So, as I said, when my mother calls we go through the standard litany of my being fine, etc., etc. I was able to keep this patter up through my second chemo session and might have gotten through the whole regimen without her suspecting anything if it hadn’t been my bad luck to have her call when I had just come out of the shower and a whole clump of my hair had fallen out of my head. It’s one thing not to like your hair, another to see it disappear in a swirl down the drain and realize that it won’t be around much longer for you to complain about. In short, my mother had gotten me at a bad moment.
“What’s wrong?” she said. My mother is not a sensitive person, but she is, after all, a mother and has that hawkish maternal ability to discern that you’re on the verge of hysteria even when you’re trying your best to hide it.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Something’s wrong. I can hear it in your voice.”
I have always been a terrible liar, which is probably why I have had such limited success with men. Lying is, as far as I can see, one of the primary requisites to being attractive to men: you have to appear cheerful, interested, and full of zest for life—only when the ring is on your finger can you let down your guard and reveal that you are, in actuality, depressed, easily bored, and inclined to sleep until noon.
“I’m fine, really,” I said weakly.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Mom!”
“Tell me.”
“My hair is falling out.”
“Get a good conditioner. It will give you more body.”
“No, Mom. I mean it. My hair is falling out … from chemotherapy. I have breast cancer.”
There was silence. It wasn’t exactly what she’d been expecting, but to her credit, she did recover quickly and set things in motion. She didn’t even stop to castigate me for not having told her earlier.
“I’m packing my bags right now,” she announced.
“No, Mom,” I said. “Please don’t come. It’s not a bad cancer. In fact, it’s a pretty good cancer: no nodes involved, hormone positive. No reason to be alarmed.”
“My daughter has cancer and you say there’s no reason to be alarmed!” She said this as though I were a third party who was minimizing access to her daughter with cancer.
“Mother,” I said, “I don’t want you to come.”
“I don’t care what you want. I’m coming.”
And there you have it: our relationship in a nutshell. Even though I was the one with cancer and I didn’t want her to come, she was, nonetheless, coming, because—that’s what she wanted. The whole situation struck me as a variation on one of those MasterCard commercials: dead-end job—bad; nonexistent romantic life—worse; cancer—worst; mother coming to take care of you—unmitigated disaster.
As I’ve tried to explain, I don’t think my mother actually means to do harm. She just has no sense at all that another person with an independent will exists on the other end of her ministrations. It has occurred to me that this might be an undescribed strain of autism. Autistic people have no sense of an emotional life either in themselves or others. People like my mother have no sense that anyone but themselves has an emotional life. Dr. Chitturi has pointed out that this is also the definition of narcissism, so maybe autism is narcissism with only one side activated. I’ve told Dr. Chitturi that she can have this observation if she wants it, maybe to write up for the American Psychological Association or something.
AFTER MY MOTHER announced she was packing her bags and flying out immediately, I barely had a chance to run over to the East Side for a pep talk from Eleanor before she arrived. My mother is that fast. One minute, Eleanor and I are walking Wordsworth in Central Park, where he is growling at the other wheaten terriers and halfheartedly chasing squirrels, and the next minute, my mother is calling up over my intercom, “Yoo-hoo! I’m here!”
She arrived with a suitcase full of the sorts of things she always brings, things that seem expressly designed to irritate me. One of these is a Cuisinart to make me healthy fruit drinks. I hate healthy fruit drinks and have told her so a thousand times. Yet she persists in ignoring my having said this and pushes the stuff on me as though we had never discussed it before. Our conversation invariably goes like this:
“Look what I made you: a nice banana, orange, and strawberry smoothie. It’s very refreshing. You’ll love it.”
“Mom, I don’t like fruit smoothies.”
“You don’t?”
“Mom, you’ve known me for thirty-four years. Don’t you know that by now?”
“Give it a try. It’s healthy and delicious.”
“Mom, I’ve tried it. I don’t like it.”
“Just a little taste.”
“No, I won’t like it.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“I said no!”
“Well, you don’t have to raise your voice!”
We’ve had this conversation about fifty times, and for some reason the end result is always the same: I pour the fruit smoothie down the drain and she becomes mortally offended at my rudeness and ingratitude—not to mention the waste of ingredients that “cost an arm and a leg.” Seeing the Cuisinart immediately cued me to the fact that this scenario would soon transpire again.
She also brought a set of yoga tapes “for relaxation” (although how I could relax with her hovering over me asking me every minute how I feel, I don’t know), some scented candles (although I’m allergic to scented candles), and a few tee shirts that she picked up for me in colors that I don’t wear. My mother is always buying me clothes I don’t like. Her assumption is that if I wore more pink, I would attract all those men who have as yet failed to notice me.
“Men like a feminine look,” she says. “You wear too much black and brown.”
“I like black and brown.”
“You look better in lighter colors.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’M Just Saying that men like pastel shades.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s common knowledge.”
You get the idea. Usually, these conversations end up at an impasse regarding what it is men like, a subject that neither of us can really be called expert in: she, having married at twenty-one the only man she ever dated, and me, despite a more checkered dating career, having failed to secure one solid marriage proposal. Neither one of us, however, was going to budge in our conviction that we understood the color preferences of the male sex. She continued to buy me pastel tops, and I continued to donate them to the thrift shop on Amsterdam Avenue (where, if you go, you’re sure to find an assortment of pink and light blue garments with the tags on, since no one, even the very needy, wears pastels on the Upper West Side).
On this visit, my mother began by taking stock of my apartment. “You still have this sofa?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I must still have it, since you’re sitting on it.”
“I’m just saying …”
“You’re just saying what?”
“I would have thought you would have replaced it by now.”
“You would? Why is that?” “
It’s mangy.”
“How is it mangy? It looks fine to me.”
“If you’re satisfied with it …”
Normally, at this point, we would have our first fight. I would scream at her for implying that there must be something wrong with me for not seeing that my couch was mangy, and she would scream back that I didn’t have to raise my voice. But this time, I didn’t say anything. I let it go. With a 20 percent chance of extinction hanging over my head, the state of my sofa, whether mangy or not, didn’t matter that much.
“You need more light in here,” my mother continued, having failed to elicit the expected response over the sofa. “You’re going to go blind if you try to read in this light.”
“Mom,” I said, “I have cancer. Going blind is the least of my problems
.”
This maneuver did not work as expected. Although it took her off the subject of the light in the room, it redirected her to the subject of my illness. You’d think that I’d be allowed to be the one most upset about having cancer, but my mother’s modus operandi is always to get the most upset, even if what she’s upset about pertains to me and not to her. If this is what it means to be a mother, it should appease me for probably not going to be one. It’s tiring enough being miserable for myself, but to have to be miserable for someone else too, and make that person more miserable in the process—that would be a real chore.
Having been reminded of my cancer, my mother sighed loudly: “I can’t believe it,” she said. “You’ve always been so healthy and now … this.”
“I have a good prognosis,” I reminded her. “You don’t have to worry.”
“It’s a mother’s job to worry about her child,” she said. “But I just don’t understand it. No one in our family ever had breast cancer.”
“What about dad’s Aunt Chickie?”
“Who knows what she had? She never spoke to us.”
“Or that cousin of yours—Dorothy?”
“How would I know? I couldn’t stand her.”
“But she was a blood relation.”
“Stop splitting hairs. No one important had it, is what I mean.”
I didn’t have a chance to parse her reasoning here because she started picking things up off the floor. “I’ll just straighten up a bit,” she said, “so that you can concentrate on getting well.”
This, I knew, was a transparent code for “How can you live in such a pigsty?” But again, I was not in the mood for a fight. I even showed her where the Dustbuster was and gave her the bottle of Fantastik. I could see that scurrying around with a garbage bag made her feel useful, and so when she held up a skirt that she had stumbled across scrunched up on the floor of my closet and said, “What is this?” I simply took it from her and said nothing, instead of getting into a battle about what “What is this?” means (my mother always pretends not to know what something is when what she’s saying is that she doesn’t like it). I even let her put a stained tee shirt that she found under my bed in the garbage bag when, in the past, I would have clung to it and worn it the next day to spite her.
I have to admit that as my mother’s visit progressed, she became, strangely, less toxic rather than more. Was this an illusion created by the greater toxicity of my cancer and ensuing chemotherapy? Or had she perhaps been chastened by the prospect of not having me to annoy in perpetuity? Probably a little of both. I certainly gave her extra points when she stopped pushing the fruit drinks after only two or three attempts and offered to make me a milk shake. She hadn’t made me a milk shake since the third grade, when she decided I was getting fat. But now that I had cancer (and weight had presumably ceased to be an issue), it was like going back in time. I could once again be the child and she the mother indulging my simple desires.
And as I thought more about it, I began to understand the whole mother-daughter problem more clearly. Mothers do just fine during the initial period of low-level maintenance: singing nursery rhymes, reading bedtime stories, making cupcakes for kindergarten birthday parties. Only as the child grows older, begins to acquire independent attributes, and comes into contact with other people does mothering grow complicated. It’s no longer a question of what is best for the child in vacuo, but what is best for the child in the context of all those variables that make up life in the world that said mother has herself had a hard time with. That’s when most of the maternal mistakes get made and the serious resentments build up. No doubt you will say that I am stating the obvious here. This may be true, but sometimes the obvious is worth stating.
I don’t want to exaggerate my mother’s turn for the better. She was still extremely annoying, and you can’t erase years of psychological damage just like that. Still, you’d be surprised what a return to basics like milk shakes can do to improve a relationship. It also helped that in looking mortality in the eye, I was less prone to make a fuss over every little thing. Not only did I let her clean my apartment, I even agreed to keep one of the less egregiously pink tops she had bought me.
“Now that looks good,” she said, when I emerged wearing it—the implication being that everything else I had ever worn before in her presence looked bad. I let it pass.
We went out to dinner and talked about doctors and treatment regimens, which, to be honest, was a pleasant departure from our usual discussion about whether I was being properly proactive in seeking a husband. To have the pressure removed on the marriage front gave us both a chance to relax and even begin to get to know each other—and I can thank my pretty good cancer for that.
MY BIRTHDAY HAPPENED to fall a week after my mother’s arrival. I turned thirty-five, not an auspicious age for a single woman with breast cancer, but what can you do? Time was going to pass, whether I liked it or not. However, as you can imagine, my age wasn’t something that I wanted to think about too much.
I had spent the morning puttering around my apartment and napping (pretty much how I occupied myself most of the time), along with trying to forget that it was my birthday and feeling relieved that my mother had not mentioned anything. It seemed I was going to escape hearing her wax on and on about how much weight she’d gained during her pregnancy, how difficult her labor had been, and what a beautiful baby I was (which I always took to mean that I had been going downhill ever since), culminating in an elaborately wrapped gift of an expensive pink garment that I would as soon wear as I would a burka. I was so relieved not to have to endure said commentary and accompanying gift that I was more than happy to respond to her request to run out to the drugstore and pick up some Olay Regenerist that she had forgotten to pack and said she had to have right away (otherwise, presumably, like those people who left Shangri-La, she would immediately shrivel up into a dried prune).
After going to the Duane Reade and purchasing said life-saving moisturizer (along with the age-defying serum and cleanser “for mature skin” that she had also added to the list), I was strolling back to the apartment when I was accosted near the entrance by Iris and Karen. I should note that these women had become fast friends as a result of my peace-keeping effort, and were often seen together speaking earnestly about things like dangerous bath toys. On this occasion, they seemed to be milling around in front of the building and seemed very pleased but not very surprised to see me.
“Just the person we were hoping to run into,” Iris said, taking hold of my arm so that I couldn’t move past her. “Karen and I have been having a bit of a tiff about something and were hoping you could adjudicate.” It is a characteristic of the stay-at-home mothers in this socio-economic group that they mix language from their former lives in high-powered jobs with subject matter of a profoundly trivial nature.
Karen proceeded to explain the topic at hand. Both Daniel and Matthew, it seems, were enrolled in a preschool class in the afternoon. It was a well-run program overall, and Karen and Iris had few complaints about it, outside of the fact that the blinds weren’t pulled during nap time and Daniel likes a dark room for napping, and the children aren’t allowed to bring their own pillows and Matthew likes to nap with his own pillow. (Another thing I’ve noticed about these mothers is that they suffer from a kind of informational Tourette’s syndrome—a compulsion to tell you things that you have absolutely no interest in or need to know.) “Anyway,” continued Karen as though she were working out a high-level mathematical equation, “almost every week one of the children in the preschool has a birthday and the mother brings in cupcakes. The cupcakes are made with refined sugar.”
“Except for the ones that Carly’s mother brought in,” corrected Iris, a stickler for accuracy.
“That’s true,” said Karen. “There was one mother who made the cupcakes with whole wheat flour and honey, and though the children wouldn’t eat them, they were very healthy.”
Whatever I was going to be told was
taking a very long time, and I was thinking that my mother’s face might well turn into one of those escapees from Shangri-La if this continued. “And your question is?” I asked, trying to move things along.
“Our question is,” continued Karen, “Should we start a campaign to help educate the other mothers about the dangers of refined sugar, or should we keep quiet about it and simply not allow our children to eat the cupcakes? Karen is for re-education and I’m for simply saying no.” Both women looked at me expectantly.
Could it be that the act of procreation set in motion this sort of thinking? Did the brains of perfectly competent, intelligent women suddenly turn to mush—or, in this instance, cupcakes—as soon as they had babies? Or was it that spending so much time among young children produced something akin to the Stockholm syndrome—the mothers began to think like their progeny, who were, in essence, keeping them under lock and key. The earnestness with which Karen and Iris appeared to take this issue, however, made me think that perhaps I was missing something, so I gave it my best shot. I said that I thought it would not be useful to try to re-educate the other mothers, who might resent such interference. As for preventing their children from eating the cupcakes, that would also not be advisable: it would make Daniel and Matthew feel bad and possibly exaggerate their outsider status (and Daniel and Matthew, as I saw it, needed all the friends they could get).
“What should we do, then?” Karen cast her maternal doe eyes up at me.
“To be perfectly honest, I don’t think you should do anything,” I said.
Suzanne Davis gets a life Page 14