I wrote this essay a year after my widowed mom moved from the home she had shared with my dad after his retirement. It was a new time in our lives, my mom widowed, my husband and I stepping up to help her during a time of health problems caused by ignoring her needs while my dad was sick.

To Follow the Right God Home

Thinking to make some resolutions tonight during this first week of the New Year, I was reading through quotes I’d recently collected:

“In the giving of self lies the unsought discovery of self.”
–Stephen Post, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University.

“… any forms of goodness function like water; they run into any opening they are given,”
–Martha Beck, author of Expecting Adam.

I had begun writing these quotes down to start an essay just before a difficult phone conversation with my aging mother. She is recovering from a broken foot and has help to do laundry, shopping, and cooking and to drive her places she needs to go. Today, I reminded my mother that the person coming would be taking her to a vet appointment for her puppy, who needs shots. As we spoke on the phone, she was surprised that she had the vet appointment, though I know I had reminded her many times in the last few days. She was most interested in telling me that she couldn’t find her jewelry, which she had decided to hide on New Year’s Eve after hearing there had been a robbery in her retirement building. She called me to tell me her fruitless search for where she’d hidden the jewelry was vexing her. She said she’d get dressed so she could go to the vet appointment. I reminded her that the helper would be getting there in enough time to help her shower and she might spend the half hour continuing to look for her jewelry. She said no, she’d decided to not look for awhile.

I know about that. Sometimes what we are looking for won’t appear until we stop looking. When I decide not to continue writing something because I can’t find what I’ve tucked away deep inside, I sometimes start writing about something else, and the very image I was looking for pops up, almost because my attention is on something else. I respect the choice my mother made. I know it works. I imagined her returning from the vet and realizing she knew just where she’d put the jewelry.

But when I called later to find out how her afternoon went, she told me she didn’t go to the vet, that she was sleeping when the helper arrived and that the helper didn’t say anything to her about the vet appointment; she said when the vet’s office called her, she told them she’d call back another day to reschedule. She assured me that within a couple of days, she would be taking care of everything. She assured me that she knew she had to maintain the required vaccination schedule. Maybe she was coming down with a cold, she added, since she didn’t want to do anything but sleep.

Not calling to cancel an appointment, not taking care of her puppy’s needs and not asking someone else to do it is not like my mother, or at least it is not like who my mother has been. Perhaps what I was telling her about the appointment just a half hour before the helper arrived didn’t register because though she’d decided to stop looking for her jewelry, she was still worrying about it. Perhaps it didn’t stick with her because she felt poorly and didn’t want to think about doing anything at all. Perhaps worry about her jewelry caused exhaustion and forgetting. Or, perhaps exhaustion from an oncoming cold caused her to forget both where she put her jewelry and that we had spoken about the appointment.

I know the wheels of my mind will keep spinning until I move beyond the frustration of well-laid plans subverted. I take a deep breath and I sit with my sadness and worry about my mother’s health and her inability to cope with even a small number of responsibilities. I sit with the fact that I can’t know exactly what is going on. I take refuge in the idea that I’ll call the vet tomorrow and see if the vaccination shots can wait until my next visit to my mother. And I am somewhat comforted by the fact that my mother lives in a building with services should she need to see a doctor.

Agitated and wishing I lived closer to my mother, I write down another of the quotes I’d collected:

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

–William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

I found this stanza in a book about the late poet William Stafford by his son, the writer and poet Kim Stafford. In Early Morning: Remembering My Father, Kim Stafford shares this stanza from his father’s work and discusses how Stafford senior had “a tropism toward truth,” rather than toward success or failure. He carried out his search for truth “by writing, by reading, and by wrestling with hard things in his own mind.” This made him, Kim Stafford explains, like “a kind of porcupine turned inside out: outwardly personable, congenial, hospitable, a good and easy friend; but inwardly bristling with pointed questions.”

“Didn’t the helper remind you that the agency told her that going to the vet was her assignment today?” I had asked. “Didn’t you remember that you and I talked about the appointment in the morning and I’d called the vet to verify it and called you back because you said it wasn’t on your calendar?” I realize now that my pointed questions to my mother poked at her. Gone was my own outward “congenial,” “good and easy” self. I couldn’t conceal my unhappiness that she had forgotten. I couldn’t conceal that this alarmed me. I wanted to talk about it because it shocked and surprised me. She heard this as judgment and blame. And perhaps it was. “You are not the mother I want you to be, the woman I am not worried about.”

The quills of my alarm, of my need to find the truth made her feel badly. Now she complained of a headache so bad she couldn’t walk straight but said she would take care of everything in a couple of days. I believe that she wants me not to worry about her, that the most motherly thing she can do is tell me she will be all right even as she tells me she isn’t. She is describing an emotional state as well as a physical one and I am not receiving what she is offering as long as I want her to be another way, to do something else. We are following the “wrong god home.”

So, I begin to write. I begin to write to be good, to be better than I was when talking with my mother. I write to find an act of goodness that can fill the cavity newly excavated in my evening and wash away my despair. I write to find the image that won’t pop up now as I remember only the sharp sound of her voice as she yelled at the puppy this morning. My mother is vacillating between someone I recognize and someone I don’t want her to become. When I visit her, I have trouble leaving. I am wishing she would live in my neighborhood. I could take her puppy to the vet, mail the necessary letters and checks, fill her pillbox and make sure she has some fun. Instead of showing my mother my concern, I am showing her that I am upset. She won’t hear of it and she asserts that she is in charge.

I keep writing these thoughts, and I see my mother’s apartment filled with lively, bright colored fine art. I see the sky blue sofa she purchased with an attached comfortable chaise. I see the outdoor light filtering into the living room even at night through her open blinds. Perhaps when I call my mother tomorrow, I will hear that she has found the jewelry she is looking for. Perhaps she will ask me to call the vet and make an appointment for when I’ll be visiting. Or perhaps she’ll have a cold and need to sleep. Suddenly, I want to write about her couch, the cherry inlays in her dining table, the way napkin holders have become the place she keeps important paperwork and eyeglass cases where she stores pens. I want to write about the morning she first made coffee with the new “stainless steel commuter mug” Melitta drip pot we’d given her over the holidays because stainless steel doesn’t break like glass carafes do, the way she asked if she’d filled the water well to the correct height and she had. I want to write about her apricot toy puddle puppy licking her arthritic toes that stick out of the cast and the shin of the leg that is not in a cast. I am finding what I couldn’t find when we spoke on the phone–my appreciation of the details of her life, that there are details of her life, that she is alive.

I feel a little better.

When we write to engage our “tropism toward truth,” who we really are, what we are really doing, we offer something of the human spirit to others. Those of us who write from personal experience continue to write, even when our own stories seem inconsequential in the face of world events like the war in Iraq or the tsunami’s devastation in East Asia or the poverty, violence and cruelty nearer to home. We write what we can and we connect to others through our human experiences of grief, desire, loneliness and joy. At times finding truth by reflecting on the situations of our lives may seem only to fill a small crack. But good is good and finding it, we follow the right god home.