Taking Care of Mother

I am one of those middle-aged daughters who has an elderly, infirm mother. There are so many of us, these days! I can’t count the number of times I have been with my mother in the waiting rooms of physicians’ and dentists’ offices, or in the hallways of hospitals, and in banks and grocery stores and department stores, when I have noticed other middle-aged women with their frail, elderly mothers. Once, in a physician’s office, I was (oddly) touched to see a middle-aged man with his elderly father.

When I tell people that part of my life involves helping my mother, they almost always express some sentiment that suggests that it is wonderful that my mother and I can be close now, near the end of her life. Our culture harbors some insanely benign image of all elderly mothers as sweet, loving people; maybe Hallmark Cards are to blame, I don’t know. But it just isn’t that way, for many of us. Today there is a review in the New York Times of a book called An Uncertain Inheritance (ed. by Nell Casey). The book contains totally unsentimental, real-life stories about what can be the utter horror of “caregiving.” Here are some excerpts taken from the review:

• “We may still believe in the healing power of love, but extreme reality can dispense shocking lessons. The hardest one… can be that love and devotion do not necessarily alleviate suffering. ‘You and your love don’t help me,’ Helen Schulman’s father brutally tells his daughter in one of the starkest essays here. ‘How could this be?’ she is left to wonder. ‘How could this endless reservoir of affection and attachment and respect that I felt for this man prove so powerless, so worthless?’
• “Scot Sea, the father of a severely autistic 15-year-old girl, bluntly describes the daily routine of his household as ‘just the same scene from the same interminable clip on the late show from hell’ and has nothing but contempt for those ‘New Age pests, overdosed on media mythology,’ who tell him that being the parent of an autistic child is a blessing. Nonetheless — in isolation, rage and despair, and with no hope in sight — he perseveres in taking care of his daughter.
• “In ‘Death in Slow Motion,’ Eleanor Cooney writes of finding herself in a similar kind of hell after her 75-year-old mother, a vital, witty and intelligent woman, develops Alzheimer’s. Swamped by the demands of her mother’s rapidly deteriorating condition, Cooney begins to go under herself: ‘I felt hard and mean and full of sorrow all at once, and it drove me truly mad. Drove me, in fact, to drink.’ Finally, feeling guilty, she moves her mother into an assisted living center. At the end of her rope after being told that her mother is too ‘high maintenance’ for the staff to handle, she asks her mother and, by implication, her readers: ‘What would you do? I’m still waiting for the answer.’”

This caregiving task is no easy job, even in the best of mother-daughter relationships. My own relationship with my mother has never been one that would be classified as among the “best.” She has her good points. She is funny (with a sharp edge) and quick-witted. At 87 years old, she’s still a snappy dresser. She is artistic, and at one time she was a good painter. But my mother has also, always, been very demanding and critical. She often prefaces her “requests” for assistance with the phrase: “I’d think that the LEAST you could do would be….” Nobody who knows my mother has ever said that she worries too much about the needs of others. She makes terrible decisions about nearly everything, and then she blames the outcomes on others. She disapproves of much of my life, and she has always been hateful to anyone I have ever loved, to everyone who has ever loved me. Despite having lived a comfortable middle-class life, she is full of envy and bitterness. Given her faults, and mine, it is probably inevitable that we have never been close. I love her, but spending time with her feels like being in hell.

This is one version of what Jon Kabat-Zinn calls the “full catastrophe.” I have no siblings, and my father is gone, lost to suicide. Over the years, any and all of my mother’s would-be friends, helpers, and/or caregivers have fallen by the wayside. Understandably. She’s “difficult,” and that’s the way she has always been. A person can navigate the world in the way that she does, so long as she is not poor, or sick, or unable to take care of herself. But when age and illness, disability, or poverty befalls such a one, then the only thing left for her is the only one who is left, the only one she has not (yet) entirely driven away. Her daughter. And, from one day to the next, I don’t know how much of myself I can give to her, without being utterly destroyed (or infected) by my mother’s bitterness.