Mary Jo I Nothing Am

Road headed toward Argyle, New York

        The moment I’ve been waiting for all my life with my mother happened yesterday on the bend in the road that runs out of Fort Edward heading toward Argyle.  We were parked—she in her wheelchair smoking—after I’d lifted the front wheels down one small step.  What happened?  She saw me for who I am.  But she didn’t know I was her daughter.  To her I was some very kind stranger with whom she could share pure love and simple joy in the moment, leaving a happy meal in a dark restaurant and coming back into the world of light on a warmish spring night in a place—a town—where there has been a fort since French and Indian War days.  “Oh, you are so kind.  I love you.  How did you know it was me?  I loved this place when I used to live here.”  The old was suddenly all new to her.  I was new to her, too.  My mother and I always "got along," but ever since I can remember something blocked the free flow of conversation.  Was it her disappointment in me (I was never popular in school)?  Was it my adoration of her (she was a real heroine)?  I have an early memory of standing by the refrigerator door listening to Mom tell me what to tell the babysitter about Katie's bottles.  Katie took her bottle until she was three, so I couldn't have been more than four at the time.  I was trying out words under my breath, practicing what to say to my own mother, and she reprimanded me, "Mary Jo, speak up!"  From then on, something has blocked my words, prevented me from talking to please myself with my mother.  But this recent moment in the parking lot of the Anvil Inn, when she said she loved me and laughed with me, the weight of years, the emotional baggage, the expectations—all fell away.  There were no mother-daughter roles to negotiate.  I lifted her wheelchair.  She saw me as a separate person—a stranger.  For the first time maybe, she noticed me.

Moses Kill River

Earlier that same afternoon, things hadn’t looked good.  Mom was exhausted from the day before when my family and I drove her along the winding roads in the border lands between New York and Vermont, through brown furze with purple mountain-backs humping into the horizon saddled with snow.  The earth there has something animal about it.  But Mom was seeing blueberry fields and talking about this year’s bumper crop.  She asked me if I remembered driving sheep through the valley along the Moses Kill river.  I said I did, going along with her fantasy and, in a flash, understanding why she seemed so tired.  The landscape out the window and the landscapes layered in her brain were like tectonic plates bumping, jarring, thrusting, hurting with the work of metamorphosis.  After several hours she was agitated, especially when Paul pulled in the driveway of the nursing home.  “I want you to take me home.  I do not live here.  If I knew you were going to pull this on me.  Here I thought we were going to have a good time.”  Her face turned red, and crumpled.  She was crying like a child.  I hugged her and told her how sorry I was.  It was awful.  Her body went rigid with resistance as I tried to coax her, gently, to lean forward and put her feet on the ground.  Even the physical therapist, who came out to help with a belt she wrapped around Mom’s waist—“give me a big bear hug,” had trouble moving her.  It was upsetting to leave her sitting in the corridor with other old people all equally disinterested in the 60s re-run of Gomer Pyle that was playing on the television.  I wanted to go home, too. 

Fort Edward Farm in February

She slept and slept through the night and into the next afternoon.  The doctor came in and implied that she was failing.  Paul said, as we sat and watched her labored breathing, “she is so close …”.  I knew that he meant “close to death,” and I snapped at him, “You’ve been saying that for the last year.”  My own heart still insists that she will live forever.  When we stopped at her favorite kitchen store in Vermont, I reluctantly bought a new oven glove in spring green with white goats romping across it.  It is hard to buy things like this because Mom has kept me in kitschy pot holders and dish towels—not to mention socks and rose lotion—my whole life, and I don’t want to admit that those days are gone and that I must do without her provisioning and, worse, do without her someday soon.  Paul took Katya to the mall so I could sit with Mom while she slept.  I picked up her extra-large print edition of “Letters of a Woman Homesteader” and read about Elinore Pruitt’s efforts to make do in the wilds of Wyoming:  “So I turned the current of my imagination and fancied that I was home.”  Eventually, Patty, the occupational therapist, wearing a bright green “Go Irish” sweatshirt, came in, and in a loud voice woke Mom up.  “Welcome back to planet earth, darling.  We are so glad to see you.”  Mom came to and ate half a tuna sandwich and the almond-horn pastry I’d brought from Gambel’s bakery on Route 9.  By the time Paul and Katya got back from the mall, she and I had been talking about her dream of spending nights in grandmother’s bed in New Jersey.  "You won't believe it, but I got into that old house and found my way to grandmother's bed.  I laid down, and an old woman watched me sleep.  'I'd know you anywhere,' she said.  She knew me when I was nursing!"  Mom is always so happy when she describes this fantasy which is very real to her.  I join in and talk about my memories of the houses—the one in which she was born, and the one in which she grew up where the water smelled so sweet and every room was calm and bright.  I wrapped her up in a sky-blue fair-isle sweater and took her out for a relaxing cigarette despite Dr. Garra’s warnings about her bad lungs.  What the heck.  “I always want a cigarette.”  And I always want to get out to stare at the cedar trees that are so much like those in the cemetery in Jersey.  Paul didn’t think it was a good idea to take her out in the car again to go to dinner, but Mom said she was up to it.  Once she had decided, I had no desire to contradict but felt my own heart leap into adventure mode.  Yay!  Mom wants to come out.  She feels like she can do it.  Who knows what will happen …

Friday night and the Anvil Inn was hopping.  It’s a converted blacksmith shop on the bend in the main road through Fort Edward.  The parking lot was full.  Not a problem.  I’d walked in the bar and let the waitress know I was coming in with a wheelchair.  A man leaped up, came out, moved his pick-up truck so we’d have a space that was easy to get Mom out of the car and into the restaurant.  “Mom, I think that was one of the men who helped us last time.”  She and I had tried this restaurant in February and loved the fire in the big stone fireplace and the kindness of all the strangers.  Once again, we got Mom situated easily and the barmaid came around to take our drink order.  “My mother likes dark beer.”  “Guinness,” Mom added.  Well, we don’t have Guinness, but I remember you, and I think you had the Cooper’s Cave Frothy last time.”  “You remember me?” asked Mom.  “Yes, I sure do.”  Mom was tickled by this.  And her own memory kicked in, but it was activated by my questions, reminiscences, and stories.  “What was the longest walk you ever did?  I bet it was when you climbed Giant Mountain?”  “Do you remember driving out with Nala to see Katya when we first brought her home?”  “Remember when Kat and I flew home to see you when Poppy was a puppy?  Remember how he and Nala used to compete for treats?”  “How did you ever manage walking two dogs when we went to Kazakhstan?”  The theme was adventure and long-distance journeys to connect and re-connect.  She began to talk to Katya about school.  She told of her own love of chemistry.  We enjoyed the beer.  The food was great.  It was so good to be there.  To be part of a ring of bright faces and to feel like I had an important role, leading the group, cuing, prompting, remembering, making the conversation work, making the past live again, making us into a family. 

When we were sitting at the table, she knew I was Mary Jo I think.  But on the way out, when I had to squeeze past the wheelchair and lift the front wheels down the step, she smiled at me in a new way.  Then I darted to the car and grabbed the blanket (black and white and very soft).  Oh, I love these blankets.  Yes, you gave it to us for a present.  I did?  Yes.  Oh, you are so kind, and I love you so much.  And I love you.  I pulled my own hat on her head, kissed her cheek and she smiled.  This was so very nice of you.  Oh, I had a wonderful time, too.  Isn’t it a gorgeous night.  Yes, it is: you know, I always loved this part of town when I lived here.  This free exchange of feelings, of appreciation, of love was something utterly new.  We were like spring freshets, flowing and bubbling with life, mixing our words and lifting each other up on happy tones of voice.  I held her hand and kissed her head repeatedly.  When she’d finished her cigarette and we helped her into the car, she said, “that girl who helped with the wheelchair was so kind.”  I started to object, “that was me, Mom, your daughter, Mary Jo.”  But I decided to accept the blessed distance dementia gives us all, to be an ecstatic nobody, riding in the back seat behind my mother and husband, next to my daughter, as the evening light grew richer and the smells of the softening earth wafted through all the cracks in our hard shells.  Who are my intimates?  Who are you?  In one long awaited moment in my mother’s eyes, I became new.