Mother Daughter Me Read Free Page A

Norm was opposed to the idea of such a big change and had grown even more reluctant since the arrival of his daughter. Now, within hours of my walking through my mother’s front door, she told me she had made up her mind: She would be moving to San Francisco, Norm or no Norm. She had made a bold decision, and I was relieved that she would be so close to me, eliminating the need for frequent trips to San Diego.
    Shortly after hearing this news from my mother, Paula made plans to install her father in an assisted-living place called the Cloisters, where she was now occasionally performing her “therapeutic healing dances.”
    Norm himself had nothing whatever to do with determining his own fate. Paula was in charge. And my mother was so determined to get out of Dodge that she was willing to cede control of her partner’s life to his daughter.
    Within a few months, my mother’s quiet life of carefully prescribed routine had become a clanging mess. Impressively, she kept her head high. She called Norm at the Cloisters frequently, but she could tell he wasn’t always in possession of his faculties. My stalwart mother even paid regular visits. But whenever she went, Paula was in Norm’s room, protecting her father as if my mother—the man’s constant companion for thirty-five years—were a mortal enemy. To top it off, soon after Norm entered the Cloisters, Paula went to court for conservatorship of Norm’s estate, which was worth a surprisingly hefty sum. Since my mother and Norm had never married, she had no claim to his estate.
    My mother decided to sell the house, which Norm had deeded to her several years earlier for one of their unfathomable tax reasons. She hired Cheryl the downsizer to help her sort through four decades’ worth of accumulation. The house hadn’t reached a level of pathological clutter, but there was certainly no shortage of stuff, all of it relatively well organized and much of it a testament to hundreds of hours spent at Costco: roll after roll of paper towels, dozens of flashlights, reams of paper and file folders, and countless tools and canned goods.
    A dozen steel file cabinets were spread around the house, jam-packed with pay stubs, credit-card bills, receipts, work documents, and health-plan descriptions. Norm wasn’t merely bland, but also creepy, and this side of him was revealed when my mother found in the cabinets black-and-white snapshots from the 1960s of young women wearing nothing but high heels. She also found a rich collection of skin magazines,
Playboy
mostly, going back decades.
    A couple of weeks later, a meeting was held to divide the possessions in the house. As my mother recounted the scene to me, Norm, now wheelchair-bound, was rolled into the house by Paula, followed by her lawyer. The court-appointed conservator arrived soon after. They all seated themselves on one side of the dining room table. My mother, her lawyer, and Cheryl the downsizer, who by now was more friend to my mother than employee, sat on the other.
    “I have an announcement to make,” Norm said in a feeble voice, amid the general chatter. My mother, still tuned in to Norm as no one else in that room could ever be, was the only person who heard him. She asked everyone to quiet down and listen to what Norm had to say.
    “I have an announcement to make,” he repeated, a bit more loudly.
    “I don’t want—I don’t want—” he stammered. Had his mind suddenly snapped into focus? Would he tell the assembled group that he didn’t want to be in San Diego after all? That he had made a terrible mistake and indeed wanted to accompany his partner of nearly four decades in her move north? The room was hushed as all eyes rested on Norm. Finally he got the words out. “I don’t want any of the old
Playboy
s.”
    MY MOTHER THOUGHT SHE might be content in an independent-living place of some kind. That made sense, but it also reminded me that my elderly mother was now heading down that one-way road we all