On Mom's Side

            Shortly after my mother fell and broke her hip, I thought of Nala.  Nala was a very large black Newfoundland that followed Mom like her shadow.  At Indian Lake, when Mom would go out for a short paddle in her kayak, Nala would stand sentinel on shore, and gaze out across the water, waiting for her to return.  Because of their size, Newfoundlands are prone to hip dysplasia, and, sadly, Nala was not an exception.  After years of nursing her on aspirin and coaxing her with treats to get up and walk, Mom gave in and let her be put down.  She bought books on grieving the loss of a dog which she passed onto me when my corgi, Poppy, fell down and got up for three months of blissful posthumous life before we euthanized him.  “Can you give him the shot so that it doesn’t happen too fast?,” I asked the vet.  Why did I think a slow death was kinder?  That it would be less of a shock?  That he would drift into sleep cradled on my lap?  I cannot know what my dog felt, but I know that two hours of watching the life leave him was agonizing for me.  I’ve done my best to block the memory of that afternoon. 

Mom caught her leg on her purse strap that was hanging from a kitchen chair.  “When I fell, I heard something snap,” she recalls.  Her hip was pinned surgically and, after I’d seen her in the hospital, I came home, bought a stuffed Newfoundland on Ebay, and mailed it to the Rehab facility.  I thought Mom might find it comforting when really the connection is very sad:  I didn’t want Mom to go the way our downed dogs had gone.  I was certain that when her willpower kicked in, she would walk and even play golf again once the snow drifts dwindle and the hard, brown earth turns green.

            Ever since my mother fell, her struggle has been behind my every thought.  Along with the primary struggle to get back on her feet, she’s in an ongoing fight to reclaim her life, resisting filial demands that she just relax, stay put, and accept that The Home of the Good Shepherd is the best and safest place for her, despite the fact that they let old men sit alone crying and despite the big article in last Sunday’s New York Times that decried the lack of oversight of assisted living facilities, calling them places where the elderly are warehoused and where they die from neglect.  In Shakespeare, filial ingratitude manifests itself as inheritance hunger.  In my family, that’s not the issue.  My brother says he wants “nothing from that house” as if it had been contaminated by plague.  What is more bizarre though is the way that the adult children have begun to act out, taking every opportunity to find fault with her and vent frustration and aggression—“he laid me out in lavender”—in what, at times, appears to be a simple show of power over a vulnerable and dependent old person.  

            A few weeks ago, I had to teach a short story by the Canadian writer, Alice Munro.  The story, called “Boys and Girls,” takes place on a fox farm in rural Canada and is mainly about the production not only of fur pelts but of gendered people—boys and girls.  The story is narrated in the first person by the young girl, who seeks every way possible to bond with her father and his outdoor work and resist the drudgery of her mother’s inside work—that is, until she witnesses her father shoot an old work horse named Mack.  She is convinced that horror she feels isn’t the sentimental attachment to animals as pets: she knows that the foxes need the horse meat for food.  Nevertheless, when peeking through a knothole in the barn wall, she senses the dramatic irony of the callous men smoking and joking before they shoot an innocent creature, “searching for a mouthful of fresh grass, which was not to be found.” 

            “Come to say goodbye to your old friend Mack?” Henry said, “Here, you give him a taste of oats.”  He poured some oats into Laird’s cupped hands and Laird went to feed Mack.  Mack’s teeth were in bad shape.  He ate very slowly, patiently shifting the oats around in his mouth, trying to find a stump of a molar to grind it on.”  “Poor old Mack,” said Henry mournfully.  “When a horse’s teeth’s gone, he’s gone.  That’s about the way.”

            Symbols in literature don’t mean anything really until they meet with a mind that’s ready to make use of them, and my mind was ready for this one.  Back in November, I’d taken Mom’s upper bridge to her dentist to have a tooth that the physical therapists had accidentally knocked out to be glued back in.  “Poor lady,” said Dr. Garrett, “her teeth are just crumbling right out of the bone.”  Maybe so.  But just like the horse in the story, Mom was getting by, and teeth or no teeth, she was still full of life.  Who decides that “when a horse’s teeth’s gone, he’s gone”?  The hired man, Henry, who makes this remark may well be searching for a way to justify the fact that he is pacifying the horse so that he’ll be easier to shoot. 

            “Mack’s thick, blackish tongue worked diligently at Laird’s hand.”  This image has troubled me.  And even though it is hard for the old horse to eat, when he’s led out in the side pasture where he’ll die, he instinctively looks for a mouthful of fresh grass.  Life seeks the means to live.  My mother, too, wants nothing more than to get outside, smoke her cigarettes, go to Mass, drive her car, and get back home where she can live life in her own way.

            “My father raised the gun and Mack looked up as if he had noticed something and my father shot him.”  The girl sees Mack lurch from side to side, fall, and even kick his legs for a few seconds in the air.  The children don’t believe Mack has died, but the men do.  They are all business.  Back to business.  My siblings (so it seems to me) have been all business in this matter of Mom’s care; and I’ve been frightened by their discursive detachment when what’s at stake for Mom is LIFE.  Her fight, carried out with a characteristic gentleness, has moved me toward a stand much like that taken by the girl in the story.  When the day comes for the female horse, Flora, to be shot, she rears, gallops, and runs into the meadow where the girl (also a fast runner) has a chance to shut the gate to prevent Flora’s escape.  But as she sees the horse charging madly toward her, she holds the gate open as wide as she can.  “He would know that I was not entirely on his side,” she reflects, but in the next thought commits herself and takes a stand: “I was on Flora’s side, and that made me no use to anybody, not even to her.  Just the same, I did not regret it; when she came running at me and I held the gate open, that was the only thing I could do.” 

 

A young girl's drawing of the narrator with Mack and Flora

My students and even Steve, a colleague who is an expert in Munro’s fiction, think that siding with Flora is part of the way the girl becomes a girl.  But I think her stand complicates her interpellation into gendered subjectivity.  “Nobody likes being put in a box,” said Steve in a conversation about the roles kids get slotted into in family systems.  Animals are caged.  Gender is a pen, and old age is a box, too.  Flora resists the human will to “put her out to pasture” and engineer her end.  To side with Flora means siding with and standing for life in all its forms against a utilitarian, business-like world.  Flora was old.  Flora was of no use to anyone.  There was no wild land for her to escape to.  But siding with Flora meant supporting whatever inner instinct remained to run, leap, lap, and lick.  Siding with Mom means something similar:  it means accepting her toothless grin, taking her out walking, watering all hopes that shoot up, giving her back her car keys, and letting her have the simple pleasure of a daily cigarette.  Even the guys living in group homes on my street in Flint, MI, yell from their porches where they sit and smoke from early morning to late at night.  “Nice dog.  A dog’s man’s best friend!”  Let’s not forget that Mom is still the wild girl riding her palomino, Goldie, through the peach orchards, the thoughtful aunt who picked up Tom Southard to ice skate at Totem Village (because she knew how much the little boy liked to skate), the caring mother who fed us, educated us, and raised us.  Shouldn’t we be at least as good to her as she was to Nala?

Why does everyone only see gender when the struggle is about life resisting death in a box?

I wrote this several weeks ago but decided not to post it for fear of offense, but now I think:  what have I got to lose?  I just got back from a wonderfully enjoyable week visiting Mom, and she even had a chance to practice drive my rental car (a Toyota Rav4 just like hers) in the parking lot of Our Lady of the Annunciation.  Here she is behind the wheel:  Go Catherine, Go!  She knows she isn't going to be driving on "real" roads anytime soon and needs practice, but, as she said when we ate dinner at her friend, Peggy's house, "one step at a time."