All the Single Mommies

I’m exhausted all the time.

Frustrated.
Tired.
Out of ideas.
Flummoxed.
Trapped.
Hopeful.
Dedicated.
Resentful.

I imagine this is what it’s like to be a single mother. I work full-time and come home to four special needs children: Three cats, and Mom.

Paisan, an insecure jet-black twenty-pounder with poopy problems, age 12, recently diagnosed with diabetes. He gets insulin, along with Miramax and lentils mixed into his low carb food, and lots of personal time and attention.

Crackbaby, an appropriately skinny sixteen-year-old tiger stripe with a thyroid problem (but can’t take those meds), poopy problems (steroids twice a day), who is an actual sexual predator (Prozac works like a charm).

Piglet drools. She is also missing one eye, has a fractured spine and no working pancreas. So now, everyone gets pancreatic enzymes added to their food.

That’s the cats.

Mom has survived two breast cancers, four skin cancers, one car crash involving a red light she “absolutely did not run,” a torn rotator cuff, broken nose and a fall out of bed that led to a lot of blood but not much else. Then she broke her back and if you ask her, that’s when everything started going downhill. The truth is it was going downhill before that.

She’d lose her car in parking lots, or find it but forget how to turn it on. Side view mirrors throughout Nassau County lived in fear of her. It’s entirely possible Mom was the inciting incident that sparked both the invention and mass manufacture of car mirrors that fold in to avoid that/her. There was the light pole that “suddenly”  appeared at the foot of her driveway. Scraped up her car (and the one next to it) squeezing her regular-sized car through a motorcycle-sized space.

At home, smoke alarms went off (as they inevitably do when you never clean the cheese from the last frozen pizza off the bottom of the oven), and confused by the noise, she stayed in her room, playing on the computer until a neighbor or two arrived, concerned about the alarm. Sometimes the gas stove didn’t get turned off at all. Or the phone hung up. Or it was hung up upside down. Or, the most frustrating of all for me, cordless phone as a tv remote control, she repeatedly hit “3” knowing she needed to be on three for the cable to work. I am “3” on her speed dial, but even wearing the hearing aids she finally agreed to she couldn’t hear me yelling into the phone: Ma. Ma. That’s the phone. This isn’t the remote. Eventually, frustrated, either I would call her doorman and have him straighten her out, or she’d call me on her cell phone (because now not only is television “broken”, so is the phone) and I would talk her through hanging the cordless phone up properly, finding the actual tv remote, and using it to turn on the television. Giving up cooking (cue: collective sigh of relief from the neighbors), she subsisted on Trader Joe’s frozen prepared foods and food delivery plans I chose.

When her boyfriend died, things got worse. That was the push down the first hill. No longer confident in her ability to remember people’s names (nouns were the first thing to disappear–the silverware drawer now that place you keep the things you eat with), she stopped going to the senior center. Stopped calling friends. She was, with the exception of my Friday visits and Seinfeld (You know, like Raymond, but Jewish) completely isolated.

We–using the royal we makes her feel like she part of the decision–moved her out of her apartment into a lovely, and expensive, assisted living facility. She blossomed. Morning discussions on world affairs. Men. Three delicious meals a day. Cocktail hours. Outings. Parties. Movies. Friends. Exercise. Social hours. Miss Popularity–the Mom I knew and resented through elementary, junior high and high school–was back. In a year, her cognitive decline stopped her from going to those morning news discussions–she couldn’t keep up with what was going on in the world, couldn’t follow the conversations and started to withdraw to her default: I’m not a whole person.

Get off the cross, Ma, we need the wood.

My mother is, by nature, a martyr. But this time it was true. She was becoming less and less of who she had been. Her eyesight had been going for a while, from both wet and dry macular degeneration. Her hearing was going. Her cognition and memory were going. She still enjoyed herself there, just less, and she still had one of her two cats there with her. Paisan had come to me months ago after she’d decided to put him down because of his poopy problems. We had our worst fight, but in the end, I won a ten-year-old twenty-pounder who couldn’t shit without help. If you can call that winning. She kept Noodnick, her ten-year-old fur-covered football with a tiny head, tiny feet and a fear of being held who she felt needed fresh water in the middle of the night, every night. And an escort to the water dish. Not sure who got the better deal there.

Mom says she fell and broke her back. She says the fall is responsible for all the memory loss, the inability to see, hear, remember, figure things out. The truth is all of that was happening before the fall. The truth is she didn’t fall.

At eighty-eight years old, she squatted on the floor pouring dry food into a cat bowl, and rather than get up and walk across the kitchen to put the food away, she scooted backwards on her butt, crashing her octogenarian-osteoporatic spine into the wooden cabinet door, shattering her L1 vertebrae.

It would take a few weeks and many hospital visits before they’d figure out she’d broken her back. Then three weeks in rehab, with a different room or roommate every day for the first week or so. She lost the things that allowed her to remain grounded.  With nothing familiar to hang on to, no routine she could recognize, she started to spiral. By the time she was released, she’d given up. Unable to walk to the dining room, she took her meals in her room while watching hours of Little House on the Prairie. Room temperature at best when it finally arrived, none of the meals were appetizing. Even once she was able to walk with help, she was alone after 7:00 pm when the aides left. I’d taken Noodnick when Mom went into the hospital, now, without even a cat for company she was sinking into a deeper and deeper depression. She lost 15% of her body weight.

The “fall” didn’t break her, the recovery did.

I invited her to come live with me, Paisan (who now pooped like a pro), Noodnick, and my (at that time) three. And just like that, two old ladies and five cats became Grey Gardens 11372. 

That was a year and a half ago. July 2018.

In the assisted living, after the “fall,” she’d been going to bed at 8:30 pm. This is what I pictured our cohabitation would look like: I would get home at 7:00 pm (Honey, I’m home!) and we’d spend ninety minutes laying side-by-side in bed watching Family Feud and talking until bedtime. 8:30 pm.  From 8:30 until 11:00 or midnight,  I’d be free to read, watch TV, write, talk on the phone, take a bath.

This is what the actual snapshot looks like: She is frequently still awake at the computer or watching television when I finally go to bed at 11pm or midnight. Don’t imagine for one second that she’s become independent again. Her self-esteem has dropped even further. Her cross is thicker, sturdier. She is, as they say in some twelve-step programs, the piece of shit at the center of the universe. As her actual skin grows thinner with age, so does her emotional skin–she is hurt and brought to tears by the seemingly smallest things. She has gotten so used to having things done for her, when she wants something to drink and I say “You know where the refrigerator is,” she accuses me of yelling at her.

When she first moved in, she could barely walk with the walker. We walked the hall,  then outside, first just to the corner. Around the corner. Around the block. To the farmers market and back. To breakfast and back. She’d gotten stronger and worked herself up to a mile and a half, done slowly. Two hours one day at the Zoo.

And just as she worked herself up, she’s winding herself down. Less each day, until going down for the mail (one of two chores–the other being folding laundry) tires her out.

There are two aides. One of whom she remembers she loves—until she doesn’t. Both of whom she likes, until she remembers that they are paid and aren’t “real” friends. And the other, whom she never remembers and alternately describes as: lovely, kind, bossy, too chatty, does all the right thing, too quiet, nothing.

This is my day:

• 6:30 or 7:00 am -Wake up
  • Make the cats food: pureed lentils, canned food, pancreatic enzymes, Miralax. Mix & let sit for twenty minutes
  • Collect and clean three-four cat food bowls
  • Refresh three bowls of water
  • Clean three kitty litter pans
  • Clean cat poop out of the bathtub
  • Sweep up the kitchen and front room
  • Put out Mom’s pills
  • Set out two tea cups with Splenda and tea. Two Splenda’s and caffeine for me. One Splenda, herbal tea and Miralax for her, because Paisan is not the only one in this house with poopy problems.
  • Make and pack up lunch. Chop, tear, slice and dice, load it into Tupperware, add apple, banana, whatever fruit is in the house.
  • Check to make sure Mom is alive/awake so she can shower, eat and dress before an aide arrives at 9:00 am.
  • Mom showers on her own, my job is helping with her bra.
• 8:00 Mom’s breakfast: Tea (with Miralax), pills, and either apple sauce with fresh fruit on the side (What is this? Holding up a sliced pear, annoyed); Hot Pocket with fresh fruit on the side (What is this? Holding up a slice of apple, annoyed), half of a Trader Joes Breakfast Burrito (That’s too much food! To be fair to the burrito, everything I put in front of her is met with the same “too much food” reaction, with the exception of chocolate, ice cream or cookies, of which there is never too much).
  • After setting her up and serving her, I start on my breakfast which I make/eat/wash up before she is halfway through her apple sauce/burrito/hot pocket.
• 8:55 I make it into the shower with five luxurious minutes left to shower, dress, makeup and get out the door by 9:00.
• 9:00 The aide arrives and I give her instructions on leftovers, what to make for lunch or dinner, and so on, which must be done in front of Mom so she doesn’t think we’re “talking about her” or must be repeated to Mom as I explain why we were talking in the kitchen.
• 9:15 Run out the door to catch the E train by 9:20 at the latest.
• 9:30 Relax for twenty-thirty minutes. The New York City MTA subway is my happy place. As is the laundry room.
• 10:00-5:30 Work, which consists of…well, work.
• 5:45 Reverse commute, twenty-three more happy place minutes.
• 7:00 I come home to a mother who has been fed (lunch & dinner) walked as much as she was willing, and played with (500 Rummy, matching games, computer jigsaw puzzles, Suduko, solitaire) whenever she is not watching the judges (Judy, Milan, Divorce Court, Caught in Providence) or napping and she is eagerly waiting for me to: talk to her, watch tv with her, play games with her, generally keep her entertained until she is ready to go to bed at 11pm-ish.

Cats are easier.  You clean some shit out of the bathtub. Leave some water and kibble. That’s it. They’re okay.

I never wanted to be a mom. Never planned on having kids. Years ago I trained to be a doula for the dying, a companion for those in the last stages of life, visiting an hour or so a week or a day. That did not prepare me for living with someone who tells me regularly she only has two weeks to live.

• 2/10/19: I give myself no more than two weeks. 
• 4/26/19: I don’t give myself more than a month or two.
• 7/15/19: I will guarantee you, guarantee you that within the next two weeks I will not be here. Within two weeks.
• 7/19/19: No more than three or four days. For this one I point out that my birthday is in four days. She’ll try not to die on my birthday she says, but it’s happening, she says.

She points out that she is sleeping later and later each day. I imagine she thinks eventually her waking up time and going to sleep time will meet in the middle and she will just stay asleep forever. It’s true, she’s sleeping later—except when she’s not. Except when she’s up before me, showered, dressed, and lays down and falls asleep again. Or gets up, has breakfast and lays down to sleep until noon. No wonder she stays up later than I do.

She reminds me regularly that when she is gone:

• I will be free.
• I can travel
• I can see my friends
• I will have my bedroom back
• I will be rich. I have stopped trying to explain that what she will be leaving is nice, but it’s not rich by any stretch of the imagination.

When she is gone, I will probably be lost for a while.

I will have empty nest syndrome.

I will be a caretaker with no one to love and care for.

Image attribution:
“exhausted pose drawings” by JoeyGates is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 
“Big Edie in Repose” by jshdoff, 2019