MOTHERLOVE
“Everything
happened to me all at once,” Mother said. Her voice was that of a hurt child,
stunned by the surprise of pain, as if it were a personal assault from the
universe, something she should have been immune to, protected from.
Her voice was
hoarse, her throat still sore from having a respiratory tube shoved down it a
week before. She lay propped up in bed now in the rehab center, wearing a
diaper, an ill-fitting faded hospital gown, and beige hospital socks with
skid-resistant rubber dots on the soles resembling sugar candy stuck on paper strips.
Mother had fallen
in the kitchen, fracturing the bone in her leg from knee to hip. Although more
than twice Mother’s weight in size, Father was unable to lift her, and had half
dragged her onto one of the vinyl-clad kitchen chairs, fortunately on wheels,
and rolled her into the bedroom and from the chair onto the bed. It was eleven o’clock at night, and the
couple, not wanting to disturb anyone, even the paramedics who might have
driven them to the hospital, decided to wait till morning. Mother lay there in
pain all night, while Father tried to soothe her as best he could.
In the morning
light, he dialed 911.
“I was going along
all right, when this had to happen,” Mother said. Her lips were down-turned in
the perpetual, self-pitying pout she wore, like a mask of suffering. When was
the last time I saw her smile? The last time she actually seemed to be enjoying
herself, enjoying life? I couldn’t remember. Her negativity hung in the room
like a wet, winged shroud, blocking out light and air. I felt its weight
pressing my chest, cramping my belly, filling my nostrils. It was a
claustrophobic feeling, but out of daughterly duty I was trapped. For these
hours by her bedside each day, I was compelled to endure her fears and
complaints and victimhood, psychological demons I had been running from for as
long as I could remember.
My sister combed
Mother’s thin hair. Gray roots showed for lack of the reddish brown hair dye
she’d missed applying this month.
“When you’re home,
I’ll do your hair,” my sister said.
My sister was a
lot better than me in dealing with Mother. For one, she could endure touching
Mother physically. I could hardly bear the feel of Mother’s reptilian, cold
white flesh. For another, my sister
thought of things to bring to the nursing home to make Mother more comfortable.
My sister reached into the cavernous canvas tote bag she always carried, and
pulled out a bed jacket, price tags still hanging from a sleeve.
“What’s this?”
Mother cried. “Why did you bring me this? I don’t need it. Don’t spend any
money on me. Take it back. Take it back to the store. Get your money back.”
It was a familiar
scene, played out over and over. My sister would buy something for Mother, and
Mother would reject it.
“Can’t you ever
accept a gift?” my sister said. “You don’t appreciate anything. I won’t ever
buy anything for you again.” It was an empty promise. Tomorrow she would surely
buy something else and try again to please Mother, to give her something, to
win her approval and love. I, on the other hand, brought nothing, thought of
nothing to bring. Instead, I sat there like a lump, wishing I was back at my
computer, back at work. Soon my sister turned to me and said, “If it were from
you, she’d take the bed jacket.” It was something she’d always say, and I would
always deny it, yet for reasons I couldn’t quite understand (maybe because I
was the older daughter), Mother did seem to seek my approval and love, even though my sister was immeasurably more
thoughtful and giving than I.
Father sat by the
window across from the bed in a wood-framed, vinyl-seated armchair, backlit by
the February afternoon sun. His eyes were closed. His cane rested against the
chair. A hardcover plastic-jacketed library book lay open, facedown, on his
bare knees. He wore khaki Bermuda shorts, a cotton knit golf shirt spread over
his huge belly, and a baseball cap embroidered with the words “Hollywood Hills”
that I had brought him from my last trip to California.
“Hy,” Mother
called out.
“Shh, he’s
sleeping,” I said. But Father stirred, hearing his wife’s familiar plea. For
the past five years, as arthritis began to impair her walking and macular
degeneration her eyesight, Mother had become increasingly dependent on Father.
With his own disabilities at eighty-eight, Father, as Mother’s caregiver, was
starting to buckle under the weight of her demands. His well-being was one of
the chief reasons I endured the daily incarceration at the nursing home.
“I have to go to
the bathroom,” Mother said. “I can’t hold it in.”
“You can go in
your diaper,” my sister said. Since the surgery on her leg that had required
the installation of a metal plate, Mother hadn’t wanted to or been able to eat.
She spurned the food that was delivered to her under a plastic dome at
mealtimes, and was nourished only by the nutritional and antibiotic IV system
hooked up to a shunt in her chest. The hospital stay or the surgery or some
other unclean handling had left her with a bowel infection that stimulated her
intestines toward elimination every half hour or so. She was weak and frail, a
shrunken figure in the bed, reduced to dependence and indignity greater than
she’d ever known.
My sister pressed
the call button to summon one of the nursing aides to clean Mother. The aide,
whose name was Princess, drew the curtain around the bed.
Princess was
Jamaican, a pretty, broad-faced woman with a pleasant Island lilt to her voice.
She handled Mother with tenderness and called her “sweetie,” unlike the other
CNAs who were sullen, impersonal, and seemed to resent attending the mostly
white patients in the nursing home.
My husband was a
nursing home administrator and because of the stories he told me, I was aware
of the racial tensions, attitudes, and complexities of staffing. Registered
nurses were in short supply, leaving the field for better paying, more highly
specialized jobs. South Florida’s current crop of certified nursing assistants,
who did most of the dirty work of patient care, came from various Caribbean
islands. Some were kind like Princess, others didn’t seem to place the same
value on kindness and gentleness. At worst, they were rough; at best, they were
indifferent to the comfort of the patients. Often, I’d pass two or three aides
in the corridor or at the nurses’ station, chatting in their native tongue,
oblivious to the discomfort of the residents who squirmed in their beds or called
out in confused voices for help.
We all rose as
Princess drew the curtain around Mother’s bed.
“I’ve been here
for hours,” my sister said. “I need a cigarette and I have to get home.”
“Go,” I said.
“I’ll stay for her dinner. Dad, why don’t you leave also? You’ve been here all
day. Go home. Eat dinner. Relax.”
Reluctantly, he
agreed. I caught my breath, afraid that he’d lose balance, as he held onto the
arms of his chair, steadying himself as he rose. He kissed my cheek. My sister
and I hugged.
I watched as
Father walked, totteringly, down the corridor. I wanted to run after him, to
steady and protect him from falling, but I knew he would refuse my help, just
as he refused my sister’s as they walked toward the lobby. Father’s balance was
off, and he leaned heavily on the wooden cane I had bought for him in a Mexican
market in San Antonio
three years back. It had taken me weeks to convince him to use it. Even now, he
sometimes left it in the car or in their condo instead of carrying it.
“Turn over for me,
sweetie,” I heard Princess tell Mother on the other side of the curtain. I
could smell the mess Princess had to clean, and I walked away toward the
window.
I looked out at
the planned serenity of the landscape, the sloping green lawn, palm trees, beds
of seasonal impatiens, red and coral and lilac colored. It was already
unseasonably warm where the sunlight fell direct, even for Florida in the spring, but the late
afternoon shadows lay across the lawn like up-ended dark towers, promising a refreshing
evening coolness. The day before, I’d noticed a woodpecker sawing away at the
trunk of a Royal palm tree, and sure enough, there he – or another who looked
the same – was again, his small red head bobbing persistently at the tree in
his quest for a hearty meal, tireless in his need for sustenance.
It was nearly
dinnertime for Mother, and I wondered if she would be tempted to eat tonight.
Her vision seemed to be worse in the nursing home, and we had to cut up her
food and sometimes place it on the fork or spoon. The night before I’d fed her
like a baby.
Princess left the
room and an aide from the kitchen appeared, carrying a plastic tray with
Mother’s meal.
Mother grimaced in
disgust as I described her dinner. “I’m not hungry,” she said.
I lifted the
plastic lid on a bowl of steaming chicken-and-rice soup, and urged her to take
a few spoonfuls before she cried that she’d had enough. When I pulled back the
lid on the main course, she wrinkled her nose in distaste. It was a quarter of
a very small roasted chicken.
“Eat a little,” I
said.
“No, I don’t want
any. I can’t swallow it.”
“Try. You need
some protein.”
I cut into the
breast part, and it was pink, nearly raw. I wouldn’t have eaten it. I nearly
gagged at the sight of the partially cooked flesh. You could see its bloody
veins.
“How about the
noodles?” I said. They were heaped in a congealed, pasty mass.
“No, I can’t eat.”
“OK. Here are
pears. You like them.” I dug the spoon into a canned half pear to cut it into a
bite-size morsel. Like me, Mother loved sweets. This would tempt her. And the
cool wetness would soothe her sore throat.
She swallowed the
first two spoonfuls, then turned her head away. “I can’t eat anymore.” The
sugary pear juice dribbled down her chin. I wiped it with a napkin.
“Do you want the
tea?” I asked.
“Yes, the tea.”
Finally, something she accepted. I dipped the teabag into the cup of now-tepid
water, and emptied an envelope of sweetener into the mix. She drank it
greedily. When she was done, I slid the bed
tray away from the bed, and removed the stained hand towel that had served as a
bib from under her neck.
Feeding
Mother was surprisingly satisfying to me. I was able to give her something, and
in the giving, I felt a shock of tenderness, even love, for her.
