Writing about family

Maya Shanbhag Lang’s memoir captures her growing awareness that her mother has Alzheimer’s, and how that changes their equation

There have been many accounts and imaginative renderings of Alzheimer’s. I recall being moved by Elegy for Iris, John Bayley’s memoir about life with his spouse Iris Murdoch who became afflicted with Alzheimer’s. Its movie version Iris had Judi Dench playing the brilliant philosopher, academic and novelist. More recently, Glenda Jackson returned to the big screen after more than a decade as Maude, a woman with Alzheimer’s, in Elizabeth is Missing, and said she did so to focus attention on a rapidly-spreading medical condition.

Maya Shanbhag Lang’s memoir What We Carry captures her struggle with impending motherhood, her growing awareness that her mother has Alzheimer’s, and the ways in which this changes their mother-daughter equation. Its Prologue begins with a story her mother (Mom) told her when her daughter Zoe was nine days old, of a woman standing in a deep river with her son, trying to decide which of them she should save as the rising waters threatened to engulf them: “Until we are in the river, up to our shoulders – until we are in that position ourselves, we cannot know the answer… We must not judge… Whatever a woman decides, it is not easy.”

Listening, Lang had been mystified, wondering what this story had to do with either of them. She learned later that it captured her family’s story and was Mom’s way of “owning up to what she had long hidden”. Lang had always viewed her mother as strong and dependable, an immigrant who fought to establish herself in her chosen profession. Partly because of this image of Mom, partly because Lang belonged to a newer generation of women with a transformed world view of their role, she approached motherhood with mixed feelings. A PhD in comparative literature, she wanted to be the perfect mom,

“nurturing, loving, adept, someone who bakes pies and gives the best hugs...” as she was to write in a letter to her unborn daughter, suspecting at the time that the words didn’t sound real. Battling severe post-partum depression, hurt by Mom’s refusal to visit even when she was suicidal, she still found ways to excuse her mother’s behaviour. “Maybe she knew… there would be no benefit in coddling me.” She discovered later that Mom’s claim of having coped alone was fictitious, that her parents had helped during her residency, taking her son back with them to India. Lang’s emotions see-saw even after the reasons for Mom’s increasingly odd behaviour are known. When she unwillingly comes to stay, it is hard to reconcile to the new Mom: dithery, prone to tantrums and to demonising Lang among relatives. The good moments are straws she grasps at, but the stress of Mom’s mood swings takes a toll on her home life, forcing her to move Mom into an assisted living facility.

Writing about family is never easy. I began Family Fables & Hidden Heresies: A Memoir of Mothers and More soon after I lost my mother Ai in 1990 because Ai had wanted to write about her life and had enlisted my help just a few months earlier, but it was 2009 before I could let go and look for a publisher. It was the most difficult thing I had done. “The beginning is never easy,” I wrote: “I’ll be honest, you say, tell it the way it was. Then you start to think about the hurt, the endless explanations, the disagreements. No, it wasn’t like that, no, I wasn’t there when it happened. I don’t remember saying that. How could you have gone and put that down? What will people say?” Mom and Ai had this in common: both chose careers in medicine. They were both also forthright. Unlike Mom however, Ai’s career was a choice without alternatives though, the decision made, she gave it her everything. Acknowledged as having the makings of a fine surgeon she had to abandon the FRCS and return to India when the Second World War broke out because of her mother’s insecurities (she was widowed in the First War). Mom was a psychiatrist, the kind of practitioner that people ran up to in supermarkets. “‘You don’t understand,’ they would say, turning to me. ‘Your mother saved my life.’” In contrast vibrant, fun-loving Ai,

What We Carry: A Memoir Maya Shanbhag Lang though clearly good at her work, remained self-effacing, battling guilt over the conflicting demands of profession and domesticity. It was stunning to learn when the memoir was published that many in her extended family were unaware that she had lived and worked on her own in a Lahore hospital before she married.

Memoirists are often asked if they have regrets. I regret that I was less than fair to Ai in soft-pedalling over incidents to spare those in her extended family who were still alive. But when unknown readers respond to the book with sensitive insights it vindicates the decision to discard an incestuous narrative aimed at settling scores and focus on a story whose accessibility straddles regions and cultures and speaks to readers about issues that matter universally. Though considerably more personal Lang’s book does the same thing. A writer of Indian descent living in the US, she is aware of addressing an audience incurably prone to stereotyping. “Whenever I tell people that my family is Indian, I get the impression that they don’t hear what comes next. It’s like they have cotton in their ears. It doesn’t matter if I speak of a lovely flat with servants or of an imperious Brahmin mother. They nod and smile, but hear poverty, Third World, came here for a better life.” She regrets that such assumptions conditioned her own responses, making her see her mother’s financial fretting as “a function of her immigrant status… I should have thought to mention her symptoms to doctors, should have seen the behaviours right before my eyes. Instead there was cotton in my ears. All I heard was immigrant, immigrant, immigrant.”

Physical proximity to those one loves can be a double-edged sword. Perhaps because of Mom’s “roller coaster” moments, the chapters swivel from incident to incident, replaying life in those difficult times, a gripping, near-stream-of-consciousness narration which is occasionally disorienting in its intensity. Unambiguous about her own fluctuating responses to her mother, unafraid to describe her most negative feelings, what comes through is Lang’s emotional bond, her admiration for Mom, and the way her ultimate decision both liberates and breaks her. If life is suddenly full of potential again, now that her time is pretty much her own, there is also the awareness that she misses “having someone in my life who cared about the details, who gave me the space to be an unhurried version of myself. I don’t think there is a replacement for this.” There isn’t. Not usually.