The Most Difficult Relationship In My Life (and I’ve had some doozies)

My mother and I are… complicated.

From as early as I can remember, I wanted to save her.

She’s always needed saving.

But she won’t let me.

Never would.

The man she married was mean. He seemed like dead weight to me. A boulder she carried while traveling miles.

He ate a lot. Didn’t work much. Had a bad temper that didn’t involve beatings. Just words. His words left scars on her. On us.

Since becoming an adult, I’ve struggled to love and remain in a relationship with her, repeatedly asking myself why I try when she’s made it so arduous for me to do either.

The end of her life is a view into how she led everything up to this point: She made bad choices about which men to trust, and was shocked and hurt when those choices provoked her children to vacillate between wanting to protect her and wanting to kill each other. 

My mother has three children. The oldest is a salesman who lives on the other side of the country. The middle is an attorney who lives 10 minutes away from her. I’m the youngest. The shrink. I live an hour away. 

Here’s a riddle: If you could only pick two of her kids as her power of attorney, which would you choose? 

You wouldn’t. Because picking 2 would mean that 1 is left out. And you’d never do that. Because you’re right in the head. 

My mother didn’t think like you. Doesn’t. 

She picked my brothers. Who I’m estranged from. One was my choice. The other wasn’t. 

Which doesn’t mean I’m out of the loop when it comes to her medical care. Out of the loop implies a delay between when things happen and when you’re told that those things happened. Eventually you are told. Her choice to name my brothers her power of attorney and to exclude me has meant I’m sometimes never told of her condition. Like the last 3 times she wound up in the hospital. Or when I called her to find that her phone was disconnected because she’d been moved. Or when she was put into hospice after her last scan showed that her cancer had spread. Or that she even had cancer in the first place.  

My weekly visits with her run the spectrum of what you might expect to experience walking into Bates Motel. Sometimes the visit is benign. Unremarkable. Sometimes we laugh for a couple hours. Sometimes I don’t recognize her. Sometimes there are black and blues on her wrists in the shape of fingerprints, the bruises causing her so much pain she can’t even hold 3-ounces of water.

Visits like that last one make me push past my pride and text the middle brother pictures, and when he doesn’t respond, I involve a cousin — shaming him into action.

Her choice.

My mother doesn’t have to live like this. Die like this. 

I’ve offered to let her live with me more times than I can count. The last time was 3 weeks ago. The last time she made sense. The last time she spoke in full sentences. 

“I’m worried he won’t visit me,” she said. 

It was the last time I offered. 

Was it the last full sentence she said? I can’t remember. 

So many lasts.

It’s not all shit, our relationship. It’s actually vastly improved the last few years, more closely resembling what we had when I was growing up. There’s a reason I always wanted to save her: She was everyone’s favorite mom.

We were slow getting here. She was slow transitioning back into a mother I remember with fondness. 

I’d stepped away from her for years, though not entirely. I’m not strong enough for that.  And there’s nothing my mother wants more than a kid who wants space from her. The combination put us in a decade-long rinse and repeat cycle of her claiming not to know why I was distant, me reminding her — in writing, verbally, in person with witnesses  — her promising to do better, then doing the stuff that caused me to step away in the first place. 

Then she fell and broke her hip. She was in a hospital for four days before a cousin called to say she was asking for me.  When I got there she was being discharged to a rehab center, then headed to assisted living. No more living in her own home. That’s what my brothers decided. We’d all been telling her for years that she should sell her house, downsize, move in with someone. She wouldn’t hear of it. Until she fell.

Seemed like the house sold right away. Her house. Though I’d lived there for 28 years and was the last to move out. 

The house was certainly gone by the time she finished rehab. That and all her belongings. A 40-something year long career in antiques was packed into my childhood home and my brother’s wife liquidated it all. 

I wasn’t told it was for sale. Or invited in one last time to take any of my things. Or informed where she’d be living after rehab. 

To be honest, I didn’t entirely care. Her fall was the thing that propelled me back into her life in a meaningful way. Short of that, I’d still be seeing her twice a year.

And it only propelled me because I felt ethically bound as an aspiring good human to visit her until she was back on her legs (which is a lot to hope for when an 86-year old breaks a hip).

But it never did take me long to warm up to her, which is why I’d made my distance so distant for the 10-years before. ‘Cause by the fourth visit within as many weeks, I was bringing her chicken soup she’d taught me to make as a kid. 

Then she was calling me from her new digs. The new place sits next door to Bel Air, a section of Livingston, New Jersey, where the average residential property lists for $2,450,000. 

The appeal to her fancy schmancy place is the elegance of the restaurant-style service…and the adventure, excitement and discovery it offers its residents. 

My mother has probably met criteria for agoraphobia (among other things) since I moved out at age 28. Twenty-eight was a long time ago and her world’s only gotten smaller in the years since. She is an introvert and a great cook known for hosting amazing holidays. She’s also an insecure woman who’s spent about zero time at other people’s homes or in restaurants. She never traveled. She stays at home. People visit her. She doesn’t like excitement; isn’t particularly curious. My mother likes certainty and consistency. 

All of which made the choice of her assisted living facility preposterous to anyone who knows her. 

Things it didn’t offer: Bathtubs. 

Who cares? My mother, who had used a bathtub in lieu of a shower every day of her life up till that point. 

The outcome? Other than during hospitalizations, she never bathed beyond a sponge bath.

Which I think was four years ago this past spring — though the pandemic has me so confused about which year a memory falls into that I can’t be sure. 

Anyway, at first I visited her inconsistently. Some months I’d come a couple times, other months I’d skip. 

I knew she was lucky to have survived a broken hip at her age. And I knew I wanted to be in a peaceful place with her by the time she died. Which meant I needed to show up consistently.

And with that consistency came her stories…

Which is how I learned that they’d finally met her. My brothers. They’d finally met my version of our mother. Up until that point she was an entirely different person with them. They got a fairly consistent version of her.  Not Jeckle-Hyde Mom.

I’m sure some of it boils down to goodness of fit. Some kids are easier for parents to be in a relationship with because the fit is better. Smoother. The pieces slide in together. They fit tighter.

I wasn’t easy to raise. 

I didn’t have first words. I had first questions: Why? and Why not? 

I was “strong willed” and not a natural academic.

Moreover, I responded to our dysfunctional childhood by holding up a metaphorical middle finger to them. 

“You’re more trouble to raise than your two brothers combined.”

Turns out there’s a reason for it – but you, my reader, will have to wait for the memoir for that story. 

My unwillingness to do as I’m told gets me branded the family fuck up. No matter how many degrees I earn, goals I accomplish, quality people who fall in love with me — to them, it’s 1991; My recent maturity, untested. Budding accomplishments not yet proven sustainable.  And ability to tell them all to go fuck themselves, still undeveloped. 

I’ll prove competent in all areas within 15 years. 

Mom and I do our I’m-trying-to-be-close-to-you-but-I-still-feel-avoidant dance for about the first year and a half that she’s living in her bedroom — which is where she confines herself to once she moves into the fancy schmancy assisted living place — and now I’m back in.

TBH, I’m mostly back in because my brothers, upon taking control of her affairs, realized that my mother’s second language is manipulation. That’s when they met the version I’d had for fifteen years.

One glance and Mom was persona non grata in their homes.

It all made her fairly desperate for someone — anyone — to connect to. And there I was. 

I started talking to my wife, Steph, about offering an invitation for her to live with us a few months before the pandemic. We’re both pretty good at avoiding relationship minefields so we were in the first week of March before I said, “I just asked my mother if she wants to live with us,” and realized we’d never landed on a decision.

“Okay,” she said. And meant it. 

On March 10th, 2020, my mother fell and broke her other hip, landing her in the population most vulnerable to death from COVID during the pandemic. 

I’d invited her to live with us just days before she fell. 

It was the first of countless “Nos” to come. 

They kept her in the rehab facility until she caught COVID. My mother’s smoked since age 13. She has COPD. A rehab filled with elderly isn’t the ideal place for her during a plague.

But they wouldn’t listen. 

No matter how hard I tried to get them to discharge her to me, they wouldn’t do it. 

When she recovered from COVID and finally exhausted her Medicare benefits, she was sent back to Fancy Schmancy Land where she’d spend the last healthy year of her life atrophying in isolation because of COVID. During that year she fell more times than I can remember. She was hospitalized again and again, my brothers authorizing an aid just three days a week, four hours a day. 

When I was finally able to hug her again it was Mother’s Day, 2021. Almost a year and a half since we’d last touched. 

Here’s what isolation does to you in the last year of your eighties: It under-stimulates the brain. So the person ages faster than necessary. Not just physically —  because there’s no one encouraging you to move with the support of others — but mentally. 

When no one speaks to you all day long, you forget how to be social. How to talk. You lose words. Hell, even clients of mine in their 20’s worry they’ve become socially awkward during the pandemic. 

My mother’s cognitive functioning nosedived during the last year. Maybe that was the cancer making its way to her brain, if that’s the direction it metastasized. All I know is that with each fall, with every physical trauma, she seemed to age five years. 

So that by early July, I was texting my cousin who works for the Board of Health, saying she’d fallen at least 4 times in the last month and they still won’t get her more care. 

Is there somewhere we need to report this? 

We never had to because just hours later her aid informed me they upped her care to 24/7. 

She had 3-4 more weeks that were OK.

So here we are, Mom and me. In the final hours? Days? Weeks?  In the final chapter of our relationship. My heart is heavy, bracing for the loss. But in so many ways, I’ve mourned her already.

Which got me thinking about relationships in general. 

Are they ever what we want them to be? Need them to be? 

Isn’t making peace with the imperfect people in our life part of how we mature?  Finding a way — whenever possible — to coexist despite their shortcomings? And ours? Two puzzle pieces that don’t exactly fit within the crevices of the other, but find a way to be together anyway? 

Doing that is hard enough when we get to choose the people. 

But when it comes to family — the kind you’re born into — how often do we find ourselves in relationships with people we wouldn’t necessarily choose? Those can be the toughest relationships of all.  

I’ve spent decades mourning the mom I needed. The one I deserved. I had to, because it’s not the one I got. Still, I love the one I have more than I can ever express. 

She was, is, the mother I’d choose, even if given the chance to pick a better one.