Other Mother

An essay.

Originally published by The Audacity on April 24, 2024.

Before she came home, my sisters and I hid all the sharp things in the house.

On the way back, we sandwiched her between two of us in the back while one of us drove. We thought she might suddenly strike at us, or try to leap out of the car. But during the thirty-minute ride she was quiet and still.

The day before her discharge, there had been a release interview with a grief counselor, so called. I had knelt before Mom and placed my hands on her knees to tell her that Dad had died. I said, 엄마, 내 말 잘들어. She looked at me. 아빠 이 새상 떠났어. Dad is gone. I prepared for her to open her mouth and let out a long, high sound. Or for her to kick me, or pull my hair, or bare her teeth. For her to collapse. For no reaction at all.

She did open her mouth, for a slow intake of breath. Her head tilted upward and to the right a little, and her eyes blinked once and rolled, like someone who had been told a ridiculous price for a rug at a bazaar.

The counselor seemed unsure what to do; he consulted his clipboard. How do you feel. What is a favorite memory.

Mom, even in that state, with whatever level of coherence the SSRIs and antipsychotics allowed, said carefully, with pauses that ended just when I thought she was done talking: He was very intelligent. I will miss him. I don’t have that much to say. I don’t usually say that much. Forgive me.

I remember marveling at her elegance, despite the fleck of white at the corner of her mouth. Her legs were crossed, hands neatly in her lap, as if waiting for a presentation to begin. The only thing that betrayed her impatience was the repeated question, Can we finish? She was shrewd to put him in a position of generosity, with that forgive me. She wanted to remove all obstacles between herself and the door.

Oh, there’s nothing to forgive! he said. I looked at his bovine eyes and dark beard, the buttoned shirt and tidy nails, which, if you looked closely, had a little dirt under them. I understood how capable he considered himself. He didn’t seem to register that my mother, herself only a shell, took pity on him. He was immaterial, a cutout, and she wanted to pass the test and go home. She answered a few more questions that were the same as the first. She enunciated her words carefully, like someone measuring out liquid with a spoon.

Can we finish? she said. Please forgive me.

Months later, I’d learn that she had called Dad the night she was admitted. What did you say to him? I asked. She was lying on her side, one hand folded over the blanket. That I’ll be home soon.

—

She walked in slowly. We watched her face. She didn’t react to the flowers or the clean house, though we saw her eyes taking them in. We cajoled her into taking a shower. She was afraid, so I sat at the vanity in the master bath, where she could see me through the glass of the shower stall. Downstairs, she sank onto the futon where she was used to sleeping, close to the ground. I brought over a bowl and we brushed our teeth over it. She wordlessly copied my movements. She must have been too tired to do anything else. When she lifted the bottle of water to rinse her mouth, her hand shook. That scared me.

I slept next to her for the next six weeks. She was always turned away from me. When I’d ask her to face me, she’d say, If I lie that way, a mountain rises inside of me.

But I noticed she also faced away from me at table, during breakfast.

—

I wondered how someone could change so much in a matter of days.

She even looked different. The sty she’d developed in the inner corner of her left eye gave her a witchy affect. Her hair now had a shock of white in it. She had been gone one week.

It was as if she’d been blasted, churned in a storm, then flung over an unfriendly landscape before being hastily recollected and reassembled. The pieces were mostly in the right place, but the edges didn’t quite line up, a darkness visible where small fragments had gone missing.

I was particularly struck by how her most established habits had not survived.

She no longer drank coffee, even though, for over half a century, every morning without fail, she had taken two teaspoons of Maxwell House freeze-dried instant, with a little sugar and powdered cream. She didn’t want anything to do with her dog, her “fourth child” whom she used to dote on. Regarding concerned classmates from college, whom she’d regularly seen up until a few months prior, she said: They are not my friends.

In the place of old behaviors, preferences, and characteristics, new ones surfaced. Her sentences often ended with “OK?”, the second syllable scrunching up against the first like the rear end of a cartoon character when the front end comes to a hard stop. Once an avid talker, she now answered questions with a single velvet mnh. She avoided eye contact. She tried to headbutt me when I led her to the shower. She sucked her back teeth. When irritated, she raised her right finger in the air and wagged it.

So, when she sometimes said my name, 은혜야~, apropos of nothing, the suffix of endearment tender and familiar, I’d look up, startled.

Is it you.

—

Mom had started feeling depressed during summer. She stopped sleeping and, eventually, eating. By fall, she was behaving strangely. She thought someone had a copy of her phone and was listening to our conversations. She called each of us girls in turn, incessantly, becoming distressed when we tried to assure her that what she believed was not true. Her money was not safe, she said. Her health insurance was being canceled. Despite repeated confirmations to the contrary, she insisted that her local pharmacy was being shut down, which made her despair. I would ask from thousands of miles away, exasperated, why she believed these things. She herself would be baffled, as if I were asking why water was wet.

We thought that all this was simply caused by insomnia, brought on by depression, which in turn was worsened by sleeplessness. We tried melatonin, then Benadryl. A therapist prescribed Lexapro. A nurse, Remeron. A doctor, short-acting benzodiazepine alprazolam, commonly known as Xanax, which we later learned could worsen psychotic episodes, especially in the elderly. Nothing relieved her insomnia. When she had not passed stool for ten days, she called me in a panic. I found a nearby emergency room and convinced her to go. The doctor there said there was simply nothing to be passed, but prescribed Linzess anyway.

Not one of these medical professionals had her tested for a UTI.

The body’s chemistry is delicate. An overgrowth of flora, a little inflammation, a crystal out of place: and an entire person could disappear.

I read in the National Library of Medicine that inflammation due to something as relatively benign as a urinary tract infection could cause “disturbances in oxygenation of the brain,” and that “age makes the brain more susceptible to the effects of circulating inflammatory particles.”

According to her psychiatrist, for a 72-year-old woman this could manifest in psychosis that, coupled with comorbidities and a chain of traumatic events that the psychotic episodes themselves might kick off, could lead to significant personality shifts that she may never completely recover from.

I imagine these inflammatory particles, circulating through my mother’s slight 5-foot-2-inch frame. Little fires between her ears, at her joints, larynx, viscera; consuming her from the inside.

I wonder how different things might be if antibiotics had entered the picture a few months earlier.

—

I witnessed Mom’s 5150, California Welfare and Institutions code for involuntary detention of an adult experiencing a mental health crisis, via FaceTime. The Mom I knew would have been docile, obedient. But she couldn’t stay still, flying in the face of authority while my sister tried to calm her. I remember the terror-filled faces through the rectangle of the phone, her incessant talking, the flailing arms. The officer didn’t want to cuff her but eventually had to. Our father, a silent smudge, watched from the stairs.

I was told she arrived at the psychiatric facility clutching at her chest, I need to go home, my husband needs me. According to the night nurse, Mom slept after a dose of Haldol and Benadryl, but that account, as with most of their other accounts, conflicted with my mother’s.

Staff, when I could get someone on the phone, would tell me that Mom was eating well, cleaning her plate, and that she slept an average of 6 hours a night. They also said she was in a private room with one other roommate. My mother later recalled that she slept very little. Fellow patients crawled into her room during the night, so that there were sometimes as many as three other people in the dark, laughing, clapping, singing. All night long, she said. Sleep eluded her there, too. She lost more weight.

Her third day there, she called me from the phone in the hallway. It was the first we’d been in contact since she’d been taken away, and I was elated to hear her voice. I felt so much love for her in that moment. I said 엄마! Mom! And she said my name. Her voice was low. She spoke hard, evenly, rapidfire. Very quickly, I realized that she was furious. You’re going to pay for this, she said, this isn’t even a real hospital, they’re all crazy here, 나쁜년.

She had never cursed at me before. I tried to speak, but the space between her words was too tight, I couldn’t find room. The call must have lasted less than a minute before I had to hang up.

Still, it had been Mom. She was angry, inundated with inflammatory particles. But I recognized her.

This would be the last time.

—

During Mom’s first six weeks home, I cleaned and organized when I wasn’t on the phone. I removed weevil-laden flour from the kitchen, along with expired cans of mandarin oranges and mystery containers in the fridge. I filled so many garbage bags that I had to pace their pickup by the city. I sorted through decades-old piles of bills, expired credit cards, business cards, and receipts. The dining room and garage overflowed with them, as well as kitchen and dresser drawers.

One bedroom was filled with layers of clothing and unopened items from Target or Bed Bath & Beyond—picture frames, photo albums, trinkets. In the garage were cheap appliances, many in duplicate, also unopened. Shoes were strewn around its shadowy periphery or stuffed into closets. Sneakers. Pumps. Flip-flops with large costume gems arranged in the shape of a flower over the toes.

I picked up a pair of unworn red heels in size 9 and asked, Why did you buy these, Mom? They’re too big for you. She was lying on her back, gazing at the wall. One hand held onto the blanket. I don’t know, she said.

It agitated her when she heard me opening and closing the closet downstairs, where she had hidden jewelry, balled up in tissue. She kept her purse in there, too, within which lay a brown paper bag, itself containing a thick fold of three hundred dollars, a mix of tens and ones.

I told her that cash and valuables were safer in banks and safes. She didn’t trust me. Decades prior, when her own cancer-ridden mother, whom she was taking care of, accused her of stealing toilet paper, she had cried.

The Janus Mom. One handing me her treasures, the other shouting, Now I have nothing!

—

The question isn’t If everything you know about a person disappears, is it the same person. It’s Did I ever really know my mother.

It never occurred to me to learn her. She was an unfailing constant. She always answered my calls. If I asked for something, she gave it. Her love was the only thing of which I was absolutely certain. I saw her with absolute clarity. She was absolute. No matter what I did, said, or became. She was something I could never lose.

Things I didn’t know surface through conversations, like baubles from coat pockets or shoes in unexpected sizes. Her sisters share that Mom had always been prone to depression, with a bad spell in college. Mom, whose past self I now associated with unflappable cheer. (I’m not sure why; many memories contest this.)

—

Twenty percent of human mothers—one in five—have difficulty emotionally connecting with their newborns. Panda mothers often give birth to twins, but abandon one in favor of the other. An anxious cheetah often overhandles her cubs, injuring them. Domestic cats, after difficult labor, feeling unsafe or nervous, can reject and even devour their young.

Humans do this, too. We must, because we tell stories about her. The unavailable, selfish, or hostile mother—in Sally Rooney’s Normal People, in the pulpy Flowers in the Attic, in The Secret Garden. There’s Caroline Collingwood in HBO’s Succession. The blonde in the red funeral dress, that munchausen by proxy, in M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense.

In Greek mythology, Medea drowned her children.

My point is, Mother is not absolute in the way that we believe. She may even be a deep unknown.

—

When Mom first came home, she was the most unknown, the least reachable. I would wake to see her staring off into space, arms unmoving under the covers. Asked what she’s thinking about, she said either Nothing, or I’m afraid.

She didn’t want to wash. She would eat too fast, gulping. She was child-like, wanting whatever I was having even if she’d just finished her own meal. She called my name repeatedly if I was out of sight until it became a roar. She liked to put her hand in the pocket of my cardigan, plucking at it as I moved away: I want to go inside and hide there.

She couldn’t abide other people, including caregivers, in the house. She cursed. She slapped her thigh if I asked her to walk, just a little. She pleaded, fixedly, for pastries. In the car, she would become agitated, wanting me to switch lanes, right now, take that exit, turn there, you’re going to miss it! While she raged, I sang over her nonstop verbalizing, out of my own mind. Ave Maria, gratia plena. Ave, ave dominus. Dominus tecum.

My sister thinks that Mom has long seen me, her eldest daughter and steadfast solver of problems, as an authority figure, reinforced by years of me bailing them out. Me standing up to Dad, his begrudging respect for me.

You are strong, Mom used to say. Sometimes admiringly, sometimes with resentment.

She was now coming into her own strength, the kind that made her say no with the speed of an athlete and the tyranny of a queen. In response to a hard-won doctor’s appointment, she would say, I’m not going I’m not going I’m not going, and in such moments I took to calling her 아줌마, the Korean word for women not your mother.

One day after yet another tussle, I screamed, Ajumma! Where’s Mom! Give her back to me! I want my mom! and she stared at me.

She said, Don’t call me that. I’m Mom. You have to call me Mom.

In a weird offset, she herself sometimes called me 언니, which means “older sister.” Unni, I want a cookie.

Once, she even said: I feel like you are the mother.

By contrast, my sister has always been, and always will be, The Baby. I note the unassailability of this, as I watch Mom caressing her hair. I say, How come you don’t do that with me. At this my mother gets irritated, becomes defensive.

I want to go back to the place where certain things were true, but she pulls away.

—

I’ve set security cameras throughout and around the house, creating a sort of force field. For Mom, who hoards secrets like money and shoes, they invade, and close in. But since she no longer wants responsibility of any kind, she has resigned herself to an exchange of freedoms.

This resignation contrasts with what I had understood to be a happy eagerness to give, cook, wash, serve, relinquish, compromise, sacrifice—be Mother—being replaced by entitlement and belligerence that spookily reminds me of Dad.

All those years of being put-together, hair perfectly coiffed, nails pearlescent, lipstick and eyeliner on before he woke up. Dressing him. Driving him to dialysis for almost a decade. Cooking to match his appetite, meal by meal. Coming when called, doing as told.

She didn’t feel like it anymore.

She now wears loose house dresses, asks the caregiver to cut her hair with kitchen shears. Her face is clean and bare. Some part of her seems pricked by this; she doesn’t want people to “see her this way” and resists leaving the house. But she also rejects returning to how things were before. She doesn’t want to go to the salon, refuses offers to be taken shopping, eschews fine silks for jeans when she has to go outside.

She seems simultaneously more fragile, and more powerful. Was she always there. Who would Dad have been, with such a wife. Would I exist.

—

Once, when I was little, Mom spanked me. I don’t remember why. I crawled under a desk and pulled the chair in after me, to erase myself. I was crying, calling for Dad. After a while, Mom came and wordlessly pulled me out. She wore a soft, dark dress with yellow flowers. She held me close. I was cradled in her lap, surrounded by arms, breasts, belly. It was warm, as if I were melting back into her.

—

Weeks in, when a certain, new familiarity had set in, I confessed: We hid all the knives and forks before you came home.

She gazed at the ceiling. Why?

Because we were afraid you might hurt me. Maybe while I slept.

In Korean, parents often refer to themselves in the third person when speaking to their children. She had these moments of what I perceived as lucidity, where it felt like she was surfacing from the deep, drawing a breath, then going back down again.

She sighed, a sound she used to make when nonplussed, though her face remained blank. Mom would never do that. In English, she repeated, Never.