Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen Read online

  In those sentences, I realized, sat the constituent parts of the cocktail that destroyed my mother: an attractive, articulate, strong, well-spoken woman who wanted to cope and had an amazing ability to bounce back quickly from booze and madness; a woman who basically refused to get better by admitting she was ill and accepting long-term, not just stopgap, treatment; and a medical team not willing or able to see how ill this woman was, how much she needed to be forced—legally if necessary—to take the pills that would make her normal, that would make her my mother again. The drinking was a veneer that they needed to see past and often failed to.

  I have now had the opportunity to review Ann's previous case notes, a doctor at the hospital writes in 1994. There seems to have been the diagnosis of a bipolar affective disorder in the past, however hypomanic episodes have been somewhat clouded by her alcohol abuse.

  It is quite difficult, writes her doctor in 1994 to the hospital, because of her past history of alcohol abuse and her personality to really be sure that she is suffering a severe degree of depression.…

  And then there was the painful possibility that all of this just took place a couple of decades too early; doctors now had more tools—better drugs, more social acceptance of mental illness—to help them fix people like my mother.

  40

  THIS IS THE ENTIRE CONTENTS OF A LETTER POSTMARKED December 16, 1990, and sent to me in Brighton, where I am now at college:

  Sat.

  Matti—How to make “Pommes Anna” for students.

  Peel some potatoes—slice into thin rounds using Magimix. Butter a pie-dish or similar. Put in potatoes (you could add chopped cooked ham or chicken in order to make a meal.). Cover with milk—add salt & pepper & grated nutmeg. (Use half [milk]/half cream if rich). Cook in oven [at gas mark] 3 for 1 hour or more.

  Try putting grated cheese on top—emmenthal best or if rich, gruyere.

  VIP nutmeg essential.

  xxx

  M.

  41

  MY MOTHER'S WORST YEARS BEGAN AROUND 1995.

  On September 12, 1995, she writes from her home in Edinburgh to a doctor in Oxford.

  Thank-you for looking after me when I was in Oxford. I have come home, but I may go back. Could you please tell my husband that I love him, but I'm mortally hurt. Yours, Ann McAllester.

  And then nothing for five years. Not a single medical record.

  My mother all but disappears from my life during these years. I have hundreds of letters from her from this period, but they tell me nothing. They are manic scrawls of paranoia and delusion, written from hostels and bed-and-breakfast places in Oxford and Ireland. She has sold her house in Edinburgh and has gone to Oxford to marry a priest, to enroll in the university, to uncover plots. Oxford is also the place where she can escape the sad memories of Edinburgh and be relatively close to Jane, who now lives in London. And then she goes to Ireland to bring an end to the region's conflict, to visit the places where she spent her childhood summers, to uncover more plots. I have done my own bit of disappearing, having long since emigrated to the country where I felt at home when on the road after high school—the United States. I go to graduate school there, then become a newspaper reporter, hiding in Long Island's stories of murder and disaster and snipers. If I'm in the States, I decide, my mother is not my responsibility. There's nothing I can do for her.

  But some news of her does reach me. I hear rumors that she may have been selling her body. She is without fixed abode now. At a youth hostel she befriends a young man who calls me when he is about to visit New York. I am like a stone on the phone because there's something about his tone that shrinks my stomach—not acknowledging that my mother is crazy, or perhaps he knows something about her he can use over me—and he doesn't call back.

  I receive calls from landladies of two separate bed-and-breakfast places in Ireland.

  “Your mother is drinking a lot and … you know,” the second one tells me. I'm touched that she has gone to the trouble of calling me in New York.

  “I know,” I say. She's nuts.

  “I'm afraid she can't stay with me anymore,” she says.

  “I understand,” I say.

  This lady is worried and kind, and I'm grateful my mother has found a forgiving hostess for a few days.

  My sister and I talk of how our mother must be burning through her not-very-large savings. At times she believes she is the richest woman in the world. What will happen when she has nothing left?

  I'm not quite sure how she has managed it, but my mother has made her way to the small city of Cork, in Southwest Ireland, and has bought a small house. In early 1998, I fly in from New York to visit her.

  When I arrive at the airport, I push my cart out into the arrivals area and there are a handful of people waiting for the Ryanair flight from London. My mother has said she will pick me up, but she is not here. I have not seen her for a year. I look at the young parents and their two children, waiting for a grandparent, perhaps. There's the round old lady in the beige coat, unsteady on her feet; the graying middle-aged man; some others whose faces and bodies I scan. Oh, well, I'll dig out the address and get a cab, I think, a little worried about her not being here, because she had seemed so desperately excited to see me when we spoke on the phone. I push my cart forward and the elderly lady in the tatty beige coat shouts, “Matty!” and sways toward me, hurling her arms around my neck.

  “Oh, Matty, Matty,” she says, very loudly, and starts crying and laughing. She holds my face in her hands with a scary strength and I smell her, picking up something of her sweetness underneath the wave of whisky and cigarette odor.

  I lead her away from the people who are looking at us, and she sways and staggers. “I did not recognize my own mother,” I think. Her face is bloated, her big brown eyes sunk between puffed-up cheeks and a somehow heavier forehead. Her angles are all gone. She looks a decade older and just very, very not like a normal person. She is ugly.

  In the cab she barks her address at the driver as if he were a semiliterate footman, and she begins to tell me in a loud voice how stupid the Irish are.

  “They're the most ignorant people you have ever met,” she says. “Plain bloody stupid.”

  “Mum.”

  “I'm sorry but it's true. They're the most ignorant bloody people you have ever met in your entire life.”

  When the driver takes a left turn, my mother, sitting on the right of the passenger seat, flops heavily into the side of the car.

  “I'm really sorry,” I say to the driver, amazed that he hasn't dropped us off before we've even left the airport. It seems the least he could do on behalf of the entire Irish nation.

  “She was like this when I took her to the airport,” he says. Just my luck, he must be thinking, to have picked up this fare for the return journey.

  At her house my mother has four pieces of furniture. In her room there is a mattress and a television. Both are on the floor. In another room there are two single beds, cheaply made but with clean sheets, ready for visitors. “This is your and Janey's room,” she says, and it breaks my heart.

  “Are you hungry, Matty?” she says, and sways toward the small fridge in the kitchen. “I want to make you dinner. I had all sorts of plans.”

  There is only a grimy frying pan in the sink and a few groceries—bacon, tomatoes, butter—in the fridge, and, besides, she can hardly stand.

  “Why don't you go to bed and I'll make us a BLT,” I say.

  She goes to bed and lies on the mattress, propped up with pillows against the wall, smoking cigarettes and ranting. She picks on, in no particular order, my father, the government, the UN, the Germans, and the Irish again. There is a dark-green plastic bucket next to her bed. Sometimes she has to take a pause from her angry monologue to cough and hack gobs of phlegm into the bucket. This can go on for up to a minute. At other times she throws up into the bucket. And then she picks up her monologue where she left off. I'm not even looking at her much of the time. I stare out the window at c
louds the color of dirty sheets.

  She has a coffee mug next to her, on the floor. I watch the football results come in on television and she drinks from her mug. I want her to be sober so that we can laugh, take a walk, cook a meal together, discuss my life in New York, gossip about my sister and my girlfriend. I want her to look after me a bit, perhaps, give me a bit of advice on a few things. I begin to look, quietly, for the bottle.

  “What are you doing, Matthew?”

  “Nothing,” I say, as I move the wastepaper bin next to her bed to one side. She knows what I'm doing.

  “Sit down, Matthew.”

  I lift her dirty bedclothes and hidden in the folds is a bottle of whisky.

  “Don't be silly, Matthew,” she says.

  “You have to stop drinking, Mum.”

  “Give that to me.”

  “No, I'm not going to. You're drunk. I came all this way and you're drunk. Couldn't you just stay sober for a bit, for my visit?”

  She reaches for the bottle. She is small, but she has that improbable physical strength still.

  “Don't be stupid, Matthew,” she shouts. “Give that to me.”

  We wrestle over the bottle, and I tear it away and walk to the other side of the room. She begins to cry. I remember the shock she has had in the past from stopping drinking too suddenly. The dangers of the DTs, delirium tremens. I am due to leave the next day. I will not see my mother before I leave. My real mother. Even if I keep the bottle and pour it down the sink, she will still be drunk or wiped out in the morning. If I keep it, she will just get up and go out, staggering, to buy more. If I keep it, she will just shout at me. If I keep it and prevent her from getting more, she could have a fit and become delusional and even more of a danger to herself. So I give the bottle of whisky back to my mother, choosing to let her continue with her self-destruction. She pours some into her mug, quiets down, and eventually falls asleep.

  I go out and eat chicken and chips from the local chip shop. They are thick and heavy and give me none of the pleasure that they did, as the ultimate dinner treat, when I was a boy. I walk among the girls in their miniskirts and the boys with their hair kept in place with gel and wax. I have a pint in one bar, and a pint in another.

  When I get back, my mother is asleep. In the morning she is still drunk and I hug her. She sobs desperately when I leave. But she can't get out of bed to see me out.

  I've come to want a place even farther away than America. In late 1998 the paper gives me a new job and I move to Jerusalem in January 1999, just in time to be pulled into the war in Kosovo, then the Second Intifada, then the days after September 11, then Afghanistan waiting for the Taliban a few miles away to fall, then Iraq to see Baghdad pounded by American bombs. It is an unusually bloody spell in history. It offers me as much war as I want, and I walk toward it every time with a huge sigh of relief: someone else's tragedy, something painful and frightening and pleasurable, something outsize and extreme, something both anesthetizing and hypersensitizing, something more important than anything else. I cannot imagine living without it.

  42

  In early 2000, my mother asks my sister if she can come to stay with her for a week in London.

  As soon as I picked her up from Heathrow she announced that she had escaped, hadn't told anybody, but wasn't ever going back to Ireland! my sister writes on October 22, 2000, in a narrative composed for the doctors who later treat my mother.

  My mother moves in with Jane—and stays.

  Within a few weeks she had started drinking and her behaviour became increasingly erratic, my sister writes.

  In the middle of August, our mother stops drinking suddenly, and the abrupt withdrawal brings on delusions. She believes a man has come to the front door and she is scared. She goes into the street in her underwear while my sister is in the bath. My sister leaps up, gets dressed, and finds our mother in the nearby gym. Back home, she searches closets and under bed linens for someone she calls “the impersonator.” When my sister goes to work, our mother is in bed talking about someone called Simon who had asked her to marry him but was going to America, and seemed very sad that they would not have any time together, Jane recounts in her written narrative.

  When my sister returns from work, the delusional behavior continues and intensifies, and eventually she takes our mother to the ER. Once there, our mother has several fits, gasping and foaming at the mouth. Ten days later, the hospital discharges her. Her behavior worsens further and my sister reaches her breaking point. She calls social workers and doctors, and a group of about ten people—including police officers—come to her house and “section” my mother, forcibly taking her to a locked psychiatric ward.

  But amid all the awfulness is the start of something better. For the first time it feels like she is going to get proper care and attention. The doctors' notes show a medical team in the local psychiatric hospital quickly piecing together a clear picture of my mother and her history and her illnesses. They do not mistake her for a drunk. Our mother has suddenly placed herself back in our orbit for the first time in many years, and we are no longer children. We are adults now, able to make the calls, able to impose ourselves on and understand bureaucracy. We are the only people our mother has. I live far away and am still absorbed by war, so I am of limited usefulness. My sister takes on the managing and the nursing. Jane has a madwoman living in her home for a year, except for the several times our mother is in the hospital during that time, and it puts a terrible strain on her.

  My sister writes down a conversation she has with our mother on the morning of October 22, 2000:

  Jane: What have you been up to this morning?

  Mum: Nothing.

  J: Writing letters?

  M: One to Hungary.

  J: What about?

  M: Telling them to postpone [Uncle] Paul's trip as it's too dangerous while Milosevic is still around.

  J: Do they ever reply to you?

  M: No, sometimes I ask them things but they never write back.

  J: Do you think they pay any attention?

  M: Probably not.

  J: And what capacity do you write them in?

  M: As Empress and Tsarina.

  J: Aah.

  M: Don't you believe I am?

  J: Well, I haven't seen any evidence of it.

  M: No, neither have I. Maybe it's not right.

  J: I don't think so.

  M: It could all be a big waste of time. Maybe I should let them get on with it alone and get on with my own things.

  J: Sounds like a good idea to me.

  Mum is very fragile, very dependent, my sister writes in her journal on January 19, 2001. She is totally subdued and quiet, in constant need of reassuring and incapable of showing any interest in anything. Her [psychiatric] drug is to blame, it seems, I hope, and while the dose changes there does not seem to be any improvement. She dribbles and shakes, hardly talks and looks scared most of the time. When I am home she follows me round, often standing still as a statue behind me while I wash up or cook, wanting cuddles whenever I pause, even tapping me and asking for them sometimes. All I can do is take her gently in my arms, try and soothe her shakes away, feel how frail and bony she is, and tell her over and over that it is all going to be OK…. I just feel like bursting into tears half the time, and the slightest thing makes me retch—a funny smell or a new problem or issue to be tackled.

  We use the money from the sale of our mother's house in Cork and some of my own savings to buy her a studio flat near my sister's place.

  On May 6, 2001, she moves in. My mother is happy there but she still drinks, still has manic episodes, still has withdrawal seizures that require ambulances. She is a danger to herself.

  My sister writes in her journal: On Thursday [June 7] I was off work [sick] and at about 6 p.m., Margaret, her upstairs neighbor, called me to say she was worried as Mums door had been open all day, the key was in the lock and she had called and poked her head in finding nobody at home. I went round and was wo
rried to find all the lights on and her handbag sitting on the floor…. The next morning I went round on the way to work and found things as I'd left them.

  My sister calls the police, who take the situation very seriously. Filling the [missing persons] form in, she writes, popping home again to find a photo of her, brought it home that she is a very vulnerable person and I had absolutely no idea where she might be, that there were no friends to ask, no clues on where she might have headed off to. For the next couple of days I was sort of in limbo; was she dead in a ditch somewhere, still wandering the streets aimlessly and without money or shelter, or lying unidentified in some hospital?

  Two days later, a nurse calls my sister to ask if she is missing her mother.

  Ann was admitted [to a hospital in North London]… on 9th June after she was found laying unconscious outside a restaurant with a laceration on her head and feet, a psychiatrist writes in my mother's medical notes. She went missing from her home on 7th June. Apparently she was drinking excessively and she had an epileptic fit.

  My sister drives to the hospital in Harrow and finds our mother in a ward next to the ER.

  She was very dazed and confused, still rather dirty and terribly small and sad looking…. Her feet were really cut and bruised from walking so much and in strange shoes that I didn't recognize and that hadn't fitted but other than that she seemed physically OK.

  She stays in the hospital for several weeks, convinced that she has been raped, demanding an HIV test. Then she returns home.

  Ann believed that she can manage by herself and did not want to be sent to a residential home, the doctor writes. Her daughter, Jane, believed that when Ann is discharged she needs support from Social Services.

  My mother attends art therapy and pottery classes. A community psychiatric nurse visits her. She has appointments with the consultant psychiatrist at the hospital. But she still lives alone, largely un-supervised, and she can still disappear at any moment into the endless streets of London. She can still be found on the street outside a restaurant, bleeding and unconscious. My sister and I yearn for something to be done, for some safe place to be found for her.