Getting Caught in the Middle Is Awful Place To Be

”. . . and I know I am a good daughter.”

JoElla Milan wrote those words at the very end of her letter to me. It is this knowledge that helps to keep JoElla sane, threading through her subconscious, helping her to sleep better at night.

Her mother, Maggie Clements, may or may not know of her daughter’s devotion. She is 73 years old and she is ill with Parkinson’s disease and, perhaps, other diseases too. She has good days and bad. That is, she goes “in” and “out.”

JoElla and I visited Maggie in the board and care home where she now lives, on a quiet Mission Viejo street. Maggie told me that since the automobile accident, “I have to work my way back into society.” But there has been no automobile accident.

Maggie looked a little better in the photographs that JoElla, a mortgage broker, had sent me in the mail. She was dressed in pink pastels.

There is one of her and her 7-year-old grandson, Matthew, JoElla’s son, and another of mother and daughter alone. A big palm tree is in the background, and red roses bloom on a bush. It was Thanksgiving of last year. The family seemed happily together, and very thankful for that.

Yet JoElla says that when she and Matthew went to Disneyland later that same day, she kept fighting the urge to cry. She couldn’t quite understand why.

Then on their way home, that vague sense of unease seemed to solidify inside her with a terrifying jolt. Now she knows it was the pressure, the seemingly unending stress. Then, she had no idea.

JoElla pulled her car from the road and went inside a McDonald’s to ask for help. She asked the young restaurant manager to please stay with her; she thought she was going to die and then who would take care of her son?

JoElla felt like a crazy person, like she was leaving her body and going someplace else.

“I realized, ‘ You don’t have your mom anymore ,’ ” she tells me now. Tears pool in her eyes.

The anxiety attacks are fewer these days, JoElla says, yet the tension is always there. The key, she says, is control.

In her letter, JoElla called herself part of the sandwich generation--the one in between, sandwiched like a cold cut, trapped. This is a media term that I do not like. It trivializes the conflicting emotions that can rip families apart; it almost sounds cute. This dilemma is anything but.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about America’s “health care crisis.” Polls say it is the No. 1 concern on Americans’ minds. Presidential candidates are under pressure to come up with a plan.

I hear about it up close all the time. Strangers call and write to tell me of their own nightmares with health insurance, with doctors that they cannot understand and do not trust, with family members who have other concerns on their minds. These strangers feel that they have nowhere to turn.

Elderly people have told me that they will never be a burden on their children if they get ill. They say they love them too much to do that. They plan to kill themselves first.

People are groping, desperately, for ways out of this morass.

My own sister admits it will be a relief when her mother-in-law, unable to care for herself, finally dies. Should she say that? Probably not. “How do you think I am?” my sister snaps when I ask.

Back at JoElla’s home in Laguna Niguel, this single mother is talking about her relationship with Maggie. The two women--the younger a tall, striking blonde, the older, shorter with soft red curls--have always been close. JoElla is an only child. Maggie and JoElla’s father divorced more than 40 years ago.

Maggie worked as an office manager in Northern California for 27 years and has worked as a clerk for a judge. She was always an accomplished, independent woman with many friends. Maggie came to live with her daughter just after Matthew was born. JoElla was in the process of getting a divorce.

For nearly six years, the arrangement worked out well. Then Maggie began to forget things and she was becoming mentally confused. There were countless trips to doctors, conflicting drug treatments, and through it all, Maggie was getting worse. There were several crises where death seemed close.

JoElla, meantime, found it almost impossible to work. She was losing friends; she stopped being fun. And mother and daughter fought. Each would say terrible, hurtful things that they did not mean.

“I would say: ‘You are not my mother! I don’t know who you are,’ ” JoElla says. “It is very hard dealing with this person. You want to just kill her.”

JoElla says that if not for the counseling she received from two priests, she doubts that she would be here today.

Maggie has been in the board and care home--after a disastrous try at a less restrictive place--since September of last year.

“It’s hard for me to evaluate myself,” Maggie says during our visit. Then she goes on to add that she was “normal” before, back when . . . Her voice trails off.

“Doggone it!” she says. “I lose a word and I can’t gain it and it will come back to me like that.”

JoElla looks at her mother, smiles, and then begins finishing her sentences and later, interpreting what her mother must mean.

“I’ll never go back to the way I used to live,” JoElla says. “This is a pain you don’t get over. It’s like watching your parents die 10, 20 times.”