I spent eight years writing my first book, MY MOTHER'S HOUSE, A Memoir. It is a story about my fifty-plus-year relationship with my mother. I often wept as I wrote, remembering what had happened to her. During most of those years, and through those tears, my little bird kept me company: Captain Kirk the Parakeet (actually I gave him four names over time).
When he too was gone, my grief was so intense that I commenced a letter to him. Eventually, the one letter became many, with memories and more tears pouring out of me - and changes occurring deep within me.
What follows here are the first pages of the book-in-progress that has arisen from those letters. of course before publishing the book, I will do some final editing.
As time goes on, as I can, I will add more chapters/letters to this page. Meanwhile, at the end of Excerpt #1, you can resume the story at My Little Bird - Excerpt #2.I welcome any comments or questions from anyone who wishes to contact me.
For information on exotic birds, go to http://birdchannel.com
***
"Birds
were what became of of dinosaurs. As solutions to the problems of
earthly existence, the dinosaurs had been pretty great, but blue-headed
vireos and yellow warblers and white-throated sparrows --
feather-light, hollow-boned, full of song -- were even greater. Birds
were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long
summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs."
Jonathan Franzen
The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History.
***
MY LITTLE BIRD
A Memoir About a Girl and Her
Bird, Her Mother, Her Bird's Vets, Her
Transformations, and a Possibly Fatal Error
______
The girl is sixty. The bird lived six years.
***
My Little Bird,
I sit on a cushion on the steps outside my new apartment. Leaning against a second cushion I’ve brought out, I imagine how companionable we’d have been, you and I. Here is where I pictured us together, you, sweet parakeet, in your cage, set upon the step above mine, both of us ignoring the decrepitude of this complex, a twin set of nine units each, their exterior paint faded, dirty, cracked and flaking; and between the two rows of the two-story complex, the courtyard before me.
I gaze at the courtyard. The old palm trees rise up, half their fronds green and upright, and half, a dead yellow, dry as a torch. Near the roofs of the buildings, the dead fronds droop from their heights in long, thick batches like witches’ hair. There are also a thin tree with bark so straggly it looks like an old man’s beard; a much wider tree covered by ivy top to bottom (a neighbor tells me a rat dropped onto her balcony one night from the ivy of that tree); and a tree with many low twisted limbs and a few truncated limbs on higher, thicker branches that hang like huge scrotums. I would have laughed and pointed this out to you, along with the squirrels chasing each other over the flattened, intermittently dry grass: The owner, a slumlord, unwilling to pay for a professional, is the only gardener.
But, still, a courtyard! This would have been so nice for you. Sometimes a bird chirps from the top of a tree. You would have looked up, your black-striped, green-feathered body alert, your head with its yellow-feathered crown lifted, your eager wild spirit aroused by the sound; and just as you did when I sat on the porch outside our first apartment with you in your cage beside me, and then on the shallow step outside the kitchen door of our second – where you spent most of the six years of your life – you would have answered the overhead call with your own keen chirp.
But you are not here. You are in the ground, in a vintage, varnished Chinese box upon which a pretty bird is hand-painted, with one of your dishes and as many of your favorite toys as I could fit in with you. You are buried behind the kitchen of the apartment I have left, next to the step upon which we so often sat on a nice afternoon. I buried you the day before I moved. It took me an hour to dig with the trowel less than a foot through the hard, packed dirt and tough plant roots. I hope your box is deep enough. I worry it is not. I worry that I made another mistake, leaving you there.
My Little Bird,
Lying in bed last night in the dark, I remembered how far we’d come from our first night, when all I had to do was come within a foot of your covered cage for you to flutter inside it in fright. How different were our nights in your last years!
Around ten I would put you on the bedroom dresser, cover your cage, turn out the light and continue to work in the living room for another few hours. You needed your beauty sleep even if I never got any. But you had your own plans.
When I retired, I turned on the bathroom light. It gave just enough illumination for me to see the bedroom but not to penetrate your cover. And yet, when I came quietly into the bedroom to do my floor exercises, you gave a sleepy chirp, as if to say, “I’m up if you are, Mommy!”
After forty minutes of weights and floor stretches, I turned out all the lights. But only when you heard me pull back my covers and climb onto my creaky bed would I hear the sound of your small feet scraping on your cage bars as you made your way up and onto the hanging yellow perch on which you spent the night. No matter how sleepy, you would not go to bed till I did.
My Little Bird,
I awoke this morning with the corners of my eyes wet. Looking at the dresser upon which your cage used to sit, my mind returned to your burial box. I’d had to stop digging because I was too tired to continue striking through the dense resistance of the earth; once more, not having slept more than four hours a night for the last twelve years has taken another toll. Everything is so difficult. But I should have pushed myself more. For now wonder if the next tenant might want to plant something above you.
The dirt comes out a foot or so from the building, and runs along it, bordered by the cement walkway. Other tenants have planted flowers in that dirt. Someone could find your box, even damage it, and throw it in the trash. Or a heavy rain could simply wash the dirt away or sink into it and rot the wood.
But I forced these thoughts from my mind and dragged myself out of bed to resume unpacking. My friend Barbara said last night, “You won’t be able to find anything for a year.” She laughed, from experience. She’s eighty-two. I laughed with her, knowing she was right.
Now, a few hours later, I take a break, coming out again onto the steps of the courtyard, to continue my letter to you.
*
***
*
I had to stop writing yesterday afternoon. I was crying too hard. I kept my weeping silent, secret, my head turned away from my new, unknown neighbors traversing the courtyard.
But no one noticed me on these steps anyway except one of the courtyard squirrels.
Now I am here to resume my letter to you. But I find myself somewhat intimidated. Do squirrels attack people?
Fat squirrels race all over the walkway and dirt, chasing each other up the trees and chittering at each other. But this one stationed itself in the crotch of the tree opposite where I sat—within leaping distance, I might add—its large eyes staring at me, its bushy tail flicking and flapping aggressively over its head, its little front feet poised to launch.
Would it have gone after you? Would it have scared you – as it did me? I know that all wild animals carry diseases. But I ignored the beast challenging me as best I could. Sitting on the steps with my laptop, I leaned against the wall, the large window to my living room behind and above me. No sunlight enters my apartment through that window. On my side of the courtyard, no sun breaks through the foliage of the trees and plants. This makes my apartment oppressively dark, but also cooler than those on the sunny side. The same holds true for my steps. The other side of the courtyard gets the sun pounding down but my steps are eighty, shady and comfortable.
But there was that aggressive rodent watching me and whacking its tail up and down, threatening to pounce onto my chest or face. I could see the Hitchcockian movie sequel in my mind: THE SQUIRRELS.
Actually, I should write the movie. The squirrel is out here again today. Good material. Too much!
I’ve come out once more to sit on the steps of late afternoon, and write. But my nerves spin little whirly twirlies of anxiety in my stomach. Only moments ago the creature was on the ground a mere couple of feet from me, digging. Then it sat on its hind legs, eating something in its agile paws, in fast motion, its beady eyes watching me. Suddenly with a jerk it shot up the nearest tree, ensconcing itself in that crotch to challenge me. Now I know what is meant by the term “squirrelly.”
“Territorial little fellow, aren’t you?” I say to it. Of course, I’ve equally unnerved the squirrel. Obviously, no one else sits out here. But I refuse to leave. I took this apartment in part for the courtyard.
My friend Rita called me earlier. Far more assiduous than I on the internet, she’d Googled “squirrels” after hearing about my paranoid perceptions and cinematic predelictions. “The largest squirrel in the world,” Rita said, “is three feet long and lives in Australia.”
“Three feet? That definitely goes in my movie!”
But we’ll just have to get used to each other, the squirrels and me, for I will continue to sit out on these steps. The trees and plants, this increment of nature, soothes me. Eventually, out here, I will write another book, a novel this time; my memoir about Mother’s and my relationship, that long saga, is finally finished.
But first, before anything else, I have to write this letter to you, my sweet little bird. For I want to preserve your wonderful things in words; I need to immortalize them in my heart before I begin to forget; and I must write about what happened to you, wherever that leads, if I am ever to sort out my present from my past, my grief from my guilt.
My Little Bird,
I can see this letter will take many days, maybe even a few weeks. Maybe there will be a few letters. In any case, I must intersperse writing to you with unpacking. Boxes tower and clog my new living room. I will be unpacking them for quite a while. Fortunately, although I will have to move again in a year or two because I cannot afford to remain here, while I stay, there is plenty of closet and cupboard space.
The rooms are also relatively large. I have fit in all my furniture with space to spare. How easily you, my little bird, would have fit. I remember the afternoon I came here and looked around, panicked at such a large step – signing with a new landlord, moving everything. Being forced suddenly from my previous apartment and looking for another one every day for six months has shattered my sense of stability in the universe.
But this was another one-bedroom, and I saw that there would be lots of room for you to fly around once you learned your way from room to room as you did last time. Take a sharp right here, a wide left there...onto a perch of some sort, or back to your cage in the bedroom, except the night I didn’t leave the light on...
It would have been stressful for you here at first, being in a new place, but you would have adjusted, like when I had the two desks.
Remember that? One was wide and long, more of an artist’s table, but I used it as a desk; I needed it for the broad surface space. Next to it stood a real desk, a few inches lower and much smaller, but it offered six drawers, three on either side of where I sat. With your cage sitting on the larger desk, you used to run back and forth between the two. Then I purchased a big used scratched stained oak desk offering both surface space and drawers. I gave the other two desks to a charity, placed your cage in the corner of the new one and, as had become usual in the last few years, left your door open.
At first you would come out and run—your waddle reduced by your speed; looking back I can see it was your Power Waddle—to the edge of the new, large desk. You leaned over, looking down in vein for the other desk. Auk! Auk! Auk! you went, as if to say, indignant and highly irritated, “Where did it go? What did you do with my other desk!” You turned to me. Awk! Awk! But after a week you stopped squawking, instead, running around it to talk to your various mirrors.
You started with the square one at the top of the orange plastic ladder that hooked onto your cage on the outside, climbing up to peck and chirp at your reflection. Then you raced over to the rectangular turquoise-framed mirror a little distance away lying on its side on the desk. Then, bouncing happily back into your cage, you leapt to the mirror attached to the dish that held your food pellets, and hurried from there to your top perch and your favorite mirror, the round one – yellow on one side, turquoise on the other – on the hanging yellow perch next to the produce I cloths-pinned to the bars of your cage. Then out of your cage you popped, and back you charged to the ladder mirror; all heavy action while chirping furiously at the reflections you thought were other birds. You’d become thoroughly used to the new arrangement.
Sometimes I placed my chin on the desk edge and you ran back and forth between your mirrors and me. With each visit to my face you pecked the small knob on the left side of the tip of my nose. Each peck was a little harder, more excited, so that finally before there was serious pain I raised my head, smiling. You returned two or three times, looking around for my nose knob, then just remained with your mirrors. You would soon have been happy in this new apartment, too.
In fact, all three my apartments, including this one, were quite a leap – or a flap – from your first homes.
Do you have any memory of them? Sometimes you cocked your head and looked upward, your expression thoughtful. What profundities did your mind graze? Were you working out some new philosophy? A mathematics of quarks and fractals, chaos and harmony? You looked so contemplative! Or were you remembering?
Did you ever dream about the places you stayed before you came to live with me – the pet store and then the hospital?
Today, in the shade and slight breeze, I recall how without warning you came into my life—at, of all places, the nursing care hospital where my mother went for rehabilitation, to learn to walk again, following her hip replacement surgery.
Certainly, seeing you there, I found one of the biggest surprises of my life. Who could imagine I would discover a treasure in that dread abode?
*
***
*
My mother, at eighty-six, required her third hip replacement surgery. After the operation, I had her transferred to a skilled care hospital where she was supposed to learn to walk again then go home to resume a difficult but independent life. Friends and even an acquaintance warned me, “You have to be there. You have to be at the hospital. Or someone does. Someone has to be there.” But neither Mother nor I understood. Wasn’t the rehabilitation hospital there to save her?
Before Mother went to the rehabilitation hospital, her medical chart actually bore these words: “Pleasant to be with.” “Has a good sense of humor.” But with me able to visit her only once a week, and one of her neighbors also once, Mother needed only two weeks there, and those words ceased to describe her. The warnings had proven valid. I felt the first hint of what would become a desperation to save my mother from the hospital.
When Linda, the social worker, offered something that might at least raise her spirits, I grabbed at it.
Linda told me on the phone, “Sometimes I bring a parakeet to cheer up a particular patient. I put it in their room and if they can’t feed it, either I or one of the nurses will. Would you like your mother to have a bird?” she asked.
I saw it in my mind, a colorful little bird chirping away. I imagined my mother’s joy at hearing the birdsong.
“Yes!” I answered. “Please.” I could not wait to tell her.
***
Of course, I knew that no little bird could possibly compensate for the abuse my mother had suffered during her first two weeks at the hands of a young man who was one of her CNAs (Certified Nursing Assistants). She’d told me about him on the phone from the first day, “He glares at me when I need him to change me!” “It hurts when he moves me!”
When she graduated to the bedpan, he put her back in the diapers, then shamed her further yet. On the phone she repeated to me what he’d said, her memory as sharp in her narration as before she went to that hospital and had easily repeated poems and lines from novels. But now uncharacteristic bitterness tinged her voice as she quoted her tormentor. “‘You’ve got diapers,’ he said. ‘Use them!’” She wept in humiliation and fear. “Then he went away and left me lying in my filth for hours!”
He so terrorized her that she called me one midnight, long after he’d left for the day. Whispering his latest act of cruelty, she finished, “I just want you to know what’s going on in case something happens to me.”
She was afraid for her life.
Because she was so panicky at how he might retaliate against her, I could not convince her for two weeks to let me complain and get him out of her room. When I finally succeeded at gaining her permission, and talked to the Director of Nursing, it took three tries to get him out because her nurses ignored or did not read the orders on Mother’s chart.
Nor would a bird in my mother’s room do anything to alleviate the continuing, excruciating pain the nurse practitioner in charge of her could not control, or the nurses who ignored or did not have time to respond to her calls for pain medication, however inadequate it was. “I pressed and pressed the thing – the cord – but no one came!” Mother told me. Or, when they came, they refused to give her the medication. Unless she was writhing and moaning in agony, they did not believe she was in pain.
Only her first nurse, a sweet red-headed Hispanic young woman, would lean over when Mother murmured that she was in pain. “What? Are you in pain?” Isabelle asked gently as Mother sat in the wheelchair. I saw this on my first visit.
“Yes,” Mother said quietly.
Isabelle would get the medication.
Isabelle left the hospital only days after Mother arrived.
But if pain medication is not administered when the pain begins, the pain cycle takes hold. Often, my mother would not receive her pills until she was in agony, by which time it would require a good half-hour before those pills took effect.
Finally, no bird could possibly replace for my mother my presence at the hospital. She needed me to be there, both to push her “caretakers” to take care, and for emotional support. For love. To know love and not feel abandoned in that place. But I had my own illness. I could only visit her on Saturday afternoon when my friend, Susie, drove me there, and came back for me an hour later. The guilt I felt at my absence from my mother churned constantly in my stomach, and my grief for the grief I caused her clutched at my throat.
But what can I do? I asked myself, assailed by my own deathly fatigue. ***
My arms and legs felt like lead. My blood ached as it dragged through my veins. With no energy, I had to lie down between every small activity – choosing something to eat, eating, gearing myself to shower, showering, choosing something to wear, putting it on.
My fatigue was based on part on my then-undiagnosed Rheumatoid Arthritis, my diagnosed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and a horrific sleeping disorder. No one who hasn’t experienced severe sleep depravation can imagine what it’s like.
Six years before, new owners had taken over my apartment building and hired a landlord who, very loud himself, moved tenants in over my head and throughout the building of sixteen units, who blasted stereos and televisions, and occasionally electric guitars, sometimes all day, sometimes after midnight. I’d been unable to sleep for more than four hours a night for all of those six years. And I could not tolerate the bus ride to mother’s hospital.
I barely had the strength to get up and walk to the store around the block, and this bus ride was three hours round trip. It consisted of the din of countless simultaneous human conversations overlapping with the roar of engines; the draining fumes of colognes, perfumes and pesticides; the constant jerking of the bus because many drivers like to hit the break every few seconds; and of course all the people hacking and sneezing, threatening my precarious immune system.
For I also carry a mysterious virus, one that is related to HIV. My virus will not become AIDS, but all of the four known viruses in this class of pathogen (called “retroviruses”) – HIV 1 and 2, and two other retroviruses – cause cancer. I was afraid to push myself too much, for instance, with this bus ride, when I was so exhausted.
Even though my mother needed me with growing desperation.
But I was trapped in my body as Mother was trapped in hers – and in that hospital.
Still, I thought – seizing Linda’s offer with guilt for me, hope for my mother and relief for us both – a pretty creature with wings and songs could still bring her a modicum of joy. Perhaps even more than joy.
Of course, theoretically, I knew any improvement in my mother’s situation at the hospital would be small. She was going to have to be there two or three months, and we already had an idea of what that would be like.
And yet – birdsong right in her room! This was still a little magical. Indeed, deep within me, I thought that this little bird whom the social worker would bring to Mother’s room might even help heal her, even just a little, as the birds had done twenty-five years before, when my mother had cancer. When her doctors had regarded her as terminal.
That is what I remembered, and I was unbelievably happy for her.
Was it so totally unreasonable to have placed so much hope on the little bird who would turn out to be you?*
***
*
A quarter of a century before, at age sixty, my mother had changed her life. Her doctors diagnosed her with Stage IV non-Hodgkins lymphoma. After commencing an experimental drug, but still only weeks from death, she summoned the stunning courage and embarked upon a huge mind-and-body holistic program. She commenced of eating raw foods, raw juices, and supplements, and threw herself into sundry health-promoting machines to coincide with her chemotherapy; and, for the mind part of her treatment, she sought and found joy where she’d never looked before. ***
All these years I’d kept this picture in my mind, of my mother on her redwood deck listening to the birds. “I never noticed the birds before my cancer,” she told me years later. I’d grown up in her house, the house in which she had lived until she went for her surgery; but I’d never noticed the birds either, until she told me about them. Yet they sang from the wild, green, sometimes fusia-flowered bushy masses surrounding the redwood deck of Mother’s small one-story house, and they chirped from the ancient jacaranda in Mother’s small yard as well as from the straggly foliage climbing up the yard fence. My mother listened whenever she came out to sit on her deck recovering from Stage IV lymphoma. That was the first time the pleasure of birdsong entered my own awareness—as a picture of Mother discovering this deep pleasure, and healing in those cascading choirs.
“I just love to listen to them,” she told me when she had cancer; and then, afterwards, “I think they helped heal me.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I’m sure they did.”
Indeed, she’d never stopped sitting on her deck, listening to the birds as she read her newspaper cover to cover and talked on the phone, classical music pouring from the jerry-rigged speakers above her; and now here was a potential echo of that picture. I was ecstatic to discover my mother could have a parakeet to keep her company during her increasingly agonizing ordeal.
This idyllic picture of my mother having a little, chirping haven of joy in her hospital room was the only desire within myself of which I was aware, but the desire was vibrant with eagerness.
I asked Linda, the social worker, “What inspired you to start doing bringing these birds in for the patients?”
“My own bird,” she said. “I was in a pet store. They had tame birds. I reached out toward a cockatiel.” A vague image entered my mind, of a bird that was white, gray and yellow. I also had the impression of a crest. I must have seen cockatiels on television, in the background; I have no idea from where else the impression might have come; and it was not entirely accurate. I was unaware of the round orange patch on either of a cockatiel’s cheeks which, when I looked at Linda’s cockatiel in a cage at the front of the hospital later, reminded me of a clown’s make-up. Linda told me, “He stepped onto my finger, climbed up to my shoulder and leaned his head against my neck. I knew I had to get him.”
Her story perhaps prompted another little unintentional desire within me to acquire my own bird. Certainly my mother’s love of birdsong, twenty-five years before, first opened my heart to your own chirps and squawks, so long after I’d given up ever having, let alone loving, another pet.
*
***
*
When I was an infant, my mother and father gave me a Siamese kitten. I have few memories of him except how much I loved him and how loving he was with me. I remember once when I was five or six, I wanted to get him out from under my bed. I saw his brown tail flicking, and I thought something like – That looks handy! I took hold and pulled him out. He let out one of those distinctive Siamese yowls and scampered from my room. Even then, though, he never bit or scratched me. I also have a photograph of the two of us when I was a toddler. I’m sitting on the floor, my little hands buried in his fur, a big smile on my face as I look up at the camera. Figaro is lying in front of me with a calm, patient expression on his face. You can almost hear him purr in the picture.
Mother had named him Figaro. One day she told me, “I always pictured you calling him –“ and she sang operatically and seriously off key, “‘Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro Figaro!” Modulating her voice, “‘Figaro here! Figaro there! Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro…!’” However, eternally absent-minded, it took her thirty or forty years to reveal the plan, and so during most of my childhood Figaro was my unsung – but not unloved – Siamese cat and closest companion .
But when I was nine, my allergies and asthma caused my doctor to tell my mother, “You’ll have to get rid of him.”
“I’m so sorry,” Mother told me. The doctor refused me permission to have any pet if it had hair, fur or feathers. A long, lonely, emotional drought followed. But finally, when I was fourteen, my allergies and asthma ceased. I got a dog, part-Dalmatian, whom I named Trixie. Mother had found an animal rescue place, and when we drove out to see the dog we’d been told about, she ran around excitedly in huge circles in the yard. She seemed to recognize us. Of course we took her home.
Trixie was my dog. I loved her, fed her, took her outside to play with in the small yard of my mother’s house. But a few years later Mother met the man who would become her second husband and the love of her life.
Mitch had had many dogs in his life. He was a dog whisperer, before the term existed. But what that meant for me was that Trixie bonded with him. She would leave me and run over to him and bound up onto the living room couch with him, staring up at him with adoring eyes, wildly wagging her tail and back end.
Mitch loved Trixie as much as he’d done his own dogs that he’d had over the years. But he showed his love in part with by overfeeding her.
“Please don’t give her so much!” I pleaded at every meal. “She’s getting fat. It’s not good for her.”
“She loves it,” Mitch responded, handing her something else, which she slurped down with scarcely a bite, her eager, ardent, expectant eyes never leaving Mitch’s face. He gave her bananas, bread, meat, pasta, and more from his plate and then let her lick the plate. I wondered if he was giving her all the food that he, as a diabetic, could no longer consume.
Trixie died four years after I got her, almost obese, the black in her fur turned gray. She was overrun with fleas. A huge tumor was growing on her ribs. I was at college when my mother called to tell me she’d died. I was surprised that I didn’t cry. But I’d cut off a lot of my feeling for her as I’d watched her become Mitch’s dog.
I moved back home just halfway through my first college semester. I had become depressed and so fatigued I could not continue my studies. I’d been tired before, but this was when my fatigue first took real hold of my life.
Somewhere right around this time – it must have been when I first moved back in with my mother – I got another dog, this one part Australian sheepdog. Mitzy. Another really awful dog name I had chosen (my mother never gave me a middle name, leaving it for me to choose; after some atrocious attempts, I put aside that quest); but I loved her. But Mitch bonded with her, too.
Dating my mother, he appeared for dinner almost every night, and Mitzy ran to him, prancing merrily around him. And he gave her scraps from his plate at every meal as he’d done Trixie; and she too got fat. After dinner, after I’d done the dishes, while we all watched television, I sat on one couch and Mitch and Mitzy settled on the other. Now my new dog gazed up adoringly at Mitch, who petted her and let her lick his face and fed her more from his after-dinner snacks.
“Aren’t they adorable?” Mother said from the kitchen where she puttered around.
I didn’t answer but it had only been a rhetorical question.
One night as I looked at Mitch and Mitzy, a gaping emptiness opened in my chest. Now she was over there, not in here. The leash of love between me and Mitzy was totally severed.
But there was more to my feeling, although I never thought about it then.
My mother had divorced my father when I was one or two. He went to Mexico and for the entire ten years he lived there, he only wrote to me once. I knew he loved me. I could feel it. But love did not mean being there for me or with me.
My mother loved me, too. “I love you!” she told me throughout my childhood and teens. “I’ve enjoyed every stage of your development.” Sometimes her love made her very overprotective. When I was a toddler, she kept pillows in her car trunk to be able to spread around me lest I fall. When I got into a fight with a neighborhood kid, she held a grudge against that child long after he and I had made up.
But on the other side of her overprotectiveness – which her friends all saw as me being spoiled—throughout my life she detonated without warning in horror and terror. “What’s wrong with you? There’s something radically wronggg with you!” I never knew when this might happen or what I might do to inspire these outbursts. “You failed me! You failed me!” This to a five year old child. A six year old child. A fourteen year old adolescent...
This was “love.” By the time I was eighteen, I seethed with rage. I would soon explode at my mother, and then leave home for good.***
When I had Mitzy, and watched helplessly while she bonded with Mitch, I hated my mother because she had taught me to hate myself. There was something radically wrong with me, wrong to the core. Because of it I failed my own mother. I was a failure.
She came to resent me for hating her. “Why are you/were you so angry!? she would say. She never understood how my rage had developed. It would have been impossible to imagine that in a dozen years we could reconcile, let alone go farther.
But when she faced cancer, we commenced a new stage in our relationship. For my part I learned to admire so much about her – her intelligence, her humor, her imagination, her love of many kinds of music – including opera – her ability to transform, to find joy in life even after Mitch died of diabetes. The way she sat on her deck and enjoyed the birds. Over the next quarter of a century, our mutual respect and shared humor grew into a deeply loving friendship that consisted of speaking on the phone several times a day, sharing stories we heard on the news, jokes, gossip about friends and family, and just about everything else in our lives.
But at the time I had Mitzy, when I was nineteen, I knew only one kind of real love: this deep bond, this real communion, with my animals, first my Siamese cat, then Trixie, then Mitzy. For a while, one dog then the next, gave me her total love, the play of racing around in the yard, the companionship of walking with me from room to room, sitting next to me when I watched television or, earlier in the day, did my homework, putting her head on my lap; until Mitch won them each away.
He didn’t do it deliberately. It was just the way dogs responded to him. But I watched Mitch and Mitzy cuddling on the couch that night, and for a moment I found myself lost, drifting in a void of grief. I had nothing. Then I was aware of my body just sitting there. I was a little numb. Then I boarded up that part of me that needed an intimate relationship with pets. I told myself not to care. Somewhere deep in my psyche the words must have reverberated: Even my dog doesn’t love me.*
***
*
“Did you get your bird?” I asked Mother a few days later in excitement, on the phone, looking forward to hearing her pleasure.
“Yes,” Mother said, but she sounded underwhelmed.
“Linda says he’s a young bird.” I was puzzled and disheartened by her lack of enthusiasm.
She replied in disappointment. “I don’t know. He doesn’t make any noise.”
My eyebrows rose up of their own accord. He doesn’t make any noise? Among the things I had learned to enjoy about my mother was her literary proclivity. Her vocabulary was usually exact and sometimes flamboyant, and she was known among family and friends to quote lines of poetry. “’Into the valley of death rode the six hundred!’” she would enunciate with flair. Or she might turn around and quote Tarzan. “’And the thin cloak of civilization fell from him like a cloak!”
“He doesn’t sing?” I asked.
“No.” She sounded peeved, as if she’d put in her quarter and was cheated of the result. This childish, regressive tone also belonged to her new, hospital situation. She was normally upbeat and spoke with her natural intelligence and interest.
Moreover, everything I’d been able to do for her to this point had elicited her gratitude. “Oh, this is wonderful!” she said of the little portable radio I’d brought her after the operation so she could listen to her classical music. When I then reported to her the doctor’s concern about her condition—that she was bleeding internally but they didn’t know why, and then that they had controlled it with drugs—she said, “No one tells me anything. I don’t know what I’d do without you!”
Now, in her disenchantment with the little bird who didn’t sing, I felt...as if I’d failed her.
I couldn’t be there for her in person, although I called the hospital all day long, every day, usually from bed. I phoned back and forth between Mother and her charge nurse, her treatment nurse, the nurse practitioner, the nursing supervisor, the Director of Nursing, the activities director, the maintenance man, the chef, the social worker, her assistant, and finally the hospital administrator, almost none of whom cared about her or took care of her needs.
Aside from the abuse and agonizing pain, she couldn’t reach her food (which was not what I’d ordered), her water, her phone; they didn’t bring her beloved newspaper—her one connection besides me to the outer world and her old life. “She shook out my covers and my radio fell—my little radio you brought me – with the classical music – and she wouldn’t pick it up!”
Despite my endless calls, my absence from the hospital limited my ability to help her, and she desperately asked every time we spoke, ”When are you coming? I need you!”
I responded, each time, my heart cringing in anguish, “Saturday.”
I reminded her again about the long bus ride and Susie’s weekend help, driving me over. But my mother’s misery was too acute, emotionally and physically. Her situation was catastrophic. Sometimes I wondered, were our positions reversed, wouldn’t she be there for me?
“He hasn’t chirped at all?” I asked, still hoping and pushing to hear some inkling of joy, however meager.
“Not one chirp!” she stated, at least with a bit of spirit.
When I came to visit her the next Saturday afternoon, I saw you for the first time.
CONTINUED ON: My Little Bird - Excerpt #2
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