HOME

I have come home to help my mother. By “home” I do not mean the house in Vancouver where my partner and I live, but the place where my parents live, in suburban Toronto, on the 17th floor of a high-rise condo overlooking a flatland of shopping malls and subdivisions, freeways and office buildings. The distinction is a troubling one, and with my father seriously ill in the hospital even more so.

I take a cab straight from the airport. When I arrive, my mother opens the door and says hello. There will be no embrace unless I make the first move. Distracted by her barking dog, a fifteen-year old schnauzer, I put my bag down and look around. The condo, as always, is frozen in time. The rooms are filled with same furniture, prints, photographs and travel souvenirs I remember from houses we lived in during the 1950s and 1960s. My baby pictures hang in the spare bedroom, a reminder of the one time in my life I was photogenic. I will sleep in this bedroom, in the same bed I slept in as a teenager 35 years ago, for seven nights.

At 82, my mother still has the energy of a much younger woman, although she complains about minor ailments and takes half an anti-depressant every morning to cope with an anxiety disorder her doctor diagnosed a couple of years ago. My father suffers from a progressive dementia caused by an aneurysm that almost killed him in the early 1990s and now needs almost constant supervision. My mother tries to be patient and caring, and usually succeeds, but the stress of caring for him shapes every word she speaks.

My mother is filled with news of my father, about how well he's doing in the hospital and how much everyone likes him and how good the specialist is. She tells me she has organized our visits to the hospital so that we will see him every day in the late morning and then stay for lunch and then visit again in the afternoon. I will drive the big Buick. I will also help with dinner and shopping and dog walking. She has been talking for half an hour before I realize that once again, she hasn't asked me how I am.

**

My mother's father died before she was born, during the flu epidemic that swept the world in 1919. She suffered a second loss when the anti-flu medication her mother was taking caused pre-natal nerve damage to her hearing. My mother was born partially deaf and continued to lose hearing throughout her life. She's worn a hearing aid for as long as I can remember but it often doesn't work very well and sometimes doesn't seem to work at all.

I admire my mother for never letting her handicap stand in the way of raising a family or holding down a full-time job. Deafness must be very frustrating and isolating. But we never talked about it as a family and she never told my sister and me how it affected her life, and we've never had a chance to tell her how it's affected our lives. The taboo against talking about her deafness has been so strong that it took me almost fifty years to find the courage to ask her why she's deaf.

When you can't hear, you either retreat or take charge. My mother always took charge. She dominated most social conversations, telling stories that were mostly funny but not always, and happily held the centre of attention while my father listened quietly in the background. She was extroverted and dynamic, interested in people and what they were doing, curious about the world and how it worked. She was always planning the next trip, the next project, the next home improvement, the next step to a more prosperous life. She loved to argue and debate. She would say outrageous things just to get a rise out of people. She would mispronounce words on purpose so that I would speak up and correct her.

But now my mother does not tell funny stories about helping Portuguese fishermen start their brand-new Johnson outboard (with my father in the starring role as master mechanic). There are no trips to talk about because my father can't travel. The vacation home in Florida has been sold, and so has the summer condo near Georgian Bay. My mother's world has been reduced to the condo and the nearby intersection where she finds her doctor, her bank and the shopping mall.

Her closest friends are dead, and the two sisters-in-law that she loved dearly are dead too. My father's sister died in the early 1980s; his brother's wife died in 1990, the year I moved to Vancouver. "I wish they were still alive," my mother tells me. "I miss them so much."

She's worked as a secretary, part-time model, and night-school teacher but she will not work again, and has no interest in volunteering. Her days seem monotonous to me, but she says she's busy, and by busy she means tasks like walking the dog and answering mail and going to the bank and cleaning house and preparing meals for herself.

The condo is different without my father around, even though he's such a quiet man you scarcely notice he's in the room. I realize that what's missing is the coupleness of my parents: they did everything together and had no individual social lives, the way my partner and I do. My parents have not spent more than a week apart in sixty years of marriage. Seeing my mother alone in the condo is freakish and unnatural, like a bearded lady at the circus or siamese twins.

For the first few days of my visit I say little. My mother talks and complains, shares every fear and emotion. We are both under great stress and I'm trying to help. I have always played this role of good listener, a role that my father usually plays. But because he's not here I'm getting the full force of my mother's attention; I've become the mirror she needs to see herself. I feel I have no place in the conversation, no way to share my life with her. This fills me with rage.

We visit the hospital every day. My father improves, beating the odds quoted by the specialist a week earlier, and I try to help my mother negotiate his return home with the social workers. Sitting at the table with them, I wonder why her hearing is better in public than it is with me, back at the condo. I wonder why she's rude to strangers. She makes instant judgements based on the way people dress and whether or not they look her straight in the eye when talking to her. Back in my father's room, a black orderly enters and she whispers to me, "He's black as the ace of spades, isn't he?" I give her a dirty look and she turns away.

**

When my mother talks about her childhood, she evokes a far-away world that pre-dates the war, television, jet travel, the Pill and rock music. She grew up in northern Alberta, in a small town called Fairview, where her father was a prominent businessman who occasionally put on blackface and performed in amateur minstrel shows, and her mother was a tough-love mom who chainsmoked and hired and fired maids because she hated housework and cooking. My mother has told me she was ashamed to bring friends home because the house was so messy.

She left home at 18 to move to Winnipeg and stay with her grandmother. She tells me that when she dies and goes to heaven, her grandmother is the first person she plans to look up. I ask her why. "I loved her more than my mother," she says. "My grandmother thought I was perfect."

I have to trust my childhood memories but it gets harder, as I get older, to connect the past with the present. My mother as I know her now seems to bear no resemblance to the woman I remember from 40 years ago. Is she more herself in old age, or, as she claims, not herself at all? "When this is all over, I want go away and find myself," she says one night at dinner after talking about how difficult it's been caring for my father. "I won't tell anyone where I'm going, and I won't come back until I'm myself again."

Near the end of my stay I can contain my rage no longer and I lash out angrily. I demand she listen to me, and show an interest in my life. I criticize and scold, I lecture. I say things I have been waiting to say for decades. I enjoy the power of forcing her to listen. She bursts into tears. "You're beating me when I'm down," she says and while I know she's right, I do not apologize. I say nothing. I stare at her tear-stained face. I know I will never stay in my parents' home again.

We are polite to each other for the rest of my stay. The relationship has changed, although it will take months for me to work through exactly how it has changed. By confronting her, I've broken the mirror and moved two steps back. I've created a permanent distance between us that prepares me for the day when she will no longer be here.

**

Every year on Mother's Day I send my mother a dozen red and pink and white carnations. When the courier arrives with the flowers, she reads the card, which expresses my love in a stranger's handwriting, and places the flowers in a glass vase on the coffee table in the TV room. May is baseball time, and I imagine that she looks at the flowers while she roots for the Blue Jays.

She's alone now. A month after I left, she realized she could no longer care for my father and placed him in a nursing home. She visits him every other day. She now sleeps in the spare bedroom. The dog has gone deaf and no longer races to the door, barking, when someone knocks.

When I visit, I rent a car at the airport and drive to my sister's house in the suburbs or stay downtown with my partner's daughter. I visit my father in the nursing home. Then I drive to the condo and ride the elevator up to the 17th floor. I take a deep breath and then knock, and when my mother opens the door I always smile and say hello. She takes the bottle of wine I've brought for dinner. I know there will be no embrace unless I make the first move. I do not make the first move.