My Mom's Story is My Story

As I wrote in an earlier post I moved back to my hometown to live with my mother about a year and a half after my father's death. The move was an adjustment on both of our parts.

My mom had a hang-up about having a forty-three year old daughter moving back in with her. I felt like she cared too much about what others' thought of her. I mean, yes, it is unusual to have an adult child moving back in to live with their parent, but it isn't so unusual to have an older parent move in with their adult child, so what's the big deal I thought? I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but I didn't really have any angsty moments over how it “looked” about me moving in with my mom.

It did take us awhile to get used to sharing space with each other. I mean, I had been living alone for about twenty years, my mom, on the other hand, had never lived alone at any time in her life until my dad died. They had been married fifty years.

Needless to say, we had some issues that we had to work on resolving (mostly in the control department, as in, each of us wanted to be the controller), but for the most part I felt like we did really well getting along. It seemed mutually beneficial.

About a year and a half after I had moved home, in the fall of 2008, my mom wasn’t feeling well; bad enough where she quit having her evening cocktail (a ritual she had enjoyed since her kids had grown and gone). Around the same time period she seemed like she was starting to get overwhelmed by things.

My dad had put her in charge of paying the bills so that in the event that something ever did happen to him she would understand their financial situation and be able to deal with it. So that’s what she had been doing: dealing with it.

She also had lived in her home for nearly thirty-five years and was ready to downsize her clutter, like shoes and clothes and furniture and things that one accumulates over the years, and thoughts of that challenge seemed also to be weighing on her.

I remember kind of bartering with her that if she would make an appointment to see a psychologist or counselor so would I. I thought we both needed it - me because when I moved I had left my old counselor behind and hadn’t found a new one, my mom because I really thought that she seemed depressed. Well, she didn’t want anything to do with what I considered to be a “win-win” for both of us. She felt like I was manipulating her. That’s what she said.

By late September she was having some emotional issues that I had never observed in her before - she got weepy over things that wouldn’t normally make her weepy.

I had tried to offer help to my mom; like paying the bills for her, sorting through things to keep or give away, but my mom was strongly opposed to giving up control.

So finally, I decided to call my oldest sister, who was a plane flight’s distance from us. I told her I really thought it would be good for her to come home and try to help our mom get organized, that she was overwhelmed, and I didn’t know what to do.

Within two weeks my sister came but not much got accomplished. Not for not trying. It’s just that again my mom just gave resistance to getting anything done.

By November I called that same sister to ask if she could get our mom to relinquish the bill paying to her (she was a financial planner), take what was becoming a real burden to my mom and free her of that. My sister was willing to do it, but my mom wasn’t.

Through the month of November my mom’s behavior got stranger. We were packing to go on a weekend trip from which my mom would continue on, via air travel, to my sister’s house for Thanksgiving and she couldn’t make decisions on what to bring. That had never been a problem before. And when I say, couldn’t make a decision, I mean her suitcase was out and ready to be filled two days before departure and she’d go back and forth from her closet to her suitcase without ever keeping one thing in it.

Finally, the night before we were to leave I just made decisions about what she should bring and put them in the suitcase. I told her that I’d bring extra clothes and she could pare that down when we got to our weekend destination.

She seemed grateful for that as she told me she still needed to pay the bills before she left.

Around midnight I saw that a light was still on and went to go find out the reason. My mom had all the lights out in her room except her closet light and when I asked what in the world she was doing up at midnight (she’s usually in bed by 9:30) and basically in the dark, she said that she didn’t want me to know that she was still working on the bills.

In hindsight I can see that even though I was aware that my mom was having problems I didn’t realize the extent and seriousness of the situation. I see all of the signs of what was coming, now, but then, it was just my mom being frustrated and me being frustrated with her.

Two weeks later when I went to the airport to pick her up from her stay at my sister’s place she seemed to have aged ten years! It was shocking. Within ten days of her arrival back home she was involuntarily confined in the mental ward of a local hospital. It was one of the saddest sights I have ever experienced in my life. Nothing prepares you for seeing your seventy-eight year old mother being held in the sterile prison-like environment of mental hospital.

Here's the long version of what happened.

And so began the next year of my life.