Mother Daughter Me Read Free

when it was time for Norm’s bloodthinner, or cholesterol medicine, or whatever other drug he happened to be on at the time. As suffocating as such a relationship appeared from the outside, it clearly worked for my mother, and Norm seemed to putter through his days happily enough. He had the love and undivided attention of an intelligent, lively woman who brought
New Yorker
cartoons and balsamic vinegar into his life.
    As the two of them grew older, doctors’ visits occurred at least twice a week, knees got replaced, teeth crowned, skin cancers lasered away. The dogs became too much to handle, and my mother resignedly placed the last remaining dog in a new home. Then one day Norm strained a muscle in his back while lifting a flat of plants. He was in terrible pain and from then on grew increasingly anxious about being left alone. Whenever my mother tried to leave the house, Norm panicked and asked her to stay. There were innumerable other small red flags that popped up along the way, along with a few doozies, like the time he accused my mother of getting his socks “all wet” when he had in fact opened his bureau drawer and sent a stream of pee straight into it. Overwhelmed, my mother called me several times a day for support and advice. The support was easy, but having never been the life partner of an eighty-four-year-old man who was unraveling, I could offer little advice.
    These are the stories you hear about the elderly. One thing happens and it triggers a cascade of other debilitating incidents, the seriousness of each new event compounded by whatever preceded it. And now my mother and Norm were living a textbook case of this downward spiral.
    One afternoon a few weeks after Norm’s back sprain, my mother called me with surprising news. Norm’s daughter, Paula, a penniless classical pianist and dancer, had just moved to San Diego from New York and had driven Norm to the doctor that morning. On the way back she called my mother to say her dad wanted to go home—not to his own house but to the house Paula was now sharing with her mother, Norm’s ex-wife. My mother’s voice was subdued, as if she couldn’t quite lend credence to the words she was speaking. I told her I was sure everything would soon settle down, that Norm would get better and go home. In my own mind I had never considered any scenario other thanone in which Norm and my mother would navigate advanced old age together.
    Sure enough, after playing caregiver to her father for a few days, Paula called my mother to say that Norm was too heavy a burden for her. But this was an egg that couldn’t be unscrambled. Just a few Normfree days were enough to give my mother some perspective. With Norm in constant pain and his mental state growing worse, my mother understood that she wasn’t up to the task of caring for him either. And now she didn’t know what to do.
    I had landed a role in the
Aging in America
script as we have come to know it, part of the sandwich generation of middle-aged adults caught between teenage kids and aging parents. I enlisted a friend to stay with Zoë and flew to San Diego. In the absence of Norm or any large canines, the house felt empty when I arrived. My mother, thin and frail, was doing all she could to appear chipper. Still, within thirty seconds I could tell she was in no position to take care of Norm, even if he was to decide to return. She was still hobbling from knee-replacement surgery a few months earlier. On top of that, she had developed severe carpal tunnel syndrome, making her right hand numb and weak, and would need wrist surgery for that sometime soon.
    We needed a different arrangement not only for Norm but for my mother as well. For several months, my mother and I had been discussing the possibility of having both of them move to San Francisco. While my mother had resisted the idea at first, her attitude toward her progressive disabilities was shifting on the Kübler-Ross scale, from denial to acceptance. But