2004: special treatment

A few years ago, when we were still trying to work towards maintaining her two New England houses, Rob and I went to the island for a long spring weekend. Opening up the houses for the spring was the goal. She'd sent us a list of to-dos: take down storm windows, put up screens, run the car to make sure it's operational, air out both houses, put out the porch furniture, and this time, bring her car back from the island to our place on the mainland so that she could drive it when she returned from the Bahamas or California or wherever she was camping this time.

The actual tasks themselves were easy; it was the commute which made it difficult (a three hour drive, a ride on a shuttle bus to the boat, a 45-minute boat ride, a taxi ride to the house from the boat...in all, it's easily a 6-hour trip, each way). She would never consider hiring an island-based caretaker for the houses, but rather expected my brother J. or me to do the work on the weekends in addition to keeping up our own places. My other brother M., persona non-grata, hadn't been allowed to visit either of her island houses in over a decade --- not even to do housework. Whenever I suggested that not only did the caretaking work put a big dent in my free weekends (as I teach at a boarding school, I'm frequently expected to be there on the weekends --- not to teach, but to help with events and to do "weekend duty", wherein faculty are scheduled to give the dorm counselors their one hard-earned day off per week), "the violins" took their places on stage. If I ever brought it up, (cue violins) she'd go into one of her diatribes about how hard she's worked to keep the family together, scrimped and saved, and how difficult it was to keep a place for us all to be together...

I always backed down, shut up, and just did the work, rather than saying "Mom, I don't deny how tough the past was, but money's not a problem now. Don't you think the work would get done more thoroughly, and with a lot less wear and tear on all of us, if you just hired a professional caretaker for the two houses?"

Back to that particular spring weekend. Rob and I got the list of chores done, then tried to start the car. No dice, as usual. This car had suffered battery and ignition problems for years, and leaving it undriven over the winter never helped. As usual, we called AAA for a jump. This being an island resort community, people who do "normal", unglamorous jobs like working for AAA are in relatively short supply; lots of them can't even afford to live on the island anymore, actually (the island used to be a bit more affordable, but is rapidly becoming more like the Hamptons). So the AAA folks there, knowing that they're unlikely to be replaced by the auto club even if there are plenty of customer complaints, are grumpy and snarky. The guy shows up after a few hours (certainly not to AAA's normal standard of punctuality, but again, that's an "island thing"), grumps at us, and gives us a jump. He suggested that we drive the car for a bit to charge the battery.

We drove around for an hour, then stopped for lunch. When we came back out from the diner, the battery was dead yet again. We called AAA yet again, and got to deal with Mr. Congeniality yet again after another hour-plus wait in the parking lot. After the car was started again, we drove it back to the house. Trying to figure out how to get the car off the island per my mother's wishes, Rob said, thinking out loud: "What if you drove the car onto the boat, and then at the end of the ferry trip, when it won't start, play dumb...just appeal to the boat crew to help?"

The idea, while well-intentioned, actually made me feel sick to my stomach. "That's exactly what my mother would do", I replied sharply. She'd been asking for special treatment, more and more as time had gone on, from everyone --- from friends to doctors to service providers. Even though she was more than capable of walking through airports five or ten years ago, she insisted on getting a handicapped designation and a wheelchair and having an airline employee escort her. It wasn't about her physical abilities or lack thereof; she could have done the walking, albeit maybe a bit more slowly than she had before. For her, it was more about getting to cut to the front of the line. Very rarely had I felt the sharp rage that she unleashed on me the few times I dared to ask "How would anything get done if everyone asked for the same privileges as you do? How would the world work?"

Rob saw that he'd hit on an extremely deeply felt sentiment, and in his typical manner, adjusted quickly and pragmatically. "Well, she's just going to have to do without that lemon of a car on the mainland, then. She can certainly afford to rent a car anytime she likes. We've done what we can".

His extremely common-sense approach just stunned me. I'd been looking at individual trees on a case-by-case basis, and then all of sudden I became aware of a huge forest before me. You mean, it's OK to step off this merry-go-round of doing whatever was possible to meet her needs?

Actually, "entertain her whims" is the better phrase than "meet her needs". She didn't *need* to own a 10 year old lemon-y car; she could have easily replaced it with something more reliable. She didn't *need* to have menial tasks done by her children for any reason other than to illustrate their allegiance to the self-described "matriarch" by making long commutes for working weekends on the island; she could have hired professional help and had the job done better and in a more timely fashion. She didn't *need* to own two houses within blocks of each other on the island, neither one of them truly suitable as a year-round residence (one, far too small; the other, not winterized); she could have sold both and bought one beautiful place to live, year-round, rather than pursuing her "camping" hobby. She had realtors falling all over themselves to list her properties, offerring to hire people to clean, "stage", and present the homes; all she need do is sign on the dotted line, sell, and make a tidy profit in the notoriously overheated island real estate market.

Any of the steps that the vast majority of rational people might have taken, given her extensive resources, were just too much for her. Any step that would reduce the drama quotient seemed completely unattainable, and not even on the table for consideration. But as the amount of stressors and complications in her life continue to increase, she continues to give lip service to decrying high stress levels, due to their negative effects on her health. Further, the implication is that if only we children were more responsive to her, if only we would step up and do what any grateful child would do for a mother, then everything would be just fine.

The truth is that any one of us could make a full-time job out of cleaning up after her ridiculously convoluted, complicated life, and it *still* wouldn't "make it all better". The drama quotient must stay high, so she would likely manufacture new problems at the rate that old ones were resolved. I spent years trying to clean up after her and the best I was ever able to do was stay something close to even.

As my brother J. said in one of his more lucid moments: "She could f%*k up a one-car funeral".