At 16 years old I wanted my mother to be dead. I fantasized that I had stabbed her, although I couldn’t really imagine the act or the horror of it, just the distant aftermath. It was an annihilating rage more than a specific vision, and it came packaged with another deeply weird notion:
In prison, at least I’ll get to read and write lots of books.
Even in my darkest imaginings, I couldn’t stop the compensatory overachieving.
Forty years removed from that sulfurous pit of damaged teen hyper-drama and wishful sociopathy, I can say this stuff out loud. I’m aware of its shock value but unattached to its weight. I can pick it up and put it down, a curiosity, inert. My momentary murderous thought is an insignificant fact that took place in a different millennium. Nearly all the cells in my body have been replaced since then, a couple of times over.
What was it, you wonder? What could possibly have been so bad back then? The reality of our childhood home resists easy description but words like badgering, belittling, criticizing, mistrusting, bullying, judging, and obsessing set a general tone. Occasional dire warnings of hellfire and spinsterhood. Occasional threats to be disinherited. Near-daily scrutiny of weight, hair, and clothes. I mean, some of this stuff is pro forma. It comes straight from the playbook, ho-hum. Emotionally unstable mothers tend to crush their daughters’ souls. In other news, the Earth is the third planet from the Sun. Pithier answer: Mom was either a maelstrom of rage and insult or a threatening, unpredictable silence. You could say she had plenty of good reasons to be monstrously stressed out (Dad, for one) but that’s beside the point.
Truth be told, there was a significant counterweight of regular life stuff: food, shelter, friends, schools, clothes, pets, books, toys, musical instruments, chemistry sets, bicycles, Broadway show tickets, and beach vacations. I will not depict ours as a house of horrors, no.
Still. No meaningful conversations. No sensible advice or hands-on emotional help. No stories from back in India. Nothing in the way of a familial consensus. No consistent tenderness or camaraderie or affection. No connectedness. Many needs unmet. To put it in words sounds bad but not terrible, right? Somehow it was just terrible enough.
Forty years ago. There have been escapes and feints, confrontation and avoidance; there have therapists and meditation and blind drunk benders on the Upper West Side; there have been rotating gym obsessions and imperfectly practiced anger management techniques. There have been forty years of hard lessons and unexpected grace, of journals and journals and journals scribbled fast and piled several feet high. There have been empathetic friends, tear-and-coffee-stained self-help books, and one single deliberate self-study program in good mothering undertaken the way other people approach their doctoral degrees….
Forty years of risks taken, fears slayed, bold decisions made, epiphanies observed….
And I can honestly say I am no longer that scared, incensed 16-year-old with a screeching, perseverating banshee where her mother should have been. I am now a high-functioning, productive, responsible, loving, forgiving, teachable creature, flawed within the standard range, tough and tender in reasonable proportions. And the all-consuming matriarch is now a little old lady whose paid caretakers seem to like her, even though she yells at them all the time.
In my twenties, thirties, and early forties, I attempted various ways to accommodate the ongoing existence of my unlovable mother. But there was no safety to be found in her. Her primary MO still involved control and criticism and complaint. Whenever she tried to hug or kiss me, I felt physically repulsed. Later on, when I’d gained enough empathy to see the fear, loneliness, and unexamined compulsion that drove her, I still didn’t want her to touch me. Not even in my thoughts. Once after I dutifully, churlishly sent her a generic Bath & Bodyworks gift for her birthday, she called and said, Your gift reminds me of your love! I hung up the phone and wanted to vomit. The abstract hint of a connection between my purchasing some lotion and her hands using it was enough to disturb me. Love? I was just getting the damn task over with to avoid guilt.
I went through the motions, waiting for the day when she simply magically effortlessly no longer existed and I could be relieved of my role as her daughter. She enabled and even accelerated this vision by having lawyers write frequent revisions to her will and sending me copies. She was still in her 50s and healthy when she began doing this. Don’t you dare ignore me was one way to read the meaning of the gesture; Don’t ever abandon me is another interpretation. Either way, I thought I might be caught forever.
When the magical seamless disappearance of my mother didn’t happen fast enough, when she wasn’t singularly raptured out of my sight, I estranged myself for seven years. Oh, of course, there was a precipitating argument, a typical flareup full of bullshit and threats, not worth repeating now. But I was a mother myself by then, and she’d moved to the other coast following a man and had not made herself felt or seen very much as a grandmother. Suddenly I knew I had to get her belligerence out of my ear so I could become a calm, centered grownup. I went into emotional quarantine with my own little family unit. I could no longer risk being infected by her crazy. I shut her out for a while so my own son could find the safety in me. Kindness, forgiveness, joy. Love more or less without conditions. Somehow I had it in me to give him.
He is nineteen now and voluntarily hugs me without hesitation. He also gets a little annoyed if I don’t add my Heart or Fire response to his Instagram posts. He’s going for the big numbers.
In late 2017 my father was in the care of his second wife and close to dying. I never quite estranged myself from him; that would have been redundant. Our connection by that point was lightweight, full of nothing. Somewhere during that era, it occurred to me that I was ready now, emotionally waterproofed enough to see my mother without capsizing. I needed to do so if only to forestall future guilt and shame when she reached the place my father was heading.
I had becalmed myself, more or less. I took my son to visit her. She was thrilled to have me back, and on her best behavior for a while. The time away had done some good; she told a few interesting stories about her childhood and early days in this country, stories I’d never heard before. Without any discussion at all of my long absence, she thrust me into the eldest child role again, making me her medical and financial attorney-in-fact after my sister’s short stint in the job.
Her tripwire raging had mellowed, although as she got sicker and older, I still found myself stuck as either the target of her fear-driven nastiness or her primary confidante/advocate. The oscillation was dizzying.
A bottoming-out came just about a year ago when a UTI turned into brain swelling and she had ended up in the ER, then hospital, then rehab facility. That was the first of six California trips I took between mid-July 2021 and mid-August 2022. The early ones were ugly. Her fear and rage were florid, operatic, frightening. I understood it was a medical situation now and tried to be her practical advocate and nothing more, but I was still semi-triggered. At one point she was found in a fetal position in her hospital bed; at another point, she seemed to have forgotten English and was yelling in Gujarati. Her usual paranoia reached a fever pitch; convinced that she had been perfectly healthy before being taken to the ER, she badgered me about finding a malpractice lawyer. At first, I felt urged to comply. Then I came to my senses. Where’s the suit? You’re not dead!
Some of my old resentment bubbled up from forty years ago. I didn’t say these things but I felt them: Just go now! Don’t make me suffer because of your suffering! What are you waiting for? She didn’t oblige. She got strong enough to return home to her assisted living apartment, diminished and significantly quieted, but content. It is the place she feels safe.
I chilled out, as well. Oh, therapy therapy therapy meditation. Lordy, the full dose of both. Many cocktails with empathetic friends—the family I had made for myself over time. More therapy. We established a hospice protocol to ensure that she would never see the inside of an ambulance or ER or hospital again, her firmest wish. This comforted her. She could still be ornery and demanding but at least she was home, the place she had lived for 12 years.
I was there again two weeks ago. She was shrinking but still sharp. She insisted on reviewing her most recent retirement account statements; she pored over them slowly, as if any of it mattered anymore. She has been micromanaging the practical aspects of her death for decades; once again, she made sure I knew where things were, the paperwork for the burial plot she bought when she was 77, the file with her will, the names and numbers of the very few remaining friends she had. When asked, I lied to her that I was still dating my spring boyfriend who was now just a friend. She wondered if he ate pork and marveled when I said yes because she believes all Jews keep kosher. She told me she sometimes wished she would turn on the television and find me there singing. She asked me if her grandson was getting straight As at college. She wondered aloud who would take care of me when I’m old.
Her body and mind are getting ready. A decade or more of heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes has worn down the machinery. Lethargy is winning. At 85 she is only alert and oriented for a few minutes at a time. Otherwise, she is so hard asleep that the gentle med techs, all of them petite and polite young women, struggle to shake her awake.
Two weeks ago I left California with a vague plan to return in a month or so. Maybe I would also rise to the occasion and do a nice thing by being there on her 86th birthday on December 10. The day after I’d flown home, she began to take a series of alarming downturns, one by one. She refused to be showered. Refused to be escorted to the dining room. Refused oxygen even though she was short of breath. A few days later she refused pain meds and refused a plan to bring a hospital bed into her apartment. Her body started saying no more.
This past Sunday morning she refused to get out of her bed. Hospice made its message clear1—polite, professional, kind: It’s probably now or never. So today I fly back out west. My sister will join me soon. Maybe it’s the last vigil, maybe not quite. A December 10th birthday visit seems highly unlikely. Despite everything, I am glad I can sit with our mother. I’d rather not leave her entirely alone in her last conscious moments, if possible. I guess this means something, even if I struggle to call it love. I mean, of course, it is that. What else could it be? The word itself resists me.
Will I miss her? This woman I wished would simply go away during so many years of our brief time coexisting? I don’t know. I doubt it—we have not had anything you could call a real relationship in our whole lives—but who knows what self-contradictory game my heart will decide to play at that time? Who knows what unanswered question I’ll find myself wishing I could ask her?
Will I regret anything? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t think so, but how can I know?
At the very least, I’m glad the rage and disgust have drained away. I’m glad I can feel gratitude for the good things she did for me. I’m glad I can look at my beautiful life and know I did okay, better than okay, even bereft of the one thing each of us needs the most: a steady, active kindness that lets you know you are loved without condition by at least one human being in the whole world. I will hold her hand and it will be okay. It’s okay to touch her now. It doesn’t upset me anymore. I can do us both this final kindness. This woman I once hated so much.
One Halloween when my sister was around 10 or 11, Mom made her a mouse costume. She sewed it from scratch without a pattern. Dreamed it up and just guesstimated the proportions and the cutting angles. Shiny gray material for the legs and torso and head, with felt the color of Pepto Bismol for the belly and inside the ears. The tail…I don’t remember how she constructed it, maybe some braided yarn. The ears may have stood upright—not sure how. Cardboard inserts, maybe. It was just the one time, this beautifully constructed costume she conjured up out of her imagination and somehow knew how to piece together on the Singer. She was gifted like that, an improviser. She was a physician/surgeon and primary breadwinner, a mistreated wife, an unstable person from a weird family full of bullies, theocrats, sexists, and manipulators, and, for all of that, deeply enraged and embittered. She was very good at a lot of things, but motherhood, not so much. Once in a rare while, though.
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Update as of Wednesday, August 24: My mother seems to have made a small rebound, and yet she is still shockingly diminished even compared with two weeks ago. My writing above may have been slightly premature, and yet its substance stands. We shall see what happens and when, but there’s only one direction.
What an opening. You write like no one else. Wishing you peace. These are tough times.
Peace and best thoughts as you proceed on this journey of the inevitable.