It's Never Enough

Author's Note: Over the years, I've written about my relationship with my mother in journals and doc files. So far, I've been writing this blog in the present tense, now that Mom has passed away. I've decided to include some material written while she was alive. Not everything in this blog is going to be about our psychic experiences, I've decided. It's about me being her daughter, too, and what it was like to live with a celebrity (a relatively minor one, perhaps, but with the same ego challenges!). These posts help to flesh out the complicated way it was. And FYI, I do own a cell phone now.

“Cheez, mom, I know it’s practically against your religion to be grateful for something— on account of how it cuts into your time crying to the moon for stuff you can’t have—but could you, just once, say thanks for something your kids did instead of being pissed off for what they didn’t do?”

“He could have stayed another day instead of flying home and then all the way back to San Diego.”

“He could have, if he’d known about his Friday meeting when he made his reservations to be there on the day of your surgery. But he didn’t—and so he ended up making personal reservations separate from his business reservations, and he didn’t want to pay the extra $100 to change them into one trip.”

“It’s ridiculous…”

“It also meant he could spend Valentine’s Day at home.”

“Well, who cares about that?”

“He and his wife, for starters.”

I scratched my head. I knew she was in pain. I knew the medication was making her cranky, too, and the lack of food and the nausea. Most of which was self-inflicted, since she refused to eat and was mainlining morphine in her IV drip. God knows, I knew being in the hospital by yourself was no picnic, either. It was nice to have someone to talk to, to complain to, to sit with you.

But given she was mostly drifting into semi-conciousness, Bill being there would have been mostly watching her sleep.

The problem always is, you do what you can, you try, you give what you can give. And whether it’s a little or a lot, it’s never enough for mom.

Other people say things like, “I think it’s wonderful how you kids are all making an effort to fly out and be with her.” People that aren’t even related to us can see that we’re wonderful. Our mother can’t, she’s too much in her own way. She hates to be beholden to anyone. And she wants to be owed for everything. So for her to be grateful just goes against the grain.

“Well, I’ll be there in a couple of weeks. You just take it slow, a day at a time. And eat something…if it was me in that bed, you’d be telling me the same thing.”

Whimpers of pain and a breathy conversation with the nurse while I hang on to the phone.

“Here are your pills, dear…”

“I can’t take those. I can’t swallow them. Can’t you give me a shot?”

“I just did, in your IV drip. Morphine.”

“Oh.”

“I can crush these pills if you’d like. All except this one, it’s a gel capsule. I can’t crush that one.”

Grumbling. “I guess I’ll have to take them, then. Get me some water.”

“Mom, maybe they could get you some applesauce if you’re having trouble swallowing.”

Moaning, then tiny clicks as the pills go into her mouth. “I have to go now.”

“Ah…okay. Talk to you tomorrow.”

My mom can flatten me out in a ten-minute phone conversation. Just suck me dry like a fly in a web, and leave my pitiful husk hanging on the line. Her suffering is relentless and garrulous, her empathy for your end of the conversation extremely limited. Her arthritis, her neighbors, the cat across the street, the horrible children on bicycles, the landlord, the gardener, the cleaning woman, even her friends; and of course, my siblings and their spouses and children. The glass is not only half empty, what remains is poison—so she is not about to see the gratitude in that! I don’t know how she got that way, it’s certainly exacerbated with age—but I thank God every day for Caller ID and Voice Mail. They preserve my sanity.

That and the fact that she’s never gotten the hang of email.

People are astonished that I don’t have a cell phone. If they spent half an hour on the phone with my mother, they wouldn’t be. And don’t get me started on cell phones, anyway. Tools for living in a world of TMI in every public place you can think of.