I don’t think it is going to wear off. This anger and residual revulsion I feel towards my mom? I think it may lessen and fade some with time but I don’t think it is ever truly going to go away. How sad is that?
My mother decided on the evening of June 17th, 2007 that she was angry at me, and was going to stay angry at me for the rest of her life. Angry at me for wanting to leave her hospital room before she had explosive diarrhea. Really.
We (we being myself, my father and my husband) had already spent an hour standing around her room chatting and pretending she wasn’t passing chokingly noxious gas, because that’s what you DO when someone is in the hospital, when she told me she was about to get sick. I was like, “you’re going to throw up?” and she said, “no, the other way” and looked down at her stomach, which was audibly rumbling. So I started making, “well, we really should be going to dinner… getting hungry… had an early lunch” comments trying to get us out the door before, well, yuck happened.
And I’ll own this now. I am incredibly squeamish when it comes to other people and their bodies and the gross things they do. Working in an animal hospital I cleaned up every conceivable combination of biological messes and it never bothered me. When I worked at a coffee shop in college I didn’t even like having to touch people’s used cups and plates and silverware. I literally am in awe of dental hygienists because even with gloves I could NOT stick my hands into people’s mouths all day. I think people are icky. I’d found my mother’s morbid obesity repellant for years. And just laying there sick and unwashed in a hospital bed, she looked disgusting to me. Not a warm daughterly feeling, I know. For years I had looked at her, this obese crazy angry woman hiding in her house thinking people were trying to listen in on her phones and hack her computers, and thanked GOD that I was adopted. Since she had screamed at me several times in my life that she wished they’d never adopted me, I never felt too guilty for how grateful I felt that I wasn’t looking at my own genetic future.
So my dad, who has always been one of those men who, if you were kicking him under the table to get him to shut up would say, “why are you kicking me under the table?”, looked at my mom and said “do you want us to leave?” And here is where my mom and I apparently differ greatly because if my bowels were about to erupt I wouldn’t WANT it to happen in front of my husband and daughter and son-in-law. I wouldn’t actually want it to happen in front of ANYONE but I’d take nurses over family, especially family on their way out to eat Mexican food to celebrate my husband’s birthday AND Father’s Day. But no. My attempts to ease us out the door angered my mom and she answered, “No, but your daughter wants to leave”. And that woman might have been unable to move or even swallow on her own but she could still make it very clear when she was pissed off. And she was pissed off.
So my dad looked back at me and I flailed for a second and said, “you know… just getting really hungry… I thought we should get going” and John, who hadn’t even made a face during the last hazmat-worthy hour, backed my play by moving slightly closer to the door and my father, who never ONCE understood an interaction between my mother and I, was like “okay… I guess we’re going to go… I’ll be back later after they go back to the hotel”. And since John and I were not planning to come back to the hospital before we left town (we were getting up super early the next morning so after we drove back John would be able to work a half day), it was the last time I was going to see my mom that trip. I tried to say a nice goodbye but she wouldn’t even look at me and was very “whatever” and I was thinking, “okay fine… I’ll fix this sometime when she’s not about to explode” and I’m sure I said something about “see you next time” or “talk to you soon” and we left.
I never talked to her again. Actually, she never talked to me again. After that visit she refused to talk to me when I called the room and my dad told me that he tried to get her to look at the cards I sent but that she refused. Flowers I sent were dispatched to the nurses station.
The next time I saw her, over four months later, she was no longer conscious. I don’t think she was aware of the very last contact she and I had the day before she died. Her doctor, to be fair, was great to my mom and came to the hospital every day and never gave up on trying to heal her. I give her props for that, but she fully believed I should have moved back to Bakersfield for the eight-month duration of my mother’s illness and never missed a chance to tell me stories about how when SHE got sick her son moved back home to take care of HER and generally made it clear she thought I was a horrible daughter.
<*deep breath*>
Okay even now, trying to type about this, my chest hurts. Her doctor had decided I needed to, I don’t even know, reach out to my mother or something and she got me up out of my chair and had me standing right next to my mom (who had been totally unresponsive for over two days at this point) and was prompting me “talk to her… she knows you’re here”. So I’m there feeling about as awkward as I ever have and I’m fumbling out something like, “Hi mom… it’s me Laurel… I’m here and dad’s here and” and the doctor interrupts me and says “she’s gotten deaf, you have to be louder”. So I try to say it louder and it sounds all wrong loud and then she grabs my gloved hand (we had to wear gloves and gowns whenever we were in the room) and forces my hand down to pet my mom’s forehead and the plastic sounds really loud against my mom’s skin and the room starts to go sparkly and tilty and I spin away from her, bounce off my dad and fling myself into the bathroom and manage, after a few minutes with my head between my legs and some deep breathing, not to vomit everywhere. When I came back out I tried to give her a look that said “touch me again and I will cut you” and made my way back to the corner of the room. As soon as I was stable I excused myself and went outside to call my friend so I could say, “oh my god I almost threw up all over my dying mother and then passed out”.
I sat in my mother’s hospital room with my dad that whole last day and (this would have made her angry too if she’d been aware of it) my dad and I would have totally missed her actual death if the nurses (who were apparently monitoring her much more closely than I’d realized from the nurses station) hadn’t come running into her room (interrupting a nice chat we were having) saying “this is it” and then, when we didn’t move, with more urgency, “Now! This is it now!”
So we stood on either side of her bed, my dad with his hand on her face, and she died. There wasn’t one of those machines you always see on TV hospitals that goes “beep… beep… beep… beeeeeeeeeeeeee” so it was actually very quiet. And one of the nurses said “she’s gone” and my dad started to cry and I stood there feeling something like relief and mostly just empty and then my cell phone went off playing “Sally’s Lament” from The Nightmare Before Christmas (“I sense there's something in the wind… that feels like tragedy's at hand”) and I grabbed at the phone to stop it singing and tried to squelch the little laugh in my throat at the irony of the lyrics floating through the room and whispered to the friend who called “I have to call you back my mom just died”. I still don’t remember who it was that called. And then there was paperwork and my mother’s doctor, who had arrived about ten minutes after she died, making snide comments like “will you be leaving now or staying for the funeral?” I almost called her a bitchy cunt right there in front of my dad and all the nurses because I knew that I was not only going to be attending the funeral I was going to be planning every single bit of it.
We finally left the hospital, me to go back to my hotel room to call John and tell him that he needed to drive down tomorrow, my dad to the house to probably cry a lot more. And so I planned the funeral. I picked out flowers and the casket and the design and what the gravestone would say. I wrote her obituary and picked out the photo to go with it. I picked out the clothes and jewelry she would be buried in. I’d say “Mom would have liked this” and dad would agree with me. I told him that mom wouldn’t mind if the minister of dad’s church did the service even though she’d asked for someone else. I said that she’d want what was best for my dad which was to have his minister there. I lied about that but I didn’t feel bad about it. All my dad had left (since my mother had chased pretty much everyone away with her craziness) was people from church and I was damned if we were going to alienate any of them by having someone else perform her service. Since I’ve always believed that once you die it immediately ceases to be about you and immediately starts being about the people you’ve left behind I had no problem arranging it all in a way that would be best for my dad.
The worst moment of all of happened the Sunday evening two days after she died. I had spent all day on the phone calling all my mom’s old friends to tell them that she’d died and then find out if they had understood that she’d been seriously mentally ill the last several years of her life. Most of them had. I had painful, arduous, intense conversation after painful, ardous, intense conversation. Friends who had loved my mom. Friends who had tried so hard to hang in there but finally couldn’t take it. Friends who hadn’t known and thought they must have done somethng wrong. They all had stories they needed to tell, explanations to give or that needed to be given. And every single one of them made sure to tell me how I had to take care of my dad now. What I owed him. I needed to call him every day. I needed to come visit him every weekend. It was my job. My duty as a daughter. By the time I hung up the last call I literally felt like someone had beaten the crap out of me. I was actually still sitting on the floor leaning agaist the guest bed after having hung up the phone on the last call when my dad burst into the room in a panic, “Oh my GOD! We forgot your Aunt Nancy’s birthday! What are we going to do! Tomorrow is her birthday!”
And I lost what was left of my frazzled exhausted mind. Because all the funeral planning I had done? Was for a service that was going to take place on MY birthday, the day after tomorrow. My dad never realized it, no matter how many times the man at the mortuary said “December 4th”, and I decided to just leave it because it wasn’t like waiting one more day to have the service was going to make my birthday suck less. My dad hadn’t realized that he was planning his wife’s funeral on his daughter’s birthday. But he had realized he forgotten his wife’s sister’s birthday and THAT was worthy of panic. That was important. And I realized that if I didn’t get out of the house that second I was going to break things, throw things, say things that could never be taken back, and I ran out of the house. The house that John was in. I ran past my own car without seeing it. It was almost like I was back in high school when things would get so bad sometimes I would just start running.
So I ran and sobbed in the dark and the cold and after about 15 minutes my cell phone rang, which I hadn’t even realized was in my pocket, and it was John wanting to know what happened and where I was and could I tell him so he could come get me. And I said no. And he was like “let me at least bring you a coat it is freezing out there” so I told him the address I was running to and hung up. I was running to Evelyn’s mom’s house. Luckily Evelyn’s mom had been briefed that I might at any time show up crying (it was something I had done several times over the years).
Evelyn’s mom was home, thank God, and held me and let me cry and spill out the story and her little dog danced around and licked the tears out of my nostrils which made it really hard to keep crying. When I could finally talk and breathe normally again I went outside and John was sitting in our car parked across the street. I knocked on the car window and John took me back to the house.
Where my dad was waiting and still had no idea what had happened. I told him, “I’m going to explain to you why I ran out of here in tears but you DO NOT get to have another crying fit about it. I don’t want to take care of you more right now. So you just have to deal with this”. And I told him that he had completely forgotten MY birthday while planning mom’s funeral on it but that he remembered Aunt Nancy’s and that really that just sucked. And he started to have a fit, I gave him a LOOK, he went out to the garage and had his fit there and John just hugged me and said “I’m so sorry babe” over and over again.
The day before the funeral I found almost all of the jewelry that supposedly had been “stolen” by “them” over the years. I was actually just looking for a warm pair of socks in my mom’s top dresser drawer when I spotted what looked like a makeup case wrapped in enormous maxi pads. Weird enough to warrant further investigation. I pulled it out and it was heavy and went “jingle clank.” I opened it over her bed and jewelry poured out. Maybe 60 rings, pins, a tangle of necklaces. She had taken all her jewelry out of its boxes and hidden it in this case so “they” couldn’t find it and then forgotten that she’d done it, leaving her with empty boxes as proof of the theft. Her wedding ring was in there. I thought my dad would be happy it wasn’t lost after all but the proof that she really had been delusional seemed to just make him more sad. He also said it was all mine now.
I took all the good pieces, put them back in their boxes, stuffed them all in a gift bag and took them home with me. I gave them away to friends and family for Christmas when I got back home. Lord knows I wasn’t in the mood to shop and everyone else seemed pretty excited. Since my mother’s jewelry shopping was almost as compulsive as her doll buying there was something for everyone. I kept a couple of rings because I felt like I should and because people told me I would want to have them later. I still can’t wear them. I actually don’t even like touching them when I paw across them in my jewelry box, but maybe someday. Maybe people are right.
Nine months after she died my father got around to telling me that my mother had left me a substantial amount of money. Not like “we’re rich!” money but a sizeable chunk. Money my dad had given to her but that she had put in an account with only her name and mine on it. The account had been created so long ago that my name was so faded on the account card you could barely make it out. My best guess is that it was her emergency divorce fund. I certainly don’t believe she ever meant to leave me a lot of money. He actually told me about it because he wanted to know if I would give it back to her estate so he wouldn’t have to deal with the paperwork of proving it wasn’t part of the estate.
I thought maybe he needed the money but was able to finally ascertain that no, he didn’t need the money, he just really didn’t want to fill out the forms and wait for the paperwork to come back. I actually asked this exact question, “So you are asking me to give you this life-changing amount of money back, money we could use to put a down payment on a house, not because you need it, but because you don’t want to deal with some extra estate paperwork?” and he said, “Well, yes.” And then I told him I thought he needed to take some time to think about just how fucked up and selfish that was and I got off the phone. And cried. And apparently he did think about it and realized that, wow, that was INDEED fucked up and selfish. So then I pointed out that if I closed out the account that paperwork would automatically be generated that would show, since now that it was gone, that it was not part of the estate. That I would be happy to give him copies of all the paperwork they would be giving to me. So he wouldn’t have to worry about the paperwork. And then I drove to Bakersfield, closed the account, drove a mile down the street to my bank and deposited the check. And then had a very nice lunch with my father.
The money was fun. I set aside some of it as “my mom was a bitch but at least I got some money” money and I got a personal trainer and a day at the spa and now my friends and I all have Coach bags. They say money can’t buy happiness but I think that’s not true if you’re spending it on other people along with yourself. And now we have a larger cushion in place if the economy gets even worse or John loses his job.
Despite all the admonishments from my mother’s old friends I do not call my dad every day or visit him every weekend. My dad would get out of my mother’s way so she could throw something at me and he backed her up on every horrible thing she ever did to me. One year when I came home for Christmas my mother somehow figured out that I was sleeping with an ex-boyfriend. She chased me around the house calling me a slut and a whore. At that time in my life I had had sex with a grand total of two people. On the way to church the next morning I told my dad that if my mom didn’t stop calling me horrible names I was going to drive back home and have Christmas by myself. He said, and I quote him here, “Well, Laurel, if you weren’t acting like a slut your mother wouldn’t have to call you one” and then we went into church together.
That’s my dad. The last time I went down to visit him he was ten minutes late to church (which I was only attending because he wants me to go) because my Aunt Nancy decided at the last minute that she wanted a Dr. Pepper that morning. He didn’t tell her, “Laurel is in town for the weekend and I’m supposed to meet her for church at nine so I will get you a Dr. Pepper after she and I have brunch.” Instead he went and got her a Dr. Pepper and let me sit there by myself for the first ten minutes of the service. Then he cried when I got in my car to drive home after brunch. He gets Christmas-ish visits, Father’s Day weekend and a phone call every couple of weeks. And I’m okay with that.
My mom decided to hold a grudge against me. As far as I know she was still mad at me when she died. She never said anything to my dad like, you know, tell Laurel I love her. Never in all this drawn out protracted dying process did she try to say goodbye or acknowledge any of my attempts at further contact. I know she was crazy but it was still a horrible thing to do to your only child. And it surprised absolutely no one that knew me or my mother. I know I’d made comments over the years that she probably would die angry at me over something stupid but the naïve part of me was still shocked when it actually happened. My mom really did die not speaking to me over something petty.
And that’s what I’m left with. Some money, an embarrassing story with the word diarrhea in it, anger I can never resolve and a wound I can never fully heal.
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