Living with my mother's id

Signed As Sincerely As Possible, Mother*

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My mother called this morning when I was in the bathroom. I didn't get to the phone, and ended up with this voicemail: "Well, I have no information. I don't know what we're doing. You will have to let me know."

Well, that's certainly not obscure, let alone rather foreboding. It's just the message you want to get when you're already running late for work.

I called her back. She was talking about coming home for a few hours (she's in rehab), and I told her we could do that, that I'd come get her at three. She talked about being cold—she keeps talking about it, but she doesn't do the things one does when one is cold; she doesn't huddle under her blankets. She doesn't shiver. I suggested that with her roommate leaving, she could get switched to the bed by the heating vent, which she found bafflingly amusing. I'm beginning to think we're talking about a metaphysical cold, rather than a physical one.

Also, she was in pain. I suggested she ask for a pain pill. No, they were already giving her too many of those. How many was she taking? She didn't know, she asks what all the pills they give her are, but they don't know. I told her the way her pain pills were prescribed, she has to ask for them. She doesn't believe that. Or maybe she just couldn't hear it, which really means understand it. I think half the time I sound like a Peanuts adult to her, but rather than ask me to repeat myself, she just ignores me. Of course, she ignores me even when she understands me.

She doesn't believe what she doesn't want to believe, which sounds like optimism, but it's really despair.

I told her I'd get her after work.

And I would have, but she called at eleven-thirty to tell me to come to the rehab center, she took a potassium citrate (prescribed) and it hadn't gone down all the way and was now dissolving, and she was probably going to have to go to the hospital. Oh, and I should call Patrick to come and sit with me.

Hospitalization and deathbed sitting for a pill that won't dissolve.

Then she put her roommate, Wanda, on the phone. (Why the fuck would I want to talk to Wanda at a time like this?) Wanda screams that she's the one who made my mother call me because I should be there, and she's never seen anyone having a heart attack, but my mother's having one.

I would like to kill Wanda.

When my mother took the phone back, I told her I'd be right there. I said it about eight times, because she wouldn't stop talking so I could hang up and actually go to where she was.

As I was walking to her room, Wanda tried to stop me. "Your mother's in terrible shape," she said. "She really needs you."

I did not say, "Look, you fucking bitch, if this was really about my mother, you wouldn't be wasting her time trying to stop me for a drama-hit. This is about you stirring things up, so just stay the fuck away from me." I did say, "Yeah, that's why I'm going to see her," without breaking stride.

She had a potassium citrate dissolving in her esophagus, and it was burning. She'd had hot tea and bread, to try to get it to go down. There was no talk of the hospital. She was feeling better. There was no talk of going home. She was going to sleep the rest of the day. I was there for about an hour.

I told my therapist the other day that I feel like I'm in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There's a scene early on where a woman is insisting her uncle isn't really her uncle. She talks about how he has a scar on the back of his neck that's only visible when he's had a haircut, and she waited and waited until he had one. And the doctor she's talking to, who has started getting caught up in her story says, "And the scar wasn't there?"

"No!" she answers triumphantly. "It was there! That's how perfect the replica is."

I have become that woman. Nobody else sees the difference in my mother. ("Nobody else" would be my aunt and uncle, Patrick, and our friend, Mary.) And that's because she isn't different, she's just different, and now I can explain how. Imagine you're having a PB&J sandwich. Only there's lots of jelly and virtually no peanut butter. Like, maybe a little peanut butter on the corner of one slice of bread. But twice the jelly. It's still a PB&J; it's just not right. And that is my mother. Her ego and superego are receding, leaving only her id. I keep trying to talk to her logically, but she doesn't seem to speak logic anymore. How many metaphors do I have in this paragraph?

I'm grieving my mother even while I'm looking after her. It takes a lot of energy but burns very few calories.

And I'm living this poem, which has always made me cry.


The Song of Madame Do-as-you-would-be-done-by
By Charles Kingsley (1819–1875)

[From The Water-Babies]

I ONCE had a sweet little doll, dears,
The prettiest doll in the world;
Her cheeks were so red and so white, dears,
And her hair was so charmingly curled.
But I lost my poor little doll, dears,
As I played in the heath one day;
And I cried for her more than a week, dears,
But I never could find where she lay.

I found my poor little doll, dears,
As I played in the heath one day:
Folks say she is terribly changed, dears,
For her paint is all washed away,
And her arm trodden off by the cows, dears,
And her hair not the least bit curled:
Yet, for old sake’s sake, she is still, dears,
The prettiest doll in the world.


*Mrs. Ramjet