THE FIRST FEW WEEKS after she returned from Canada, my mother slipped on the stairs twice. Her feet just slid out from underneath her. “My slippers don’t have any traction; they’re too slick on the carpet,” she said.
That’s when I yelled at her not to wear those slippers—the same way a parent yells at a child who has just barely avoided an accident, an anger that comes from fear. Do you know how close you came? Do you know what could have happened? Do you know how much I love you? Do you know how scared that makes me?
“Okay, okay,” she said. But still she wore those slippers.
I knew then I wouldn’t be going anywhere that September, not to San Francisco as I usually did each September, not to Japan as I had hoped. I needed to stay in Seattle. I needed to keep an eye on my mother.
She was supposed to be lying down, resting, but often I found her in the garden, loppers in hand, trying to cut back the blackberries, the rhododendrons, the azaleas.
“You’re not supposed to be doing that,” I said, feeling like a teacher assigned to yard duty.
“I know. I just need to clip a few—”
“Give me the loppers. I’ll do it. You go lie down.”
“Okay, okay,” she reluctantly agreed. It wasn’t as if she could argue—she had a broken back. But before I knew it, she would be up doing something else. It felt like a giant game of Whac-a-Mole. Every time she popped up, I told her the same thing: I’ll do that; you go lie down.
The doctors wanted her horizontal, resting, for ten weeks, but my hummingbird mother had no sit-back-and-relax setting. She functioned on one of two speeds: overdrive and off. Once she was done sleeping, she wanted to get up and be productive. She did not want to lie down. She didn’t want to rest. She didn’t know how.
Resting now meant spending time on a platform bed in the living room. Her own bed was too soft, not supportive enough of her back, so we set up a futon next to the large picture window in the upstairs living room. From there she had a view down the long yard to the fruit trees in the distance. She could see the whole garden.
This meant she could see every weed that needed to be pulled, every branch that needed to be trimmed. Before I knew it, she would wander out to take care of them. That’s when I would find her with loppers or pruning shears. That’s when I would tell her to go inside and lie down again.
The bed in the living room made me uncomfortable. It reminded me of the elderly gentleman my mother had bought the house from. We’d heard he had spent ten years in a bed set up in the living room. “This is where I am going to live when I can’t get out of bed anymore,” my mom said when we first saw the house. “You can all come to pay your respects.”
My mother was getting older. She was becoming more frail. I was prepared for that—as prepared as one can be. I could imagine taking care of her once she was bedridden.
What I was struggling with was the timing. She had only been in Seattle two years. She wasn’t that old. She was still my bossy, stubborn, know-it-all mother. How could she be bedridden?
I hadn’t thought we’d be here so soon.
It had been odd living in my mother’s house that summer; it was even odder to be there with her. Always before when I visited, it had been in a house where I had once lived—a house that was also my home. This new house was very much my mother’s territory.
Little things set us off. When I woke up in her house that first morning after moving, I noticed my mother had put the toilet paper on the wrong way—with the paper dangling out the bottom rather than hanging over the top. I changed it back, thinking she was off her game. Then I noticed the downstairs bathroom was the same.
“Did you change the way you put on the toilet paper?” I asked when she returned from Canada.
“I did,” she said, a note of glee in her voice. “It took me a long time after you kids left for college to decide how I wanted the toilet paper. I like it better this way.”
Parents shouldn’t be allowed to change what they’ve taught their children, I fumed silently. All my life I had been trained to hang the paper over the top. Now she was changing the rules?
Of course the real worry lay deeper: If we could no longer agree on toilet paper, what hope was there for our relationship?
My mother was growing older and changing in ways I could not anticipate or control. Ground I had thought solid was shifting beneath my feet. It felt like a small betrayal, as if I didn’t know her anymore. Maybe I never had.
One morning, as I came up from the downstairs office where I was still camped out, I heard a voice talking on the phone. There was no one else in the house, so it had to be my mother, but it sounded nothing like her. She sounded younger, softer. I hesitated on the stairs. If I walked into the kitchen, she would see me, and I knew her manner would change.
That summer on the island my mother had made a friend. I had met her myself when I took the niecelets up there. My mother’s new friend Priya had brought her granddaughter to the cabin. The three young girls piled into the hammock with their sun-bronzed legs and their long braids, and I had a moment of wonder remembering how I had made island friends in the summer when I was a child, so glad they were getting this experience too.
I didn’t speak with Priya much. I was exhausted by the logistics of our visit—keeping an eye on the girls and my mother all on my own, making sure she rested and they got the activity young kids need and everyone got fed and somehow the dishes got washed. When Priya and her granddaughter arrived, I sat back and watched the girls swing in the hammock and their grandmothers sit in the sun and talk, but I noticed right away that something was different.
My mother does not have relationships of parity: She is mother to her children, teacher to her students, therapist to her clients. She has few friends. This means there is rarely anyone to call her out—to tell her she’s being irrational or suggest she rethink a decision. She is the law. This also means there is no one for her to lean on.
Perhaps it was the broken back, perhaps it was just a good match of personalities, but my mother was leaning on her new friend. There was a softness between them I had rarely seen, a level of comfort unusual for my mother. And when Priya left, she gave my mother a jar of homemade yellow plum compote.
“On some miserably gray day in Seattle, you can open it up and remember summer,” Priya said. My mother looked at her and smiled.
I knew then that my mother had told Priya things—how she hated Seattle in the winter, how she struggled. Priya knew more about my mother’s life than I did.
It was Priya on the phone that morning. I heard laughter, giggles. My mother sounded like a young girl. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but I sat down on the stairs and listened—not to the words, which were muffled, but to this noise I had never heard before: the sound of my mother’s girlish laughter.
That fall my mother was scheduled to have a laser treatment on her skin. Afterward she would have to stay out of all sunlight for three days. There was a dark downstairs room where she could camp out during the day, but she would need someone to bring her food and water until the sun went down and she could move about the house freely.
“Is this a chemical peel?” I asked, surprised that my mother would be doing anything so image focused.
“No—I don’t care about things like that,” she said. “You know that.”
She wouldn’t tell me much more. Only that the doctors were going to treat some spots on her face that were cancerous and had suggested she do the whole thing. She would have to be dropped off and then picked up at the end of the day. That was it. When it came to her medical condition, I was on a need-to-know basis.
She had always been like this. Once her doctors had accidentally called me with the results of a medical test. I was her emergency contact, and when they couldn’t reach her, the office called me to say her neurological exam had come back fine. My mother was furious.
“What neurological test?” I asked. “Why did you need one? Are you having problems?”
My mother wouldn’t talk about it. No matter how I tried, the conversation was closed.
“I’m going to be the one who has to make medical decisions on your behalf if you are incapacitated,” I told her. “Don’t you think I should know what’s going on?”
But still, she refused to talk. She had no problem discussing her concerns about my health—she aired them frequently—but her own was off-limits.
I drove her to the hospital the morning of her procedure. It was in an area called Pill Hill by Seattle locals, in reference to the many medical facilities there.
“I always get lost here,” my mother said, staring out the window at the view of Lake Union as we drove down the highway.
“It’s the James Street exit, right?” I knew the neighborhood, though I did not know which of the many hospitals we were going to.
“Yes,” my mother said. “James Street, and then turn left.”
“What do I do next?” The left turn had taken us up the hill to a large intersection. “Right or left?”
My mother looked around blankly. “This is where I always get lost.”
“Come on, Mom. Right or left!” I sat poised on the edge of the intersection, the cars behind me starting to honk.
“I don’t know.”
“What do your directions say?” She had pieces of paper in her hands, printouts from the hospital with notes written on them.
“I didn’t write the directions down.”
“Jeez, Mom—come on. You’ve been here before. When you get to this point, what do you do? Right or left?”
My mother looked around the neighborhood as if she had never seen it before. “When I get to this point, I call the hospital, and the nurses tell me what to do.”
“Mom.” I swerved across oncoming traffic just before the light turned red again and we were stuck there. I held my tongue and began to drive down the street. “Does this look familiar?”
“None of it looks familiar.”
“What about this?” I pulled up in front of the entrance to one of the hospitals. “Is this where you’ve been?” But it was Harborview, not Virginia Mason—wrong hospital. I finally exploded in frustration and fear.
“This is no way to live!” I shouted at her. How could the mother I had known—always in charge, always in control—be reduced to this? For a second I took my eyes off the road and glanced in her direction.
My mother—so small she sat on cushions in the car, using them like a booster seat—was staring at the road, tears beginning to slip down her stony face. She made no move to wipe them away.
“I know,” she said quietly, still staring straight ahead. “Don’t be angry with me. Getting old is no fun.”
Winter in Seattle is a challenging prospect. The cliché is that it rains all the time—and sometimes it feels like it does—but rain is not the hard part. What is hard is the dark, the bleak. On the worst days, there is no dawn, just a subtle lightening of the pervasive gray. On the worst days, you keep the indoor lights on all day.
At the height of winter, the sky doesn’t begin to lighten until after 8 A.M., and sunset starts at 2 P.M.; it is fully dark by 4 P.M. Office workers commute in pitch black. People hibernate. Unless you are proactive, you may not see your friends until spring.
The garden called it quits in the winter as well. In some ways this was a relief—incessant rain means the grass barely grows; most weeds go dormant. If you do a good job of cleaning things up in the fall, the garden sleeps throughout the winter without much need for tending or maintenance. Even things that continue to grow slow down. The rate at which kale produces leaves in the winter requires great patience.
Being with my mother that winter required great patience as well, which I didn’t always have. I buried myself in work, hiding out in the downstairs office, though work was not going well either. The economic downturn was making itself felt in all corners. Where before work had been, if not plentiful, at least available, budgets had now been slashed. And I had spent the summer working less than I should have. When it came to my career and finances, I was bailing water on a sinking ship. That winter felt hard all around. Inescapably hard.
The only bright spots were the afternoons the kids came to play. I was usually working when they arrived, but soon I heard them gallop to the stairs and they burst into the downstairs office, hurtling their small bodies at me. “Tea-tea!” they cried in excitement. “Tea-tea!” On days when my work felt stalled, when it felt like I was failing, having small people simply delighted to see me was like unexpected sunshine, cheerful and warm.
My mother threw herself into these visits. She spent the day before shopping, buying foods she knew the kids liked, making sure she had organic milk in the house. The day after their visits she spent cleaning up the games or crafts scattered around, re-hanging dress-up clothing in the closet, sweeping up crumbs and bits of food from under the dining room table. I knew she loved them coming, but I wondered how long she could keep it up.
The days Graham—the girls’ new brother—came to play were easier on her. His needs were simpler, the pace of a baby slower. She was perfectly happy to sit on the floor and roll a ball back and forth with her grandson, for hours if he wanted. It reminded me again of how much seniors can offer, what a good match they can be for small children.
The baby looked exactly like my brother—blond hair with stickup cowlicks and big wide eyes. It was as if my brother had managed to clone himself. As Graham started crawling and toddling on uneven legs, it felt like we had gone back in time. To see him playing on the same Chinese carpet my brother and I had played on was to feel as if thirty years had somehow vanished, as if I were seeing my brother again as a child. As if no time had passed at all.
To see my mother with the baby was even more affecting. When my brother was born, she had been overwhelmed, newly abandoned by her husband, suddenly responsible for the care and support of a family of three. There had been no time to enjoy her baby. She was focused on survival.
Now, thirty-odd years later, my mother no longer had to work so hard. And here was a child who looked exactly like the child she had missed out on. She poured herself into the baby, marveling at his development, his intelligence.
“Do you know what Graham did today?” Her conversation opener on the days he had come to play was always the same.
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“I was making lunch, and he wanted his quesadilla, but they weren’t done, so I told him we needed to be patient. Then, later in the afternoon, when we hung the birdseed balls in the yard, I looked for birds and finally said I guessed they weren’t coming. Do you know what he said then?”
“I don’t know.”
“He looked at me and said, ‘Grandma, patient.’ Can you believe that? That’s pretty abstract thinking. I tell you, that kid is just so smart!”
My mother was smitten. Like I had never seen her before.
When I went upstairs to get a cup of tea, or saw the two of them together in the garden, a wave of emotion washed over me. My mother with her gray hair, a little boy who looked exactly like my brother. They walked hand in hand, looked at each other with such adoration; they spent hours playing with blocks or studying some small rock or pinecone in the garden. She had all the time in the world for him, and he loved her for it.
Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, life gives you a second chance.
Once the children had gone home, however, it felt as if all sunshine had gone out of a bleak sky. The house was big and cold, and my mother and I were left there, just the two of us with our sharp edges, puzzle pieces that never seemed to fit together.
We fought that winter—and not just about toilet paper. On the worst days, we fought about deeper things: how judgmental she was, how I feared I disappointed her, how we each failed to meet the other’s needs. John may have used Chinese medicine to explain our dynamic, but that didn’t make it any easier to live with.
“Loving you is like trying to hug a porcupine!” I shouted at her in the midst of a particularly bad fight. “Do you realize that?”
My mother stopped and laughed, a short, angry bark. Then she paused.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “I imagine it is.”
The next day I could barely remember what had set us off. It almost didn’t matter. The subtext to our arguments was always the same.
Why don’t you see me for who I am? Why can’t you accept and love me the way I need to be loved? Why are you making this so hard?
It was late at night that October when I got the email from my friend Sarah: Are you still awake? Can we talk on the phone? I have something to tell you.
Sarah and I had seen each other a week or two before, on a walk through the wooded trails of Carkeek Park. She had told me how busy her schedule was, how she didn’t have time for the medical appointment she had made. “Why don’t you postpone it until after your deadline?” I asked. She had a book project taking up too much of her time.
I had plenty of friends in Seattle by then, but none with whom I shared as many commonalities. Sarah understood my fierce Northern California politics; she had lived there herself in high school. We were both trained journalists, with the cynical second-guessing that brings along with it. She also shared the gallows humor and worst-case-scenario thinking I had been raised with. I had assumed this a feature of my mother’s personality but was coming to realize it was cultural. Sarah’s ancestors had seen the same hard times mine had.
It was this worst-case thinking that made her ignore my suggestion to reschedule a medical screening for which she was ten years too young on a week she was on deadline and had no free time. It’s good she didn’t listen to me—for there she was on the phone, telling me she had been diagnosed with cancer.
There would be surgery, she said, and then they would see. They had caught it early. Had she waited ten years for the screening, as medical guidelines recommended, she would have died. If she survived, it would be entirely due to modern medicine and her own fiercely suspicious nature.
I sat there on the phone that night wondering if my mother was right—perhaps we should expect the worst, perhaps we should plan on it. Life increasingly felt a fragile and dangerous proposition. We were all dangling by the thinnest of threads. How easy to start spinning out of control, how easy to plummet into the chaos. Really, it could happen anytime.
I spent the night after Halloween at Sarah’s house, having dinner with her husband, Daniel, and the kids. She was in the hospital and had asked if I would help out. Her little girl—the baby we had all passed around that hot summer night—was a toddler now, and the evening routine was hard to do alone.
That night one of the boys refused to eat vegetables but still wanted candy afterward. When I said no, he started crying—big tears that turned his face red. Daniel was putting the baby to bed, and I pulled the crying child onto my lap. He resisted at first, then went limp, snuggling his head under my chin and sobbing as if his world had broken in two. When he wrapped his arms around my waist, it took all I had not to cry along with him. I knew exactly how he felt.
His mother’s in the hospital; give him the damn candy already.
When chemo started I began going over for dinner on Wednesdays, when Daniel worked late, bringing with me a big pot of soup. When you cannot make things better, when there is nothing you can do to make a problem go away, it’s therapeutic to chop vegetables. It makes you feel like you are accomplishing something.
Each week as I chopped the vegetables—kale from the garden, mustard greens, chard—I thought about all I hoped for my friend. I hoped the soup might make her strong. I hoped it might bring her some comfort. I wanted her to have something easy to heat up on days when she was busy or not feeling well. It was only soup, but it was all I had.
When the soup was ready I took the still-warm pot off the stove. I doled some out for my mother, then carried the rest to my car. I put the pot on a kitchen towel on the floor of the passenger seat and drove to Sarah’s. She and Daniel lived only ten minutes away from my mother’s house, the soup still warm when I carried it into her kitchen, dodging small, excited children. “Tea’s here!” they shouted. “Tea’s here!”
When we sat down to dinner—the two boys, the toddler, Sarah, and I—the family went around the table, everyone sharing two good things about their day and one bad thing. The bad things were predictable—a broken toy, a lost book, perceived unkindness on the part of a sibling, all the small but significant heartbreaks of childhood. The good things ranged from a favorite dessert to a new game, or a visit from a friend. But on the nights I was there, each of the boys said that one of their best things was that I had come for dinner.
After the toddler was asleep, after I had read the latest chapter of How to Train Your Dragon with the boys, after we had cleaned up the leftovers and had a cup of tea and a chat at the table, the alarm for Sarah to take her medication would ring, and it was time for me to go. She always thanked me, over and over again. Over and over again, I said it was nothing, it was my pleasure, and really it was.
What I don’t think she knew, what I don’t think she ever understood, was that she was helping me through my long, hard winter as well. Those evenings with her and the kids felt warm; they felt joyful, even in the midst of fear and uncertainty.
To walk through the door and have small people cheer just because I had shown up (Yay! It’s you!) was an antidote to my mother’s grimness, her frustration with me, and my own feelings of failure at work and at life. At Sarah’s I felt appreciated in a way I rarely did at home. I could make her daughter laugh just by hiding behind a doll blanket. I marveled at the boys’ latest Popsicle-stick creations, and they glowed bright with pride. With my own family, I felt guarded, always fearful of judgment or rejection. Being at Sarah’s felt validating. It felt redeeming.
Sometimes a kitchen-table chat with a friend is exactly what you need to soothe the barbs of the day. We all have our small but significant heartbreaks. We all need help in hard times. But sometimes help works in mysterious ways. I might have been helping my friend, but she was helping me just as much.
That is the mark of a good friendship, I thought, driving home late at night on quiet, dark streets. When you each give all you have and you both think you are getting the better deal; when walking through the door of a house that is not your own feels like coming home.
And week by week, soup by soup, we got through the long, hard winter together.