Confessions of a Mean Sister

After spending some time on Long Island with my two younger sisters, memories and feelings have been percolating. It was a stressful time. We were traversing new territory regarding care for our mother, who was transitioning between the hospital and a rehabilitation facility. Emotions connected to past family history surfaced and receded. I was not a kind sister. I wanted to be, but when my sisters were born, it was complicated. I felt misplaced, if not erased.

My sister Helen was indeed a special baby. My mother had endured the loss of six previous babies through miscarriage. As a mother myself, I can't begin to imagine that realm of suffering. After my parents adopted me, it became possible for my mother to undergo a procedure that would enable her to carry a baby to term. Her own baby. After the procedure, she was confined to bed for the duration of the pregnancy.


My mother moved downstairs to our family room which, with its large open white brick fire place and comfy chairs and rug just right for somersaults and cartwheels, became the heart center of the house.  Her bed, strewn with books and papers was an island to which I swam. Mom and I played checkers and backgammon and made recordings for the blind on funny green plastic records, and she read to me. I did errands with my father on weekends -  to Britton's Hardware store and to Bauer's Drugstore for ice cream cones. He and I made pancakes or waffles with sausage on Sundays. I acquired a taste for kippered herring. When it was time for my mother to give birth, my father trundled her joyfully down to the car in a wheelbarrow. There was an anticipatory feel to things - as if the house itself were holding its breath.


When my mother came home with my new little sister, a fearsome Gorgon of a baby nurse took charge. Entry to the nursery involved stern admonitions regarding germs, and not touching the baby;  I felt lost in the shuffle. I loved my baby sister, but then I grew jealous, and afraid that maybe I wasn't needed. 

Lacking the language of fear, I acted out in a variety of destructive ways. When my youngest sister, Tina, was born 11 months later, I panicked. Oh, no, I must have thought. Oh, no.


I was mean. I teased relentlessly. A lot of the time. Our nanny was wont to say I "tormented" my two sisters, younger than me by 6 and 7 years.

I was daring my parents to give me back. They didn't. But, my behavior caused deep rifts between my sisters and me. I've made amends, knowing that deeper trust takes time. Meanwhile, I am trying to be a good sister, the sort of older sister I would want. A blossoming wellspring of love for them both has arisen that words written in a blog can't begin to express. Words can't erase damage done, but a faithful adherence to remaining present through all the discomfort of regret does help to ease the pain of the past. At least somewhat.

I am hopeful that we three sisters can turn toward each other, rather than away. Patience for our halting progress is required - and gentleness.

Fun with Dick and Helene

Lynn, my mother's chief caregiver/secretary/computer tutor, also known as Lynne 1 to differentiate from Lynne 2, who usually spends nights, stands in the hallway outside my mother's hospital room. Lynne has Valkyeric presence: tall, with long, rippling blonde hair, she's a gentle persistent force, invaluable to Mom. Lynne gets things done.

At times, I'm fairly certain Mom considers Lynne to be the daughter she never had, even though she already has three daughters, but that is just a thought.


"We've been banished," she tells me, grinning.


"Banished?"


"Your Mom is on the phone with Dick."


Dick is an old flame of my mother's. Once, long before my father proposed, Dick asked Mom to marry him. My mother received lots of proposals in those days, and a few engagement rings, which she returned. She kept notches on her hairbrush. I knew about some of these suitors, but this was one about whom she'd kept mum. She had said 'no' to Dick, and they had each married other people.

Then, a few years ago - when she was in her mid-80s - his name came up. They'd been in contact. I was stunned. 

"What are you talking about?" I demanded. "Who is this Dick?"

"He's a very successful newspaper publisher who lives in New Jersey, a dear old friend. He knew me when I was a girl at Saranac Lake."


"Oh, brother," I said.

"I've always felt badly, somehow, about saying 'no' to Dick," she said wistfully.


"What about Dad?" 


"Oh, I would never have married Dick, and I loved your father, it's just..." she trailed off.


"No one but Dad would have been able to stick it out," I muttered.


"What was that?"


"Nothing."

Mom and Dick wrote letters, and talked on the phone. "He's a Democrat," she complained. "A liberal."

Once, she visited the liberal at his home in New Jersey.


"How did that go?" I asked, with the dubious fascination of a rubbernecker passing the scene of an accident.


"He doesn't own a computer, and it felt as though the bed I slept in hadn't been made up in years. There were clothes under the bedspread."

"Whose clothes?" I asked, half imagining lacy lingerie from the 30s.


"I don't know whose clothes, his, I guess. He's been a bachelor for several years ever since his wife, my old friend Franny, died...but, I can't get over the fact he doesn't have a computer!"


When Dick, lanky and stooped, visited Mom, things didn't go so well. He couldn't figure out how to put my mother's Lexus in gear, and a neighbor had to come out and help.


"He got so mad," my mother reported. "He said, 'I'm not going anywhere when I don't know how to drive the car.'"


Nor did he compliment her on her appearance. My mother was swift to retaliate.


She ignored him at that night's dinner party at the club. She talked to the man on her left, leaving Dick to talk to Ethel, who did go on. And on. Then, my mother left him there, cane in hand.


"Why did you do that?" I asked.


"I didn't want him to think I was after him for his money," she said.


"What?"


She giggled. "I said to him, 'I think the big important business man can find his own way back to the house.' I was dreadful, really."


Yet Dick persisted. He went to visit Mom in Florida, but he, as she put it to me later, "lacked enthusiasm." He preferred to sit on the couch and chat. My mother had organized enough activities to fell Porfiro Rubirosa: bridge games, dinners, luncheons, concerts, cocktail parties, musical theater. At one point Dick appeared to be having an anxiety attack. He required medication.

"Also," she admitted nervously, "He wanted to have a little kiss."


"Ah!" I interrupted. I batted her words away with my arms. "I don't need to hear another detail!"

"Oh, Amy," she laughed, "Don't be so silly."

See Dick and my mother, Helene - both in their 90s. Dick has recently suffered a partial stroke. Helene is in the hospital, recovering from a nasty fall that left her looking like the survivor of a bar fight, stitches, black eye and all. Dick still doesn't have a computer. He continues to be a Democrat. Helene still doesn't want him to think she's after his money, so she hangs up on him regularly.

"Lynne!" My mother bellows.


We enter the domain that is her hospital room.


"So, how's Dick?" I ask, smirking.


 "Well, it wasn't much of a conversation," my mother reports.


"Mostly, I yelled, "What? I can't hear you!"

"And mostly, he said,"Dammit, I can't hear you either!"

Our Patient is Trying...Very

"Get me out!"

My mother's voice quavers with indignation on her end of the phone.

"What's wrong, Mom?" I ask, my heart thumping.

"Can't talk," she whispers. I take that to mean that Midge, her white-haired diminutive roommate is awake.


"I'll be there soon," I promise. But first, I think, the gym. Without certain routines - meditation, Qi Gong and exercise - it's difficult to stay present.

*

Last week my mother fell at home. She slipped on some mail and pitched forward face first. Luckily, two of her caregivers were there, changing shifts, and heard the thump.


They exhorted her to lie still, offered reassurance while an ambulance was summoned. She had been taking the drug Coumadin for a blood clot in her groin; there was imminent danger of excessive bleeding. A plastic surgeon stitched her forehead, two places under her right eye, and her left hand. She sustained a concussion.


I drove straight from northern Vermont to the hospital in Glen Cove, New York the following day, hooked on CD after CD of The Time Traveler's Wife, traveling through time zones myself of the interior kind: past and present, hurtling toward an unknown future.

My mother looked frail in her hospital bed, surrounded by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, her phone book, the phone, and small spiral bound notebooks. A yellow begonia, a tiny basket of primroses, and a St. Patrick's Day arrangement of shamrocks lined the windowsill. I glanced at one open notebook page where she'd written the names of her neurologist, her plastic surgeon, the vascular specialist, and the head nurse. My mother thrives on information. She makes lists: 
                                                   
                                                     Willy's b-day! 
                                                     Call Rosie, M.L. and Gloria. 
                                                     Find out what to do about Debbie's granddaughter - gets headaches during the winter, but not in the summer - wi-fi in the school?

A scarf decorated with shamrocks was draped over a pillow. A tiny open ceramic box held hearing aids, nestled together like cashews.

"Hi, Mom," I said. 

She grimaced ruefully at me beneath a mosaic of angry purplish bruises and a blackened right eye - like she'd been ko'd by boxer Micky Ward.


"I was just so stupid," she began.


"It was an accident, Mom. What happened? How are you?" I pushed papers aside and perched on her bed.


"It was the strangest thing, as if the rug just came rushing up to meet me..." Mom said dreamily, gesticulating with her hands for emphasis. She had a headache and felt dizzy; her hospital tray appeared to be sliding away from her. The neurologist explained this was a normal reaction to concussion.

Frail, but feisty.


"How do you get this damn thing to work?" she interrupted herself mid-tale, brandishing the white phone receiver. "They tell you to push 9, I push 9, and nothing happens!" 


Frail, but bossy.


"Why didn't anybody get me anything to drink last night?" she snapped. "I asked that one nurse for some water, and it seemed she just couldn't be bothered! It takes these people ages to respond." She made the haughty face - the one that used to instill terror - and glowered.


"I don't think you were allowed to have anything by mouth," I reminded her. Earlier in the day, she had undergone an inferior vena cava  filtration procedure to prevent the clot in her groin from moving.


"Well, no one explains anything to you here. I'm going to call B and complain!" I translated this to mean she feels trapped in alien surroundings, anxious, no longer calling the shots. Here, they don't serve 5 prunes in a crystal bowl for breakfast.

*

My two sisters and I confer by phone. We speak to doctors. We arrange for our mother's caregivers to be with her when we can't, and throughout the night. It's the best we can do. We bring flowers, organic chocolate bars, life savers, her green quilted bathrobe, cookies. We convey phone messages.

After several days, she's deemed too wobbly to return home, but gets the okay to be released to a nearby rehabilitation facility, from which this morning's frantic phone call originated. My youngest sister, who arrived last night from Florida and I are staying at our mother's house on Long Island. We are sitting in the kitchen drinking black tea with soy milk, and eating bowls of raw oats soaked in cider topped with yogurt and sliced apples. It's delicious. 

The phone call reins us back abruptly from strategizing a coverage schedule for our mother in the new facility during the day, between bouts of physical therapy. 

"What did she say?" my sister asks.


"She wants out."


"Mmmm, how about more tea?" she offers.

Invitation

Recently, I received an invitation to my 40th high school reunion, a school from which I didn't graduate. I was kicked out. Bounced, as my father said. 40 years later, and I still feel remnants of shame. I can see the girl I was then, sneaking cigarettes, richocheting from exuberance to despair. 

The first joyous flash of insight when I realized that A Separate Peace by John Knowles was a theistic story about good and evil, and not just about events at a boys' private school, that literature contained clues about what it is to be human. (It's ironic that there in a southern all girls' boarding school, we were reading about the experiences of boys.) I listened for themes in music appreciation class, studied Jean Valjean in French class, whacked a tennis ball around the courts with my Latin teacher, Jorge Suarez, whom I alternately adored or despised, or ridiculed during class. I charged our pinny-swathed opponents during field hockey games, girded in goalie pads, my face obscured by a face mask. I never passed geometry.


But, increasing swells of anxiety lay beneath the gregarious facade of my rebellious, uniformed teen-age self. When we read Childhood and Society by Erik Erikson, and discussed identity, I felt empty. Who was I? I had no idea. The issue of being adopted, being different and somehow lacking filled my mind with dread. 


I told no one. No one must know.


I felt wild. A friend pierced my ears with a safety pin, I dyed my hair. I shrieked and giggled and gossiped and linked arms with my chums. I sprayed a substance into a brown paper bag and inhaled it until I blacked out.


On Father's Day weekend sophomore year, I performed Gunga Din with a practiced cockney accent. Later that day, my cousin would find out from her father that her parents were getting divorced. What had seemed solid was collapsing.


By the following fall, girls riding horses and school team allegiance to mascot Foxes and Hounds seemed superficial and silly. I spent time alone in the woods reading Thoreau, or re-playing Paul Simon's I Am a Rock lyrics:

I have my books

And my poetry to protect me;

I am shielded in my armor,

Hiding in my room, safe within my womb

I touch no one and no one touches me.

I am a rock

I am an island.

I found a separate, uneasy peace, of sorts, taking long walks in the woods. In those days, I didn't know the language of frozen emotions. I turned inward, dis-connected. Eventually, they sent me home.


I was given a second chance: repeating my junior year. But, my friends, now seniors, had outstripped me, were moving rapidly away. I didn't know how to do life, and I was tumbling through space.


One day, after hiding out in the infirmary to avoid an algebra test, I drank a bottle of Romilar CF, the drug of choice for angst-ridden, risk-taking private school girls. The pain stopped, and I literally bounced around campus, giddy and high, with no thought at all about consequences - which were swift.


Within hours of detection, I was packed up and shipped home. There had been the incident of the horse in the academic building, and those illicit cigarettes in the attic, and that undermining mockery of school rules and school spirit.

As Robert Frost's poem - The Road Not Taken - ends: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
                                                                                   I took the one less traveled
                                                                                   and that has made all the difference


I am the girl I was then, know her bones and spit, foibles and strengths; we're on intimate terms. I am friends with what was once frozen and inexplicable.

Mowin'

On an early Spring day a small, stooped woman with shoulder length gray hair waited near a plain, battered mailbox. She was wearing a long dark dress over black boots. Her homestead, a collection of gray weathered outbuildings and a large red barn collapsing in upon itself lay across a busy highway in Southern Vermont. A solitary goat munched grass inside a wire enclosure. A cow flicked a languid tail. The yard needed mowing.

I felt a pang as I sped by in a stream of cars, dust whirling. How long would she have to wait, I wondered. And why didn't I stop?

On my way back into town, I stopped at a farm stand and bought a dozen purple tulips tied with a pink ribbon. I turned into the dirt driveway, walked to the front door of the sagging white house in need of paint and knocked. There were some geraniums on the windowsill. The door was opened by a gray haired woman of similar stature to the one who had been waiting by the roadside. She wore a dusky blouse and a blue skirt that fell to her knees, a straw hat and glasses. Her eyes looked sore.


"Hi," I said.  "I'm looking for a woman who was standing by the road this morning trying to cross against traffic."


"Oh, you mean my sister Ruth," the woman said. "She ain't here. She's to market."


"Oh," I replied, disappointed. "I brought her these flowers to say I'm sorry that I didn't take time to stop."


The woman peered at me. "Ay-yup."


I handed her the bunch of purple tulips. 


"I'm Mildred," she said.


"Hello, Mildred, I'm Amy," I smiled.


"Ay-yup, people just race up and down; sometimes it takes Ruth near a half hour to get acrost the road. She's only goin' for the mail."


"I see," I murmured.


"It's just Ruth and me here now. Our cousin died last year. He used to help us out with chores and such."


"What sort of chores?" I asked. I straightened my shoulders. "Maybe I can help."


"Well, you jist missed the milkin,'" Mildred remarked.


"Oh, no," I said, having never milked a cow, but eager to try. "Maybe I could help with that another time."


"Uh huh," said Mildred.


"As a matter of fact, I'll be right back." I walked to my car and wrote my name and phone number on a piece of paper. I handed it to Mildred, who stood with the purple tulips resting in the crook of her arm.


"If you ever need help with anything, will you give me a call?"


"Ay-yup," Mildred said. "See, we plant marigolds over there." She pointed to an old tractor tire filled with dirt lying on the ground. Someone had cut a design in the rubber. "We save the seeds."


Mildred and I looked around her yard. "We keep some chickens, and I've got a goat, and my sister's got a cow up t' pasture."


"Whatever I can do," I said. "And please say hello to Ruth."


A few days later I was in bed recovering from a virus when the phone rang.


"The yard needs mowin'," a voice said.

"Mildred?" I croaked. "I'll be there directly."

I found the old push mower in a corner of the barn covered with an empty grain sack, and for several hours I dragged and shoved it around the sisters' yard through prickers and matted grass. Mildred planted marigold seeds. I coughed and dripped sweat, but when I quit there was a tidy area of rocky yard. 

I told Mildred good-bye, and promised to be back in a few days to finish up.


Two days later I got a hand-written note.

Hi Amy
We hope you are feelling better from our cold.
We are paying you $7 dollars 
for mowing of some our lawn 
for us.
One of our nephew mawed the 
rest. For us.
 

In Motion

I admit it: winging home from Patzcuaro, Mexico after 12 days of vacation en sol, drinking morning cups of cafes con leches on the Plaza Grande and gorging on enchilladas and chiles, and tiny, honeyed cheese filled pies, and already I was thinking Where to next?

I'm reminded of a Little Rascals episode, one involving a homemade fire engine, with dozens of Our Gang aboard applying the brakes with dozens of scuffling feet, plunging down hill, the rear of the fire engine swinging forward to meet the front half. Spanky demands of Alfalfa, "Where are we going?" Alfalfa responds, "I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way."

Exactly.

Juan the Gardener and I were conversing this morning over oatmeal about the differences in our natures. While he prefers a more domestic lifestyle, one in which he can shuffle around the house   watering his bonsai, I ache for foreign shores.

"You're energy," Juan stated, after I had mentioned going to Florida with some girlfriends in April. "Up and out, fire and air."

"What would that make you?" I asked.


"I'm more earth and water - down and out -- or, down and in," he amended. "Meaning inward," he emphasized, pointing to his heart region.

"I think you had it right the first time," I said. "With the down and out." I pointed to his attire: striped bathrobe over long johns.

"You're always moving," he said. He stirred yogurt into his oatmeal. 

"Yes, mostly I am."  He really doesn't like it when we spend too much time apart. He feels we met late in our lives, and he's right - we never know, really, how much time we have.

"I used to want to be away from the house when I was young," Juan continued. "Outside with my friends. Or just by myself playing down by the creek."

"I wanted to be outside too," I agreed. "But, I liked doing projects with my friends."

"What sort of projects?"

"Once, my friend Wendy and I sold daffodils."

"Where did you get the daffodils?"

"We stole them from the cemetery and sold them for 25c a dozen at the end of Wendy's driveway. It was a nice little business until one of my mother's friends caught us circling the head stones. That was pretty much it. We moved on to sling shots and setting small fires."

"I rode bikes with my friends and played ball, but sometimes I just wandered," Juan mused.

"I do like to walk, though," he added. "Remember, we walked a lot in Mexico."

"You meander," I said. "I stride."

"I like adventure," Juan said. "I've been to Mexico 8 times and Europe twice." He held up two fingers.

"And you travel from your office to the den," I teased. "And from the den to the kitchen."

"I also like the Travel Channel," he laughed. "I can do a lot of traveling from the couch."

I went around behind his chair and kissed him on the top of his suntanned head.

Later, I had a memory of being in Pamplona, Spain for the first time, on a family vacation. It was during the Running of the Bulls and my father took us to a bullfight. I was far enough away in years from Ferdinand the Bull not to mind too much, being somewhat more interested in the tight fit of the matador's pantelones and his whirling red cape. I'm not sure how my younger sisters felt. We may have been whisked away before the final violent denoument. 

What I do remember is how afterward all of us had to pee something fierce. My father pulled the car over by the side of the road and we all scrambled out. Just as we girls were poised to squat down in the tall grass by the roadside, a small boy meandered by, dragging a stick. We jumped up, affecting indifference, hopping foot to foot until he had passed. 

Somewhere there are photographs documenting this event: three young girls hunkered down, my father a bit farther along the road, wearing a light colored sports jacket, his golf hat on his head, my mother snapping the picture, all of us giggling.

 

Tangles

I came through the doors from bright July sunshine into the frigid air of building Two South at the Brattleboro Retreat, barefoot, dripping water from the swimming pool. I was wearing appropriate swimming attire: shorts and a dark tee shirt, nothing remotely suggestive. I didn't pack a bathing suit when my doctor called to tell me that yes, there was a bed. 

I was there to shed some serious grief. Like puffs of steam issuing through fissures of volcanic rock, powerful emotions were leaking out; the tears had begun. I had not dissolved nor careened off into madness, I simply cried.


At other times, I smuggled breakfast muffins back to my room, listened with my heart-mind to people who had lived in torment greater than mine, jogged around the green rectangle of a field behind the hospital, swam laps.


During rec time, we played a form of softball I called Oddball. People came and went, dragging bats and flat, worn-through leather mitts. A player might run to first or third or right off the field. Someone might choose home plate as a desirable place for a nap. Mac might hand me the softball and say, "You pitch," or he might stand on the pitcher's mound, smoking and humming. One had to be flexible.


I learned about my penchant for perfectionism while I strung glass beads and glued tiny, multicolored ceramic tiles together. The standards I had set for myself now seemed impossible. It was time to relax. It was time to apply kindness.


When my eyes adjusted to the indoor light, I noticed a familiar form down by the front door: my son, Will was sitting in a straight-backed chair amongst tables of tattered magazines. Next to him, Charlie launched into his staccato routine of TV cop dialogue. Will nodded and smiled. Old Ruthie, the laundry thief, was there too, wearing Angie's blue sweater. There would be trouble about that later. A few of Paul's green plastic alligators were taped to the windows.


In that moment, I knew Will to be the bravest person I had ever met. He had come to visit his Mom in a loony bin. 


"Hey," I said. He stood and crumpled me in a hug.


"Can we just go to your room?" he asked.


"Sure," I said.


"Mom, there are bars on the windows here," he said, when I had shut the door.


"It's to keep the bad guys out," I joked.


He lay on my bed, his long legs dangling out over the end as we talked.


"So, do you think you might be coming home soon?" he wondered.


"Yes," I said. "I'm getting there."


He sat up and looked me over, then stood and searched around on the wooden bureau. He picked up my hairbrush and with the most tender of strokes, he brushed my hair, all tangled and damp from the pool.


"That's better," he said, standing back and appraising his work. "Now you don't look like such a crazy person."

He grinned.


"None of this had anything at all to do with you," I told him. "I just needed some time to work things out."


"I know," he said.


It would take some more time before the scaffolding was in place and I could venture back into my life, thin-skinned and somewhat teary at first, but stronger, every day a bit stronger.