The Big Squeeze: Our Parents, Our Babies, Our Lives

My mother is holding the baby. From where I sit, both are in profile. My mother’s waist-length gray hair is pulled back into a twist, as always, with bobby pins. Chloe, in a fuzzy pink pram suit, is wearing the white headband Grandma Jan has just given her. Christmas tree lights twinkle in the background. They look into each other’s eyes, laughing, a picture of delight.

I took that photograph about two months before my mother was found by her neighbors, wandering her front yard at dusk in her nightgown, incoherent, with an unlit cigarette in one hand. I keep it on the wall above my desk. I never grow tired of it; usually, it fills me with joy, sometimes, it makes me want to weep.

*

The bad news comes after a long work day at the end of February. I am already racked with the guilt that is peculiar to the working parent--my column is late, which is unfair to my editor, and I am late leaving for home, which is unfair to my nursing baby.

I have been back from maternity leave just a month. This is the first time I have worked so late. My body is tuned to my baby’s needs; my breasts are about to explode.

I call home to say I am on the way.

“Don’t come,” my husband says. “Call Kaiser. Something has just happened to your Mom.”

Probably angina, I think. She has had several episodes of heart pain over the last few years, each time requiring a visit to the emergency room, an EKG, some oxygen and a warning to take it easy for a few days.

I drive to the huge Kaiser complex at Sunset and Vermont, and walk briskly into the emergency room. I know this drill.

“Oh thank God!” Mom says when she sees me. My thoughts exactly. But then I realize something is terribly wrong. The rest of her speech is unintelligible. Her long gray hair, always up, is streaming onto the pillow. She looks confused.

“Ma’am, who is the President?” a young resident asks my mother.

Her eyes widen; she shakes her head. She doesn’t understand.

My heart hits the floor.

They wheel her out for an X-ray. I sit in the room. The slow ache that has been building in my breasts all day is now sharp, tingling pain. I have been away from Chloe for 14 hours.

I walk into the little bathroom, unbutton my shirt, unhook my bra and try to relieve some of the pressure with massage.

I stand over the sink crying, tears mingling with milk.

That night, we learn that an aneurysm in my mother’s brain has ruptured, spilling blood into the area that controls speech and comprehension. There has been quite a lot of bleeding, but it has stopped, a good sign.

A brain scan, however, shows something dangerous. An aneurysm is a bulge in a vessel wall, but this one has a double bulge, shaped like a snowman, and there is very good chance it will bleed again.

My sister flies in from San Diego, my brother from San Francisco. We authorize brain surgery to clamp off the rupture. Our mother is in surgery for 6 1/2 hours. The operation has gone smoothly, the surgeon tells us, but there is no way of knowing how fully she will recover.

When we see her the next day, she has a tube down her throat, a tube down her nose, and tubes coming out of her arms. She looks so sweet, so vulnerable. Hiding her shaven head and a six-inch arc of metal staples is a crown of white gauze.

Two days later, my brother and sister leave. Peter is finishing his residency and his wife is expecting their first baby; Jenny, the mother of two, is working and attending school full time.

I feel bereft. The family support was wonderful. My brother’s medical expertise was invaluable. My sister’s sense of humor was indispensable. Now it’s just me. My husband is a terrific help, and a wonderful son-in-law, but in the end, she’s my mother, my responsibility.

*

March is a blur of baby, mother and work. I drive and drive and drive: to the office, to the hospital, back to the office, and home again. I am shortchanging everyone.

I try to stay on top of my mother’s medical care, but it is a nearly impossible feat at Kaiser. They have lost her glasses, and I go insane. They tell me to buy her high-top shoes because her foot is starting to droop, then they forget to put her shoes on, and I go insane.

I only start to feel a measure of control again after meeting Gretchen Jaeger, my mother’s speech pathologist, a very caring woman who spends a long time filling me in. She is fascinated by my mother, and thinks she is a lovely person. I am so exhausted at this point that all my emotions are overreactions; I want to fall at Jaeger’s feet in gratitude.

*

As my mother convalesces, slowly regaining her speech and physical strength, it dawns on me that my siblings and I are part of the great demographic bulge called the “sandwich generation”--the estimated 35% of Americans who are caring for young children and aging parents at the same time. The sheer numbers might be comforting, but there is no time to dwell on this unfortunate fellowship.

Sometimes, I feel I have two babies. One is seven months old. One is 65. They have a lot in common, starting with no hair.

Chloe and my mother begin eating solids the same week. In the morning, I give Chloe pureed pears. In the afternoon, I spoon-feed my mother vanilla pudding.

Lately, Chloe has started to cry with frustration when she can’t reach something. My mother reaches for language, and when it eludes her, she cries too. I can hand Chloe her toy. I can’t fix things as easily for my mother. I can only reassure her that she is improving every day. I hug them both a lot.

In the morning, I stand over Chloe’s crib and sing her a lullaby. In the evening, I stand at my mother’s bedside with Jaeger and sing “Happy Birthday.”

“Why are we doing this?” I ask.

“We’re trying to find a way in,” she replies.

When my mother finally says my name, I get the same rush I felt when my baby first smiled at me.

*

A discharge nurse gives me a list of Kaiser-approved “skilled nursing facilities.” I am supposed to visit each, then make an informed decision about which place will be best for my mother.

It’s like visiting day-care centers. You walk in nose first, sniffing for signs of poor treatment. Even the best nursing home or day-care center stinks now and then. Incontinence goes with the turf. Any decision you make involves a leap of faith.

I am depressed at the thought of placing my mother with people who don’t know her, who don’t know she hates to be called Janet (she is Jan!), who don’t know that she is a retired teacher, that she is charming, that she has a terrific sense of humor and hates to be patronized.

She is starting to talk pretty well now, though some speech is still garbled, her memory impaired. We can usually understand her, even though she often uses words that seem out of context. Sometimes, she is inadvertently hilarious, which has kept my siblings and me emotionally afloat.

“Dad wants to come to visit you,” I tell her one day. They have been divorced nearly 20 years.

“He does?” she asks, delighted. Then, very serious: “Is he . . . sensitive ?”

My husband makes a poster for Mom with photos of her children and grandchildren. He labels them and when we visit, we play a memory game.

“Know who that is, Mom?” I’m pointing to Perry Violet, our Boston Terrier.

“Of course I do!” she says, sounding insulted. “That’s little Whoozits!”

She accidentally re-christens my sister’s husband and their daughter.

Steven is “Spot.” Krissa is “Kaluna.”

The new names stick.

As my mother improves, I begin to trip on my tangled loyalties.

I try to visit her three, four, five times a week. But twice--to devote more time to work and baby--I stay away for four days, and each time something disastrous happens.

One time, she develops a bladder infection. I walk in and she is shivering under her thin blanket. The nurses’ aide seems oblivious, and I have to insist that her temperature be taken.

I should have been there sooner, I think. It’s my fault.

*

Toward the end of April, after five weeks in the nursing facility, Mom is ready to leave, but not ready to be home alone. My sister has generously offered to drop out of school for a month to care for her. Mom will spend the night with us, and we will drive her to San Diego in the morning.

We have a lovely afternoon, visiting, playing with the baby, and watching TV. As we sit down for dinner, Mom pales. “Uh-oh,” she says, as she lowers her head to the table. “Here I go!”

She has fainted, but I am sure she is dead.

The paramedics arrive, and whisk her away.

I nurse the baby to sleep, then drive to the hospital.

I sit with her as the doctors run some tests. They think one of her pills has lowered her blood pressure too much, causing her to faint.

A nurse calls me to the phone. It’s my husband. The baby is having a bad reaction to her six-month shots; she has been crying for 20 minutes, he says. Please come home. Please.

*

I have another picture of my mother, one that I cherish, but this is a mental one.

I am sitting on the edge of her bed in the nursing home, holding the baby. We are talking quietly. All of a sudden, she looks at Chloe with wonder. Her eyes fill with tears.

“She’s just so precious,” my mother says, her voice breaking. “She is like a gift from God.”

“I agree, but what makes you say that?”

“Just look at her ears,” she says tenderly, “they are so perfectly round.”

We look at each other quizzically, then burst out laughing. The baby joins in.

In that moment, I sense that everything is going to be fine. Our memories can fail us, our tongues can trip us, our bodies can betray us. But as long as we can make each other laugh, we can find our way into the light.