Mother’s Day 2008
She seemed so frail; hunched over, skin of parchment, clinging to gnarled arthritic hands. When I hugged her, it seemed that if I squeezed too hard, she would snap like a dried twig.
I was in Wethersfield, Connecticut visiting my 91-year-old mother for Mother’s Day. I had seen her last year to celebrate her 90th. At that time, she was not doing well physically but seemed to perk up pretty well with all the relatives around her for her surprise party. And she seemed, in the past year, to improve dramatically. A bruised, arthritic leg that had virtually immobilized her seemed to be improving, though it still ached and she walked with a limp and a cane. In addition, her doctor had given her an anti-depressant medication that helped her mood a great deal. Better living through chemistry.
I wondered in those first moments how it would go between the two of us. What would I do with this 91-year-old woman who could barely move without experiencing some measure of pain? I was about to spend 4 days living under her roof and entering into her world.
I soon discovered that my mother, though frail in appearance, was still one tough cookie. Every step for her is painful, and yet, she makes her way around her small home each morning, making her bed, preparing her meager breakfast of tea and an English muffin, and planning her day. Though she has both a walker and a cane, called a “bahstouni” in Greek, she hobbles about without either. She says she is delighted that her house is small because if she loses her balance, there is always a wall nearby to “bounce into or off of” to support herself. I marvel at how active she is compared to the last time I saw her. When I offer to make her tea or her English muffin or prepare her lunch, she declines saying that she likes to keep moving because she feels better when she does.
It takes her quite a while to accomplish even the simplest tasks. And yet it is a blessing because she has little else besides television to fill her time when she is not doing her daily chores. She still makes her way up and down a fairly steep flight of stairs to do her laundry or iron her clothes. We, her family, have hired our niece to come in three times a week to do these chores and light housekeeping but my mother does not want to wait for Susan to come. She gets something in her mind and it must happen NOW. In fact, she feels guilty that we are paying Susan to do her chores when “she is perfectly able to do them (herself)”. Of course, she is able, but we all worry about her navigating the steep stairs from the first floor to the finished basement and back up again. But she has a system worked out for herself. When she needs to go to the basement, she will have several things that need to be done there. She will start a wash, iron some clothes, and has a TV there while she waits. “I never go down and right back up again”, she says, “I make a morning of it”. I argue that the stairs are steep and she sometimes loses her balance and she responds “that’s what the hand rail is for.” As I said, she is a tough cookie and she wants to do for herself and nobody else can do it the way or as well as she wants it done. That is not something new since she has gotten older. She has always been that way.
My mother loves to putter around in her yard, planting or transplanting flowers, raking leaves, and generally taking pride in the appearance of her property. She feels badly when snow accumulates in her driveway or leaves accumulate on her lawn. Actually, she feels embarrassed and ashamed of what the “neighbors might think” because her yard is not presentable. This is consistent with her over-all and lifetime obsession with appearances. As much as she loves to garden and putter in the yard, it is becoming, at age 91, increasingly more difficult. She has difficulty bending and standing again. Her arthritic hands cannot grasp and pull the weeds as she used to. She constantly expresses frustration at no longer being able to do the things she used to do, particularly in the yard.
Knowing all this, I have determined that while I am visiting, I will do some of the trimming, digging, and pruning that she has been wanting to do and unable to do. In addition, I suggest that we buy some mulch and spread it around her plants to make everything look prettier. So, after morning chores are completed, we hop in the car and head for Lowe’s to purchase mulch and other supplies.
Now one might think that making a quick trip to Lowe’s would not be a major enterprise but when you are 91, everything is a major endeavor. First of all, we do not simply leave the house, hop in the car, and head out. Leaving the house requires some significant effort because my mother, who has always been fearful to some extent, has become significantly more so since my father’s death and as she has aged. “There are a lot of bad people out there who wouldn’t hesitate to prey on an older person. Even though I don’t have much, there are drug addicts out there who will break into my home and take whatever they can to buy drugs.” Consequently, every door and every window in the house must be locked….at all times. When I say every door, I mean not only the two locks on the front and back doors but also the lock on the screen door and the storm door entry to her front porch. I fear that should anything happen to my mom, emergency personnel will have a very difficult time gaining access to her home to help her. If she goes out to get the morning paper, 4 locks must be undone and when she reenters, four locks must be redone. At night, every lock must be checked AND if I check it and tell her it is done, she will still wait until she thinks I am not watching her, and she will check the doors herself.
So off we go to Lowe’s. Our doors have been unlocked, the alarm has been set, and the doors have been relocked. It is now time for us to get in the car. Getting in and out of cars is no easy task for a woman carrying her purse, her cane, and a 91-year-old body. It is a slow process and as she stoops to enter, her legs can no longer do what they used to and she literally “falls” the last 6 inches into the passenger seat. But, while it worries me, it is a routine with which she has been very familiar for several years now, and she laughs as she tumbles into her seat and repeats again a phrase I will hear at least 100 times in the 4 days I spend with her: “You see, Charlie, you see what happens when you get old, I just can’t do things the way I used to.” I hear her loud and clear. She is sending me a warning: “Some day you will be here.” To myself, I think about another one of her favorite phrases: “The only thing golden about the “golden years” is your pee.” I am amazed at the courage and determination she displays in getting up and about. But I should not be surprised. This is a person who has been stubbornly determined to succeed and survive her entire life.
Once in the car, we head off to Lowe’s. But first, “Charlie, let’s go around the corner to the grocery store. I need to pick up a few things.” I know she needs nothing for herself and she is bent on getting some juice and oatmeal for breakfast for me because she learned that is what I eat.
My mom is not remembering things as well as she used to and has become afraid to drive because she is afraid of getting lost even within a few blocks of her home. But the strip mall which is two left turns from her home is one of the two centers of her “out of the house” world. The other is the church.
We go to the local Stop and Shop and she makes her way up and down the aisles pushing an empty grocery cart. I say: “We are only getting a few things, we don’t need a grocery cart.” And she responds: “I use it to steady myself when I walk.” These are the tricks you learn when you live to a ripe old age. We get the few things she was after and when we reach the checkout counter, I step in and pay for the few things we have. She wants to fight me for the bill. She says: “You are a guest in my home”. I reply, “No, I’m not, I’m your son.” She says: I know that better than anyone.” And she laughs.
I have to interrupt my story about our trip to Lowe’s to talk about something I have not mentioned in my writings about my mother. And it is important because of its impact on my life. What I have not mentioned before is my mother’s laugh. It is and always has been, the most musical laugh I have ever heard. Her laughter delights me and always has. I learned long ago to make my mother laugh. And I learned that the way to do it was to tease her. Even today, she talks about her grandson, my nephew Matthew, and how he is always teasing her. He says outrageous things to her and she laughs. I learned to say outrageous things to my mother to make her laugh. When I was in the 6th grade and had a crush on a girl, I knew that she was not interested in me the way she was interested in Tommy Cooper. But I was able to make her laugh. I knew how to tease her to get her attention. Tommy Cooper was her boyfriend but at least I could be her boy friend. My mother taught me that girls like to be teased and receive attention. And she taught me that teasing is not the same as “tormenting” or being hurtful. Because with my mother, there was never any doubt about when you crossed the line and what kind of reaction you would receive if you did. So, when the sad day comes that my mother leaves this world, I know that I will always be able to remember the sound of her laughter.
Laughing, she falls into the car. Laughing she declares her awareness that I am her son. My two sisters always refer to me in my mother’s presence as “my son, my son.” They maintain that because I was her first born AND a boy, that I was her favorite. I don’t recall any sort of favoritism being shown to be because of being a boy. I did all the same housework that my sisters did. I can dust, do laundry, iron clothes and keep house as well as any woman because I had to. But, my sisters maintain she had more pride in me than in them. They were “just girls” and I was a “boy”. I never experienced it in quite the positive way that they present it and the next part of our trip was to illustrate the downside of being “my son, my son”. Because the next stop was at the local bank that was about 5 stores down from the Stop and Shop. She did not, however, have any banking to do. My mother likes the tellers that work at the bank and apparently they have been very nice to the little old lady that comes to do her banking there. So, my mother wanted to stop in to the bank to introduce me to her “friends”. Now, for me, there is something very uncomfortable about being “shown off” to strangers. I feel like I am the medal on my mother’s chest and I am not interested in being anyone’s major accomplishment, perhaps because I am so aware of the flaws inherent in that accomplishment. Nevertheless, into the bank we went. And wouldn’t you know, the bank was really busy. So, my mother stood there waiting for her favorite teller to finish counting whatever she was counting. Finally, she tired of waiting, so she pointed at me and whispered to the teller from a distance of 12 feet or so: “MY SON”. I feebly waved “hello”, smiled dutifully, and mumbled “nice to meetcha” before walking out feeling like a 12 year old. This is apparently one of the benefits of being “my son, my son” which is the envy of my sisters. They can have it.
After one more stop at the Dollar store where my mother bought candy for me which I later discovered were chocolate covered peanuts which she loves but is not supposed to eat because she has diverticulitis, we set off for Lowes at long last. Now, it has been nearly many years since I have spent any time in the greater Hartford area. A lot of things have changed in those years. That meant two things: first, I had no idea where we were going because I had not been there for such a long time and second, my mother had no idea where we were going because although she used to know where everything was, she has now forgotten. Well, that’s not exactly true. She has a vague idea where things are----sort of . Fortunately, I had some directions from my sister and we headed off in the right general direction and eventually found Lowe’s, bought the things we needed and faced the ordeal of getting back into the car again. Once done, I made our way back home, impressing my mother with the fact that I could, indeed, find our way home. It was a perfect example of the blind leading the blind.
Once home, and having unlocked a lot of doors, we proceeded to our ultimate destination, the front yard. I thought it would take me no more than 30 minutes to spread the few bags of mulch we had purchased and, truthfully, it didn’t take much longer. However, while I busied myself hauling bags of mulch around, my mother decided that there were some weeds that just needed pulling. However, these weeds were actually suckers off the roots of a small tree. She spent the next half hour stooped over, under the tree snipping and pulling and being unwilling to quit no matter how emphatically I urged her to do so. Finally, I walked over and told her that the “weeds” she was trying to pull were actually new tree trunks growing out of the roots of the larger tree and that she was just NOT going to be able to pull those out of the ground. She finally concurred and we moved to the back yard where she issued orders for the trimming of tree branches which were reaching over the roof of the back porch, hedge trimming and finally, the digging of a small garden. While I did this work, which up until a few years ago, she would have done herself, she busied herself with more weed pulling and digging with a small trowel. In all, we worked in the yard for approximately two hours. And that was after going to the various stores in the strip mall and our trip to Lowe’s. Honestly, I was tired. To my amazement, my mother while tired, seemed no more fatigued than I, 26 years her junior.
Later that evening, after we had returned from my sister’s home where we had dinner and as we sat in front of the TV, my mother turned to me and said: “My back really hurts for some reason. What did we do today?’ As her memory problems have increased, I have tried not to carry the memory load for her but simply try to get her to remember. So, I said: “Mom, you tell me what we did today and why your back may be hurting”. I remember a few times the previous years where she would tell me on the phone that she was hurting but she really hadn’t done anything all day. There was no doubt in my mind that on those occasions, her “did nothing” was probably a day of doing quite a lot with some fatigue related forgetting at the end of the day. She backed up through her day, recalling one piece at a time of the things we did. And then she laughed. I looked knowingly at her and said” “I don’t know about you, but I’m beat. And if your back is NOT hurting, then you are more of a miracle than I already think you are.” And that was the beginning and end of the first day.
