THE WRITER’S WIFE
PART III: My Mother | The Car
She was sitting at the side of the bed, hands planted firmly on the edge of the mattress, when she announced, “I’m going to make a pot of coffee.”
Coming from my mother, neither the announcement nor the project was uncommon, so the fact that it was not yet dawn wasn’t the problem, even if it was unusually early.
The problem was that she was in the ICU Cardiac unit at St. Joseph’s, rendering the coffee plan, from my point of view, resting on the bed next to hers, hilarious.
“Mom! You’re hooked up to stuff! You’re all plugged in! You can’t go anywhere,” I stage whispered as I padded to her in my beloved hospital socks. Looming over her, I pointed to her right hand, and like a TV game show hostess, slowly swept my arm up towards the metal rack with the hanging plastic bag filled with her liquid medicine de la nuit. She followed the thin clear tube back down to her hand, dotted with sun spots and bruises, adorned with a silver spike taped to the dunes of her blue veins. Then she looked up at me with either all the wisdom of her 55 years, or the guilelessness of a child, and said simply, “then take it out.”
The entire night was spent giggling together and shushing her, so we wouldn’t get scolded by our Night Angel of Mercy, a sugary blond nurse who happened to be the level of physical beauty that gets noted when it’s not in service to entertainment. My mother was no doubt one of many who repeatedly gushed that she was in the wrong profession, and she sweetly took the compliment as if it was the first time, every time.
Not all my visits would be so playful, but the nights when I didn’t stay were the ones that led to morning phone calls from the head nurse, who needed to report the scratches left on the wrists of hospital orderlies as they attempted to restrain her. She was a fighter, that ol’ mom of mine, and in her ICU psychosis believed that those attempting to silence and calm a screaming, out of control patient were Nazis experimenting on her, and she fought hard. And she left scratches. Left unsaid was that this was a reasonable deduction if you wake up with no memories and examine your surroundings in a heavily drugged state. Oh, and you’re a Jew.
Home at last. After stripping off all that hindered me, I threw myself atop the bed and gratefully closed my eyes. This would be a long, deep, well-earned sleep. I was just beginning to deeply exhale when my husband’s strident command filled my ears. “You have to move your car.”
Who has to do what now?
“I’m late. Your car’s blocking mine, you have to move it. Now.”
This can’t be.
“I just got back from spending the night with my mother in the hospital. No sleep. Must sleep.”
“You can sleep after you move your car. Come on, let’s go.”
At the time, I thought this was the most selfish thing a person could do, especially to a person they claimed to love.
A quarter of a century later, I still do.
A t the time, I couldn’t understand it. I knew it was an overtly hostile gesture because at the time I had several brain cells that, when rubbed together, occasionally created a thought. I burst into tears at the blatant cruelty of his request, which quickly became a demand.
I screamed into my pillow, imploring him to let me sleep, recycling the undeniably excellent justification for not getting up, getting dressed, stumbling down two flights of stairs to the garage, forgetting my car keys, eventually backing up my Honda at enough of an angle so that he could maneuver his Honda out of the narrow spot and be on his way. We had both grumbled and stumbled through this process solo, and yes, it took longer and was annoying, but I just got back from spending the night with my mother in the hospital. No sleep. Must sleep.
I n retrospect, I believe that consciously or not, he needed to assert himself as my priority. My mother’s sudden cardiac arrest demanded much more of my time and energy than he was happy with, and this highly unreasonable demand was designed to made it clear that there would be no tolerance for too much attention in anyone else’s direciton.
In the rear view mirror, I’ve analyzed his needs, motivations, and yes, drives that led to these types of behaviors with the skill of a trained analyst, which isn’t necessarily boasting. But once I returned to the bed, stripped off my clothes again, threw myself onto the bed and screamed in fury and anguish, I asked myself why I did it, intuiting that it was a crossroads moment, and I had blown it.
If only I had simply said, “no,” and continued to lie in bed. I could’ve changed our push-me-pull-you dynamic at that moment. He would’ve been furious, but he also would’ve learned that he could not rely on me to obey him; there were annoying things in his life that he would have to handle himself, even after he asked me to. And perhaps if I had been reasonable with myself instead of compliant to his infantile demand, I could’ve broken a cycle that ran through my matrilinial gene pool as firm and unbroken as our . And who knows if that simple “no” could’ve started a whole different pattern early in our marriage — which is when this event occurred — perhaps his trajectory wouldn’t have eventually become so lethally dependent.
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