flashquake Non-Fiction - Mother's Day by Debi Orton

flashquake
Mother's Day
by Debi Orton

It's the night before Mother's Day. Against her objections, I've convinced my mom to let me take her out to dinner. We're sitting in her favorite Italian restaurant. It's not that she doesn't enjoy going out, but she's ashamed of herself, embarassed by her condition, and doesn't like going out in public at all any more.

Before we leave tonight, she says, "I ought to take the cane." I know that she wants to appear less disabled than she truly is, but I have to play the conservative here, the role traditionally assigned to mothers.

"You'd better take the walker," I say.

She sighs heavily and admits I'm right. I don't take any pleasure in it, as I might have if this conversation had taken place thirty years ago. I don't enjoy being the parent.

The waitress has deposited our appetizers, and I watch her as she tries to eat her soup. In the restaurant lighting, she's having trouble finding it with her spoon. She turns her head from side to side, trying to get a better view, not unlike a bird stalking an earthworm in a dense lawn. The first attempt misses the cup, the second finds the cup but misses the soup. She lifts an empty spoon to her mouth, her face not betraying the fact that there's nothing there. The third attempt is successful. I want to help her, as I would if we were at home, but can't find a way to do it in public without shredding her dignity.

I think back to a sweltering August afternoon three years earlier. I'd just had a bitter argument with my mother's nephrologist in the hall outside her hospital room, where she was recovering from a shattered hip. He was insisting that I put her into a nursing home.

"She'll never be able to stay by herself, " he told me. "And she needs 24-hour care. We can't send her home alone. Look what happened the last time."

Ten months earlier, she'd slipped on some wet leaves and broken both of the bones in her right leg. She had such severe osteoporosis from years on dialysis that her bones needed to be reconstructed with donor grafts and four pounds of hardware. Her recovery had been long, spent at my house with hired aides caring for her while I worked. She'd returned home in May, and had only been there three months before this fall sent her back to the hospital.

"No," I replied. "If you put her into a nursing home, you may as well kill her." My mother is a stubborn, independent woman, unused to having to make the compromises necessary to live in the society of others. Her body is frail, but her mind is still sharp. And I'd seen how shabbily she'd been cared for in so-called "acute care" wards during her last two hospitalizations.

I entered her room. "Did he talk to you too?" I asked her, and she nodded. "Well, what do you think? About the rehab facility?" I wasn't ready to talk about the nursing home, so I started with the less controversial option.

She shook her head. "I can work with the visiting therapist at home, just like I did for my leg." She might as well have crossed her arms over her chest.

We moved on to other things then, but my thoughts swirled as I struggled to find a way to make everything work. The seven months she'd spent at my house while her broken leg healed had been torture for us both. I couldn't do it again. But what options did I have? Her remaining savings wouldn't last more than three or four months. The aides were costing us a fortune, almost a thousand dollars a week. We'd gone through a fair portion of her savings already, and if she went home in her present condition, what was left wouldn't last long.

The issue seemed to disappear for a few days, although it never left my mind. Then one evening while I was helping my mom take a sponge bath, my aunt called. She was drunk, as she often was after dinner, and started lecturing me about the necessity of putting my mom in a nursing home. The nephrologist had attempted an end run.

Suddenly, all of my frustration, confusion and worry erupted and were focused upon my aunt, who was always ready with an opinion about what we should do, and would offer to help only to back out at the last minute. "She doesn't want to go to a nursing home," I told her, "and as far as I'm concerned, that's the end of it."

"Be realistic. She'll never be able to afford this on her own." This was true. My mother receives $1,200 a month between social security and her pension. That wouldn't even cover the aides. I thought back to the last in-depth conversation I'd had with my father before he died. He was telling me that he was leaving my mother, and going to move in with a friend.

"I just can't take it any more," he'd said. "She's driving me crazy." My mother was in menopause, and her manic mood swings and tantrums were taking a toll on all of us. "Your brother's getting married next month, so he'll have his hands full. I'll leave right after that. So I'm asking you to move in here and take care of your mother until she's back on her feet. I need to know she's going to be okay."

He was my father. How could I say no? So I'd moved in with my parents, and on the day my brother was to have been married, my father was buried. The promise I'd made bound me even tighter. And it was that promise I remembered now, as I answered my aunt. "That's none of your business. I've been taking care of her without any help from you, I might add for almost a year now. Whatever it takes, I'll do."

I didn't know then what that would mean. I spend three nights each week and all day Sunday at her house, helping, I pay all of the bills and buy her groceries. I keep her medicines straight, draw insulin needles and pay for part of her one aide's salary. She has since had a kidney transplant and was hospitalized for phlebitis. But she's still at home, living on her own with all the dignity I can give her.

Our meal is finished, and I can almost hear my mother breathe a sigh of relief. She's managed to get through the evening without any major catastrophes. She's smiling when she looks at me and says "thank you," and I know that it's for more than tonight's dinner. I tell her she's welcome. There have been plenty of times since that day when I've wished that I had my life back. However, I haven't once regretted my decision to help her stay at home.