The Yellow Wallpaper

I haven’t been wanting to write much lately. I’m feeling tired and uninspired, just trying to deal with the ups and downs of this spell.

A routine is starting to take shape: I visit my mother on Tuesdays and Thursdays right after work. I leave the library at 3:30 and get to Garden Manor by 4. I sit with my mother until dinner, which is served at 5. For the past two Sundays we’ve gone out to lunch and then for a short ride. This seems to be working well for her, although she has accused me of not visiting “for weeks” when I let two days elapse between visits.

We had a very nice visit today. I found my mother in the common room, watching TV with several others. She looked happy to see me and, although she did mention hoping to go home, she seemed calm and settled. We sat in the airy central area and were joined by a woman who is very sympatico with my mother–they react to each other the way I remember reacting to my best friend in grammar school. One day as I walked my mother to the dining area, this woman emerged from her room and they both lit up. “Have you met Mary?” my mother asked me as they held hands for a few moments. Today we discovered that my mother and Mary were born on the same day.

Today was what I hope will come to pass for my mother. Companionship, security, warmth and care. I hope visits like this one will become more frequent, that I’ll be able to relax when I’m not with her, that I’ll come to believe that she isn’t always sadly thinking about what was taken away from her.

The place isn’t perfect, but I can see that I can improve her care by being there frequently and getting to know the staff. There are a couple of CNAs on her wing that are exceptional. The place is very clean and my mother is always dressed in clean clothes, her hair brushed. She told me that the podiatrist visited the other day, and the local lab draws her blood for her there. There are pictures of residents at various activities posted everywhere–my mother has gone on a few outings. When I see the activities director he lets me know what she’s up to.

I’ll know she feels secure when the pictures stay up. I had brought several photographs for her room, and whenever I visit I find them stacked up on her bedside table. Each time I will put them back on the windowsill and the wall–where they belong–only to find them stacked on her bedside table the next time I visit. She claims she needs to have them packed up for her eventual move back home, and so they’ve become a symbol of this transition. As long as they are stacked on the table my mother is still making the journey. When she arrives, maybe the pictures will go up.

My sister and I brought my mother home from the nursing home yesterday. Within two hours of her arrival she was fast asleep, and stayed that way, more or less, for the next 16 hours. I woke her up for her pills at one point but that was it. I probably should not have let her sleep that long–especially since she had just been treated for a pulmonary embolism–but I did. She awoke this morning moaning that her legs were aching–as I expected she would, after so much inactivity. I noticed that she wanted me to help her dress, having gotten used to that assistance in the nursing home. I did, and was pretty firm about getting her up and moving, despite her complaints.

Liz and I noticed a very definite change in her mood from the past few weeks. As upset and confused as she often was in the nursing home, she never seemed to be lethargic. After dressing and eating this morning, she flopped over on the couch in her familiar posture. After an hour or two of cajoling from us–Want to read the newspaper? Watch TV?–she ended up back in bed.

Her alertness improved as the day progressed, as usual. We gently questioned her about her experiences in the home. In her mind, she had been in college again, and she told us that she was supposed to have received “an award,” before graduating, but hadn’t. Several times she regretted aloud not having been given this award, but couldn’t tell us what it was or why she was getting it. She had been taken into a room and a “committee” had informed her of it, but she’d never gotten it.

The night before her discharge I had visited, as I often did, at dinnertime. My mother and another resident whose name was Claire (but whom my mother called “Dot”) seemed to have formed a special bond during the past few weeks, and this night they sat together at one table in the dining room. They were joined by my mother’s roommate Viola, a very sharp lady, and a sleeping gentleman named Italo. Claire had been preoccupied all day with the whereabouts of her car, a preoccupation that had escalated by the time dinner was served. She’d been asking me where the front of the building was, and at first I innocently pointed down the hallway. I realized shortly afterwards that she was formulating a plan to go check on her car, and she wanted my mother to go with her.

“Did we take the car when we came here?” she asked my mother several times.

“I think so,” my mother said, and it occurred to me that possibly Claire was aware that my mother would be leaving soon, and was expressing her own desire to go, too.

“I think it was stolen,” Claire said. “I’m going out to check on it. I have to go check on it. I think I left the keys in it.”

“It’s too dark and cold outside,” I said. “Why don’t you wait until tomorrow to check on it?”

“Can I get a ride with you?”

“Why don’t you finish your dinner first,” I said.

“But my car–did we come in my car today?” she asked again.

“I think so,” my mother repeated.

The diminutive Viola weighed in, waving her hand impatiently. In her wheelchair, she was barely at eye-level with her food. “Nobody comes here in a car! Everyone who comes here comes in an ambulance!” she asserted, before attempting, once again, to awaken Italo.

At this point, Claire pointed to my mother and then to herself, and made a “let’s get going” motion. Once again I attempted, without luck, to divert her attention. A nearby aide intervened then and promised to take Claire out to the parking lot to check on her car, LATER ON.

I did feel sad at separating my mother from Claire, even though she barely said good-bye in her haste to leave the next day. I had been privy to several of their conversations over the past couple of weeks. Although I could not often follow their train, I could see that the women were communicating in some way with each other. Each took the other at face value–when my mother would wonder (as she often did when sitting with the other “wanderers” by the nurses’ station) “when the party was going to begin and how were they going to feed all these people,” Claire would seriously consider this problem before answering.

This was my first real glimpse into the society that existed in this place. I’m embarrassed to say that I would walk into the nursing home and see its residents as “other”–removed from my society for one reason or another. But they have made their own society, with all its rules and nuances and affiliations, and it grows and diminishes with the arrival and departure of each resident. I think my mother was stimulated once again by finding her place in it.

My mother now says she is glad to be home, but then sighs, “Well, I guess that’s the end of school.”

“Weren’t there some good things about it?” I ask.

She immediately said Yes, and then began again to regret not receiving her mysterious award. She had regarded her fellow-residents as students, and I wondered what role she had played in their eyes.