No One Tells You This

by Glynnis MacNicol

  I looked down at Connor again. He had gripped my finger in his sleep. Where the fuck was this biological alarm that was supposed to be going off? I thought of my mother. It would have made her sad, I suspected, to know my thinking on children. She had loved being a mother. I had not grown up with a woman who felt suffocated by motherhood. She had not struggled against its restraints or felt her great mind was going to waste, dulled by the mundane routines of caring for small children. In the early seventies, at the height of the feminist movement, she had quit her job and chosen to become a stay-at-home mother upon my arrival. I couldn’t even say she gave it all up to stay at home, because there was never a hint from her that she felt she was giving anything up. She preferred her life at home, packing lunches and carting us to a carefully planned schedule of activities. Perhaps if she’d liked it a bit less I would have had an easier time relating to her, or valuing the choices she made; perhaps I would have been less fanatical about some of my own. As it was, starting at a very young age, I constantly pushed against the quiet, predictable framework of our suburban lives, loathing how mundane and stationary it all was. And now here I was, finally being forced to acknowledge the value of that life, simply by confronting whether it was something I could live without.

  That was really the question. Would I be okay without a child?

  Each night I sat with Connor and forced myself to go down the path of imaginary motherhood, suspicious of myself that this would be something that I would be willing to reject. Every night I expected to have a change of heart and come up with a different, more recognizable answer. But it never happened.

  Instead, sitting in the dark and quiet, something quite unexpected occurred. My life, precisely as it was—the product of good and bad decisions—began to come into focus for me. Sitting there, I could see it for the first time as something I’d chosen. Something I’d built intentionally, and not simply a makeshift thing I’d constructed as a for-the-time-being existence until something came along that would make me a whole person in the eyes of the world. Once I began to see it as such, it dawned on me that I had no wish to escape from it. On the contrary: I wanted it. I was choosing my life. I was willing to risk it.

  Eventually Connor would wake, and no amount of rocking or pacing could get him back to sleep. On cue my sister would appear on the staircase to reclaim him and feed him, and I would retreat down the hall to my bed, sticking my head in on the kids to make sure their blankets were pulled up, before sliding under my own, checking the alarm to make sure it was set to go off in a few hours.

  11. On the Road

  I was home alone when my sister messaged me. It was ten days into my stay. Quinn was at school, and Alexis had left the house for the first time alone with both Connor and Zoe, while I stayed back, ostensibly to write. It was two days after Halloween, and beside me was a growing pile of mini chocolate wrappers from the kids’ stash that I’d been steadily plowing through. I’d seen almost nothing of my parents since they’d dropped me off. Normally, I split my time, often sleeping at their house, and in bed with my mother to get a sense of how she really was, but things had been far too chaotic with the new baby. Alexis had only one vehicle; any trip had to be coordinated around the kids’ schedules, which didn’t let up until late in the evening. Now I had a few hours to spare, my first time off, and the book proposal needed finishing.

  Instead of diving in, however, I’d spent the last hour reading emails and relentlessly scanning Twitter. There was a string of messages from our business accountant requesting more paperwork. Rachel had just announced her pregnancy publicly in an article, and my in-box was full of congratulations from members of the network we ran. I’d also published a piece just before I left about burning out and was fielding many requests for a follow-up. Normally I’d have been in a frenzy to deal with all of it, but instead everything felt as if it were taking place in a different world, a universe away from where I was. As though it had nothing to do with me, a limb gone numb.

  A green bubble popped up on my screen; I kept my phone off in Canada to save on international charges, but I had my text messages looped through my computer. It was my sister.

  Can you call me from home phone? Issues with Mom.

  My heart did a familiar drop. What now? I thought. I stared at the screen for a bit, taking deep, bracing breaths. Whatever it was would be bad, I knew. I waited, temporarily holding off the news of whatever was coming, as if I had the power to put my life on pause, even for just a few minutes. Then I went in search of the phone. I finally found it in the Barbie house in the basement and dialed my sister.

  “What now?” I asked when she picked up.

  The fire department was at my parents’ house. Apparently, my father had left home without leaving a note, and when my mother woke up she’d been confused, as she often was after a nap, and thinking she was in the wrong house had called 911. No one knew where my father was. My sister had left a message on a cell phone he had, though neither of us was sure if it worked or whether he had it on him.

  “They’re calling to find out what we want to do,” she said.

  “Tell them I’m coming.” I stood up and gazed out the window. It was pouring rain. “Oh shit. Wait. There’s no car here.”

  “Fuuuck.”

  My sister’s voice was a river of exhaustion. A few months earlier, Alexis had gone to visit my parents and coincidentally arrived at the house at the same time as the firemen who were responding to another of my mother’s 911 calls. “They let the kids play on the truck,” she told me when she’d called to catch me up. “They were both thrilled.” Another time, the same thing had happened, but my father hadn’t told us about it until later. He’d apparently gone to the hospital after being informed of her whereabouts, found my mother quietly sitting in the emergency room where the firemen had left her waiting to be seen by the doctors, and simply collected her and driven off without telling anyone. I was furious when I learned this. I thought of all the time I’d spent scheduling appointments in the hopes of getting my mother’s condition formally recognized so I could start the process of getting help. Surely calling 911 in confusion and being deposited in the emergency room by the fire department merited some sort of intervention, but if it wasn’t on the record, how could I argue it? My father was insistent that she was fine. “She exaggerates a lot of this behavior for attention.” It wouldn’t occur to me until much later that thinking this likely made the reality of what was actually happening to her bearable for him.

  And now here we were again. I didn’t allow myself to be sickened by the relief I felt at having another chance to get some official record of her condition. I simply knew I needed to get to the hospital before my father could pick her up and remove her.

  “Where are you?” I asked my sister.

  She was almost in the city. “I can be home in an hour if you want to take the car. Shit, wait, there’s swimming lessons tonight. Maybe I can get one of the neighbors to lend you their car.”

  I walked to the window. All the driveways looked empty. The rain was turning to sleet.

  “Hold on,” said my sister. “Dad’s on the other line.”

  “Tell him he has to come get me before he goes to the hospital.” I walked to the bathroom and turned the shower on. I gave the kids baths at night, but couldn’t remember the last time I’d showered myself. If I was going to the hospital I needed to look less crazy.

  My sister came back on. “He’s coming to get you. He says he’ll be there in half an hour.”

  He’d apparently taken his desktop computer to the Apple store two hours away and had been en route home when my sister called.

  “Hold on,” my sister said again. A minute later she came back on. “That was the fire department again. They’re taking Mom to the hospital. I said you’d meet them there with Dad.”

  By the time my father arrived twenty-five minutes later I’d showered, battled successfully with my hair, and fished out clean clothes from my suitcase, which still
lay where I’d dropped it the day I’d arrived home. The first thing I noticed as I walked out the door was that my father was driving someone else’s car.

  I ran through what now felt like freezing rain to the driver’s side and knocked on the window. “Want me to drive?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?” I tried to keep the hopeful note out of my voice. He shook his head. “Whose car is this?” I asked, diving into the passenger seat.

  “It’s a rental.”

  I steeled myself. “Why do you have a rental?”

  “I backed into a truck in the parking lot the other day. I was backing up, and he was just there.”

  I didn’t ask for details. There was nothing I could do about it now. I just buckled up. The fire department had taken my mother to the nearest emergency room, which was a forty-five-minute drive northeast, mostly along a two-lane highway that wrapped around the northern shores of Lake Simcoe and was known for its unpredictable bursts of intense winter weather. It was only November, but up here it wasn’t unusual to get blizzards. As we drove, the sleet turned back to rain and then back to sleet again. The car my father had rented was small and light; I could feel the wind shake it when we went through open stretches. Every time a truck passed us, the windshield would be covered in a splash of water and dirt, blinding us to the road. I breathed a quiet sigh of relief when we finally came up behind an enormous slow-moving truck and were forced to slow down. I pulled down the visor to apply lipstick, and just then my father gunned it to pass the truck. Between windshield wipes, which only briefly cleared the glass from the river of rain and dirt the truck was giving off, I could make out headlights in the distance coming in our direction. I felt the wheels of the car hydroplane across the groves of the opposite lane. Would they make it? came the voice in my head, as though narrating a cliffhanger scene.

  For a second I was reminded of careening around Iceland with Viktor. Had that really been only a month ago? I felt as though I’d lived three lives since then. Funny now to think, or it would have been had I been able to muster a sense of humor, that I had approached my birthday gripped by the fear that my life would be a long boring slog from here on out. Instead it had felt like everything, good and bad, was happening to me all at once.

  My father pulled back into our lane just in time, as the oncoming cars blared by us. I leaned into the seat, sliding back into myself, but only for a moment. Ahead of us were four more trucks nearly the same size; surely he wouldn’t make a run past all of these. I turned to my father, took a deep breath, and spoke calmly. “When we get there, I want the doctors to give Mom a checkup.”

  I waited for a response, but none came. I went on in the same low voice. “We need official documentation to show how she’s doing. And if she’s confused enough to call 911 then that needs to be recorded. The lists for nursing homes are eighteen months long and she’s not even on the list yet.”

  Again, silence. I wondered what the thought bubble above his head might say if there were one. I persisted. “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  I felt the car gun up again as my father prepared to move out into the oncoming lane. I was suddenly flooded with anger. I will be so pissed if this is how I die, I thought, thinking how unfair it would be for my sister to have to deal with any other calamity. But we didn’t get very far. The line of cars in the opposite lane stretched as far as the eye could see. My father pulled back into our lane and remained there.

  We found my mother sitting alone in the brightly lit emergency waiting room with a pleasant smile on her face. She looked tiny and old under the harsh lights. Like a helpless child.

  “We’re here, Mom.” I sat down beside her and put my arms around her, struck as always by how I was able to feel her bones through her clothes.

  “Oh, how nice, yes,” she said as if greeting a late-arriving friend for lunch. “Did your appointment go okay, Jack?” she asked, turning to my father. I sighed, my heart sinking—she knew who we were. It was entirely possible her confusion had passed since she’d been picked up, and she was actually thinking clearly, in which case the doctors would likely send us home after only a brief checkup. What I needed was for her to be at her worst, the way I’d seen her in the evenings on nearly every visit home since Christmas, so that I could get a doctor to sign off on her being eligible for the care I knew she required. I felt like a monster for wanting my mother to be worse than she was. The unpredictability of her dementia was almost as bad as the symptoms themselves. It was like living in a fun house; I never knew if what I was seeing was reliable.

  I went to the nurse’s window to make sure they were aware my mother was there, and I was given a series of forms to fill out. Around us the waiting room was filled with all sorts of people, some injuries more apparent than others. Sometimes I couldn’t tell which person in the group was the one waiting to be seen. Every few minutes my mother would try to get up and help someone, thinking she was back at her last job as a social worker in a center that was attached to a hospital, helping families figure out where and how to place their elderly relatives. That had been only two years ago.

  After an hour and a half, we were called into an examination room and led through the swinging door that said DO NOT ENTER. On the other side was a long hallway; people were slumped in wheelchairs along the wall or lay on gurneys. One little boy in a cast was sleeping on his mother’s lap. “Oh, can I get you anything?” my mother asked gently as we passed. We were put into a narrow, bright room with an examination table in the middle and nothing else.

  “Do you want to lie down, sweetheart?” my mother asked, turning to me.

  “That’s for you, Mom,” I said, trying to guide her toward the table.

  “Oh, but I’m fine, why don’t you take it?” This was the mother I had known all my life. Gentle, kind, and forever inquiring whether she could get something for someone else. But now I regarded it with a weary and defeated eye. There was no way anyone was going to be alarmed into action by this woman. My father sat down on the floor with his back to the wall and put his head in his hands. This wasn’t unusual. In almost every specialist appointment I’d accompanied him on that required us to wait for anything, he’d usually sit down on the floor with his hands crossed over his chest.

  “Is your back bothering you, Jack?” asked my mother. My father shook his head.

  The doctor who eventually arrived was young and handsome, with a deep, gravelly voice that made me want to make him talk more. Before I even realized I was doing it, I tried to catch a glimpse of his left hand. Was he married? Could I live in Canada with a doctor? I blazed through my old mental questionnaire before I caught myself, stopped, and focused on what he was saying. He wasn’t looking at me. He was addressing my father, who was now standing. Legally speaking, my father was in charge here. I stayed quiet, watching the doctor’s face as I listened to my father explain my mother’s symptoms in the friendly, conspiratorial tone he normally saved for the woman at the pharmacy who gave him his prescription pills. None of it sounded particularly alarming, neither did my mother currently appear alarming. I let him go for a few minutes before breaking in with my calmest, clearest, sharpest voice. I laid it all out, point by point and in detail, describing everything that happened, as if I were a professor standing at the front of the class with a pointer. I drained all the emotion out of my voice as I spoke, I made our world black and white.

  I tried to mimic the tone of the nurses I’d dealt with when I described how in the evenings, after the cloud of rage had passed into confusion, my mother’s body would suddenly go rigid, “as if struck by paralysis.” I didn’t say that no matter how many times it happened I was never prepared for it. That I’d lunge toward her, worried she was about to fall to the ground. How she would collapse into my arms instead, something that normally would have knocked me down, except she was so light now it was as though one of the kids had decided to take a flying leap. I didn’t say that I wasn’t quite strong enough to carry her u
p the stairs, though I often tried, leaning over and putting my arm under her legs. That when we finally reached her bed—minutes or an hour later, I never knew—I would gently lay her down, bending with her until I was sure the mattress could take her weight, and then try to remove her shoes. I did describe how her toes would curl too tightly for me to be able to get her shoes off, though, and how when I pulled at them she would cry in pain. It was a sound I’d never heard from her before, and it seemed to come from some deep place within her I didn’t even know existed. And then when I stepped away she would whimper over and over, Please don’t hurt me. It was the worst thing my mother ever said to me.

  As I went on, the doctor methodically taking notes, my father slid back down the wall and put his head back in his hands. The doctor glanced at him and then turned back to me. I wondered how I appeared. The angry, overbearing daughter? The harried forty-year-old whose lipstick was now misplaced and obvious? Now and then I could feel my voice rising. This is bad, I wanted to scream. I am not imagining this. I need someone to do something. But I pushed back on myself, slowing down and taking a deep breath. I was a totally competent person. I imagined all the hysterical family members he must see every day. All the family drama that must play out in these back hallways, histories being sliced open and examined the same way bodies were. I was determined to separate myself from the fray, and the only way to do that was to sound the complete opposite of how I was feeling.