Chosen Family

“I'm late.”

I admitted to myself that I was very late to the realization about my family. That when dealing with blood relatives feels like you’re fighting your way through the jungle with a machete, it's past time to choose your family instead of trying to belong to the family given to you by DNA.

I loved my mom, I lived with her after my divorce. She didn’t drive, so I became her unpaid chauffeur, as one of my co-workers put it. She was having fainting spells, where she would get to her feet and then suddenly just collapse. After she fell in the basement, she had a lump on her head the size of a goose egg and I wondered if I should take her to the emergency room.

“What are your kids’ names?” I asked her, to find out if she was thinking straight.

“Greg, Brian, and Chris.”

“Who’s the president?”

“Barack!” She liked him so much she always used his first name, as though they were close buddies.

Anyway, she refused to go to the hospital.

Despite my best efforts, Mom eventually fell and broke her hip. The surgeon did her hip surgery on Mother’s Day and when I thanked him, he said he was glad to get away from home. I was wondering if maybe he needed a chosen family too, after that statement. I realized later that was the first time I’d seen my brothers spend Mother’s Day with their mother, instead of with their in-laws. Because she was having surgery.

Mom had a six week stint in a rehab facility after her surgery, getting occupational and physical therapy. I remember my brothers sitting there by her bed in the nursing home, playing with their phones when she was in so much pain she was grimacing. When I saw her facial expression, I immediately informed the nurse so Mom could get the pain medication she needed.

I confronted my brothers. “Why didn’t you see Mom was hurting and get the nurse?”

“Well, we thought the nurse would know what to do without us saying anything,” my younger brother explained.

I gritted my teeth to choke back the words I wanted to say, then spoke more calmly. “There’s a lot of patients. The nurses don’t always know what’s going on. Sometimes you have to speak up.”

My older brother said, “Mom didn’t raise us to be assertive. It was always ‘children should be seen and not heard’ with her.”

That was not really the case. Even if it had been, once you become an adult, you have a responsibility to think about how you were raised, and decide if you want to be a different person than you were while growing up.

I put my life on hold to be the sole caregiver for my mother, and I wouldn't change that decision. I remember my younger brother bringing an ice cream cake for my mom's birthday. Mom was grateful, but she knew who was the one who fixed her scrambled eggs for breakfast every morning and who got up more than once in the middle of the night, every night, to take her to the bathroom.

I was so grateful for social media at that point. I couldn't leave Mom for long, so was glad to stay in touch with my people using messages, photos and clever quotes. My friends...my chosen family...saved me from despair.

My friends were there for me when I was questioning how much longer I could go on being Mom's full-time caregiver. Often my back would spasm when I lifted her to her feet. It was so painful that I cried out involuntarily.

"You screamed," Mom once said.

"I hurt!" I told her, trying to keep my patience. "I wish you would let me hire someone for respite care.” Since my siblings could only talk about the vacations they were taking instead of offering to help. But Mom wouldn’t hear a word against my brothers and their wives.

Mom shook her head. "I remember my mom and dad hired someone to come in and do housework, laundry, and meals. The helper got in the fridge and ate their chocolate pudding."

"If I had to work for your perfectionist mom, I'd probably eat her chocolate pudding too," I said.

I am so thankful that my mom’s mind stayed sharp up until the very end. When Mom was in the hospital after her last fall, with broken ribs and a broken collarbone, she started talking to the young Black woman who was assigned to be her technician.

“I’m Veronica.” The technician spoke in a pleasant tone, not with that fake heartiness I hated. “Like in the Archie comic strip.”

“Oh, like Veronica Lake!” Mom gasped. I checked later and the actress Veronica Lake had, at that time, passed away over forty years earlier. But Mom remembered her, although I was fairly sure that despite the technician’s smile and nod, that she didn’t know anything about Veronica Lake.

After Veronica left, Mom said to me, “I don’t think I’ll make it.”

“Mom, don’t give up.”

“You get Greg and Brian to help you with things.” Yeah, right, good luck with that. When I wanted a wheelchair ramp added on to the house, I had to hire the builders. And fire the first one that Brian recommended, and hire someone I picked out at random.

‘I hate it that you fell, Mom. I’ve tried to be so careful.” She had been standing there holding on to her walker. I turned my back for a moment to adjust her seat cushion, and she just crashed down.

My friends had told me that I shouldn’t blame myself. They told  that I needed to take care of myself and get rested up to recover from the exhaustion of being Mom’s caregiver. I still couldn’t sleep much at night, despite cutting back on caffeine and reducing my screen time in the evening. I had to take five grams of melatonin a night just to get about six hours of sleep.

Mom grasped my hand and said softly, “I’m sorry I’m such a mess.”

Meaning it, I told her she wasn’t.

Her condition worsened. Mom stopped eating and talking. She moaned frequently from pain. I had gone from praying for strength and courage for myself to praying for Mom’s relief from suffering. The doctors decided she probably wasn’t going to recover, and gave her enough pain medication to knock her out. She passed peacefully. I wrote her obituary and did most of the funeral planning. Greg and Brian bought the flowers and their extended families came to pay their respects, which was very nice of them.

I was talking to a friend, several months later, in her kitchen. She and her partner had agreed to let me live with them after Mom’s house was sold, until I could find my own place. “I don’t even see my brothers and their families anymore, now that the estate is settled. They live right here in town, but they didn’t invite me for Thanksgiving and Christmas this year.”

“That’s why you were invited to Thanksgiving with us, and why we went out to eat on Christmas.”

“Thank you. I really appreciate what you did. So I wasn’t alone for the holidays.”

She smiled.

I thought a moment. “You also gave me that Christmas cactus, which was awesome. Despite the fact that I’ll probably kill it because I have a black thumb.”

She turned and opened a paper bag. “While I was out, I bought you an Asiago cheese bagel.” She handed it to me. “I remember that’s your favorite.”

Such a kind, thoughtful gesture. No wonder that she, along with her partner, and some other friends, became part of my chosen family.