.
So bleak, and your description here and in the previous piece of your mom’s decline is heart-rending. And terrifying I imagine, for the young Karen.
Also complex and painful is your Dad’s response; he’s isolated and overwhelmed too, and impossibly desperate for you to be an adult ally. All of you (and your younger siblings) in so much pain; my heart goes out to all of you.
Thanks, Gina. One of the things that seems saddest to me about all of this is that my father and I couldn’t figure out how to be allies. I wanted him to take care of me and he wanted me to take care of him. Neither of us could do this for the other. We were too lost and wounded.
This brings back so many sad memories. I was in high school during the worst of mom’s illness, breakdown, depression – I’m never sure what to call it. I was so used to her listening with interest (or at least feigning interest) to my typical self-involved teenage up and downs with school, friends and boys. I was very sad and angry at both Mom and Dad and felt guilty about it. I remember breaking down at school to a trusted teacher about the difficulties of life without Mom there for me. I was your typical teen and was no help to Dad in an emotional or practical way, nor was any help to me. I was never close to him. At least Mom and Dad raised us to be self-reliant beings at an early age, an important life skill that helped get us through those bad times.
It was a terrible time for all of us. I didn’t understand until many years later what it was like for you and the other kids to be living at home while everything was falling apart. I worried about all of you, and I tried to get Dad to let me take a leave of absence from school so I could live at home and help take care of everyone. But he wouldn’t hear of it. I was too sunk in my own despair to reach out to any of you back then, which I deeply regret. Somehow, none of us knew how to be allies for each other. Certainly, Dad didn’t know how to let any of us help him, nor did he know how to help us. Like you, I was sad and angry at both Mom and Dad for not being there for me, and also felt guilty about it. I was supposed to be old enough to handle life on my own. After all, Mom and Dad were on their own when they were college-aged. But I didn’t know how to move forward with my life without their support. I felt frozen in place. In the end, walking away from them was the only way I could start to live my life again.