HAPPY M THER’S DAY
HOW I LOST MY MOTHER, AND WHERE I FOUND HER AGAIN.
It was a cold night, my father was away and we were bored. So of course, we went to the movies.
I was 8 then, late in the fall of 1990, and I begged myself hoarse to see the newly opened “Home Alone.” But “Home Alone” was still playing at the normal theater. We were regulars at the “dollar theater,” with its offbrand cola and squeaky seats, to watch films long after their sell-by date on the cheap. We were going, she told me, to see “Rocky V.”
I can feel the face I must have made. But any movie was better than no movie. I got in the car, sulked down low and steeled myself for boredom.
As we drove, the car diverged from its expected route. “You missed the turn,” I said, before some warm realization started to spread in my gut. We turned into Westridge Mall (today it’s called Desert Sky Mall), home of the full-price theater — where they were showing “Home Alone.”
We could never have paid full-price for all the movies we saw in my childhood, because we saw practically everything. All summer long and on weekends during the school year, my mother would put down a few dollars at the ticket counter and walk with me past the concession stand, her purse packed with contraband snacks: two cans of Coke and a cardboard box of Junior Mints, our favorite. When the lights darkened, she’d secret out the two red cans and hand me one, and we’d wait, fingers poised until the sound blared loud enough to mask the crisp snaps of the aluminum tabs. We’d sip Coke between Junior Mints, plucking them one by one from the cardboard box and letting them melt between tongue and palate, the screen’s adventure flickering across our rapt and chocolatey faces.
At home, my mom blasted the “Care Bears” theme song through the house on mornings she worked from home. She spent summer days singing “The Little Mermaid” songs with me in our pool. She drove me to the library and stacked my skinny arms with books until they could carry no more back to the car. She taught me the alphabet before kindergarten, row by arduous row, and pressed a shiny gold star sticker at the end of each successful line.
In the years before she died, I agonized to pinpoint the exact moment I lost my mom. That mom.
The answer changed depending on how tragic I felt.
It was when they amputated her right hand.
It was when she started choking and had to go to the ER.
It was when she started stealing from me.
It was when she first told me she hated me.
It was when she had her last grand mal seizure.
It was when she had her first.
It was at the beginning, when I was a young teenager and she ran the phone book through the washing machine and couldn’t explain why.
I couldn’t decide at what point during her transformation from bubbly, forgetful, sweetly irreverent and endlessly patient mother she became the permanently disabled slurrer of words, the unrecognizable couch creature who would sleep and eat all day, her dentures resting on the coffee table, casual as a pair of glasses.
As her symptoms passed the decade mark — sometime after I had graduated from college and was nearing 26, still living at home because I felt I had to — I decided I had lost that mother, and in her place was someone else. The Other Mother. The one whose body and brain let her down in small and aggregating ways. The one whose seizures had no explanation. The one whose gait grew wobblier and more dangerous.
My father and I struggled for years to find a diagnosis. The MRIs continually baffled doctors.
The Other Mother’s condition got a name only after the meticulous dissection of her dead and damaged brain: Huntington’s disease, a condition of such staggering cruelty some grad student at this very moment is using it as a dysteleological argument against the existence of God.
She’d been tested for the neurodegenerative disorder when she was alive, the potentially offending gene singled out by geneticists and deemed normal. Ultimately, though, the autopsy that analyzed her brain decay ruled that she had it anyway, that either the test was a false-negative or she had a variation so rare it wasn’t even on the books.
Before then the disease, whatever its name, had sent her to the hospital innumerable times. Each time, for more than 15 years, she seemed to come home a little bit less. A little more Other Mother.
It was Other Mother who called her family names and drank alcohol when they weren’t around. It was Other Mother who swallowed all of her tranquilizers one morning and tried to kill herself.
It was Other Mother I thought I visited in the ICU after work late one March evening, shortly after I had turned 32.
A choked-on piece of chicken had been the first in a macabre sequence of events that would end with the amputation of her right hand, and then death. After all the indignity and decay she had survived, it was something as small as an IV wound, spiraling out of control, that would take her out.
That night, I stood over her hospital bed, both of us ignoring the purpled hand, dead under its dressings, weeping its last before the amputation scheduled for the morning.
I touched her hair with one hand as the night nurse checked machines and IV bags, adjusted sheets and tubes. Our eyes willed the nurse to leave the room.
My other hand played anxiously inside my jacket pocket, into which I had emptied a cardboard box of Junior Mints. They were the enemy of her all-liquid diet, strictly prohibited. Finally the night nurse left. My mother opened her mouth and I pulled out one of the candies and dropped it in.
She melted the candy between tongue and palate and opened her chocolatey mouth for another. I watched the doorway, and dropped in another. We did this until we ran out.
My mother told me she was tired. She looked at me, her hand still rotting at her side, and told me not to worry. She told me she would be all right.
I left, exhausted, Other Mother a baby bird I had had to feed by hand. As I wiped the chocolate from my fingertips on my denim jacket I thought, This too? Even Junior Mints, this disease had stolen from me.
She died a few days later.
Last year, I treated the first Mother’s Day without my mom as any other ordinary day to be suffered. It made little sense to mark the occasion; Other Mother’s death was not to be mourned. I had lost my real mother long ago.
In the year since then, slowly, I started excavating yellowing photo albums from their dusty nooks in my parents’ house. Their protective cellophane curls at the edges, but I can still perceive intelligence in her blue eyes.
The home videos were a bigger shock.
My dad had converted all those jumpy VHS tapes into DVDs. When I put the first disc into my machine and pressed play, my mother’s persistent Southern drawl, decades removed from her South Carolina childhood, emerged from the speakers. There it was — that voice I had thought I’d forgotten after so many years of slurring. That laugh, loud and immediate and infectious.
Somewhere in there, I could hear the mom who put a gold star at the end of each line. The mom who stacked my arms high with library books. The mom who whisked me into the dollar theater so many times.
And I see myself today — a professional writer, a voracious reader of books, a joyous cinephile.
Now, as I face my second Mother’s Day without my mom, I recognize a certain lucidity in our last night together in the ICU. There was a light in her eyes, a clarity of purpose that had mostly been absent in the years before. I remember hearing her say she would be all right. And I think now that she believed it as little as I did. I realize that she was saying goodbye.
And I realize, now, that I never lost my mom.
That the night before the amputation, I didn’t stand over my Other Mother. Because there was never an Other Mother.
There was just one mother, whose love could not be undone by a mutated gene. The mother who played music in the mornings when she was lonely for me to wake up.
The mother who took me to the dollar theater.
To “Back to the Future” and “Big,” “The Little Mermaid” and “Hook,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
And once, that one night, to the expensive theater, to see “Home Alone.”
This Mother’s Day, I will honor her as I should have the last. I will go to the box office, cash in hand, and buy a ticket for “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” a box of Junior Mints hidden in my purse.
I will wait for the lights to darken, for the sound to blare. As the adventure flickers across my face, there will be a Junior Mint melting in my mouth.