It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when things started going haywire with my mother. But I have a guess. Several years ago, during a few days in Malibu with my husband, Rob, I woke on my birthday to a dozen missed calls and texts from my daughter. The kind every parent dreads.
“There’s an intruder.”
“We’ve called the police.”
“Mom. I’m so scared.”
“PLEASE ANSWER YOUR PHONE!”
The messages had been sent from 30 miles away, back home in Los Angeles, where my mother, then in her 70s, was visiting and staying with my 16-year-old daughter. As she was going to bed, my mother said she saw someone standing on the balcony. She frantically awoke my daughter who then called 911. They cried and huddled in my daughter’s room until police with shotguns arrived, broke down the kitchen door, and swept through the house. There was no sign of an intruder. No footprints. No unlocked windows or doors. Footage from outside cameras showed nothing until the police came.
One of the cops said, “Maybe you saw a ghost.”
My mother liked this theory and ran with it — and brought it with her to Malibu where she insisted on staying with us for the rest of her visit so she wouldn’t be alone. (My traumatized daughter decided to decamp to my ex’s house.) That night my beachside birthday dinner carried on as planned, with my mother in the lead role, recounting her late-night scare in the canyons of L.A. to our friends. She held the hand of a former lover she’d invited on the way there and regaled people with her encounter with the supernatural. She was in such rare form that a new friend, upon meeting my mother for the first time, remarked to me afterward, “Wow, your mother really moves through the world as a sensual creature, doesn’t she? She leads with her sexuality.”
Later, Rob bristled. It had been a stressful few months and we’d been looking forward to some time on our own. “That was some next-level, black-belt manipulation,” he said to me once we were finally alone, her visit over.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Your mother is like a savant. She has to upstage you, even on your birthday. I’ve watched her do this for years. She didn’t want to be left behind. Now she has a wild story with ghosts and men with guns coming to save her.”
He had a point. Drama did seem to follow my mother around, or maybe it was the other way around. Her calls were often of a calamitous nature; something sinister was happening, requiring my immediate attention. Thirteen years ago, when, at 65, she quickly married a man named Jack whom she met on eHarmony and moved to a tiny rural town 2,000 miles away in Texas, I was relieved. But it didn’t take long before it turned into: Was her husband trying to poison her? Was he having an affair? Was he stealing her social-security money? After about five years, she became preoccupied with coming back to L.A. to find a new man. If she wanted to visit and I said, “That week is super busy for us, can you come the following week?,” she would show up anyway and call from the airport. “Hi, I’m just leaving LAX.”
Looking back now, that intruder episode probably wasn’t just something designed for attention. It was, perhaps, an early sign we missed because it looked like business as usual.
Growing up, my mother was “wishy-washy about marriage,” as she put it, and possibly even less thrilled about motherhood. Having me at 22 was unplanned, but it wasn’t going to force her to commit to one partner. Instead, she continued her life as a single person with me as her plus-one.
Young and gorgeous — she always did her hair and makeup before leaving the house — her primary focus was capturing the attention of men and being adored by them. She once told me how, when she was a preteen and her parents had parties, she would stay up late to spy on the adults — with the specific goal of trying to converse with the men. Their wives didn’t hold the same appeal. It was all about the men. She would watch them and think, “One day …”
A lot of our conversations happened while she was dressing for dates. I’d study her closely, mostly because when she walked out the door I never knew for sure when I would see her again. Sometimes I would be sent to stay with friends or relatives for weeks or months at a time. “You only get one chance to make a good first impression,” she said. “If you look ratty when you meet someone, they always remember you as ratty.” Without much direction beyond that, I surmised at a young age that I was supposed to look pretty and get along with men.
In those early years, my life revolved around my mother. She wasn’t overly affectionate and didn’t ever tell me she loved me, but she was all I had. I attuned myself to her moods, her rhythms, looking for clues as to when our life might be upended. There might be a new man, a breakup, a new sibling, or even a move to a different country. I was born in London, but then we cycled back and forth between living in Sydney and Hong Kong. I needed to be on alert to the changes in order to weather them.
Then I turned 15. My stick-straight body had grown curves and suddenly I was interested in boys. Some of my mother’s tendencies had transferred to me, and I was doing exactly what she had at my age. Overnight I became both her rival and her proxy. We’d had years of fighting bitterly, often over whether I was allowed to go out on a Friday night or to a party, but now she was pushing me to date. And she had specific ideas about the “contenders” — as she liked to call them — none of which were boys my age. But watching me date made her envious. At the time, she was in a serious relationship and about to finally surrender to her first marriage, to an American man, so she’d earmark men for me, like the German chef in our Hong Kong apartment building who was in his mid-30s. “One of us ought to have him,” she said. I was just shy of my 16th birthday.
“Why go out with someone your own age when they don’t know what they’re doing, either?,” she said another time. These had been the instructions from her own mother: “Date someone who can teach you something. And make sure they can afford to take you to dinner.” I heeded her advice and mostly dated men at least ten years older than me. Not surprisingly, they expected a lot more from me, sexually, than I knew how to give, and I found myself in situations that I had no idea how to get out of. With no sense of how to protect myself, what I learned to do instead was to give in, to be sexual before I was ready. When you’re brought up to be pleasing, figuring out how to draw boundaries when you need them isn’t easy. The “upside” was that dating an older, successful man was something that got my mother’s attention, even admiration, which gave me the sense of worth that I was searching for.
As I grew older, our relationship grew more tense, more combative. We moved to New York with my new stepfather. I had a 7-year-old brother from one of my mother’s prior relationships and she had another baby on the way. I had the sense that underneath she loathed me. From what I could gather, marriage and three kids was boring and suddenly it looked like I was getting the better deal and was flaunting it in front of her. She often flirted with guys I went out with. Once we even dated the same man: I met him first when I was 17 — then she had an affair with him the following year and almost left her new marriage for him. Another boyfriend noted our fucked-up dynamic, telling me, “Your mother is competitive with you to a weird degree. I can feel her trying to pull my attention to her.” If he paid me a compliment in front of her, she would say, “When I was her age, I had everyone’s attention.”
When I was 19, my stepfather’s job moved us from New York to California, and two years later, they moved back while I stayed in L.A. It took us living on opposite coasts for our relationship to shift gears. It was easier to get along when we only spoke on the phone. She still never told me she loved me, but she’d soften toward me when I was heartbroken, broke, or otherwise in the dumpster. When I was broke she would send me a couple of hundred dollars and say, “Go do something nice for yourself.” She counseled me after a painful breakup with someone I loved but who had addiction issues. She liked him for me and thought I should stick it out. “He loves you,” she said, as if that solved everything. I couldn’t understand why, if the relationship was causing me such pain, she would tell me to stay. But that was her thinking: A man who checked most of the boxes was far better than no man at all. Later, after her first marriage ended, she moved back to L.A. and watched me get married to someone she couldn’t stand. I had a daughter and then got divorced. The parallels made me uncomfortable.
And then I met Rob, three years after my first marriage ended. We dated for more than five years before getting married. Given my history and relationship role model, I didn’t know if I knew how to commit long term. I told him every ugly thing I could think of about myself to see if he might run, but he didn’t. He would say, “That makes me really sad,” or “I love you because of all you’ve been through, not in spite of it.” My mother had been a fan of Rob’s from day one — he’s an alpha male and exactly the type of person you want next to you during a crisis. In the meantime, my mother had found Jack and they got married. Six months after that, Rob and I finally married. A few years later, my mother confessed, “You got the right one and I didn’t.”
Not surprisingly, she wasn’t past hitting on Rob. “Rob, you look so handsome with that beard,” she cooed during one visit. “Wow, doesn’t he look good?” She was so fixated on him that even my daughter complained. “It’s so inappropriate,” she said to me, out of earshot from her grandmother, “Why does she keep saying that?” When my mother learned Rob was about to drive up to Northern California for the weekend, she said, “It’s so lovely up there — can’t I go with him?” He declined.
Her visits to California tapered off there. Soon she wasn’t up for traveling anymore and preferred to stay in her own environment. Then sometime last year things started to dramatically change and it was clear she needed help. She became confused and anxious and called me sometimes seven or more times in a day, forgetting that we had talked and repeating herself. Once she called me frantic because she had been driving somewhere and forgot where she was going. Another time she was hysterical because she said she had seen a man with his head sheared off — at first she said it was a car accident she had driven by, and the second time she said the man was sitting in a car and had blown his own head off. She would call me sobbing and say “I’m not a crier,” and she wasn’t. When Jack was away she would phone and say things like, “I bet Jack’s down at the bar, hitting on all the tarts.” I’d wake up to strange texts — “C’est la vie,” “I wasn’t expecting this month” — that were like fragments of conversations we weren’t having. Whenever I suggested it was time to go to the doctor, she was furious. “I’m an old tart on my own, what do you want from me?” Around the fall of last year, she started dodging my calls. Finally, last December, Jack called.
Although she refused to be diagnosed, her cognitive decline had become impossible to ignore. When she was left alone, she spiraled, so she couldn’t be by herself anymore. He told me about “sundowning,” a term for late-day confusion and aggression in dementia patients. “Your mother is on a downward slope and next year may be very different,” he said. He wanted to update me and to let me know that if anything happened to him, I’d be the one responsible for making decisions about her care. Any mention of dementia or Alzheimer’s would enrage her. “I’m not going to the doctor; I don’t have dementia,” she said. “Only old people’s memory issues.” Jack told me, “It would be good if you can get down here. There’s no way she’ll be traveling to California again. We need to be prepared for a ‘long day’s journey into night.’”
“You should only talk to her early in the day,” he told me. “Not later, when she’s had a couple of vodka tonics.” That was when a well of vitriol awakened in her, directed at me.
“Is this every night?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “She likes you in the mornings and hates you in the evenings. She calls you a scheming bitch. So don’t call past 2 p.m.”
“Why do you think she’s so angry at me?”
“Your mother is having a hard time with aging,” he said. “You have to understand that her life has been about her looks. She got jobs because of how she looked. What she keeps talking about is that when you were 17 she noticed when you walked into a room, people looked at you and that makes her really angry. She talks about your ‘early sexuality.’”
Dementia was like a warped fun-house mirror that reflected back all the issues I thought we’d buried in the past.
At that point, I’d avoided seeing her for nearly two years. Before that, Rob had insisted on setting a two-day limit for her visits after an eight-day stay left me anxious and picking fights with him. Within four hours of greeting her at the airport, I was fantasizing about self-harm. “Don’t you know any wonderful men for me? Surely you must know somebody,” she’d said. She didn’t ask any questions about me or her granddaughter but talked over me constantly. She commented on where my weight was at, how I looked. “Hmmm. That shorter haircut really does give you a different look, doesn’t it?” All the work I did in therapy would come undone until I was 14 again. That visit, she didn’t have a return ticket and the idea of an open-ended cohabitation induced sheer panic in me. “Let’s book her a ticket right now,” Rob said. “But we’re not doing this again.” After that, we stuck to catching up over the phone.
Early this spring, my mother called me, perplexed. “The person who is living here is different,” she whispered to me on the phone, so that the person in question wouldn’t hear. She spoke of the “Old Jack” and the “New Jack.” One is her husband, the other her new lover, also named Jack. In reality, she is the one who is different now.
“I’m here on an island with nobody I know,” she said quietly, with a resignation that gutted me.
“I don’t know who this Jack thinks he is, but he’s acting like he’s the king of everything. He has his computers and all his shit everywhere like he owns the place.”
I decided it wasn’t worth pointing out that he did, in fact, own the place. Dementia guidelines recommend not correcting the person. I’m supposed to let her think it’s her house and he’s a lover who won’t leave.
“We get along all right but, I don’t know how to get rid of him before my Real Jack comes back. This New Jack is sleeping in my husband’s bed.”
I ignored the guidelines. “You’re married to Jack. They’re the same person.”
She started to laugh. “What? I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. He has different coloring — and he’s a foot shorter.”
She had never been a fan of monogamy so maybe her brain had split Jack into two different men to keep things interesting. “They say the person’s dominant personality comes out in the extreme,” a friend told me. Sometimes, Jack says, he wakes to find her packing, saying she’s leaving him. An hour later, she doesn’t remember any of it. “The good news is she can only hold a grudge for a couple of hours. If you can’t come by July, then you probably shouldn’t bother,” Jack cautioned.
As Rob and I were driving down from the airport this past June, she called.
“Where are you?”
“We’re about an hour away.”
“What?? You’re coming here? DID THAT FUCKING BASTARD JACK SET THIS UP WITH YOU? I would have appreciated some fucking notice.”
Then Jack called back. “Your mother is having an episode. She knew you were coming but now she’s very angry at me and called you the C-word.”
We debated not going. “We could stop by and see how she is,” we told Jack. “Then we can go find a hotel.” The adrenaline was making me nauseous. I steeled myself to be face-to-face.
Half an hour later he called back to say she was fine now; in fact, she was looking out the window in anticipation of our arrival. Rob looked tense as we drove up. He was not designed for this level of emotional tumult; I was born into it. I had learned not only to survive my mother but to synthesize the elements of my crazy childhood into something livable. It wasn’t perfect, but I was in a good place. Coming back to her felt like being dangerously close to the edge, as if I might unravel along with her.
She walked out of the house and immediately I dropped my armor. She looked so tiny and frail. As I went to hug her, her whole body stiffened and she gave me an obligatory pat on the back. This was normal for her, but I hadn’t seen her in so long that I had forgotten. Affection was reserved for men.
Then she turned to hug Rob and brightened. “Wow. Doesn’t Rob look good!”
Inside, on a wall filled with photos of her and Jack, she pointed to one in the corner, saying “That’s my Jack.” The heat was oppressive. “Let’s have some water,” I replied.
We spent the afternoon feeding their horses and chickens and looking at old photos together. We talked about her mother, which made her happy.
When we drove to the restaurant for dinner, she and I sat in the back. I placed my hand softly on hers and gave it a brief, gentle squeeze. She looked down at my hand like this was a foreign, unwelcome gesture. In defiance, I left it there a few extra seconds before lifting it away.
The thing is, I still want my mother. Inside I’m still that 14-year-old girl trying to get her to love me. I long to experience a mother-daughter bond and, unreasonably, keep trying to construct it. I know it doesn’t exist. The sort of reckoning or acceptance I’m yearning for can never happen. But it’s clear that I have to let her go now, and my mother-hunger has to go, too.
“You’re leaving soon,” she said. “And you might not come back.” It was true; I might not come back. Neither would she.
For the rest of the visit we walked on eggshells, waiting to see if she would get angry again. There were flares of temper but she mostly stayed steady, despite barely eating a thing the entire time we were there. Jack said that we would have to make plans for her care on the phone, “She thinks you and I are in a conspiracy,” he told me. “She also thinks you’re trying to ‘be sexual with me.’ We can’t talk about any of this now.” Anytime she got me alone she wanted to talk about the annoyance of this New Jack, how “he’s getting to live here for free at my home,” and she didn’t know what to do about it. When I tried to gently suggest that it was his home, too, she became incensed. “It is NOT his home. This is my former husband Jack’s home. This is my house. I’ve lived here for decades.” Moments after these private conversations, I watched her with Jack, and she was more affectionate and loving than I’d ever seen her.
Later, on one of my calls with Jack he told me he planned to put off moving her into a care facility for as long as he could. Where would that home be, I asked. “It will have to be here, that way I could see her every day.” He also said, despite her objections, he had made plans to take her to the doctor to get her some meds. He was managing my mother as well as one could ever hope to manage her. In an email two months before our visit, Jack wrote, “I love her and will be here to the end. I’ll keep her with me for as long as I can.” She had found the right one, after all.
Still, as he’s put it, “If something happens to me, this will all be on you.”
Eventually, after two days together, it was time to leave for the airport. She endured another good-bye squeeze from me, before we left them sitting on a restaurant patio having brunch. I headed for the door and turned back for one final wave. But she wasn’t looking.
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