Me as my Mom’s Mom
This is a story from before Mom’s death while she was in the retirement home where she had lived for nine years. I wanted to respond especially to what VHcath wrote about self-care and just remind us all how easily and lovingly we do get trapped by our care giving role.
"Sometimes Mom calls me her Mom. Sometimes this causes quite a scene at the retirement home. Not so long ago I was late for my regular Wednesday morning visit, and there was a new care giver.
Mom asks her, where’s my Mom? She’s late. She’s never late.
The caregiver doesn’t quite know how to respond, but very gently and kindly, she says, I think perhaps you are mistaken. Your mother has passed on long ago.
No. No, that cannot be. She begins to cry inconsolably.
I arrive just at that moment. Mom smiles at me and all is well again.
I explain to the caregiver who is now very upset, Mom sometimes calls me ‘Mom’. It’s okay now."
I’ve been Mom’s caregiver, Mom’s ‘Mom’, for a long time. She has been sick a lot in her life, physically and mentally, and she has had to bear an enormous burden of sadness. Too much sadness.
I remember being six years old. I come home from school, running through the house looking for her. Calling out, Mom where are you? She is always in the kitchen waiting for me. I find her upstairs, sitting on the edge of her bed, crying and crying. Mom. Mom. What’s wrong?
I am so frightened. I have never seen her cry before. I don’t know what to do. She holds out a black edged card. Her hands are shaking. I can’t read the words. The letters are heavy in a strange looking script. I don’t understand.
My father has died, she says. I was not there to receive his blessing, to say goodbye. I was not there to comfort my mother. How can this be?
I sit down on the floor beside her and cry and cry with her until Dad comes home.
As soon as Mom could make the arrangements to travel to Europe she went to visit her mother and her father’s grave. Then her mother died too. She was very sad for a long time after that. I tried to look after her and make her feel happy that she still had us, Dad, my brother, and me.
Mom’s three brothers were killed in World War Two. Before the war Mom had married a Dutchman and moved to Holland. He was killed too. Her first baby, a son, was still born.
But then Mom met Dad in Holland after the war. Dad was a Cameron Highlander, part of the Canadian Forces that liberated Holland. They married and Mom came over as a war bride to start a new life here.
When I was eleven the doctor told Mom she had breast cancer. I remember thinking, now I have to do everything my mother does. I have to make the meals for my father and my brother, and I have to keep the house tidy. She might die. Mom might die. I was scared. But I also I felt strangely grown up. I would have to look after everyone now.
Shortly after that her doctor told her she had cancer of the bladder for which she received chemotherapy.
Close to my sixteenth birthday, Mom was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, manic depression they called it then. At first Dad wouldn’t let me go to visit her in the psychiatric hospital, the loony bin as the kids at school called it teasing me.
But I insisted. Dad, I’ve sat by her bed for hours sometimes when you are at work. She cries and cries. She won’t get up. I can’t get her dressed. She won’t eat. I know how she is. I must see her. Dad finally agreed to take me after school
When did Mom begin to recover from the bipolar disorder? Did she ever really heal completely? Did she have bouts of manic depression that I didn’t know about? Chose not to remember? She was eventually prescribed lithium pills which stabilized her for periods of time. But she continued to struggle with violent mood swings. She spent time in the psychiatric hospital to have her drugs monitored or changed, and after Dad died she suffered severe bouts of loneliness.
Dad died seventeen years ago. One day three years after Dad’s passing, I phoned and her voice sounded strange, sort of slurred and muffled. I drove as fast as I could to her place. I found her lying on the floor. I managed to get her into the car. She was like a rag doll, barely able to stand up. We sat for ages in the emergency waiting room. I was so anxious. She slumped down more and more in her chair. She seemed to be slipping away. Finally she got a bed and the doctors began to assess what was wrong. Her kidneys were shutting down. Lithium toxicity. She hadn’t been monitoring her intake of the drug, the drug that had seemed such a miracle solution for stabilizing her moods. Dad had been the one to remind her. Now it would be me.
This was a pattern that continued for the next nineteen years until Mom died. I think when we care so intensely for our loved one that when they pass away we mourn not just the loss of our mother, but the child she became. So we lose doubly - our mother and our child.