Doing The Math

It’s supposed to be spring soon–supposed to–but I’m still sitting in front of the heater in my robot hoodie and wool knee socks, sipping tea and listening to the southerly howl and screech outside. Tui courtship season, ostensibly; I feel sorry for those poor noisy birds huddled up under the whipping branches. This morning when I finally got into work after a five minute walk to the bus stop I had to wring the rain out of my skirt.

My pernicious, continuously chosen location in springtime, on the opposite side of the planet to the Place when my mother lives means I can’t ever talk to her in the mornings, her time, when she’s feeling really strong. I can’t get up early enough to call her before my hour’s commute to work, and I can’t stay up late enough either to get her at a time that makes more sense to her. She’s always a bit tired when I call. She’s often very confused; she knows who I am and can usually follow the conversation, but she has a hard time with some of the details. My sister says that she is a lot better in the mornings—and Mom agrees—but I just can’t stay awake long enough.

Saturday morning, my time, is when I skype her. About six weeks ago I called the head nurse at the Place and let her know in my best social worker voice that The Wellbeing Of This Resident Requires An Integrated Care Approach So Please Have Someone Go To Her Apartment At The Appointed Time And Turn On My Mother’s Laptop, Thanks Ever So Much. It worked for a couple weeks but lately I’ve had to call the Place and remind them. I can hear them rolling their eyes, every week, all the way in the other hemisphere. They (usually, eventually) come and help her but Mom gets so anxious. She apologizes to me for not knowing how to use the computer anymore. Over the weekend, when I’d had to call her on the landline because the assistant hadn’t arrived yet, she said my sister was going to help her get set up. “Beck is here,” she said. “She’ll know what to do.”

“Is she in the house with you, Mom?” I know, by now, to cover my bases.

“Oh. No. Not in the house, no.”

We get on fine, though, during these talks. When I call her during the week I’m always at work in an unused office, one eye on the clock, but during our weekend video chats I’m usually still in my pajamas and sometimes drinking a cup of tea. This past Saturday I entertained her by making my bedhead as fuzzy as I could get it. We talk about what’s outside our respective windows: parking lot and live oaks (hers) or washing line and bellbirds (mine). We talk about her day, if she can remember it, or about what I have planned for the weekend. She’s always really excited if I have a gig, as I did the other day, or if I’m going to a party or something. I ask about the cats a lot, about what she’s reading.

I don’t lie to her about my life, or hers—from the beginning, we’ve all made it a point to say CANCER and not talk around it—but I try to keep everything on a pretty positive note. She needs, apparently, to use a walker now, and so I tell her that it’s a way for her to keep active without worrying about her balance. She says that she wants more services, and I remind her of how much she likes her yoga teacher and tell her that we—and of course by ‘we’ I mean my sister—are doing everything we can to get her more help. I don’t know if she agrees with me about any of this. It’s hard to tell.

I try not to do it too often, but every now and again I can’t help offering to go home. To stay home, with her. I have talked to my sister, I have done the math, so many times, and every time it doesn’t make sense, for me to go, for me to stay. I go over and over it again but there is never any middle ground between my staying here, in my beloved community, a minimum thirty-six hours away, and my being there, with nothing and no one else. No income, no friends, no health insurance, no band, no dating. If I go there, if I stay there, then I do full time care for her and that’s it, that’s my life, for who knows how many years. If I stay here, if I stay here, then I am the furthest away from her I can possibly be and I can never call except when she’s tired.
The decisions have been decided—for now, at least, because three weeks ago she was sounding super strong and clear, two weeks ago there was no walker—but I can’t help asking her, sometimes, again, if she wants me to come home.

She always says no. She always snaps to the kind of lucidity I rarely hear from her, anymore, and that I can barely recall used to be her normal way of speaking. “Oh, no, honey, I don’t think we’re ready for that. There’s no reason to do that now.” She never misses a word or leaves gaps in the sentence; it’s immediate and clear, unlike most of our conversations. She always says she doesn’t want me to lose my life; she has said it many times. It’s always a relief, though, every time, because that math, that other side of the equation, is almost impossible for me to contemplate. But there is a part of me—a very childish part, a part that still wants my mom to tell me what to do–that wishes she would say yes: come home, stay home. I hate making this choice. I hate making it over and over again.

She doesn’t, though. I don’t think she ever will. If I have to go back, if it comes to that, it won’t be her asking. Meanwhile, I do the math every day. I lose more sleep and still never manage to call at the right time.