So long and thanks for all the help

My mom came to visit a week or two before we moved this summer. This was our first move in five years, our first move to a new city in close to ten years, our first move ever with kids. We were not prepared for the awfulness of this move. My mom said she would come to help us. When I picked her up at the airport I said “we’re really stressed out from the move so I apologize in advance if we’re crabby and less fun to be around than usual.” “I understand, moving is hard and it’s hard having little kids, I won’t take it personally.”

My mom came with me and the kids to the library one night. She read a novel while I played with the kids. When it was time to go I gave my older kid a heads up that we were leaving in five minutes. She said “I don’t want to leave yet.” “We’re not leaving now, but soon. Finish up the activity you’re doing, then we’re going home to have dinner.” Then I realized the baby had a wet diaper. I changed the diaper while my older kid kept arguing with me about not being ready to leave. She had a whiney and not-quite-but-almost shouting edge to her voice that she gets when she’s hungry or tired or both. The baby kept trying to roll off of the platform where I was changing her. My mom picked up a magazine and started telling me factoids from it. “Did you know Edgar Allen Poe only got paid this really small amount of money for his first short story?” My kid said something about not leaving yet, the baby kicked and tried to roll. My mom flipped a page. “Wow! There’s a slide in Wisconsin that’s three hundred feet long!” I told my kid to finish up what she was doing and I put the clean diaper under the baby. “Oh, do you know where they have good natural soap, the kind that’s really easy on your skin, for real cheap?” My kid argued back that she wasn’t READY to FINISH her activity YET and I said don’t yell in the library and the baby wriggled and flipped over onto her stomach. “Did you hear what I said?” “What?” I turned the baby back onto her back. “Do you know where they have cheap but good natural soap that’s easy on your skin?” “Uh, no.” I snapped the cover on the baby’s diaper. “Family dollar.” I set the baby back on the floor. “Okay.” “Remember that for after you move.” She flipped a page in the magazine. “Umm, okay. I’ll try to remember that.”

Most of the visit went like that. “When you have kids, I’ll help you.” My mom said that a lot as I was growing up. This was my mom’s first visit in over a year, and the first time she met my younger kid.

When I came home from work the first night after my mom arrived my wife gave me a hug and whispered “I know she’s trying, but oh my god.” My mom walked into the room and said “I packed the clothes that were in the drier!” My wife said “the ones in the drier just now?“ "Yes.” “Oh, umm, thanks. Which box did you put them in?” “The one right in front of the drier.” My mom went into the living room, which is mostly our kids’ playroom, and start putting toys in boxes. My wife and I looked at each other. What were our kids going to play with if all the toys were boxed up? My wife whispered “those were the clothes we were going to wear this week and next, I don’t know how to politely tell her not to pack stuff without asking me what to pack.” I went into the living room and said "Mom, thanks for your help but I’d like to wait on packing up the kids toys until after the kids leave, so they have stuff to play with while they’re still here.” My mom said “I’ll just pack up some of them then.” “Umm, well, there are some toys they play with more than others, I don’t want you to pack up toys they’re going to want while they’re still here, please.” My mom got up and picked up her book and sat in a chair and started reading.

After my mom went to bed my wife said “this morning the one kid was shouting because she didn’t like what I made for breakfast and the baby was crying and trying to escape while I changed her diaper and your mom kept telling me things she had done around here that weren’t actually any help. Like she packed all the library books that were on the bottom shelf, the ones I was planning to return tomorrow. Finally I just said umm thanks for your help, let me change this diaper and deal with the screaming kid and then we can talk, okay? She said okay but a minute later she was back to talking at me.”

I had the rest of the week off work. I started taking my kids out a lot. They and my wife were leaving a week earlier than I was. I wanted more time with them before they left and I wanted my wife to get a bit of time without the kids. I asked my mom to join us. Sometimes she would. Sometimes she would stay home to talk with my wife. After two days it felt like my mom had been there a week. My wife said “I’m trying really hard to be nice but she’s driving me crazy. It’s like having a third child.”

My mom must have picked up on the fact that she wasn’t actually helping by putting random stuff in boxes because she stopped doing much other than sitting in a chair and reading novels. One night while I washed dishes after fixing dinner she called from the chair in the other room “have you read anything by this John Steinbeck?” I think she said. I turned the water off. “What?” “You ever read Steinbeck?” “Yeah, I like him a lot, what I’ve read of him.” “Me too.” I turned the water back on and rinsed the bowl I was holding. “This one’s especially good.” I turned the water off. “You said that one’s good?” “Yeah.” “Good… What one is it?” “East of Eden.” I waited a moment then scrubbed a plate, turned the water on to rinse it. “I’ve read it twice before.” I rinsed the coffee cup. “I’m rerereading it again.” I put the coffee cup in the dish drainer and turned the water off. “What?” “I’m rereading it again.” “Oh. That’s cool. I’d like to read more of his books. I like all the ones I’ve read. I haven’t reread any of them though.” “I reread books a lot.” “I’d like to do that when I get more time but whenever I get time to read I always want to read something I haven’t read.” “That makes sense.” I turned the water back on. My mom said something else. I turned the water off again. “I’m sorry mom, it’s hard to hear you over the water from out there and I gotta get these dishes washed so I can’t really have a conversation with you like this right now while you’re sitting over there and I’m washing these dishes. Sorry.” “I understand.” I turned the water back on.

I guess I should have just said “maybe you could wash some of the dishes, while I sweep the floor?” but I didn’t. In part I was afraid it would come out shouted with some swear words added. I washed the dishes and thought “I would like to be sitting down and reading a damn novel right now. You know who else likes novels? My wife.” I remembered her last visit when my wife was very pregnant. I came home from work and my wife was fixing dinner and washing dishes and talking to our three year old. My mom was laying down in the living room, reading a magazine.

My mom has such infrequent contact with my kids that they don’t have much of a relationship. My kids are slow to warm up to new people. My mom started the visit getting up in their faces like she was a frequent contact grandma and they sort of stepped back from her. She stopped trying to interact much with them. By her third day visiting my kids were used to having her there and were excited to play with her, they would ask her to read to them and to play dolls and trains and whatnot. My mom seemed slow to accept those requests by that point. One night I tried to get my mom and my older kid in a conversation. I started telling my mom some things my kid had learned about dogs from a science video, and said “do you want to tell grandma more of the things you learned?” “Well, dogs are -“ My mom interrupted my kid and started talking about this kind of dog she liked called a goldendoodle and how they were nice dogs and how her dog was getting old and how she wanted a new dog before her dog got old and died and those goldendoodles they seem nice do you know what those are I feel like I’ve seen a lot of them around here since I’ve been here do you think they’re nice dogs? My kid tried a few times to get a word in to tell her grandma about this video and I tried to interrupt a couple times to help my kid talk but my mom kept going on about goldendoodles and asking questions without pausing for an answer afterward. I texted a friend that my mom was making me feel crazy.

She started taking really long walks, like two hours, often without telling us. She would step outside then just not come back. On her last day at our house she put her suitcase in the entryway to our house. “What are you doing?” my wife asked. My mom explained that she might get a ride to the airport from my brother Tom. I had already talked with my mom about how I would be happy to drive her the airport. My wife said “I thought Nate was driving you?” My mom said “oh well yeah but maybe Tom will drive me.” My wife said “if that’s what you prefer it’s up to you but you could leave your stuff in the room you were sleeping in, why put it in the entryway?” “It will be easier to just go this way.” “You’re going to say goodbye before you leave though, right?” “Tom said he might be able to pick me up, I’m going to call him.” “Umm, well, please don’t leave without saying goodbye, that will hurt the girls’ feelings.” “I’m going to go call Tom.”

My mom and my brother have sometimes been estranged. It’s complicated. It’s all complicated all the damn time. Whenever there’s a chance of contact with my brother my mom gets weirder, and likewise so does my brother when there’s a chance of contact with my mom. My wife told me about the conversation about the suitcase. I called my brother and explained the situation. He said “I told my mom I can’t drive her, I have to work today.” “What?” “I told her repeatedly that I can’t drive her to the airport and you guys only live like fifteen minutes from there anyway.” “Totally, it’s not a problem at all to drive her there.” “She’s weird.” “She’s real weird. Like weirder than I remember.” “Yeah.” “Well if something ends up changing and you do pick her up to go to the airport, please come in and say hello, and make sure she comes in too, to say goodbye. She’s acting like she’s just gonna split without saying anything.” “For sure, I will, and I’m not driving her anyway so don’t sweat it.” “Cool, thanks Tom. I’ll talk to you.” “Talk to you, bye.”

I tried hard to be empathetic as I thought about my mom but I just felt angrier. It’s more work to be empathetic in the middle of all the other moving and parenting work I had to do. I suddenly remembered my mom shouting “extra work! again extra work!” at my brothers and me, on multiple occasions when we were kids. I wondered if I was being like my mom, did I need to forgive her for all that stuff when we were kids in order to not end up being like her as an adult? That thought made me angry too - again, more work! And I started remembering all the times when I was a kid when I had to act like an adult, and really this is the central problem in my relationship with my each of my parents - every shortcoming is every shortcoming. Or I should say, each incident recalls every incident, never forgiven and not forgotten so much as hibernating.

I sometimes feel like I am constantly angry. I know I’m not actually angry 24/7 and 365 days a year but there are times in my life when I am, and times when I can turn to being furious suddenly like a switch is flipped and I think this is because sleeping lightly just under my skin there are hundreds of rageful memories humming away, and as I’ve gotten older and gotten a better sense about what childhoods and parents should be like I’ve added to this collection and each one’s a wasp that can sting me so I suddenly want to shout and sob. Like my parents did, like it seemed like they constantly did, no doubt bit by their own hornets of memories burrowed under their skin. “You little asshole” my mom would say to me, “that’s what he would say,” telling me what her father would do when he was angry. “I thought he wanted to cut me up and throw me in the trash.”

“I’m not harsh,” my dad would insist, “I know what harsh is, my dad was harsh, I used to get beat with an extension cord, I used to have to kneel on gravel until my knees bled. That’s harsh. That made me tough. I’m not harsh with you.” I used to jump whenever he walked into the room and I would go to my mom for comfort whenever he yelled, and I would sit by myself when she yelled, and now I occasionally raise my voice to my own kids but not the same way, though I have moments of worrying that I am the same way.

I never tell my kids any of this because I have since decided that there are ways of being inappropriately emotionally honest with your children. Part of being the adult is knowing what not to say to your kids rather than treating them as peers. That was a line my mom crossed all the time. For a very long while it felt like we were emotionally close - it felt like me and Mom against the world sometimes - and I suppose we were close but it was predicated on her being emotionally honest with me in what I now think was an excessive and age-inappropriate way. Our relationship deteriorated in my twenties as I realized this, remembered more (“I can’t do this, I should just get on a greyhound bus” she would shout, “I should just stick a gun in my mouth”, “you’re just like your father, you’re going to end up doing what he does”), and after I said directly to her “I love you and you have hard stuff in your life and that’s really not fair but I’m not your peer, I’m your son, there are some things in your life that you need to tell a peer or a therapist rather than me, I can’t be your emotional confidant in the way you want me to be, it’s not good for me.”

I thought about some of this at various points during her visit. It would just come up in my mind. One of my brothers tells me that my other brother told him that a psychologist thinks he as PTSD because of the way memories just come back suddenly sometimes and the strong emotions that go with them. My brother speculated that all three of us may be like this, and our parents too. I often try to just ignore those memories and feelings at first, pretend to myself they’re not happening. That usually works, temporarily anyway, but if the feeling’s big enough I eventually need to say “I feel angry” or “I feel afraid,” at least say it to myself, and stop pretending I don’t feel that way, or it doesn’t really go away. It never really goes away anyway, it just goes back to sleep.

The rest of the last day of mom’s visit went okay. My mom actually played with my kids for a while. I made her some tea. I drove her to the airport. We made small talk about her dog and about novels. I dropped her at the airport and hugged her, told her it was good to see her. It really was. As I drove home I tried to focus on the sacrifices my mom made and the hard work she did and how she really wants to believe she’s not who she is, because she doesn’t like who she is. I love her and I like her, it’s just that I don’t only like and love her. It’s all complicated all the damn time.

Later my wife said “That was exhausting.” “Yeah.” “It must be really hard being your mom. Like being in the world is not easy for her.” “No.” “I feel for her.” I didn’t say anything. “And I feel for you and your brothers if she was like that when you were kids.” “You don’t know the half of it.” “I- well, I mean… I guess it’s remarkable you’re not crazier.” I laughed. My wife continued, “part of what was so hard this time is that there was so much to do and I was so tired it was hard to empathize with your mom and to remember that it’s hard being her.” “Yeah.” “I think it’s easier to be around her when I remember that.” “Yeah.” “Do you not want to talk about this right now?” “I don’t know. I guess not. I think I’m still in ‘get through the week without being rude’ mode instead of reflective mode. Does that make sense?” “It definitely does.”

I don’t remember if my wife and I watched any comedy on the internet that night. It feels like we did. We do that sometimes in the snippets of time together we sometimes have after our kids go to bed. We watch a lot of British comedy shows. She said once “I think it’s good for us to laugh together.” Laughing together is important. While my mom was visiting I told some friends some of the funnier bits of my mom’s visit, by text and by phone while I was running errands. It felt good to laugh about it. Laughter trumps anger and fear, drives off memorywasps. I think I like to crack jokes a lot because I feel angry and afraid a lot. I guess the more metaphorical wasps there are, the more the need to laugh.