Book Sample

My Parents + Me

Together, my parents ran their home like a fine-tuned machine. It was an older-fashioned setup: Dad worked, Mom stayed home with us kids, and each of them had their territory. Dad handled the outside of the house, the cars, anything that needed fixing or building, dad stuff. Mom handled the laundry, the sewing, the cooking, the cleaning, bathing us kids, all the shopping, mom stuff. Bills got paid on time. Nothing ever slid. They were right as rain, always.

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Even once they were considered elderly and had moved into a condo where a lot of the maintenance was handled for them, that same division held. Dad vacuumed. Mom cooked. The bills still went out on time, together, like clockwork. Neither of them ever let the machine skip a beat, not for decades.

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I don’t know exactly when the gears started slipping. Dad was sleeping more, walking less. And somehow, all that other stuff, the small daily upkeep, just stopped registering as important. They weren’t messy people, so it wasn’t like dishes piled up. Mom still handled them, and there were never very many. It was quieter than that, a machine slowing down so gradually that you don’t notice until it’s already changed.

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By the time my mom moved in with me, not long after her second TIA stroke, I was the one running the whole machine myself, meals, cleaning, shopping, laundry, all of it, and I was in over my head. My mother, meanwhile, would ask me for a dust rag and limp around behind her walker trying to dust things herself. I didn’t have room in my head for dust. I was drowning.

And then there was the thing she did that I hated at the time and would give anything to have back now. When I’d take her anywhere, she walked so slowly with that walker she had time, real time, to survey the entire house on her way out the door. “There’s a coffee spill on the floor, Jodi. Maybe when we get back you can mop.” “The plants look awfully thirsty.” “Does the vacuum still work? Maybe we should get a new one.” Passive-aggressive, every bit of it, delivered at walker speed on our way out the front door. I white-knuckled through those comments back then. Now I laugh out loud thinking about them. I’d take a hundred more coffee-spill comments if it meant one more slow walk to the car with her.