She listens to her intuition and battles illusions.
A night before my impromptu visit, my mother phoned the police in Vancouver, insisting that someone had broken into my home and attacked me. At two in the morning Pacific Time, they sent officers and an ambulance to the address I gave as my own—for mail and for insurance mom wouldn’t discern my true whereabouts: my best friend Cathy’s apartment in East Vancouver. The response team buzzed intercoms and made their way into the building: neighbours were woken up, the landlord was notified.
Cathy was on an overnight at her mum’s. She let me know what had transpired as I locked the door behind me and made for the subway.
My heart sank with heaviness. Again. Again. Not this again. Again.
I’d made a list of errands to complete and take care of—my mother wanted to find a job. I hoped to get her medication refilled and ensure the monthly needle was administered. I’d promise to help her fill out applications for jobs and volunteer positions if she agreed to go to the doctor with me. I needed to check her cupboards for alcohol and stock shelves with pasta, tins of tomato sauce, nuts or other sources of healthy protein. I crumpled the list and tossed it to the bottom of my backpack.
It was a Tuesday morning, cold, wet and grey. Perhaps it was an omen, this Vancouver sky above me. The damp enveloped me—I felt it in my bones.
My mother answered her intercom within seconds of my buzzing her number. “I was see you on the security TV.”
She stood at the elevator as the doors opened on her floor. Grasping my forearm, she pulled me into a fierce hug, smothering me with kisses on both cheeks—five, six loud smooches. “Let me see my daughter. Daughter de mamma. So long I no see you. Too long I no see you.”
I pulled away.
An elderly neighbour from across the hall opened her apartment door.
“This my daughter.” My mother puffed up her chest with pride. “I telling you she was come for see me.”
“Yes, you did.” The neighbour, Mrs. Perkins, shook my hand. “She’s been very excited about your visit, it’s all she talks about.”
“You want have coffee? I just was make.”
Mrs. Perkins declined: in Italian my mother says, “Well thank goodness, what a nosy neighbour, coming to her door like that.”
I smiled at Mrs. Perkins as we said goodbye and entered my mother’s apartment.
She had a fantastic view of Lake Ontario and the Toronto skyline. Her one bedroom, situated on the twelfth floor, was spacious and roomy, with an empty closed-off balcony area: no plants, nor any of the usual knick-knacks she collected from dollar stores. Knockoff ceramic cherubs sat on the television stand. Assorted furnishings, the grandfather clock, the baroque coffee table, the dining room set and 10,000 crocheted doilies she’d managed to retrieve from the house. She lived in stark contrast to my father in his pint-sized bachelor apartment above a print shop. Her building also had an amenities room, a caretaker, and a thoroughly modern security system: She’d watched me approach the building. Four cameras monitored the various entrances and common areas of the building. She had a safe home, yet she heard voices of murderers in the walls.
She set coffee on the table with espresso cups, a matching sugar bowl and creamer.
“When your plane was land?”
“What do you mean? I’ve been here already for a week. You saw me, remember?”
“I went to the airport. I didn’t see you. I watched all the people, the ones coming from Edmonton. From Calgary. And Winnipeg. Lots of flights came from Vancouver, but I didn’t see you. So many people! People crying and laughing and kissing and hugging the family waiting for them there. So many people was at the airport yesterday!”
“Why did you go? Didn’t I tell you to stop going to the airport?”
This behaviour developed after the divorce. A voice would notify her of my impending arrival, and she’d show up at Pearson International. Morning, noon and midnight. Airport officials occasionally telephoned Aunt Sofia who would explain they needed to send my mother home in a taxi. I wasn’t scheduled to land, no reunion possible except the one she fancied in her broken brain.
“I wanted see you.”
Perhaps Mrs. Perkins should have joined us. A buffer. I used to be the cushion—not the best bumper, more like a pin-cushion—between my folks, but I’d lost the ability to soften any blows. “I’m not going to tell you when I’m at the airport ever. Understand? Never. You always want to make a spectacle of yourself. The grieving Italian mother. I will never allow you to do that to me again. I’m here now, and this is better than you deserve.”
“If someone told me I’d give birth to a daughter with the tongue of a serpent—”
“Sure. Because you’d never stoop to puzzle out if I inherited your venomous nature. You poor victim, oh boo-hoo, no one’s had it harder than you.” I wrung my hands for extra theatrics. They vibrated with rage. “It’s too late, Ma. Stop sending me things. Stop looking for me at the airport. Stop calling the police. Stop looking for me in the bushes around your building. Stop searching for me or Dad at your ex-sisters-in-law’s houses. Stop. Give it a rest. Please, for the love of God, let us rest.”
“Why I should stop looking for you? I don’t have anyone else. What am I supposed to do?” Fat tears rolled down her cheeks. She grabbed a tissue and rubbed it across her eyes. Her movements jerky, a probable side effect from forty years—off and on—of hard-core antipsychotics.
Defeated, I stared at the crocheted tablecloth under the clear plastic cover.
She huffed and wailed with her mouth open. My mother looked like a child when she cried. Her face scrunched up, and she covered her eyes with the backs of her hands to hide that she was weeping. For the millionth time, I wondered about her childhood, about what happened to her, about what it must have been like to grow up in postwar Italy in a family of farmers, born to violent, repressed and oppressive parents, people who were fit to raise livestock, not children.
“Okay, Ma, okay.” I apologized and said the coffee was good while it carried an acrid aftertaste that coated my tongue.
“Eat the ricotta torta. I made last night.”
The pie tasted off, infused with the scent of mothballs. Sure enough, she’d baked the confection and stored it with chemical pesticides. Later, I’d watch her spray lemon-scented Pledge into the air like room freshener because the perfume worked as protection in her apartment. The skin on her hands was scaly; alabaster cracks peeled with pooled dried blood from using harsh cleaning products without gloves. She washed her dishes with Comet to avoid contamination from germs.
The previous day, she had left the airport alone and called the police to report my assault, believing she heard me screaming, “Mamma, help me. Mamma, there’s killer at my door. Mamma, I need you.” Then she bought eggs and stayed up late to make my favourite dessert.
I swallowed the coffee and asked for another piece of the pie. “Don’t scrimp, Ma. Make it a big one.”
Her fridge was almost empty and her cupboards bare. When I questioned her weekly allowance, she showed me a nickel and said, “This what I have lefting. Tomorrow I go bank.”
I insisted that we go grocery shopping, but she argued.
“No need.” She yanked open the fridge. Inside was a bag of milk, defrosting from the freezer in a plastic jug, a tiny jar with three bulbs of garlic, a small container of store-bought pasta sauce and a watermelon. The wide-open spaces starkly white and cavernous.
I dropped the subject. Better to throw my mental reserves into dragging her to a medical appointment. I took in the view from the balcony. “Centre Island. This is a nice apartment, Ma.”
“You like, you come live with me.”
She sensed I wasn’t being honest. Her questions and nonstop chatter took on a machine-gun barrage. “You see your father all the time, or are you here for a visit him? Where do you work now? What do you do? They don’t have that job here in Ontario? Why don’t you tell your boss your Mamma needs you? It’s no good, me here, you there, your Papa someplace else. We all pay rent. The money will finish. The money will run out. We need a house. We need the home.”
I redirected the discussion to the weather, my cat, anything but my father and his sisters. Talking with my mother is like the kindergarten game Telephone. Only there is no class of sticky-sweet preschoolers between us. From my lips to her ears, the firing of synapses, the misunderstandings, the reaction time, the engagement of the nervous system when a comment is perceived as an insult or a slur: It’s simply the two of us, always misinterpreted and perplexed. I learned this the hard way: Words—the source of endless wonder for a writer—are worthless in the punishing world of psychosis. Definitions became nonsensical. Sentences and paragraphs of word salad tumbled out of my mother—void of meaning. What I said and what she heard never matched—on one level, this itself is not so dissimilar from regular encounters. Misunderstandings between strangers and friends occurred all the time, complications caused by different interpretations—but there was a conversational thread, a trail of bread crumbs for everyone to find their way. This was never possible with my mother. We didn’t even speak the same language to each other. My mother spoke fragmented English, peasant dialect and psychosis-fuelled speech; I spoke patchy dialect mixed with basic English, and rage-full rhetoric when we argued. Confusion reigned supreme.
“If I stay in this apartment one year more, Julian Fantino is going to give me a house. He did it for another two ladies that lived in this building. They left last month. One neighbour said they died, but I know the truth. This place is too small. I move here, I move there, I move around, but there’s no room. No backyard. My friend said I should write Fantino because he helped her. He’s chief of the Toronto police, and he’s Italian. He’ll fix this situation for me. He can arrange for me to have a house. Let’s write the letter together. You can help me.”
“Can I lie down for a bit, Ma?”
She jumped into mothering mode, commenting on how tired I must be from the time difference. I didn’t correct her. She’d wake me in an hour.
It made her happy, having me in the other room.
I stretched out on her double bed and felt a serrated blade under my pillow. A bread knife stashed under my head.
“What’s this, Ma?”
“Protection. From all the killers in the building.”
“What are you going to do? Make them toast? I’m not sleeping here tonight if you don’t put the knife back in the kitchen drawer.”
“But what if someone comes in?”
“Your door has a lock and a bolt. If we have a problem, we can call the police.” Could someone have 911 on speed dial, I wondered? If anyone did, it was my mom.
Anosognosia, one of schizophrenia’s most pervasive and frustrating symptoms, is lack of insight that one is ill. Anosognosia is not denial, not a “difficult client,” not plain stubbornness. To fully appreciate the horror of this signpost, I need solely recall the last time I caught a cold or flu and envision the congestion, aches and fever as a permanent state. Did I remember to ingest the prescribed antibiotics consistently? Doubtful. A Temporal Lobe Influenza: the disease that took possession of my mother. Impaired awareness of illness also occurs with Alzheimer’s and in individuals who sustained brain injuries.
Because she took her meds randomly, my mother was agitated, and more likely to call the police, make her way to emergency, or harass one of my elderly aunts. On medication, she was a fraction less manic. Age had deflated her rage: She could still hit that opera-level atomic high note but did so less often. The dates on the three blister packs of pills my mother had were for April; it was August.
That afternoon, as we sat in her doctor’s office, I watched my mom speak to the people she knew, observed as they took her in with carefully blank expressions. In her interaction with the receptionist, she was blunt; she didn’t waste time with pleasantries. Mom jabbered at the young woman while she held the phone receiver to her ear, instructing a caller.
“This my daughter. I come for my needle.” My mother headed for a chair.
The receptionist nodded and covered the receiver, “Please have a seat, Lucia.”
Every spot in the waiting room filled up as we waited. A television in the far corner played the World Cup: Italy had been knocked out of the competition early on.
It was midafternoon. My mother fell asleep, her head down, tucked in. I did a sidelong scan. She was immensely vulnerable, slumbering in public. I turned away and blinked my eyes at the sports on screen.
My inner critic snapped to attention: look. You look. You don’t get the option to turn away now, when she’s sitting right next to you. You abandoned her. She barely functions in this big city, this massive country. You speak the language, you navigate everything so much easier, and she struggles every single day. You bear witness. The least a dutiful daughter could do. Look.
I shifted in my seat to face her. At sixty-one, she seemed decades older. Her pudgy features ravaged by an illness that also caused poor self-care habits. She was missing all her top front teeth. Without the protective barrier, her upper lip collapsed in on her mouth. Her skin was wrinkled with deep grooves, fissures lined her cheeks. She’d been a stunning beauty as a young woman. My parents, with their chiselled chins, high cheekbones and flawless skin, made a striking couple.
I sat up straight, and my adjustment woke my mother. She looked up at me and smiled.
The nurse ushered us into a small room. My mother handed over a tiny bottle of liquid meant for the syringe, a small vial filled with clear liquid. The medication she picked up at the pharmacy downstairs.
“Lucy, what happened? We haven’t seen you in a while,” asked the nurse, her voice warm and welcoming. I almost burst into tears over this simple act of kindness.
“Are you her daughter? You live in Vancouver.”
“Yes, I’m visiting.” I meant to smile, but it came out more of a grimace, my lips flattening against my teeth, a reflex to stop from welling up.
“You must be very happy, Lucy. I can see it from the smile on your face.”
“She the only one I have. And she live too far from me.”
I bit my upper lip.
My mother lifted up her skirt. Even in warm weather, she would not give up full-support pantyhose. She pulled down the hosiery on her right side for the needle. The medicine meant to prevent psychotic episodes had to be injected into her thigh. The nurse asked my mother if she remembered which leg she’d been poked in before, so she could alternate, as my mother always felt tender afterwards.
I fidgeted: I crossed my arms. I unfolded them to hang on to my mother’s purse for her. Scratching my forehead and my earlobe, I searched the exam room for a focus while shifting my weight. I felt fourteen again: powerless to prevent her pain, unable to break the family curse.
On the way back to her apartment, my mother was subdued. The morning storm clouds had blown out of sight. We stood on the crowded bus, facing west, the sunlight blinding bright.
For dinner, she scorched an onion in reused oil until it blackened and poured store-bought sauce into the pan. The macaroni cooked in an uncovered roasting pan placed on an element.
“Is that safe?”
“They say cooks fast this way. They say no hurt my teeth if cook like this. They say healthier to make in this.”
They: the background chatter—the ceaseless din.
After doing the dishes with the soap I’d purchased over her protests, we agreed on an activity: taking an inventory of all the apparel she owned, clothes she refused to hang in the closet. She produced an enormous haul of blouses and camisoles, neatly folded and proudly shown off. See-through shirts, tank tops with sequins, nylon peignoirs, lacy panties, cotton underwear and flashy polyester numbers in tropical garden prints. She’d stockpiled towels, bed linens, negligées and kitchen utensils into three giant suitcases.
“I bought this one for you because you fat now. XXXL. Three X and one L, maybe it fits you. Who else could take it? I buy for you.” She handed me a hideous canary yellow and factory grey T-shirt with silver script that spelled out “Gymnastic Golfing.”
“I don’t want this. Please spend your money on food.”
Her eyes narrowed.
I’d stepped on another mine.
“Who’s the Mamma here? I am. Who do you think you are? Lying to me, arriving for one day and forcing me to go to the doctor. You think you know everything? You know nothing. I raised a stupid, selfish daughter.”
I sighed. “Okay, Ma. Takes one to know one.” I accepted the plain black cotton underwear she’d set aside. “The rest of this cheap crap is no bargain. Please don’t wear it when you cook.”
The effort required to be together meant when we climbed into bed, we both dozed off fast.
In the morning, while I gathered my backpack and my purse, she whimpered, “Why? Why you have to going? There nothing for you here? Nobody?”
“Please, Ma, please don’t—” I begged her not to come downstairs with me, but she insisted on walking me to the bus stop.
“When I will see you again? I waited so long, and this is all you give me, one day.”
The time between goodbye for now and hello again was never long enough for me; for my mother it seemed an eternity.
The leaves on the maple trees were brilliant hues of emerald. In a few weeks, come October, I’d revel in the season I’d missed the most out west when the greenery switched to ruby, crimson and blood—the colour of family.
“Soon.”
The bus turns onto her side street.
“Okay, Ma, give me a hug and go back inside.”
She kissed me five times, crying.
“It’s okay, Mom. I’m okay, promise. Don’t worry about me.”
“Who else I can worry for? You’re all I have.” She walked partway back to the entrance of her building, then stopped to watch me board the bus.
I waved.
She waved back, the way one might to an infant, hand steady as a salute and moving her fingers as if she was patting air. She stood alone against the backdrop of the tall building, a tiny senior, such a contrast from the Titan of my nightmares; a woman abandoned by her parents, lost in the destructive shuffle of a serious brain disorder, missing her only child. We continued to wave to each other as the bus pulled away from the curb. Farewell and welcome look the same, for an instant, were it not for me putting distance between the two of us.