And then there were times, too, when my sister frightened me, when I locked myself in the upstairs bathroom for the night, trying to sleep in the hard white porcelain tub, just as my mother locked herself in her master bedroom, as my sister raged. In the days after, my mother would pick up after my sister’s mess, restoring the house to some semblance of what it had been before, as though she’d done something wrong and needed to pay penance.
“You’re the nice one,” my mother told me. Her understanding of the world, and her way of expressing herself in English, were simple. I was the nice one. My middle sister was the smart one. I was the good one. My middle sister was the bad one. Even at the time I realized these designations were harmful ones, to both my middle sister and me, but it was how my mother saw the world.
“You’ll see,” my mother told me. “It’s better to be nice than smart. It’ll catch up to her one day. She’ll be her own biggest source of unhappiness, her own worst enemy.”
My mother had a strange mix of childishness and wisdom that I’ve never fully understood. She confided in me often, whether I wanted the closeness or not. Her words, though hurtful to my own intelligence, weren’t necessarily wrong, in that my sister’s behavior seemed destructive to everyone involved, including herself. Where before my family had been undone by my father’s temper, in the years after he left, my sister became that figure of fear. My mother lacked the capacity to do anything about the situation.
* * *
After my father departed, my mother seemed focused on survival day to day, on staying afloat with her job responsibilities. We rarely had food at home in the years after my father left, the fridge nearly empty but for, at best, milk, orange juice, and fruit. She raised us as though we were tiny adults, already fully capable of figuring out what we needed to know. She did this out of necessity, I think, lacking the bandwidth to do more than try to survive the requirements of her work, so she could provide for us monetarily. Her struggle was more than that of any single parent tasked with raising children—because of her undiagnosed decline, it cost her extra effort to pass at work, to pass as functional in everyday life.
We ate daily from the box of ramen, or “lahmyen,” as my mother considered the correct pronunciation, kept in our living room closet. I used to eat it raw, breaking it into chunks in a metal bowl after school. My father, on brief visits home, would get angry over this nutritional choice, even as he’d always left the feeding of us to my mother, before disappearing to Korea again.
My sister often started screaming at my mother over the lack of necessities like food, to which my mother would try cooking something, which she would always ruin. My sister seemed to lack any empathy for my mother, in displaying any understanding of the difficulties she faced.
* * *
There was no constancy to my mother’s behavior. She was reliably unreliable, even if the ways in which she couldn’t be depended on fluctuated over time. I often got stranded in places from which she’d promised to pick me up. She didn’t attend any aspect of my life, school-related or social, unless it was related to music—she’d been denied music lessons when she was young, and so, even though I didn’t want to play piano or classical instruments, she insisted on music for me. Once I could drive, she occasionally attended my music concerts with me, even as she was reliably absent from any other parentally attended events. I wasn’t surprised later in life, when I read that music alleviates symptoms for those with neurocognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s—I saw this play out in real time with my mother, as she calmed down whenever she sat nearby as I played piano, often specifically because she asked me to play for her. “Play for me, play for me,” she asked me, as she sat expectantly on the floor.
She didn’t care for sports, and so sports faded from my life. After my father left, I missed his encouragement of my athletics. My mother couldn’t care less about sports, and so I stopped going out for them, became sedentary, as she was. My vision was changing, too, and since no one else noticed anything was wrong, I didn’t question why I failed to recognize peers’ faces until they were within arm’s length, or why I couldn’t read the names, written in black marker, on white strips of tape on others’ shorts.
“Call out the name of the player you’re passing to,” our coaches told us, in summertime basketball practice in middle school, but squint though I might, I only saw a blur. I had no one I could talk to about such things—my mother didn’t listen when I tried to talk to her about my life, distracted by some facet of surviving her own—and so time went by when I couldn’t see, during which I thought life simply was this blurry.
* * *
With neurocognitive disorders and mental illness, someone often does need to stand in, in terms of capability, and to pretend otherwise is to diminish caretaking, as well as the real tolls of an individual’s impaired abilities. Growing up I became accustomed to standing in for my mother, as much as possible—to anticipating her needs, and trying to fulfill them. She would make mistakes at all times, meaning my constant alertness was needed, due to their unpredictable nature.
In the King Soopers parking lot she began panicking as the car kept skidding forward, seemingly of its own volition, after she parked. I reached over and slid the gearshift into Park, quickly, quickly. In the moment she failed to understand why the car wasn’t cooperating and she froze, helpless—she didn’t realize she’d forgotten to put the car in Park before turning off the engine. These sorts of tiny mistakes translated into a feeling that haunted me. I felt a responsibility to my mother, to help look out for her, to maintain constant vigilance over all the small details of everyday life. These sorts of moments led to her increasingly turning to me, in lockstep with my age, from middle school to high school and on. She relied on me to take over for as much as I could on her behalf, so she could be absolved of the responsibility.
* * *
Unhealthy as their marriage was, as badly as they both spoke of each other, my mother seemed to fall apart in my father’s absence. My father’s departure meant that my mother juggled her work as a professor with raising two children, one of whom was capable of scaring her. More damaging, perhaps, was that with his departure came loneliness. The isolation of their shared lives was mirrored in my mother’s isolation as a single parent. When her decline began, she had no close relationships with adults who could notice and assist. Her isolation seemed to hasten her descent. She had only her children to turn to, and herself.
In my father’s absence, my mother turned to me in ways that retrospectively seemed unhealthy. Even at the time, I didn’t appreciate many of my mother’s behaviors, but I had no normal against which to compare. I saw my best friend’s family, but her household resembled mine not at all.
My mother often slept in my bed, either to use me as a sort of shield when fighting with my father before his departure, or to ward off loneliness. I wanted my own space, but I could never predict when she or my sister might come bursting into my room, unannounced.
She needed help in nearly everything, or so it felt at the time. Some things sound normal, perhaps, such as her paying me a dollar for a household task she needed completed. But they didn’t feel normal. It felt as though she needed me to step in and take care of the tasks that her husband would’ve managed.
She needed me to be strong, when she was fearful. She needed me to take care of her. Gradually I took on more and more of her responsibilities, as she became increasingly unable to manage. In high school I refiled three years of ta
x returns, after realizing that she’d done them all wrong. Shortly after, I helped her remortgage her house, when I realized errors in the paperwork were set to cost her tens of thousands of dollars. Once I turned sixteen, she turned driving over to me as much as possible.
After she came to me late at night, in a panic over my middle sister’s Ivy League tuition bills, I began managing her bank accounts and bills. I began managing her retirement savings. When I was twenty-one, after she’d been finally diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, I returned home to file her Social Security disability application.
* * *
I knew only bits and pieces of my mother’s life growing up. So much of my mother’s history was lost to me, because she herself could no longer remember the answers to otherwise basic questions, such as what her parents had done for work. I knew she worked on the first computers in Korea, big boxes that filled entire rooms. I knew she worked with the 0-1 punch cards. That she worked in chemistry for some time, too.
That when she was growing up, her father hid, to avoid conscription into the army. And that her mother used her as her safeguard—taking her along when sneaking in to check on her father. I wondered if that’s where she learned to do the same with me, to make me into her shield, when things weren’t going well with her husband. I knew her by her bitterness toward my father—that characterized their relationship, from both sides.
If I learned unhealthy behaviors from anyone, it was quite possibly from her. I had once enjoyed taking care of her, enjoyed being the “good daughter” whom she praised. But as she continued declining, I felt the fruitlessness of my efforts. I was tired of feeling like her caretaker. I wished she could see my needs and appreciate me for myself, too, rather than as some sort of extension of herself. So much of my identity was built around trying to please her. I failed to imagine a future or life of my own.
* * *
To say that my middle sister absented herself from any caretaking responsibilities in relation to my mother, over her decades-long illness, is an understatement. I’d never had anything resembling a positive relationship with my middle sister. Our relationship was fraught. When I was in college and after I graduated, my middle sister appealed to me often when dealing with her mental health issues, in all-hours phone calls that pulled me off balance, that ignored my own life as irrelevant, that I never quite knew what to do with. I was ill-equipped for this onslaught of personal emergencies. There’s illness, and then there’s also personality, and it often felt to me it was the latter that caused conflict.
Until my own health emergency struck in my early thirties, I was treated, perceived, and I thought of myself as one of the “healthy” ones in my family, with all the accompanying caretaking burden, and resentment, of a healthy person in an unhealthy family. Resources are not shared equally when not all are capable of, or interested in, fighting in the same way. I’d grown up with this expectation: my middle sister would be excused from responsibility, while I would be expected to shoulder it.