Understanding My Mother's Anxiety Helped Us Heal and Care for Her in Her Senior Years
I used to marvel at the relationships some of my friends had with their mothers. Mothers they would confide in, mothers they would turn to for comfort and advice.
“I couldn’t live without my mom,” some would say, and I just couldn’t imagine what it would be like to feel that way. Words I would use to describe my mom might include self-centered, unpredictable, short-fused, immature. Loving, caring, selfless, reliable – I would only use these as antonyms for her behavior and personality.
In my life the fractured relationship I had with my mom sometimes made me sad, sometimes mad – it lead me to seek love and acceptance elsewhere, and sometimes in destructive ways. Knowing that she would either get angry or act like a victim made calling her out on bad behavior seem like more trouble than it was worth. I had a therapist who said, “You’re going to have to talk to her about these things at some point,” so naturally I stopped seeing the therapist, as I had no intention of ever doing that. I had a large, gaping mother wound that I wasn't ready to admit I had, let alone to heal from.
Eventually I became apathetic towards her, maintaining a very surface-level relationship. That worked until something major happened – like when she said that she didn’t think she could make it to my wedding, how she never came to visit after I had a baby (or ever), how she never even called me during the year I went through chemo, radiation and surgeries to treat breast cancer. Then all the repressed hurt and anger would resurface. It’s hard to have any sort of relationship with a person who is only happy when everything revolves around her and her needs. Maybe that therapist had a point.
When my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, I knew that was the end of any chance for any kind of healing conversation with her. Though truth be told, we most likely wouldn’t have had one anyway. Now I watch her memory fade, newest ones first. It makes me think of rings on a tree stump, the outer rings disappearing slowly, her core memories feeling more and more like the present day to her. She’s forgetting the names of her grandchildren. I wonder when it will be my name she is grasping for.
But in the meantime, something unexpected happened. My mom softened. She became demonstrative. She is more often than not pretty calm and reasonable. In short, she got kinda nice.
At the onset of her disease, she was not nice. In fact, she was how she’s always been, only filterless and a thousand times worse. My father needed in-home care, and my mother systematically drove one after another of his aides away with her horrible, combative behavior. My sister was driven close to the brink on many occasions, trying to care for a woman who not only was being mean and difficult now, but had been a mean and difficult to her as a child. It can be hard, if not impossible, to muster sympathy for a person who punctuated your childhood with at turns yelling, criticism, and belittling, or neglect and disregard.
After a late-night fall left her with a concussion and broken ankle, we decided that they needed to be in a care facility. Because of my father’s needs, that meant a nursing facility as opposed to assisted living. They had a beautiful two-room suite, but it was a far cry from what my super active mother was used to. There were no stairs to run up and down a thousand times a day, no garbage to take out to the bins, no laundry to wash and hang out to dry on the clothesline in their backyard. She was like a herding dog without any sheep. She had no outlet for all her nervous energy.
So, her focus became solely directed towards my dad. She had no real tasks as he was cared for by the staff, but she would not leave his side. She no longer felt territorial, as this place was not the home she lived in for sixty years. It changed something in her to have been unburdened by responsibilities (even imagined ones). On the one hand, she was bored and complained daily about wanting to go home. On the other hand, she became so much less combative and, dare I say it, nicer.
For my dad, who had long suffered under her unrelenting bullying, it must have been such a relief. She forgot about all the ways he annoyed and disappointed her and became tender and loving towards him. She told him often what a good husband he has been, what a wonderful father. It felt nearly miraculous and was such a relief to us all.
Did she know something we didn’t? It’s possible. They were in each other’s lives for seventy years. Was she atoning for bad behavior because she knew time was running out? I guess we’ll never know, but we lost my dad almost exactly two months after he was put in the nursing home.
She was now truly alone, for the first time in her life. She was lost. She turned to us, her four grown kids, for comfort and support. And finally, it didn’t feel like an impossible task.
Her layers have all been peeled back now. I can see all the anger she expressed her whole life for what it actually was: anxiety. Not to mention her emotional immaturity, which would make her struggle with the demands her life supplied her.
She came from a generation where there was only one acceptable path for women. Regardless of your desire or preparedness for motherhood, that was the expectation. But she was also at the start of a whole new era, where out of necessity, more women were joining the workplace. So there my mother was – struggling with anxiety, mental illness, four kids, a husband with health problems, and a full-time job. She was thrust into a position she was ill-prepared to handle, and she lashed out at the easiest targets. But it was only because she was in survival mode, in over her head and feeling as though she was fighting for her life. It reminds me of one of my favorite poems, Drowning Not Waving.
I get that she lacked the skills and temperament to do any better without help from therapy and medicine. This understanding now doesn't help explain it to the kid I was. It can’t negate the challenges I faced nor the scars I bear by being raised by such a volatile person. But it allows me to open my heart to her now when she needs me the most. When I speak to her on the phone, I can listen to her complaints about being lonely, or wanting to go home with nothing but sympathy. I can tell her that I wished l lived closer and that I love her and mean it.
It's the same for my sister, who took care of my parents at home for over six years, when my mom was at her worst. As the long-distance child, the only productive thing I could do to help was to support my sister emotionally, but I know how much she suffered in the arrangement.
She still sees my mother several times a week, but now there is no dread (other than dreading the traffic she’ll have to face on the way home). She says she enjoys her time with mom, something neither of us could have imagined even a year ago.
They have this little routine where my sister comes and does her hair for her and then takes a picture of her to send to the rest of us. Mom always gives a little wave to the camera.
Like all of us siblings, my sister had a fraught relationship with my mother her whole life. There were years when she saw her as little as possible; a protective measure we have all have used. But when their health began to decline and it was clear they needed a lot of help, it was my sister who put her life on hold to care for my parents.
For six years she couldn’t grow her personal training business, instead often had to cancel sessions because of some emergency with my parents. Her relationships suffered because she had nothing left to give and was angry and frustrated that her work was literally never done. The emotional toll that came from caring for someone who shouted, and demanded, and acted like a child so much of the time was truly enormous.
And she fought tooth and nail to keep them at home, just the same.
But now that mom is in an assisted living facility, her relationship with my mother is better than it has ever been at any time. She says, “I feel like I have the mother I always wanted now.” And as sad as that is, I also know how she feels.
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