Tina, I'm Scared

“Tina, I’m scared”

            “Tina, I’m scared,” Mom whispered into the phone.  “I think Kathy wants to hurt me.”

            But it was Kathy who had made the call to help Mom, and Mom didn’t remember that.  That was the day before Kathy and I took Mom for a test at the neurology clinic at Kaiser.

Kathy was definitely the one who did the most for my mother, but she and I—and my sister Suzy—were now a team, taking care of my mother.       

            For decades—between 1968 and 2007-- my mother and I were a team, visiting my brother David at Napa State Hospital and then at Garfield Neurobehavioral Center.  In fact, one of the stories I like to tell about her comes from a visit at Napa State Hospital, when we were walking through my brother’s ward to fill out the form for taking him out to lunch, and Mom smiled at a patient who was coming our way.

            “You don’t mean that smile, you bitch!”  the patient said.

            Mom replied, quietly.  “You’re right.  I was just trying to be friendly, but I really don’t feel like smiling.  I’m worried about my son.”

            Her response, which I thought was remarkable in its candor, seemed to disarm the formerly belligerent patient, who replied as gently as my mother, “Well, good luck, and have a nice day.”

            Most people, I thought, would not have responded like Mom.  They might have rolled their eyes or shown hurt or annoyance, muttered “Geez” or “Sorry” or pretended not to have heard.   Maybe I would have responded in one or all of those ways.  (I have a lot of inner conflict which sometimes shoots out.)   But Mom had dared to lay herself bare by communicating something genuine to the patient. 

            Most of my stories about my mother—my vignettes-- do not revolve around our visits to my brother, but most or her calls to me almost always did until she started calling me to beg me to save her from her partner of forty years, her caretaker for many months, our most valiant family member, Kathy, who Mom thinks is now trying to murder her.

           

            In the past when Mom called, she usually said, “Hi, Tina.  I was wondering when you’d be free to visit David.”  So I was surprised when she called one day eight years ago and asked, “So what are you up to?”

            “Well, I’m just about to go out to spend the afternoon with a man I love,” I said.

            “You’re not going to marry him, are you?”

            “Not today,” I said.

            “Well, that’s good.”    Then she asked about going to see my brother.

            It was several months later that she asked, “So who’s this man you love?”

            “I wish I knew,” I said.  “He’s either a CIA agent or a drug trafficker.”

            “Well,” Mom said, “I hope he’s a drug trafficker because I don’t think CIA agents are very nice people.”

            “Some people don’t think drug traffickers are all that nice either,” I said.

            “It depends on the drug,” she replied.

            Then in 2005, I introduced her to this man I loved, whom I refer to as my Meque (mejor que un esposo—better than a husband).  My meque Javier and I had gone to a peace demonstration marking the second anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, and because Mom hadn’t felt well enough to go because of “digestive problems,” we’d brought her our peace sign, showing a Guernica-like graphic with an Army tank bearing decals Halliburton, Bechtel, DynCorp and Lockheed Martin.   When we arrived, Kathy, Mom’s partner of almost forty years, greeted us because Mom was on the phone to a Congressional line letting her voice her opposition to the war     

            “Please!  Please!” she told Javier by way of greeting.  “Tell them you’re against the war, too.  If you are.”

            “I am!”  Javier said, handing Mom the flowers he’d brought her.  Then he took the telephone.  “I am against this war,” he said into the phone, adding a few other words.

            When he left to use the bathroom, Mom and I had the chance to talk behind his back.

            “He’s so charming,” Mom said.

            “I know, Mom.  He’s opposed the war from the beginning, and he always brings me flowers.  I love him.  But I know he lies.”

            “Well, that could work,” she said.

            When I laughed, she said, by way of explanation, “I mean as long as you know he’s lying.”