Mother Daughter Me Read Free Page B

dread: first independent living, then assisted living, followed by planetary exit.
    Finding a suitable independent-living arrangement was problematic. The San Francisco Bay Area is expensive to begin with, and growing old in comfortable fashion is even more so, as I was about to discover. A few weeks before I brought my mother to San Francisco, I consulted Anne Ellerbee, a woman who owns a business that places seniors in independent- and assisted-living communities. Anne and I discussed a few possibilities, and thick brochures from places with names like The Sequoias, Sterling Court, and Drake Terrace began to arrive in the mail. But they were all “buy-ins,” which means that you pay several hundred thousand dollars up front; in return, you get a “membership” of sorts. On top of that, you pay rent for your apartment, which can run as high as $6,000 every month. Who could afford this? Moms and dads of the Silicon Valley crowd, no doubt, but not my own fixed-income parent. Or me. As the search progressed, my mother began to get cold feet. Even if she found an affordable place, she said, she wasn’t sure she was ready to join a retirement community.
    Next we explored the idea of finding her an apartment close to Zoë and me. Preferring not to get on a plane and come to San Francisco togo apartment hunting herself, my mother entrusted me with the job. She requested a building with a doorman—a rarity in San Francisco. Nonetheless, I scored almost immediately, with a one-bedroom apartment in a building a mile from my own. The distance felt just right. The apartment itself was small but otherwise perfect. Pleased with myself, I sent my mother iPhone photos, including one of Abdel, the doorman. She didn’t like it; it was too close to the street. Nor did she like any of the other apartments I looked at over the next week.
    With each day, her desire became clearer: She wanted to live not merely near me but
with
me. She didn’t say this outright, but I could tell it was where she was headed. While it wasn’t my initial choice, I began to warm to the idea. If I went out of town, she’d be there to stay with Zoë, a luxury for a single parent, to be sure. And I wouldn’t have to travel—even a mile—to see her. We’d need a bigger place, which would cost more, but she could help pay for it. These pragmatic advantages were nice, but there was something deeper: This was finally my chance to have a real family home—with my mother in it—making up for many years of lost time.
    I decided that having her live with us was the solution. One afternoon, I called her to suggest it, and she was thrilled. For my part, I was guided by a combination of love, protectiveness, and, as I would eventually come to see, magical thinking. I believed we were as close to the mother–daughter ideal as two women could be. We often spoke several times a day. I confided everything to her. I told myself I had long since put any lingering anger about my childhood behind me, that I had taken the ultimate high road. And I had little tolerance for those who harbored bitterness toward their own mothers for transgressions far less serious than those my sister, Sarah, and I had had to endure. With a transcendent eye, I now see that it’s far easier to imagine a future we can invent than to reckon honestly with a painful past.
    ONE NIGHT SHORTLY AFTER inviting my mother to live with us, I found Zoë at the dining room table, flipping through homemade flash cards offamous paintings she had memorized for an art history class the previous year.
    “Wow, I can’t believe how much work I put into this,” my daughter said. “I wonder how many I still know.”
    “Want me to quiz you?”
    “Sure. No, wait. I’ll quiz
you
.”
    She held up a card: four goldfish in a glass cylinder. That was easy—I’d owned the poster for years.
    “Matisse.”
    The next one—a famous fifteenth-century masterpiece that gives the mistaken impression of a shotgun