This is a piece I wrote while I was care-taking my mother-in-law. It's for all care-takers who need to remember to breathe.
This isn’t about me. My mother-in-law was always quick to remind
me of this in the sharp tone she used to mask her fear that I would pull my
support, pack my “overnight” bag and leave her to die alone.
She is (name deleted) the red-haired lady who dressed for
the TV camera and took the mayor and his council to task whenever she saw the
need. For some, she was the voice of conscience; for others, the proverbial
thorn.
For the last year that she lived alone I was her caretaker, the
significant other who signed her outpatient release and unlocked her front door
when she returned home from rehab with a knitting hip and a nagging fear that
the world had changed in her absence. Now she's l
We didn’t start off the best of friends. Forty-some years ago she
bought a black dress for her son’s wedding and refused to invite anyone from
her side of the family. Frankly, she wanted better for him and she was not shy
about letting me know.
I was the in-law who never seemed to please, but who hung in
there trying. Some of the fault was mine. I didn’t share her vision of
matriarchy with me on the bottom rung. I was unfinished when I married her only
child and I acquiesced until her grudging intolerance became a pattern for us
both.
A Portuguese daughter of Azorean dairy farmers, she had worked
hard to raise her social status and she saw me as a spoiler. In the 50s she
opened a photography studio on Higuera Street Wilding Lane
Over the years the two of us formed a history. Jaunts to old
inns and cafes helped diffuse our differences. She taught me nuances of style
on shopping trips to Monterey Fresno Santa
Barbara San Bernardino
When a heart attack
forced her to give up photography she became interested in city politics. At 85,
she still drove herself to City Hall three days a week and attended meetings
that lasted until 1:00
A.M.
But the years caught up with her. One morning she missed the
last two steps of her stairway, tumbled and broke her femur. Two months later
she was released from rehab with a walker, a commode—and me.
The days formed a comforting pattern. I made out her checks and
she signed them. She scrutinized the grocery receipts, questioned the calls I
received on her phone and tried to make things the way they had been. In the
mornings I read to her from my novel-in-progress. I slowed my pace to match
hers. We took afternoon tea with pound cake made of lemons from her backyard
tree.
We acted in single accord, respectful of our limits, but it was
not easy. Visiting nurses and physical therapists patted my arm and wrote
covert notes encouraging me. They understood that my mother-in-law was
difficult.
At the hospital I heard one of the nurses whisper, “She’s the
daughter-in-law, not the daughter!”
The first time it happened, I smiled. But I
realized that her son needed to be at her side; he’d missed the best parts of
his mother, the adventures, her joie de
vivre. He didn’t understand the
glue that cemented his mother and his wife like a feminine Odd Couple; two
women who never liked each other very much until we came to recognize the depth
of our love.
One night, when I washed her feet and painted her toenails with
vermilion polish, I looked up to find tears. She would never think to thank me,
but I saw in her eyes that she was touched. We
are not that different, I thought. When
I am old and alone I hope someone touches me like this.
Now she’s waiting to die and I miss her already. Maybe Thomas
Wolfe is right; we can never go home again, but we can travel to a place we've
never been. My mother-in-law was right, too. This isn’t about me
Anne
Schroeder writes and speaks on healing relationship in her memoir, Ordinary Aphrodite.
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