Maternity Leave

Mothers frighten me. The weight of their worlds—so often borne alone as their demeanors imply—is a presumption of responsibility that eludes me. For Gen X and younger women, the task seems less onerous, more shared perhaps, less vile. But that might just be wishful thinking by one in midlife who evaded this condition of her gender—willfully, deliberately with a tubular ligation at twenty-five—until blessed menopause eliminated the fear for good.

My mother in early Alzheimer’s terrified me and my three younger siblings as we caucused secretly back home in Hong Kong. Mum’s widowhood and world felt crushingly weighty. Number two sister, the MBA, took over finances, transforming a complex tangle into manageable accounting after Dad’s demise. Number three sister, the criminologist, took charge of keeping our extended Indonesian family at bay; only she had lived in our parents’ country of birth, so foreign to our own, and was conversant in the language and culture. As for Mum’s Catholicism, the keeper of hope was our brother, a liturgist and church music director, the last of the flock. But it was the power vacuum that frightened me most, and not because of any power struggle among the sibs (there was none). Instead, it was my mother’s clinging to a long-absent power that threatened to overwhelm me. And as I was 大家姊, or “big sister of the family,” the job of wresting away that power fell to me.

There was a moment, when I was just shy of forty, that Mum no longer frightened me. Unlike Dad, she had at the time only just retired from paid employment as a pharmacist. My father never saw the point of working for a living and was only too happy to dispense with it as soon as he could so that his days could follow a clockwork of self-actualization. Breakfast and the morning paper: thirty minutes. Daily toilet: one hour. Public transport of choice (the neighborhood free shuttle to the stop for Kowloon Motor Bus number 7) and the walk to his post office box to retrieve materials of self-actualization (Kompas, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Time, Newsweek, letters from the world where relatives, friends, former business acquaintances and the occasional stranger via an introduction regularly wrote him their geographies of time, distance, longings, and desires): one hour, forty-five minutes. Purchase and consumption of one lunch box (chicken drumstick or roast pork or some other soong with rice) at 大家樂, Hong Kong’s answer to Macdonald’s, where “everyone is a big happy family”: one to one and a half hours. And then the return journey, an overlong, rambling trip of under four miles that would have taken much less time by MTR (the subway, a higher fare), to return home to read and clip articles that were neatly filed under various categories (“China Today,” “American Presidents,” “Sex,” “Chinese History,” “Indonesia,” “Viagra,” plus some clips set aside to be sent to his correspondents) or to write letters on aerogrammes or sheets of thin, airy light blue paper in his tiny, cramped hand to the rest of a world where you would travel but had no desire to move to and live in.

By then Mum would be back at the flat, or almost back, having spent her day asserting power at church, at the market, at shops. Her power was most apparent in the kitchen, and their long-suffering domestic helper would hope that her boss was happy, unsuspicious of theft and other sins (although no helper in more than two decades ever stole or was unduly sinful), and satisfied with dinner preparations. By dinner my mother would have made a few attempts at conversation with Dad, to which he might respond, depending on his unpredictable moods.

But dinner! I tried to stop coming home for dinners, even though my parents had desired I attend since my return from New York to a job in Hong Kong in ’92. My second sister, returned the same year from London, came over even less. Mum’s obsessive nagging would begin sometime earlier in the day—calls to our offices to remind us, usually in the middle of meetings—and our secretaries and staff soon learned that “your mother” was not the call we ever needed to take. You could not be late, even though both our management jobs careened into overtime against our wills, well past the sacrosanct dinner hour of seven, even though Dad said, it’s okay, never mind, you have your work to do, stunned as he was by how much we were able to earn in our inflationary city. Neither of us really wanted much to eat, especially when summer rolled round and the temperature rose to an ungodly degree, and soup, rice, meat, vegetables were beyond the limits of our appetites.

But dinners. My sister and I won some reprieve when the two younger siblings came home to visit, from Jakarta and Ohio respectively. Our sister-in-law, a vegan, gave up telling Mum that vegetable soup cooked with pork is not vegetarian. Dinners meant the evening news on TV blared for Dad, while Mum continued a conversation stream he ignored. When the news ended, both parents would vie for conversation space, talking at cross-purposes, neither one listening to the other. Even the visiting sibs and sister-in-law would exit, stage left well before dinner had ended with some excuse, must see so-and-so before I leave, sorry! Dinners were easier outside the home at a new restaurant or old favorite that would please both parents. That became my strategy because by then I was no longer afraid of what Mum thought of me or what she would try to tell me to do (because she did try), of how she wanted to interfere in my second marriage (because she would), because by then she was just my mother, whom I could ignore on anything that mattered, since she had little idea of what my life was really like, because all she wanted of me was to listen to her complaints about Dad, which I had been doing since my early teenage years.

So dinners at home disappeared from my life, and then I was transferred to Singapore, which distanced the daily despair but still left me closer for visits home than New York.

Then Alzheimer’s appeared. We dismissed it at first as the usual melodrama, the known exaggerations of suffering and sacrifice, the post-traumatic shock of our father’s sudden and unexpected death at seventy-five, he the younger by four years. It’s like that, this strange disease that only now, in the early twenty-first century, we think of as an “illness.” You do not notice the onset because an intimate like my mother had long been a familiar stranger. A physical malady would at least generate a known response. Confabs with medical professionals. Fear. Anxiety. Grief at a prospective demise. The desire to make up for lost time sooner rather than later. But Alzheimer’s, like dinners, can be ignored for quite a time, and then one day even the idea of dinner disappears and then you wonder, where did it go? Didn’t I once eat dinner around a table with a family and chopsticks or silverware and cloth napkins like civilized persons do, instead of nibbling cholesterol-laden hors d’oeuvres at fancy receptions, downing free liquor paid for by business clients, ordering room service at some five-star at 10:55 at night, just before the dinner menu ends, because your flight was delayed but who eats airline food if they don’t have to? You ingest what passes as dinner, and then run or swim to keep off the weight because, even in your forties, you are still young in the late twentieth century, unlike in an earlier, more benign era when forty-something signaled the path to the grave, ending corporal torment.

Our brother, who, unlike me, is not allergic to doctors, was the first to declare: something’s not right. There had been a traumatic trip to Europe with him and his wife, the problem being, according to Mum, our sister-in-law. Understand, mind you, that we three girls call her our “fifth sib,” that we like her sensible, down-to-earth disposition, admire her intelligence in her chosen field of psychology and, most of all, love her for loving our brother. Understand, mind you, that even our mother did reluctantly acknowledge our brother had married well. Yet what Mum now saw was only the woman who took away her son. Even though she no longer asserted the kind of control she used to over my brother when he was younger, that power remained alive in her head. So this trip, arranged to occupy Mum in widowhood, this trip had turned into a disastrous meltdown, one that in retrospect might have been partly due to Alzheimer’s. You are not quick to name it that, though, given your own arriviste American identity. After all, you have been called foreigner, minority, alien, and suffered those arrows, stings, and slings before letting go of that barrage of names. Yet still at times, in moments of stress, you do revert to the outsider who doesn’t belong here, one who will denounce the American way of naming everything a disease. My brother, being less of an arriviste, and for whom America represents self-actualization as well as segregation from Mum, appreciates the value of good medical care with benefits. In a reversal of power, he asserted control and took Mum for a complete checkup that returned the diagnosis: Alzheimer’s.

In time, even my two non-American sisters agreed. It was not just old age. The odd behavior our mother exhibited was real, was beyond her control, was not simply more of her extended fictions. She did lie, outrageously now; she did hide things down rabbit holes of drawers and closets; she did confuse personal history and incidents and insist she was right; she did behave irrationally for real and not from the habitual passive aggression we all knew too well. Once, when she and my youngest sister accidentally locked themselves out of the flat, she declared she would climb from the roof down to the veranda and get back in that way. We are at the top of a twelve-story building. My mother was once a budding tennis star and swimmer, an athlete who might actually once have made such a climb. But by then it had been more than thirty years since she played tennis or swam or was in any way physically active. Her declaration was not just ridiculous, it was delusional.

There is, as Naipaul says, an enigma of arrival. The thing is finally here and known, as was my mother’s diagnosis. However, the one arriving is not the subject but the state; Alzheimer’s arrived and now my mother would never entirely be herself again. I arrived and re-arrived and re-arrived again in America; along the way I acquired citizenship and became a subject of the state. But I did not disappear. If at times I sounded patriotic while at others mildly traitorous, my behavior was controlled despite any anti-American sentiments expressed. What I vent does not lead to irrationally exuberant acts. More significantly, my actions are not potentially harmful to others or myself, and I do not dwell in the perpetually frustrated misery of almost-memory, in an exile of near-control, delusion and slippery power. Unlike my mother, in Alzheimer’s, whose feelings cannot be easily articulated and remain only what I can guess at—How contentment is always denied me, despite my age and the years I’ve given to children and family, putting my own dreams and desires aside because this was the life my God handed me! How I wish I could say, in those moments of my real self, that I am grateful for that life, and happy, more or less. Or perhaps that is only my wishful desire, to imagine my mother’s tiny moments of happiness, despite this miserable state to which she has been condemned.

At church, the priests who had known her for years noticed. Other parishioners, the women with whom she once would lunch or organize the flower arrangements, called, concerned. Would you like to join us for afternoon rosary? May I drive you across the harbor to the Catholic Women’s League meeting? Will you come with us to lunch, someone can bring you? No, she insisted, no, no, no, because she had lived in this city for forty-odd years, knew it well, and should not need anyone’s help.

Meanwhile, Mum’s domestic helper Maryam, a young woman who had worked for our aunt in Java and whom my mother employed to be her companion after Dad died, was going through a slow crack-up. Her original employer—the woman who bought her conversation tapes and books to teach her English and Cantonese so that she now spoke both passably well enough to get by in this bilingual city, the one who taught her to cook and shop in the local markets, the one who consoled her when the boyfriend left her pregnant, the one who paid for the abortion, the one who taught her to save money for the house and business she would eventually buy back in Java—that woman had turned into an uncontrolled shrew who screamed at her daily, disparaged her cooking and work, accused her of stealing, and told anyone who visited, loudly, how stupid she was. This woman was no longer the auntie with whom she watched television or reminisced about Indonesia. Maryam sat on the kitchen floor for hours, muttering to herself, counting the days, hours, and minutes to Sunday, her one day off, when my sister would come over and take Mum out to lunch, relieving her from further obligation for at least a day.

We children who lived abroad caught on slowly. I visited regularly from New York but only stayed for three weeks or less each trip. On one visit, Maryam told me she was being underpaid. I asked to see the accounts. My mother had misconstrued a new government ruling on domestic help pay and cut Maryam’s salary for well over a year. That was rectified quietly, behind my mother’s back, as there was no longer any point reasoning with her. On one of her visits, my Indonesian-fluent sister had a long conversation with Maryam, and all the pent-up frustrations, repressed anger, and genuine concern—because she was and had been a trustworthy, faithful employee who cared deeply for my mother’s welfare—tumbled out. One morning, my mother went to town to meet my uncle for lunch and got lost in the neighborhood she had previously lived in and knew extremely well. She dared not move from the street corner until Uncle came to get her. After that, she never would take public transport alone again. One day, we realized she had shunned all friends and acquaintances from church, muttering angrily about these women of whom she had become insanely suspicious, as opposed to being benignly suspicious while still on friendly terms.

We each of us tried to talk to Mum about her condition. We did not talk. We screamed at each other. At times I felt I was losing it, reverting to a long-forgotten state of clinical depression when I would scream at myself, lost in the America and marriage to which I had arrived, only to find a state so alien I wanted to tear it out of me. Except now I was screaming at Mum, trying to get through to her because I still did not fully believe in that “arrival,” because I would rather have had the mother I knew, despite the gulf between us, because that woman would either ignore me as I ignored her or sigh melodramatically about her sacrifice and suffering, which at least made a good story to share with the sibs.

And so the screaming continued until the crisis of the spiral staircase.

Sometime in the eighties, my father built the rooftop structure and connected it by a spiral staircase to our home below. It was a guest room for relatives (we have so many!) or “the children” when we were home from whatever foreign place or lover currently claimed us. He designed it like a Japanese hotel room—stacked, tiny, only for sleep—but equipped it with a spacious bathroom and its own compact refrigerator for fruit, cold drinks, and coffee and tea supply because civilized people would take breakfast before descending the spiral staircase that connected it to the flat below. Rubbish! said Mum. What guest would stay upstairs when breakfast was served downstairs by “servants” (as she called the one helper) who “waited on them hand and foot”? Which is why my mother considered it her job, however exhausting, to scale that staircase, knock on the door at breakfast, lunch, and dinner to get that guest down to meals, even if the guest were sleeping off jet lag or if a couple was perhaps making love. No guest would be hungry in her home, not as long as she ruled and could serve.

My father had been the host who loved visitors; my mother tolerated their presence because that was the way things were and who was she to argue? Once, when my now-ex-in-laws were visiting, I found Mum scrubbing out their underwear by hand, complaining about the work. Why? I asked, shocked. They certainly didn’t expect it, had only given her their laundry because she insisted, saying the servant would do it. Their very Americanness was alien to her (my mother-in-law was with her fourth husband, the keeper, finally) and nothing my husband or I could say or do would lighten the unbearable responsibility of their presence.

After Dad’s death, the guests disappeared. And when Alzheimer’s arrived, stayed, lingered, outstayed its arrival like some of our less-welcome guests of the past, we children no longer invited relatives or friends to stay. Yet it was now that Mum suddenly wanted guests, her own family, the last blood relatives who peopled her childhood. None of them had visited much when my father was alive because either his family or we four siblings dominated the upstairs room. Mum had three elderly sisters left in Indonesia, one in an even more advanced state of Alzheimer’s or dementia; the other two were frail and only traveled if a younger relative accompanied them. So when the latter two sisters were traveling in China with a niece from Australia and called to say we’re coming to Hong Kong and wish to see you, Mum welcomed them all because of course she had a guest room now, one under her control and not Dad’s, so yes, please come, please visit, please stay.

But what she forgot about was her existing guest, the hovering archangel, relentless and merciless like Gabriel announcing to Mary, you will bear the son of God whether you like it or not because this visit I’m paying you, it’s an honor, see? But she forgot that the guest room could only house two people at most and forgot, naturally, to tell our Hong Kong sister, or anyone, the date of their arrival. One day in the middle of life, my sister received a frantic call and rushed over to Mum’s to find ten people waiting to stay with her, having just arrived from Guangzhou. Mum was as surprised as my sister. The niece was with her children and other relatives, and fortunately, this stranger-cousin whom we had never met was with it enough to make alternative arrangements once she took stock of the situation. Mum’s two sisters stayed upstairs and things settled down, and Maryam coped as best she could with these two unexpected guests. Meanwhile, that other invisible guest hovered, saying, hey, don’t I get rights of first refusal here? and we knew, we understood, that this must be the end of guests, regardless of my mother’s desires.

Which meant redirecting phone contact by our network of relatives, many still strangers to us, whose language we barely knew. The Indonesian sister took on primary responsibility, although the culture being what it is, they still called or even just showed up without warning. When you live in huge homes, waited on hand and foot by an army of servants (in my mother’s childhood, I think the family had at least ten or more), guests are a minor inconvenience. But Mum, the one who left her country because life was too slow there, too corrupt, too lazy and unproductive for her, too lacking in personal independence, too uneducated, especially for girls, Mum was afraid to say no to the horde who wanted to descend. Like the middle-aged nephew whose name she barely recalled, whom she had perhaps last seen when he was five, arriving from the Netherlands with wife and children in tow, looking for a free hotel room in expensive Hong Kong. No. That became my operative word. No, no, no. If you want to visit, call me or my sister, I insisted, and then of course I’d accentuate the negative. Suddenly, all the bad cop training from my former corporate life (laid to rest, I thought, the “skill” of firing people) was back, an equally unwelcome guest. My Indonesian sister did the diplomatic thing, pouring oil in mellifluous tones, talking around the subject as the culture demands; my Hong Kong sister monitored information flow, with Maryam as number one spy. But I, I became bad cop with the really hard cases, and who wants to be that when the older you get, the kinder you would prefer to be, but how else to protect Mum, how else to prevent the agitation of guests? Because she was agitated, frightened by the weight of responsibility, which she confessed to in moments of lucidity, because she no longer managed much, not even her kitchen, having relinquished the marketing, menu, and food preparation entirely to Maryam (unthinkable in her younger years). My mother, I said to stranger-relatives in emails, over the phone, in person, has Alzheimer’s and is too elderly to have guests anymore, and they, as naturally suspicious as her, poked, pried, wanted to be sure their (suddenly!) “dear” Auntie Klin was okay, was being cared for, was not sitting on some vast fortune they stood to inherit since everyone who makes it to Hong Kong gets rich, or so my mother’s world believed.

Who was this obnoxious horde?

Some years earlier when my aunt died, her older companion Christine (lesbian, halfway out the closet) fell into the hands of blood relatives. These two maiden aunts were rich, or at least had wealth enough for a comfortable retirement in Indonesia and looked forward to living in the Bandung home they built. Both had worked in Hong Kong and were among our closest relatives, much like immediate family. Yet Christine, after almost a lifetime in Hong Kong, was cast adrift. Where do such elderly people with no spouse or children go to die? She went to a nephew in Indonesia. My Indonesian sister and I assumed her power of attorney, but her nephew kept a joint account with her in Jakarta. Yet this “dear” blood relative, this son of her favorite brother (long deceased) bilked the joint account until we finally caught on and turned off the flow of funds from Hong Kong. She was eventually cared for by a distant cousin who did inherit the fortune, deservedly, but it was my lesson in how to look beyond blood in matters of money.

My mother is not rich, but she did inherit half her schoolteacher sister’s fortune. It keeps her well cared for. What assets my father had when he died were long in Mum’s name—the home, some joint accounts, and modest savings—and he did not die a rich man, as he once had been in his younger days. But her relatives! They hovered and nosed around like a pack of bloodhounds on the wrong trail. Desist, I cried. Cease this relentless trail in the pursuit of phantom wealth. Finally, they did.

But Mum continued to climb the stairs, the slippery, narrow, spiral affair that Maryam would beg her not to climb, afraid she would slip and break her neck. Who did she hear above her head? Which guest, which unwelcome visitor from which sector of memory past? When I came home to stay, as I increasingly did, I learned to lock the door to the roof room so that Mum wouldn’t burst in on me. Once, I left some jewelry up there while on a side trip to Shanghai. The jewelry disappeared and did not resurface by the time I needed to return to New York. I dared not breathe a word to Mum, knowing for sure she would blame Maryam. Over the next few months, my sister snooped through Mum’s cupboards. She eventually found it hidden in a drawer. Mum had climbed the stairs, found the jewelry, and probably thought to safeguard it in my absence. In one of the lower-pitched arguments over her condition, I mentioned her doing this. She denied it, did not recall, the memory lost to heaven or hell, who can say which?

Yet still she climbed. Oh, there’s no one here, we sometimes heard her say. What, we wondered, was it she really heard? because my mother continues to hear footsteps often, as someone in the building invariably is renovating, this favorite Hong Kong pastime, and nearby, workers always lurk. Workers, men(!), this was her great fear, harking back to 1960s Hong Kong when crime was rampant and break-ins common. Or is it my father’s two half-sisters she recalls, who lived with us when they were teenagers, in our previous home where the guest room was a separate flat on the same floor? For years Mum could not release the burden of that responsibility. The older sister lied, told stories about being mistreated by my mother, was a royal pain in the neck. Do their spirits fly back from Canada, where they live, to dance on my mother’s ceiling, taunting her with their presence? Or is it some other young woman, the Japanese perhaps, of whom Dad was so enamored? Mum hisses at moments: your father wanted to move upstairs, away from me! We have no evidence of this, just Mum’s repeated accusation. An unhappy marriage is like that, although, unlike an Alzheimer’s spouse, even an indifferent but real husband will keep you focused on life as it is because you must make sure he gets his breakfast and dinner even if he does take lunch out, must deliver any phone messages from friends or acquaintances, must oversee the laundry and ironing because Dad needed his shirts and clothes and things just so, and, above all, must keep the home clean, every speck removed, all the silverware shined, the crystal sparkling, the parquet polished, the hair swept off the bathroom floor because my father saw hair everywhere—your hair! he cried through our childhood—because in a household of too many girls, hair always lurks.

It’s hard work being a mother when you also have to be a wife.

One day, the crystal came tumbling down. The wine and liquor glasses were stored in a wood cabinet on the wall above the sideboard in the dining room. The cabinet had two glass sliding doors. I heard the crash and descended the spiral. The weight of crystal and a host of other junk had finally collapsed it. Between Maryam and me, we salvaged what we could and trashed the wreckage. Mum might have climbed the stairs for all I know because I finally had to move her aside from where she hovered, monitoring the cleanup but only getting in the way. What shocked me, though, was the layer of black dirt on the glass shelves, on all the crystal, a layer that clearly hadn’t been cleaned for years. It was after this that I began to look for dirt, channeling Dad’s detective eyes, and saw the piles of papers and unopened mail thrown higgledy-piggledy into drawers; the caked, ancient makeup on top of and in my mother’s dresser; the clothes, the rows of unworn clothes, some brand new, two closets filled with my late aunt’s clothes, my aunt who predeceased Dad; the sets of unused dishes, appliances unopened since the 1960s, chipped vases, Pyrex plates, birthday cake candles, a dormant rolling pin . . . the exhausted mess crammed into kitchen cupboards, the ones Mum no longer dared open. My mother was never especially neat, but this, I knew, was beyond even her limits. She hadn’t discarded any of our ancient schoolbooks, old report cards, or unwanted gifts, filling up rooms with stuff. Maryam slept on a narrow single bed in a tiny room, the one formerly with bunk beds my brother and I shared in this home I had lived in for only a year before disappearing to college in the States, and so was relegated to the top bunk for my transience. The room was so chock full I wondered how she slept.

Meanwhile Mum climbed and climbed and climbed the stairs until I thought I would go mad.

In this home of accumulation and slippery stairs, there were moments I wept. I came home more and more frequently, staying longer each time. Although there was a literary career that occasionally demanded my presence in the city, I knew, as the spiral staircase nagged at me, that work was the least reason of all. I could write just as easily in New York, and more happily too, at home with Bill. I teach at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in writing, a low-residency program, and even though I could be away most of the time, my presence was required twice a year in Montpelier. What teaching I did in Hong Kong—and slowly I found myself accumulating gigs—was to fund my time at home, babysitting Mum.

Because I found myself being, for the first time in my life, a mother. And the thing about motherhood and maternity is the fundamental desire to protect a helpless being whether in the womb or out. Mothering frightens me; how is it possible to watch another being twenty-four-seven, to make sure she will not climb and climb and climb that spiral and finally break a leg, or worse, her neck?

My mother frightens me because she is still quite healthy, with a straight back and good appetite, but her balance is shaky and only getting worse. Alzheimer’s arrived, stole her mind, but fooled her into believing herself physically as strong as ever. It’s like that, this unwelcome guest, downing the bottle of your best liquor but leaving just enough so that you think you’ve still got some left. It tramples your roses while helping you garden, pulls out the new shoots instead of weeds, leaving your garden in a state of despair. I once knew a man who confessed that hostesses would not let him help with dishes: he always managed to break their best crystal, not deliberately, mind you. Alzheimer’s is like that, crashing clumsily into your life, “accidentally” scratching a key across your memory chips so that you loop around endlessly, round and round, up and down the spiral, while the hard drive refuses to reboot.

Once an elderly person breaks a leg, a hip, and ends up in a wheelchair, deterioration is rapid. This received wisdom, from the medical community and those who know, nagged me more than Mum ever did. It is the dependency, to be strapped to a wheelchair, unable to negotiate your way around, that is crippling, more than the physical state. Watching her climb and climb and climb those stairs, I became the mother trying to prevent this accident in the making, trying to preserve the last measure of independence for Mum’s survival.

And so it came to pass that we built a metal cage around the spiral, with a gate, and locked it. Mum screamed and shouted, demanded the key, took a screwdriver to the lock to force it open. Will you lock me out of my own home? she demanded. This was worse than Dad and his threat of removal upstairs, worse than me implanting myself in her home, taking over command of the kitchen and helper, managing her day to day, establishing foreign routines she simply knew were wrong, wrong, wrong. Divide and conquer, her longtime strategy with us, failed. We passed the buck to each other whenever we spoke to her; A said talk to B, B said talk to C, C said talk to D, and the loop began again. Meanwhile we powwowed on email so that each knew the latest developments in our corners of the globe.

It was the criminologist who said, we need to blow up this apartment.

When I told my friend Jenny about the spiral, her first response was remove it! Just take it away, she said. After all, we could access the roof from the building’s stairway. In fact I had begun to do that, so as not to go home through the front door below. Mum locked me out more than once with the dead bolt, and I had to wake Maryam to let me in. The alternative was to have Mum sit up and wait, which she did, and I would return at one or two in the morning after a night at the jazz clubs or drinking with Jenny, and there was Mum, asleep in her armchair, her eyelids fluttering awake as soon as I entered, saying, I wasn’t asleep, of course I wasn’t, followed by how come you’re so late, a question to be answered through clenched teeth if I didn’t want to scream.

You simply cannot be both daughter and mother. It is too schizophrenic, even worse than simultaneously being corporate bad cop and writer. You can justify bad cop as the exigencies of paid employment, since a literary life can leave you leaner and meaner than you want to be. And you can blow up the apartment. Which was what we did.

Her new home, or rather her new-old home, cleaned and refurbished, does not have a roof room. It does, of course, where I, the part-time babysitter, now reside. But the spiral staircase is gone, and sometimes, my mother stares at the empty space and asks, didn’t we have another room, and one of us replies, no, you’re thinking of G flat, our old homestead with the separate flat, or no, I don’t think so, and minutes later, she will be focused on something else, dinner most likely.

The excess clothes I gave away to the Salvation Army, filling ten boxes. The crystal cabinet is gone, as is the sideboard, as are all the plastic filing cabinets filled with dead letters. The kitchen I emptied at breakneck speed in between transpacific travel and work, blessing the advent of laptops and high-speed internet that connected me to my world. Her old closets, which she locked constantly and then forgot where she put the key, are gone, replaced by wardrobes without locks, just as the doors to her room and bathroom no longer have locks, just as she now no longer holds a key to the flat because she is never alone anywhere. Two Filipino helpers watch her twenty-four-seven and alternate their time off.

Now I am the employer, the one who has to show the helpers how to acclimatize to Hong Kong, who handles visa applications and medical insurance, who must prove she is locally employed and solvent enough to afford these foreign workers. Who must, by law, reside in the home where these helpers are employed. When my Hong Kong sister and I conceived their job description, our top priorities would likely not pass muster for most want ads today: the candidate must be pretty and clever—otherwise my mother will loudly criticize her appearance and lack of intelligence—and Catholic, because she must take Mum to church every morning and on Sundays and holy days of obligation. It helps not having to go with Mum to Mass as often, but I still occasionally do, lapsed though I am, and the priests approve, as do the parishioners, glad to see her cared for and happy, looking more alert and better groomed than she has been in a while, and proud to have a daughter so filial as to take her mother to church. It is hypocritical, I know, but at least it quells the screams.

My Hong Kong sister still takes Mum out most Sundays for lunch, and on a weekday as well if I’ve run away home to New York for a spell. Now I shop for my mother’s clothes and shoes, bringing home packages that she unwraps like a happy child, and before she can ask I say, it was on sale, 70 percent off, and then name some impossible price of fifty years ago (U.S. dollars stated as Hong Kong ones work, given the exchange rate, and this way I do not tell a total lie), and this she will understand, nod happily, pleased that she has taught her daughter the value of a dollar. I bring her flowers when I’m there or surf FTD.com when I’m not. The flowers brighten the home, for both her and her permanent houseguest. If things get too much, I call Jenny and we meet for drinks and bitch about life and old age. You can do that if you’re not a full-time mother.

Mum no longer screams. But the agitation never completely disappears because Alzheimer’s is like that. She’s good one day, crazy the next, and benign immediately afterward. My Hong Kong sister likens it to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which both the protagonist and his family must learn to live with their new reality. It is its own beat, atonal and arrhythmic, improvisatory at best of times, but always complex and never easily assimilated.

I am less afraid of my mother now because I don’t know how much longer she will remain my mother, so fear seems pointless. One day I’ll come home and she’ll say, as her eldest sister does to my cousins, who are you? Do I know you? It isn’t the tragedy I once believed it was because at least now she is in control again, bossing her two “servants” who take their real direction from my sister and me. Now she is Queen Mother again, whose children are “home.” My youngest sister arrives, my brother departs, I come and go, our Hong Kong sister shows up, and each time, it is as if she saw us only yesterday, or the day before, or it doesn’t matter because my children will all come home again eventually. Alzheimer’s time is like that. As in a novel, time skips, you arrive at the next dramatic moment of the story and ignore the missing time. My mother no longer needs the facts. The illusion, the fiction is, for her, the more significant and comforting truth.