Do-over Dreams
Monday, 23 January, 2012
Even my unconscious recognizes twenty years have passed. I’m --- years old, the mother of two grown sons. And that’s the thought which drags me upward to the surface of wakefulness. It’s not me who is completing her studies; it’s my boys who are graduating! One day after the next, I awake astonished by this revelation.
My God! I remember my Aunt Dora—the one who hid Grandfather Irving in a basement during the Russian Revolution—pinching my cheek when I was a girl. She exclaimed some endearment in her thick accent. My mother told me, due to Dora’s bravery, her dad had survived his family. Irving’s father had been shot by the Czar’s men right in front of him; his mother and siblings were later killed in the street by the Nazis. But Dora’s huge purple mole, on the side of her face, filled my vision. I failed to conjure up the image of a heroine.
I remember being sixteen, visiting my Great-grandmother Ida in the nursing home. Classical music filled the room, the sound scratchy as the album bumped around on her cheap-looking record player. My Grandpa Jack, eighty-years old, said in a sour voice, “Eddie isn’t here. He died. You always liked him best.” Grandma Helen, smiled warily and squeezed my hand. (I can still feel the assured grip of her small, dry hand, the metal of her dead son’s college ring bearing down into my palm). “I spent yesterday sewing name tags into Ida’s underwear, just like I did for your father when he went away to camp.”
I remember how frustrated one competitive boyfriend of mine would get when my Great Uncle Morty—well into his eighties—won every game of Trivial Pursuit we played against him. My uncle would eat roast beef on rye and quote Longfellow, the baseball game humming on TV in the background. His wife, my favorite aunt, once confessed in a fake whisper, “I never told Morty I voted for Roosevelt. He’d never speak to me again.”
I remember my husband falling asleep in the passageway of the kitchen, standing up and leaning on the wall. It was four a. m. and our first son, not yet six-months-old, was happily babbling in his swing. Succumbing to his boy’s schedule, my husband had made us a stack of pancakes.
I remember watching my father, a week before he died, trying to eat one of his red popsicles; the skin around his hands was draped so loosely, it foretold his future. Dad gazed out the window, at Grandpa Irving, who was resting on a chair by the pool. My grandfather was reading the New York Times, as was his habit. Thirty years older than my father at the time, Grandpa lived to the remarkable age of 107. My father died at 67. Over the years, my father had helped Irving selflessly and often. Perhaps, the old man had grown an exoskeleton as protection after outliving the Cossacks and the Nazis. Whatever his reasons, my grandfather refused to acknowledge that cancer had snuck into the house, deadly as the SS. Under his breath, Dad called him, “Methuselah.”
When we left, the last time I’d see him at home, my father hugged me to his brittle body, apologizing for his condition, the fact that he couldn’t eat. “I’m sorry I scared you,” he said.
This morning, I had the urge to grab time by the tail and yank it backwards. I wanted all the ghosts to remain, hovering in the air. How I miss their company! But, then, my son plopped on my bed and said, “Let’s go somewhere fun this afternoon. I’m sick of studying.” Suddenly, the molecules realigned and I was plunked into the present. No-do overs are allowed during daylight hours. There I went, moving in the only direction available: forward one more day, still on this earth.
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In Miten Drinen (In the middle of everything)
Friday, 13 January, 2012
The message on my voice mail was from my brother who gruffly informed me that “something is wrong with Mom.” Instantly, my heartbeat changed rhythm; it skittered, then thudded. I had ignored the ringing phone, an hour ago, because I was working: editing, writing. Whatever it was felt more important than chatting. Now, it turned out, that while I was dodging interruptions, my mother was slurring her words and experiencing numbness on her left side. I didn’t have to check with my neurologist brother-in-law to know what these symptoms meant: stroke.
My mother’s friend called EMS or the Fire Department—we’re still not certain which. But they arrived swiftly, behaved professionally and efficiently, delivering her to the nearest hospital. I left my older son, home from college, in charge of picking up his younger brother from high school. When I kissed him, on the top of his head, he smelled lovely: musky, familiar. He hugged me, solemnly.
My husband, who had been working from home that day, drove while I made one call after the other to: my sister in Maine, my aunt in New Jersey, my mother’s two best friends on Long Island and another to my brother, who was shaken up and planning to take the Red Eye from LA. I tried to gather information on my mother’s condition, but all anyone knew for certain was that she was able to hobble to let in the EMS workers—a good sign—and that she hadn’t been taken to “her” hospital, the one in which she worked as a social worker for over twenty-five years. The nurses and doctors she loved would not be called down to the ER to provide support.
When we arrived at the hospital, my mother was on a gurney, parked in the hall outside the ER, in nothing but a gown over her pants—shoeless, sock-less, exposed. But she was propped up on her elbow, smiling, and talking to the resident—a short, thin, be-speckled boy who looked like he could be my older son’s classmate. When she questioned why she had to be taken to the stroke unit—now that her symptoms had abated—he spoke to her kindly, patiently. And though she tried to charm him to let her go home, he didn’t relent.
The stroke unit was upstairs, a four bed “suite” already filled with three other patients—all men, all younger than my mother, and all in much worse shape. My mother was hooked up to a machine that, periodically, let out jarring, headache-producing beeps. “How is she supposed to sleep here?” I asked, over and over, to no one in particular, once I learned that she would have to spend the night.
My mother’s mood was giddy—as is often the case, I find, following a traumatic event. She laughed with my husband as they read from the instruction sheet she’d received from one of the neurologists about changing her habits to prevent strokes. “You’ll have to give up cake,” my husband teased her, well aware of my mom’s penchant for sweets, in particular chocolate and donuts. “But I love cake,” she said, pouting.
My husband was his usual comforting self; in an emergency, he’s the guy you want. Tired, after a crisis, he’ll often withdraw, become grumpy, retreat into cyberspace. But, at a hospital, he’s a prince.
I was not so gallant.
When my dad was dying of cancer, my mother was beside me in the ER as I trembled, struggled for breath, shell-shocked. She told one of her nurse-friends, “This is my gentle daughter.” “Gentle” could have been code for: anxious, introverted, not up for a fight. My younger sister, in contrast, is steely and brave: she toured China by bike for three weeks, horseback rode through Portugal, learned disaster training as a doctor in Israel, worked as a psychiatric resident in NYC on 9/11. But gentle or not, I am the one around. My brother and sister would have to fly in from the Northeastern and Western corners of the country.
My sister flew in from Israel too late to see my father; she got the news of his death as soon as she stepped off the plane. Rising to the occasion, despite her sadness, she helped my mother make funeral arrangements, replaced the cracked toilet seat in my parents’ downstairs bathroom, then cleaned up for the guests who came to sit Shiva. This time, my mother didn’t seem to be in grave danger; but no one was taking any chances, despite my mother’s protests: “I’m not up for playing hostess.” I discussed, with my siblings, what little I knew about my mother’s condition—and what my sister and her husband could gather from talking to her neurologist—as I paced the halls. I am not the best person for the job of team leader in my family or any group. I’d rather fall back, work alone, observe. But, as I was in the thick of things, this was my role—at least for one night.
I collapsed in the chair next to my mother’s bed and complained about the “beeping” to the cheerleader of a nurse--who happily reported my mother was the most talkative patient she’d ever had on the stroke unit--and tried not to stare at the youngish woman weeping quietly on the chair next to her sleeping (also youngish) husband’s bed. Finally, we kissed my mother goodbye and headed home, promising to return the next day, before she was scheduled for a MRI.
When we got back to our house in New Jersey, my sons were seated at the dinning room table, each quietly doing work on his laptop. I blinked and imagined the same scenario a week from this time: only my younger boy would be here. A year and a week: we’d be returning to an empty house.
This, I thought, would be the rest of my life: a series of leave-taking. I could clutter up my days with work and chores and busyness, but still the phone would ring and loss would find me. I swear it was as if an apparition appeared on my staircase, not the Grim Reaper, with his dramatic black hood and menacing scythe in hand, but his delicately-built, downtrodden brother, the Angel of Loss.
I called the hospital. My mother was doing fine and was most likely out of danger. Bleary-eyed, my husband and I sunk into the couch and, with our sons, watched Top Chef Texas.
The good looking guy from Malibu was eliminated. It was his turn to leave. It’s not my mother’s turn, not yet.
In Anticipation of the Inevitable
Tuesday, 03 January, 2012
My younger son is leaving for college in less time than it took for me to carry him from conception to term. His entry into the world was a hard one: he was delivered by emergency C-section after I was rushed into the operating room, knocked out with general anesthesia, and torn open like a curtain, which branded me with a thick scar and robbed me of all muscle tone in my abdomen. But, my boy was healthy and we were released from the hospital two days later. “Why so worried looking?” a nurse asked him, upon our departure. That furrowed expression—the look with which he was violently yanked into the world—is often still there on his face.
When I think about my house without my son’s six-foot body inhabiting it, the sense of emptiness stuns me. It’s as if my heart, split in two between my two children, will never survive the loss. For twenty-two years the home my husband and I created, with our boys in the center, fueled us with joy. How will it feel without my younger boy’s voice belting out songs in his rich baritone, baking his chocolate ganache cake, gathering with his friends to construct a physics project or to have movie night in our living room, laughter rising like smoke up to our bedroom?
When my older son went to college four years ago, we visited him too frequently for his liking. On one of our early trips, he refused to let me hug him in public; he was embarrassed that his parents were on campus on a weekend when other Freshman’s families were not there. I sat on a stone bench in the yard outside his dorm and cried. In the last couple of years, he has relaxed about our visits and we have learned to come and go without weepy displays. He has spent a summer in England and one in Washington DC, sung in Athens, Dallas, Paris, San Francisco, and Tokyo with his a cappella group—in other words, he has been physically absent more than present in our home.
It wasn’t my original plan, putting motherhood first—far from it. In graduate school, I read feminist theory and truly believed that I would be able to slot mothering into the role it deserved: a relationship, not a profession. The morning after my first boy was born—after a long day of painful back labor—I propped myself up in my hospital bed, reached for my notes and proceeded to work on my doctoral thesis. I was terrified I would surrender my autonomy, my drive; that the fierce muscular ambition I’d built would atrophy. Yet my body had other ideas and quickly rebelled. Milk streamed forth in the shower, enough to feed a small country of starving children, mortifying me. I would not succumb to what my insubordinate body wanted me to be: a feeding machine, a servant to another’s needs! I would shuffle all the cards until the deck was full of everything I desired: marriage, children, home, and big career, all in its proper place.
In small part, I did manage to succeed in integrating parenting with work, but not in the way I’d planned or anticipated. I’d originally hoped to juggle an academic career with writing fiction. I gave up that dream, after interviewing for a full time job while five months pregnant, sweating, my stockings having torn en route, my brain foggy, focused only on the crackers in my pocketbook and the moment I could finally tear open the wrapping. Following eight long years of graduate school, I’d lost my desire for a tenure-track teaching job. It leaked out of me, not all at once, but in a steady stream. My head wanted stimulation, security, a solid paycheck; my heart ached for more time with these wondrous children we’d created. My heart won. Still, I wasn’t a traditional stay-at-home mother; we couldn’t afford that and I needed to put in a few good hours of work everyday to stay sane. But I arranged my schedule so I could be attentive and available to them when their school day ended. I managed to juggle freelance work —writing, editing and teaching—with parenting, if not always well.
The big career . . . has not materialized. And the small successes have been a constant uphill battle. The part of my life I thought would be the most difficult, for which I’d figured myself the least equipped, has turned out to be the most fulfilling and, astonishingly, required less effort than work I’d spent my twenties honing myself to do. The irony is that so far (knock on wood), my kids are all right. These days, it’s their mother I worry about, how to live without the pleasure of their excellent company.
