1979 to 2005, New Jersey and North Carolina

By Sharon M. Riley

I believe that no one can replace my mother, but it took me decades to realize this. For years I searched for a new mom to replace the schizophrenic model that I have.

My mom’s symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia reemerged when I was in eighth grade - revealed to me by a carton of milk. After school I was cleaning the house while Mom was at work. I rolled our player piano away from the wall to vacuum behind it. There sat a quart of milk that was on its way to becoming a block of cheese. Mom had hidden it, convinced that my father was trying to poison her, as she told me that night.

She began tucking away “safe” food all over the house – a loaf of Grossinger’s rye bread behind the television set, Taylor Ham and salami under sofa pillows. My glamorous mother, who looked like Mary Tyler Moore and wore tailored pantsuits to her secretarial job, who drove me to dancing school, and took me to ballets and Broadway musicals, this mother was replaced my eighth-grade year by a disheveled, screeching woman who pounded on my bedroom door at 3 a.m., because it was time to wash the windows.

Schizophrenic mother lost her job and wandered the house in a dirty robe clutching her pocketbook. From our front lawn, Mom yelled across the street to the perpetually-housecoated Carmella, who watered her sidewalk every day.

“I know you’re stealing my money, Carmella,” Mom projected, making sure the mailman and everyone else outside – and in – could hear. She ranted beyond the neighborhood, sending rambling letters to her ex-co-workers, my Dad’s boss, my friends’ parents, my brother’s teachers, and my school principal, Sister Francis Margaret. The scribble littering her flowered stationary with our family’s transgressions and those of the letter recipient, too.

I abandoned the psychological chaos of my house for the well-ordered kitchen of Mrs. M., my best friend’s mom. Mrs. M. was from Scotland and said, “There you are, love” with a brogue as she served her daughter and me after-school tea and scones. I calmed in the ordered-atmosphere of Hummel figurines displayed on Lemon-Pledged shelves. Assembled spoons from Glasgow and Great Adventure neatly mingled in the wooden rack that Mr. M. made. These were the things of Mrs. M.’s sane and starched household. She made me eat my liver and my wilted soul basked in the rays of her structure and stability - emotional photosynthesis.

And so began my life-long vocation of collecting other people’s mothers.

In the clarity of hindsight, it is hard to understand now why my father and my mother’s siblings didn’t get her psychiatric help immediately. My dad said that Mom was unwilling to go for help, but that is the Catch 22 of mental illness, especially paranoia; my mom thought that she was the only sane one and everyone was out to get her.

Years after the milk-behind-the-piano incident, after I had graduated from college and moved away, Aunt Phoebe finally committed Mom. That day, Mom went to the bank with her sister and yelled that the bank security guard was going to shoot everyone. She ran out of the building into downtown traffic. Brakes screeched and a bus stopped short of running my panicked and confused mother over, almost flattening her into an obituary cliché. How many times she had said, “In case I get hit by a bus….”

Aunt Phoebe took her straight to the emergency room and from there Mom was admitted to the psych ward. The doctor told me that my mother had been in a mental institution as a teenager. Her family had kept this quiet.

After a few weeks, Mom was discharged to her sister’s apartment, where she had lived since the divorce. At first, she sat in the living room saying nothing, her unfocused eyes staring past “The Price is Right.” But as she stabilized on the correct dose of antipsychotics, a muffled and medicated version of my old, pre-eighth-grade mother reemerged.

Unfortunately, the old Mom appearance was short-lived. Soon she stopped taking her medication, went back to the ward, and was trapped in the revolving door between the hospital and Aunt Phoebe’s couch for the next 10 years. I would glimpse the capable, sweet woman who helped me frost my first Easy Bake Oven cake, only to lose her again in the fog of psychosis. It was painful loving this mother. One month we would shop and lunch together, pretending that all the crazy years never happened. Mom would talk about returning to work. The next month she would refuse to get out of bed and pee on herself.

So, I continued to collect new mothers. Boyfriends were dated based on how nice their moms were. I made friends with older women. I got married and attached myself to my mother-in-law, giving her a third daughter, whether she wanted one or not. I thought I would grow out of the needy daughter role, but I continued to play it long past its prime, like an aging child actor. Emotionally, I just wanted to be a perpetual Brady kid, forever hanging in the avocado and orange 70s kitchen while Alice made my lunch.

I was embarrassed into recognizing my behavior last summer when my friend invited my husband and me to his beach house rental for a long weekend. This friend’s brother and sister-in-law were among the guests, as was his mother, Mrs. B., who owns her own house a few blocks away.

Within a half hour of first meeting Mrs. B., my deck chair was next to hers. We sat in the sun drinking margaritas and talking about books and politics. By day three, I knew Mrs. B.’s life story, her worldview, and how she had met her husband. I monopolized her attention. The final night at the beach, Mrs. B. did not eat dinner with us, meeting her friends in town. During dinner I raved to my friend about how great his mother was. I went on and on in my praise of Mrs. B., closing my tribute with the standard question, “You think she’ll adopt me?”

This got the usual laughs and my friend said that since he didn’t have any sisters I could have the job. Welcome to the family. Ha ha. I thought this would be the end of the Mrs. B. talk when the sister-in-law spoke. I noticed she didn’t laugh at my adoption request. I also realized, in this moment, that we had not talked to each other much, beyond initial hellos.

“You must have grown up without a mother,” she said. My mind reviewed the few biographical exchanges we had made. Did she say she was a psychologist? I attempted to recapture the light mood that preceded sister-in-law’s observation.

“Oh, no, I have my very own mother,” I said. I added a smile and embellished that my mother was great. Sister-in-law didn’t blink.

“If she’s so great,” she said, “then why do you need to be adopted?” With that question, table action ceased - no joking, laughing, shrimp peeling, or beer drinking - just staring. All eyes on me, waiting.

“It’s just a joke,” my voice trembled through my cheerful facade. “I mean, I’m over the legal adoption age, right?” I forced a laugh and no one joined in. No smiles or new topics. Silence.

They watched me flap, a pathetic, lost, middle-aged bird peeping, “Are you my mother?” My friend, son of Mrs. B, coveted adopted mother of the week, continued the torture.

“You know, I’ve never heard you talk about your mother,” he said. “Is she all right?”

“Of course she’s all right,” I said. “She’s just been sick for awhile.”

“What’s wrong with her?” my friend’s brother asked, the one married to the perceptive sister-in-law. I had never fielded this many questions about my mother. My friends who knew my mom’s story were my childhood friends. I never had to explain her to anyone, except to my husband, and I wasn’t going to reveal my mom’s schizophrenia to this crowd.

“Old age is catching up with her,” I said. Silence. Surf pounding on sand. My face burned past sunburn to shame.

“Who’s going to the fireworks at the pier, tonight?” my husband asked. My hero. Chewing resumed with the talk of pyrotechnic planning. I excused myself from the table.

I haven’t seen Mrs. B. or the sister-in-law since, but the lesson from that weekend has stayed with me. I have decided, as a middle-aged bird, that I am old enough to be my own mother, not to mention somebody else’s and I have stopped stealing other people’s mommies, concentrating instead, on loving my own.

I have realized this: even though we don’t marry our families, the vows apply - for better or worse, in sickness and in health. I have finally resumed the role I abandoned in eight-grade, to be my mother’s daughter, vowing to love her fully and unconditionally, regardless of her current mental state.

Mom still vacillates between mental lucidity and dislocation. She lives in a nursing home where she is medicated, fed, showered. My brother and Aunt Phoebe visit, bringing her favorite beverage (and the only one she would drink left to her own devices) – a large cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, light and sweet – decaf only, doctor’s orders. When I call long distance, sometimes Mom will answer the phone with a professional “hello,” a remnant from her secretarial days. We discuss “Wheel of Fortune,” our favorite Vanna outfits, the weather. “It’s raining here in New Jersey,” she says.

“Here, too,” I say from North Carolina. Common weather and TV shows breach the years. I mention that I am going to the dance recital of a friend’s little girl and we retreat to my dancing school career that spanned first through third grades.

“Your recitals were always on the hottest night of June,” Mom says. We talk about my tap dancing costume - a red leotard with a little white skirt and matching bow tie with musical notes on it.

“I saved a lot of things from the house, Mom.” I have the record with the tap routine song on it. When my parents sold the house, I rescued many items from the garage sale including Mom’s wedding dress, our family photo albums, my grammar school yearbook, and all the records that I grew up on - including the one that Miss Carol gave us hoofers so we could rehearse at home. I put the 45 on my thrift store turntable and play it over the phone to Mom.

The song is perfect for a 7-year-old’s rock-em-sock-em, show-stopping tap routine, opening with Herb Albert-type jazzy trumpets. A female vocalist sings, “How do you get on television? How do you move with such precision? Is there a way to be a star? Practice. Practice. Practice.” More jazzy horns and drums.

“Step-ball-change, heel-toe, heel-toe,” I say. Mom laughs.

“I can see you practicing that routine in the basement,” she says. “I didn’t care if you scuffed up the floor down there.” In my mind, I am seven, in my red leotard and taps. We’re backstage and Mom is applying powder-blue eye shadow to my lids. I can smell her Yardley’s English Lavender perfume and am thrilled to be wearing makeup just like my glamorous mother. My heart aches as dust blows off the artifacts of this lost, happy life. How do we find each other again, my mother and me?

Practice. Practice. Practice.

Sharon M. Riley lives with her husband and cat in Raleigh, North Carolina. She no longer tap dances but is considering renewing her childhood hobby.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 | Email This Post

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