Gretchen Staebler's Blog - Posts Tagged "mother-lode"
The Story Behind the Book
Maybe you won’t like me. That’s what I thought when I started my “Daughter on Duty” blog about life with Mama. It was private at first, just my whiny journaling going out to a few friends who wouldn’t judge me. Then I decided what the hell, and I made it public. If my words offend you, don’t read it. I’m not writing for you. Caring for my mother—living with her again, for gawd sake—was the hardest thing I’d ever done, including raising children, and I thought that was hard. I was willing to risk vulnerability to tell the truth of how it was, or my truth anyway.
Some choose to care for a parent, some feel they don’t have a choice, some can’t, some fervently wish they had had the opportunity. Some choose not to—and there is no shame in that. One of the purposes of a memoir is to shed light on our common experiences, hoping others who choose a similar path will learn something that will help them, or at least know they are not alone. I wrote to those people.
I began to search out memoirs written by people caring for a parent. I was no stranger to memoir, it’s my favorite genre. Not the memoirs of famous people and celebrities (though some of those are interesting too, we never know what lies behind the curtain of fame), but of ordinary people no one ever heard of. They aren’t so much about a life as about how the writer experienced an event in their lives or navigated a thread sewn through it. I read the stories of those who felt honored to have been able to be there at a parent’s end of life, who reviewed their lovely childhood relationships or extended a close adult one, or how they overcame difficult ones. They felt so lucky. I didn’t feel lucky. I was tired, and frustrated, and lonely. I saw my 60s slipping by me. I felt stuck.
I didn’t find any memoirs by caregivers who found the work less than rewarding. Are we ashamed of ourselves for not being able to “do it better”? Afraid we will be judged? We live by the notion that if we can’t say something nice, say nothing. I assumed that was why no one was writing that story, not because I was the only terrible person, not because I lived on a distant planet.
Then I learned that memoirs are “supposed” to be written after the event at the core of the story is over, even long after. This gives the writer an opportunity to reflect, to see the entirety of the story and make sense of it. It also allows time to dig out those rose-colored granny glasses that were the rage in the 1960s, of which I had a pair. Emotional memory can be short, we see things as we wish they were and over time adjust our stories—known as “writing it slant.” When I was entrenched in living my story, I didn’t need someone else’s version of how it turned out in the end, I needed to know how they got through the days.
I decided to write the book I needed to read, and to eschew the “rules” and write it in real time, knowing bringing my frustration to the page may make some readers uncomfortable. It’s a vulnerable place. I loved my mother, and she nearly put me over the edge. Many times I thought moving across the country, into my childhood home, to care for her were the three stupidest decisions I’d ever made.
Lest you think my story is nothing more than a whine-fest, I also wrote the humor in living with an elderly person (albeit irreverently), I learned much about how to care for myself, and as time went on, how to care for my mother (though I never got good at putting knowledge into regular practice) and how to navigate the health care system in this country. They are tools I hope will help those who come after me. And I did take out many of the angst stories and put in more of my mother’s back story. If readers don’t like the main characters, they won’t read the book, and it did make the story more interesting.
As I edited my manuscript, after my mother died, I was tempted to alter it, to take out even more of the words that made me look like the world’s worst daughter, to rewrite the story to include what I could see more clearly later. Three years into caregiving, I wrote this in a blog post: “Perhaps when I have finished this walk across the wilderness, I will look back and understand how it expanded my life. Today I am highly skeptical.” Four years after my mother’s death, I can say that did happen. It did expand my life, I do understand my mother better now, I do wish I could have done it better, I am glad I was here. But that is not this story.
Some choose to care for a parent, some feel they don’t have a choice, some can’t, some fervently wish they had had the opportunity. Some choose not to—and there is no shame in that. One of the purposes of a memoir is to shed light on our common experiences, hoping others who choose a similar path will learn something that will help them, or at least know they are not alone. I wrote to those people.
I began to search out memoirs written by people caring for a parent. I was no stranger to memoir, it’s my favorite genre. Not the memoirs of famous people and celebrities (though some of those are interesting too, we never know what lies behind the curtain of fame), but of ordinary people no one ever heard of. They aren’t so much about a life as about how the writer experienced an event in their lives or navigated a thread sewn through it. I read the stories of those who felt honored to have been able to be there at a parent’s end of life, who reviewed their lovely childhood relationships or extended a close adult one, or how they overcame difficult ones. They felt so lucky. I didn’t feel lucky. I was tired, and frustrated, and lonely. I saw my 60s slipping by me. I felt stuck.
I didn’t find any memoirs by caregivers who found the work less than rewarding. Are we ashamed of ourselves for not being able to “do it better”? Afraid we will be judged? We live by the notion that if we can’t say something nice, say nothing. I assumed that was why no one was writing that story, not because I was the only terrible person, not because I lived on a distant planet.
Then I learned that memoirs are “supposed” to be written after the event at the core of the story is over, even long after. This gives the writer an opportunity to reflect, to see the entirety of the story and make sense of it. It also allows time to dig out those rose-colored granny glasses that were the rage in the 1960s, of which I had a pair. Emotional memory can be short, we see things as we wish they were and over time adjust our stories—known as “writing it slant.” When I was entrenched in living my story, I didn’t need someone else’s version of how it turned out in the end, I needed to know how they got through the days.
I decided to write the book I needed to read, and to eschew the “rules” and write it in real time, knowing bringing my frustration to the page may make some readers uncomfortable. It’s a vulnerable place. I loved my mother, and she nearly put me over the edge. Many times I thought moving across the country, into my childhood home, to care for her were the three stupidest decisions I’d ever made.
Lest you think my story is nothing more than a whine-fest, I also wrote the humor in living with an elderly person (albeit irreverently), I learned much about how to care for myself, and as time went on, how to care for my mother (though I never got good at putting knowledge into regular practice) and how to navigate the health care system in this country. They are tools I hope will help those who come after me. And I did take out many of the angst stories and put in more of my mother’s back story. If readers don’t like the main characters, they won’t read the book, and it did make the story more interesting.
As I edited my manuscript, after my mother died, I was tempted to alter it, to take out even more of the words that made me look like the world’s worst daughter, to rewrite the story to include what I could see more clearly later. Three years into caregiving, I wrote this in a blog post: “Perhaps when I have finished this walk across the wilderness, I will look back and understand how it expanded my life. Today I am highly skeptical.” Four years after my mother’s death, I can say that did happen. It did expand my life, I do understand my mother better now, I do wish I could have done it better, I am glad I was here. But that is not this story.
My Smiling Daughter
A deleted scene from my memoir "Mother Lode: Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver." https://gretchenstaebler.com
These years here with my mother have not brought the connection I dreamed of when I moved across the country. But today, as the sky lightens, I lie in bed realizing that my love for nature, and even for adventure, is born of my mother. The recognition is a beginning, and time is not up.
I rise and move to the chair in the corner of the living room. My coffee mug on the table beside me, I pick up my journal to write from a prompt to start the day. As it usually does when I follow the pen, the words come around to Mama and wondering why, for so long, we didn’t see each other. The pen travels back in time with a force that transcends conscious thought.
For decades, in cross-country phone calls, Mama greeted me with, “Is that my smiling daughter?” I don’t know why it began to irritate me several years ago, but it did.
I have heard the story of my babyhood many times over the years.
Your crib was in our bedroom. When you woke up—early—you stood motionless in the crib until one of us moved a muscle. Then you jumped up and down, rattling the crib, laughing. She decided my identity back then and she was sticking to it. I didn’t have permission to be in a funk, so I chose not to include her in my life when I didn’t tell her over the phone I was ready to strangle one or the other of my children, that their father was out of town again and I was tired of doing it all, that I was lonely, that my period had started and I felt like shit. I wanted empathy, I wanted compassion. But had I told her how I really felt in that moment, she would have been worried about me, given me unwanted advice, and sent me magazine articles, dragging my bad mood farther into the future than its natural life dictated as she tried to fix it.
One day, a few years ago, I had had enough. I couldn’t live up to her expectations and I angrily asked her to stop calling me her smiling daughter. And she did.
As I write this, I realize with a start that when I walk into her room at the assisted living facility now, and she asks who’s there, she doesn’t know what I look like. Me, her smiling daughter! Her eyes see light and dark against the opposite background, and that’s all. I’ve heard her say countless times to visitors: “I can see your shape, but not your face,” but it hadn’t crossed my mind that she can’t see my face. She doesn’t see that my face is aging, that I’m looking more like her every day. Whatever static picture of me she has in her head is all she has. I don’t know what that picture is. Am I smiling?
She did see you, my pen writes. Of course she knew I had bad days back then; but I am generally a happy person, an optimistic person. That is my identity. She has known you from the womb, watched your ebb and flow, and seen you return to your Self again and again. “Is that my smiling daughter?” was her way of reminding me of who I am. It was her way of telling me she had faith that no matter what was going on in my life that I probably wasn’t telling her, I would reach into my core and find my strength. Just as she does. It was her way of being my cheerleader, the mother I wanted.
“Is that Gretchen?” she says, unsure of her accuracy in distinguishing my voice when I enter her room and greet her. I wish she would ask if it’s her smiling daughter.
These years here with my mother have not brought the connection I dreamed of when I moved across the country. But today, as the sky lightens, I lie in bed realizing that my love for nature, and even for adventure, is born of my mother. The recognition is a beginning, and time is not up.
I rise and move to the chair in the corner of the living room. My coffee mug on the table beside me, I pick up my journal to write from a prompt to start the day. As it usually does when I follow the pen, the words come around to Mama and wondering why, for so long, we didn’t see each other. The pen travels back in time with a force that transcends conscious thought.
For decades, in cross-country phone calls, Mama greeted me with, “Is that my smiling daughter?” I don’t know why it began to irritate me several years ago, but it did.
I have heard the story of my babyhood many times over the years.
Your crib was in our bedroom. When you woke up—early—you stood motionless in the crib until one of us moved a muscle. Then you jumped up and down, rattling the crib, laughing. She decided my identity back then and she was sticking to it. I didn’t have permission to be in a funk, so I chose not to include her in my life when I didn’t tell her over the phone I was ready to strangle one or the other of my children, that their father was out of town again and I was tired of doing it all, that I was lonely, that my period had started and I felt like shit. I wanted empathy, I wanted compassion. But had I told her how I really felt in that moment, she would have been worried about me, given me unwanted advice, and sent me magazine articles, dragging my bad mood farther into the future than its natural life dictated as she tried to fix it.
One day, a few years ago, I had had enough. I couldn’t live up to her expectations and I angrily asked her to stop calling me her smiling daughter. And she did.
As I write this, I realize with a start that when I walk into her room at the assisted living facility now, and she asks who’s there, she doesn’t know what I look like. Me, her smiling daughter! Her eyes see light and dark against the opposite background, and that’s all. I’ve heard her say countless times to visitors: “I can see your shape, but not your face,” but it hadn’t crossed my mind that she can’t see my face. She doesn’t see that my face is aging, that I’m looking more like her every day. Whatever static picture of me she has in her head is all she has. I don’t know what that picture is. Am I smiling?
She did see you, my pen writes. Of course she knew I had bad days back then; but I am generally a happy person, an optimistic person. That is my identity. She has known you from the womb, watched your ebb and flow, and seen you return to your Self again and again. “Is that my smiling daughter?” was her way of reminding me of who I am. It was her way of telling me she had faith that no matter what was going on in my life that I probably wasn’t telling her, I would reach into my core and find my strength. Just as she does. It was her way of being my cheerleader, the mother I wanted.
“Is that Gretchen?” she says, unsure of her accuracy in distinguishing my voice when I enter her room and greet her. I wish she would ask if it’s her smiling daughter.
My Smiling Daughter
A deleted scene from my memoir "Mother Lode: Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver." https://gretchenstaebler.com
These years here with my mother have not brought the connection I dreamed of when I moved across the country. But today, as the sky lightens, I lie in bed realizing that my love for nature, and even for adventure, is born of my mother. The recognition is a beginning, and time is not up.
I rise and move to the chair in the corner of the living room. My coffee mug on the table beside me, I pick up my journal to write from a prompt to start the day. As it usually does when I follow the pen, the words come around to Mama and wondering why, for so long, we didn’t see each other. The pen travels back in time with a force that transcends conscious thought.
For decades, in cross-country phone calls, Mama greeted me with, “Is that my smiling daughter?” I don’t know why it began to irritate me several years ago, but it did.
I have heard the story of my babyhood many times over the years.
Your crib was in our bedroom. When you woke up—early—you stood motionless in the crib until one of us moved a muscle. Then you jumped up and down, rattling the crib, laughing. She decided my identity back then and she was sticking to it. I didn’t have permission to be in a funk, so I chose not to include her in my life when I didn’t tell her over the phone I was ready to strangle one or the other of my children, that their father was out of town again and I was tired of doing it all, that I was lonely, that my period had started and I felt like shit. I wanted empathy, I wanted compassion. But had I told her how I really felt in that moment, she would have been worried about me, given me unwanted advice, and sent me magazine articles, dragging my bad mood farther into the future than its natural life dictated as she tried to fix it.
One day, a few years ago, I had had enough. I couldn’t live up to her expectations and I angrily asked her to stop calling me her smiling daughter. And she did.
As I write this, I realize with a start that when I walk into her room at the assisted living facility now, and she asks who’s there, she doesn’t know what I look like. Me, her smiling daughter! Her eyes see light and dark against the opposite background, and that’s all. I’ve heard her say countless times to visitors: “I can see your shape, but not your face,” but it hadn’t crossed my mind that she can’t see my face. She doesn’t see that my face is aging, that I’m looking more like her every day. Whatever static picture of me she has in her head is all she has. I don’t know what that picture is. Am I smiling?
She did see you, my pen writes. Of course she knew I had bad days back then; but I am generally a happy person, an optimistic person. That is my identity. She has known you from the womb, watched your ebb and flow, and seen you return to your Self again and again. “Is that my smiling daughter?” was her way of reminding me of who I am. It was her way of telling me she had faith that no matter what was going on in my life that I probably wasn’t telling her, I would reach into my core and find my strength. Just as she does. It was her way of being my cheerleader, the mother I wanted.
“Is that Gretchen?” she says, unsure of her accuracy in distinguishing my voice when I enter her room and greet her. I wish she would ask if it’s her smiling daughter.
These years here with my mother have not brought the connection I dreamed of when I moved across the country. But today, as the sky lightens, I lie in bed realizing that my love for nature, and even for adventure, is born of my mother. The recognition is a beginning, and time is not up.
I rise and move to the chair in the corner of the living room. My coffee mug on the table beside me, I pick up my journal to write from a prompt to start the day. As it usually does when I follow the pen, the words come around to Mama and wondering why, for so long, we didn’t see each other. The pen travels back in time with a force that transcends conscious thought.
For decades, in cross-country phone calls, Mama greeted me with, “Is that my smiling daughter?” I don’t know why it began to irritate me several years ago, but it did.
I have heard the story of my babyhood many times over the years.
Your crib was in our bedroom. When you woke up—early—you stood motionless in the crib until one of us moved a muscle. Then you jumped up and down, rattling the crib, laughing. She decided my identity back then and she was sticking to it. I didn’t have permission to be in a funk, so I chose not to include her in my life when I didn’t tell her over the phone I was ready to strangle one or the other of my children, that their father was out of town again and I was tired of doing it all, that I was lonely, that my period had started and I felt like shit. I wanted empathy, I wanted compassion. But had I told her how I really felt in that moment, she would have been worried about me, given me unwanted advice, and sent me magazine articles, dragging my bad mood farther into the future than its natural life dictated as she tried to fix it.
One day, a few years ago, I had had enough. I couldn’t live up to her expectations and I angrily asked her to stop calling me her smiling daughter. And she did.
As I write this, I realize with a start that when I walk into her room at the assisted living facility now, and she asks who’s there, she doesn’t know what I look like. Me, her smiling daughter! Her eyes see light and dark against the opposite background, and that’s all. I’ve heard her say countless times to visitors: “I can see your shape, but not your face,” but it hadn’t crossed my mind that she can’t see my face. She doesn’t see that my face is aging, that I’m looking more like her every day. Whatever static picture of me she has in her head is all she has. I don’t know what that picture is. Am I smiling?
She did see you, my pen writes. Of course she knew I had bad days back then; but I am generally a happy person, an optimistic person. That is my identity. She has known you from the womb, watched your ebb and flow, and seen you return to your Self again and again. “Is that my smiling daughter?” was her way of reminding me of who I am. It was her way of telling me she had faith that no matter what was going on in my life that I probably wasn’t telling her, I would reach into my core and find my strength. Just as she does. It was her way of being my cheerleader, the mother I wanted.
“Is that Gretchen?” she says, unsure of her accuracy in distinguishing my voice when I enter her room and greet her. I wish she would ask if it’s her smiling daughter.
What is Home at the End of Life?
The rural house sat at the end of a fork of the south bay of Puget Sound. It was an unremarkable house, but exiting the backdoor, like the closet door into Narnia, my first childhood home was anything but ordinary.
Through the wooden screen door and down the steps, past the lattice-fence that divided the tamed yard from the less-tamed yard, beyond the huge homemade swing set and the outdoor brick fireplace my father built, between the log cabin playhouse and the muddy flats of the bay at low tide, lay the woods. I spent long summer days in that strip of trees where make-believe flourished. In the front yard, my sister and I waited for the bookmobile, the borrowed books flaming more imagination. Kids and fathers played softball in the field next door and little girls played restaurant in the neighbor's abandoned chicken coop.
We left that home when I was eight, the thirty miles of interstate between it and my second home bisecting my life into its first before and after. I lived in the new house on the side of the hill the remainder of my childhood. But the home by the bay remains irrevocably my soul home, the one I will remember when memory eludes me.
__________
My mother lived in fourteen houses with her family of origin, her father following work and running from creditors. She moved, alone, across the country for a civil service job as World War II began and relocated several more times, waiting for her new husband to return. Her dream, she tells me decades later, was to stay in one place.
She got her wish. After the war, she and my father bought the house I was born to and lived there until we moved to our hillside house, where she stayed for fifty-five years.
__________
I was 64, when, after four years of caring for my mother, I reached the end of my line. I couldn’t care for her in her home any more, a role I had reluctantly taken on in the first place. Would she have to leave the place that, like my first home on the bay, was the one locked in her soul? If we moved her to assisted living, did that make me a disloyal and selfish daughter? Would I be breaking a promise I hadn’t made? Was there another way? My 100-year-old mother struggled with me living with her, I think; and she battled against the few hours a week paid caregivers were in the house. Was it harder to have someone in her own home—where she had been queen of the castle for more than five decades—than it would be if she moved one more time?
What happens when we realize we no longer have the energy to continue? Can we resign? Are we obligated to continue in the way we had been? For how long do we pressure ourselves not only to physically but emotionally sacrifice our lives in favor of someone else’s perceived happiness? Did I have the right to reclaim my life? I decided I did.
Nearly five years after her death, I’m still questioning myself. The hospice nurse said she was home, the place that had become familiar; and she was in her own bed, the one she had shared with her husband.
Everyone says they want to die at home. What does that mean? I am contemplating the question for myself, to make known my hopes to my own children. And I am considering it now, at 70, while I am, hopefully, far from the need. I'm considering it in the light of having been the giver of care. I hope not to be in a hospital, with bright lights, beeping machines, an unfamiliar bed; but if that is what happens, I can live with it . . . or die with it. I don’t want my children to sacrifice their living to keep me in any particular place. I want to free them to be my beloved children.
They are my home. Home is inside me in all the places I’ve been and the people I’ve known; playing in the woods, rolling down slopes of grass between beds of pansies and violets, waiting for the bookmobile.
I think my mother was home too. I have made my peace.
Through the wooden screen door and down the steps, past the lattice-fence that divided the tamed yard from the less-tamed yard, beyond the huge homemade swing set and the outdoor brick fireplace my father built, between the log cabin playhouse and the muddy flats of the bay at low tide, lay the woods. I spent long summer days in that strip of trees where make-believe flourished. In the front yard, my sister and I waited for the bookmobile, the borrowed books flaming more imagination. Kids and fathers played softball in the field next door and little girls played restaurant in the neighbor's abandoned chicken coop.
We left that home when I was eight, the thirty miles of interstate between it and my second home bisecting my life into its first before and after. I lived in the new house on the side of the hill the remainder of my childhood. But the home by the bay remains irrevocably my soul home, the one I will remember when memory eludes me.
__________
My mother lived in fourteen houses with her family of origin, her father following work and running from creditors. She moved, alone, across the country for a civil service job as World War II began and relocated several more times, waiting for her new husband to return. Her dream, she tells me decades later, was to stay in one place.
She got her wish. After the war, she and my father bought the house I was born to and lived there until we moved to our hillside house, where she stayed for fifty-five years.
__________
I was 64, when, after four years of caring for my mother, I reached the end of my line. I couldn’t care for her in her home any more, a role I had reluctantly taken on in the first place. Would she have to leave the place that, like my first home on the bay, was the one locked in her soul? If we moved her to assisted living, did that make me a disloyal and selfish daughter? Would I be breaking a promise I hadn’t made? Was there another way? My 100-year-old mother struggled with me living with her, I think; and she battled against the few hours a week paid caregivers were in the house. Was it harder to have someone in her own home—where she had been queen of the castle for more than five decades—than it would be if she moved one more time?
What happens when we realize we no longer have the energy to continue? Can we resign? Are we obligated to continue in the way we had been? For how long do we pressure ourselves not only to physically but emotionally sacrifice our lives in favor of someone else’s perceived happiness? Did I have the right to reclaim my life? I decided I did.
Nearly five years after her death, I’m still questioning myself. The hospice nurse said she was home, the place that had become familiar; and she was in her own bed, the one she had shared with her husband.
Everyone says they want to die at home. What does that mean? I am contemplating the question for myself, to make known my hopes to my own children. And I am considering it now, at 70, while I am, hopefully, far from the need. I'm considering it in the light of having been the giver of care. I hope not to be in a hospital, with bright lights, beeping machines, an unfamiliar bed; but if that is what happens, I can live with it . . . or die with it. I don’t want my children to sacrifice their living to keep me in any particular place. I want to free them to be my beloved children.
They are my home. Home is inside me in all the places I’ve been and the people I’ve known; playing in the woods, rolling down slopes of grass between beds of pansies and violets, waiting for the bookmobile.
I think my mother was home too. I have made my peace.
