Maternal Dementia

Somebody always has something to say about how you’re supposed to feel. Once I worked for a man with bad hair, and he accused me of being too sensitive. “How much is sensitive enough?” I asked him. A lover once told me I was too mental, “You can’t think through your life, you have to feel it.” Both of these comments came at about the same time. I didn’t know what to make of it; was I too feeling, or not enough?

When I was pregnant – this seems like ages ago – I was informed by others, often complete strangers, how I ought to feel about becoming a mother. There were, apparently, designated emotions of excitement, anticipation, and joy, and the fact that I felt other feelings like dread, fear and suffocation – not on the condoned list – meant I’d crossed a line, putting the sacred institution of motherhood at risk. “Oh but you must be so excited,” people would correct me, denying me my inalienable right to feel miserable.

So I felt it anyway, just more quietly.

This inspired me, once I hatched small beings into the world, to be very mindful of the casual language we end up using around feelings. “Don’t be sad,” we say unconsciously to a small pouting child. What is that about? Telling a child that the rush of sadness that came over you just now is somehow wrong, you shouldn’t feel it? You have to be one of those happy shiny people all the time?

Not that we should overindulge their sadness or anger. But sometimes, doing a little bit of nothing does the trick. Emotions, like waves, follow their course, crashing on to the shore and receding back into the larger body of water. One wave follows the next, and they just keep coming.

Yesterday Short-pants was angry at me. She made this obvious by putting her feelings in writing and slipping the large note loudly under my door. I didn’t try to talk her out of it. “You are really angry,” I said, like I learned in
a book about how to talk with kids. And just like the book promises, if you wait a beat, the whole story pours out about what she wanted and what Buddy-roo wanted and what I did and didn’t do…the whole crisis is illuminated. The anger, once expressed, begins to dissipate, sometimes merely from the fact of not being denied.

Maybe anger has a half-life, and half of it goes away when you get that it’s just plain okay to feel that way for a little while.

But what about me? What do I do with my pent up I’m-fed-up-with-all-this? How do I get to express my longing? Or my sadness, my fear? Little eyes are always watching. I used to lock myself in the bathroom, just to have a moment alone to process. But little fists learn quickly how to knock incessantly. And besides, why should I shield them from what’s real?

Of course I try to contain the more difficult feelings, but when I can’t keep them in, I simply don’t. I’ve stormed into the girls’ room in a rage, their little faces shocked and their little bodies recoiling from the force of my angry words. I’ve backed up against the wall and let my body slide down it until I’m sitting with my forehead against my knees, heaving tears. About these outbursts I do not apologize; I explain. Later, when the feeling has ebbed, we sit on the stairs and I say something like “Mama was pretty angry, I wish I hadn’t been so loud that I frightened you,” or “Mama was pretty sad, wasn’t I?”

But what if something happens and you don’t feel anything? Like when you’re supposed to feel and you can’t figure out how? Or you’re just, numb? Can they see that too? Which is more damaging to them, I wonder: to witness rage, fear, and sadness or to watch their mother stoically stand at the counter, sponging over the cutting board in a circular motion again and again and again, just to get at the nothing that’s brewing within?

“Careful, the couch!” This is the Valkyrie cry in our home, since I am prepared to slay any small (or large) being who might casually soil our newly acquired piece of furniture. This may seem a harsh punishment, but if you knew how long I have been waiting to buy a new couch, you might empathize with me.

For years, I’ve been trapped in this apartment with a hideous canapé, a cream-colored (read: off-white and stained) sofa-bed with far too many cushions to add any aesthetic presence to our living room. The seat cushions were famous for their capacity to spontaneously slide forward and down toward the floor. More than once, I sat on what I thought was the edge of the couch, only to hit the parquet myself. The four square cushions that were supposed to line up along the back of the couch were too easily crunched and crushed, or completely removed and transformed into a fort or a roof or series of stepping stones on the floor, permitting dry passage to the foyer without menace from the alligators. That old couch was a boat, a barge, a bridge – about anything you wanted it to be. It absolutely stimulated young, playful imaginations, which was, in the end, the only thing I liked about it.

Then last month, an astro-furniture convergence smiled upon me when three planets finally aligned: Saturn, the planet of limits moved into the 5th house of small children, and conjunct Jupiter, the planet of expansion, and Venus, the planet of beauty, in the 4th house of home and 60%-off. The kids are now finally old enough (and coordinated enough) to pay attention to rules and warnings. A little Christmas cash augmented our budget, permitting this purchase despite the recession. De-facto even agreed that after last summer’s repainting of the living room, the old couch looked pretty tired.

Forget that we had to bulldog the new couch through the front door, since I neglected to measure before purchasing. Absurdly, it was a few centimeters too large. The tiny grease mark on the side that resulted from its dramatic breech birth (feet first, after their removal) into our apartment is barely visible. The new couch matches the carpet, and makes our living room look, well, grown-up. De-facto likes it, too, he says it really ties the room together.

But then, the law had to be laid down. Short-pants and Buddy-roo were summoned to the new couch, invited to admire it, and ideas were solicited for how we might keep it clean and pretty. My children are smart and their suggestions were on the money, so they now have some ownership of the new couch mantra: no shoes, no eating, no drinking, no drawing. Except that occasionally I have to remind them. The minute one of them even looks the couch with their shoes on, or comes within a meter of it while holding a cookie in hand, I’ll shout out: “Careful! The couch!” I can’t help it. I just blurt it out. The other day, Short-pants dips her head and looks at me over her glasses, “I know mama, don’t worry.”

I hate this, really. I don’t want to be yelling at them about a couch. With the old one, I didn’t care. I might casually throw out a gentle warning, “feet off the couch…” but that was only to reinforce good manners. There’s nothing they could have done to hurt that old gray lady. But now I’m nervous, constantly walking the tightrope between the desired aesthetics of my adult life and the vigorous imagination of my children’s. I want them to be creative, which often means being messy and manipulating their environment to match what’s happening in their minds. I just don’t want to look at it, in my living room. And I don’t want it to damage my new, beautiful, stylin’ couch.

This morning, a plastic pink cup found perched on the arm of the new couch – fortunately no trace had been left – but then Buddy-roo’s name came in a shriek and then a stern reprimand of “what did we all agree to, about the couch?” She stood, frozen. Eyes on the couch, then on me. Then that face, the mouth curves down into a precious kind of pout, and an eruption of tears, “I really miss our old couch.”

Not me. I’m glad it’s gone. But this can’t go on.

France was on strike today.

If only I could go on strike. I wouldn’t have to get up early in the morning, in the dark, in the cold, to get you ready for school. If I could go on strike, I wouldn’t even set the alarm. I wouldn’t offer you pancakes or egg-in-the-hole, or the coveted, imported Cheerios. I wouldn’t lay out your clothes, or pretend to nod approvingly when you adorn your own (mismatched) outfit. I wouldn’t search the house for your hairbrush, hidden in the drawer by the Play-Dough. I wouldn’t squeeze toothpaste on your toothbrush and leave it poised on the sink. I wouldn’t hunt for misplaced schoolbooks or slip the package of biscuits in the side pocket of your backpack for your morning collation. I wouldn’t dig out a pair of matching mittens and squeeze them over your tiny, disobliging wrists. I wouldn’t see you to the door or steady you on the way down the stairs. I wouldn’t hold your tiny paws in my hand when it’s my turn to walk you to school.

If I went on strike, the laundry pile would grow radioactively, a virus of miniature, mismatched socks, inside-out cotton tights with stripes and hearts, turtlenecks with chewed sleeves and chocolate stains. I would not check your vaccination schedule. I would not wait in line at the conservatory to sign you up for the solfège. I would not send in the form to get put on the list to have the right to telephone the office secretary next Tuesday between 9 and 11 o’clock in order to get on another list to be called back for an appointment for an interview to enroll you in the bilingual school.

If I were on strike, I wouldn’t sew buttons, I wouldn’t tie shoe-laces, I wouldn’t cut the crust off, get the ketchup out, put the juice in a sippy-cup, put the juice in a big-girl cup, get a straw, cut your meat, or don’t cut your meat. I wouldn’t read stories about pigs that eat hot buttered toast or little girls that live alone in hotel suites. I wouldn’t watch the Never Ending Story a never-ending number of times. I wouldn’t change the sheets when you throw-up in your bed in the middle of the night. I wouldn’t kiss boo-boos or find lost doo-doos, I wouldn’t scratch your back up-a-little-lower, I wouldn’t put band-aids on wounded, naked dolls. I wouldn’t study your artwork and ask thoughtful, enthusiastic questions before posting it on the refrigerator.

If I could only be on strike, I wouldn’t rush through the days to get everything done before the school pick-ups and the pre-dinner witching hour and evenings of bedlam and chatter.

If I could go on strike, oh, I’d linger in bed. I’d lay there dreaming an Egyptian thread count, and then a mid-to-late-morning rally to the cushioned couch where I’d sit and listen to the sun quietly spilling through the skylight, staring at the coffee cup that both my hands would wrap around, slowly smelling the strong aroma before each savored sip. If I could go on strike, I’d have time to do all the things I want to do and then I’d have more time, still, to do nothing.

Time that I would probably squander, spending those luxurious hours thinking about you, in your little bodies, wandering around your little worlds, wondering what or how you were doing.

When I thought I might lose you, there wasn’t enough time. This notion of time is my riddle. Now I know that time is not mine to have, it’s mine to give away; to parcel out without counting the minutes or moments. Going on strike might give me some respite, a slight slowing of time, just enough to catch my breath. But as time goes, there is never enough.

My mother could never remember which toothpaste to buy.

She was not a stupid woman. She was extremely bright and capable. She enjoyed the professional respect of her colleagues, she was a working mother who could edit an entire magazine, direct a staff of a dozen people, meet deadlines, develop public relations strategies, fight off the politics of a male-dominated world, volunteer her service to several community organizations at once and still somehow manage to pick me up after school, drive me to piano lessons and float meetings, attending to all the administration of our household and get dinner on the table before my father came home from work.

But she couldn’t come home from the grocery store with the right toothpaste. She’d return with Gleem or Colgate, or Close-Up, anything but what I wanted. And I would admonish her as only a rotten teenager can.

It was beyond me how a woman so smart and accomplished could be so absent minded about such a simple thing as the brand of toothpaste that was clearly (at least to me) our family’s preference.

It wasn’t just the toothpaste. She’d confuse my friends’ names. She’d even confuse my name, sometimes calling me by my sister’s or brother’s names. She’d holler up the stairs, cycling through each one of our names until she got it right. My mom was one big eye-roll after another.

Not just my mom. My friends agreed, all moms were dull-witted. Maybe they were smart at their jobs, or smart when they read the newspaper or helped with a homework assignment. But otherwise, they couldn’t remember anything important. Moms were a joke. We loved them, but they were feeble-minded.

And now I’m one of them. I’m astounded at what my mind cannot hold. And I respect my mother more than ever before. Will I have to wait as many years for my daughters to have the same epiphany?