I never expected to become the mother of my mother. That isn’t how it’s supposed to work. Children grow up, move away from home, and become independent of their parents. It wasn’t something that was talked about as I was growing up; I just absorbed the idea as part of my world view. We lived two states away from my mother’s parents whom we rarely saw; my dad’s parents lived worlds away, although we could have driven to their homes in less than three hours.

This message of independence was reinforced when I came home from college for Thanksgiving my freshman year to discover that my mom had sold my bedroom furniture and turned my room into a sewing room. “I didn’t think you’d mind since you’ve left home,” she explained.

The actual role reversal began so innocently that I never took conscious notice. About nine years ago, she broke her ankle and we would make weekly trips to Abilene to do her grocery shopping and clean her house. Several years later, she lost her job and we began to help her with her bills, finally buying a house for her in the town where we live so that we would be close by. Being a proud person, my mom accepted this help awkwardly, alternating between humble embarrassment and resentment.

The full revelation of my responsibility for her came crashing down on me the last Friday in January 2001, just before the 3:30 bell rang. An office worker brought a note that I must call my husband immediately, before I left school. When I returned his call, he told me the Adult Protective Services Office had called him and that they needed to speak to me about my mom. It seems that she had called 911 multiple times in the early hours that day, terrified that her house had been contaminated from radiation emitted by a satellite which the Russians had purposely landed in her backyard. “They had the exact coordinates for my address,” she explained to me later that night. “I was watching TV when a news bulletin interrupted the program, and as I listened, it hit me that they were giving my address as the location where the satellite would land.”

You see, my mom had left me to live in TV Land. She escaped the pain and humiliation she felt trying to cope with macular degeneration, as well as a poverty resulting from a lifetime of bad financial choices. But most of all, she needed an escape from the horrible loneliness caused by her stubborn pride that kept us who reached to help her at arms length. She has become a rich heiress with powerful and famous friends. Matt Lower visits her frequently after interviewing her for an A&E Biography about her beautiful, handmade Christmas decorations. He is smitten with her from all appearances. Mr. Dillard calls her to ask her opinion about new products he is planning to carry in his retail stores and sends sample products for her to try. Her lawyer and her accountant keep her apprised of her wealth and investments.

TV Land is not all glamour, though. Detectives Stabler, Benson, and Munch of the NYPD Special Victims Unit are still working to solve several crimes that have touched our TV lives. My mom called at 2AM on January 1 in tears to break the news that the Today Show had just announced that our older son Matt had been found dead by his car in a Brownwood alley. Assurances that his car was in our driveway and that he was asleep in his bed increased her fear, now for my sanity. The second week of January there was a grisly murder in her front yard, a drive by shooting. Blood was all over her sidewalk until the police used her garden hose to rinse it off. Upon discovering how much danger my mom was in, living in a city filled with murderers and drug addicts, my TV Land sister was on her way to pick up our mother and save her.

Clothes began to pile up around the house. Without enough suitcases to hold them, white plastic trash bags stuffed with her belongings began to line the living room walls. So many hard choices to make. What to take and what to leave? She would be here soon. Was it today? Or did she say next Wednesday?

Irrational fear overtook my mom as surely as the alien pods invaded the bodies of Sci-Fi America. Now she feared as much for her poor schoolteacher daughter as she did for herself. Her daughter seemed to have lost touch with reality. Because she refused to admit that she’d been fired from her teaching job and kept showing up at her room to teach, the school had hired guards to keep her out. As much as she hated to, Bette was forced to obtain a restraining order against her own daughter, fearful that my insanity would cause her to harm her own mother.

Tragedy, it seems, would not leave her alone. As my very rich, beautiful TV sister was hailing a cab in New York City, on her way to save our mother, she was murdered, a victim of a sexual crime. Who would save her from all this danger now? As she wept in her small living room with only her prized TV given to her on her 75th birthday by her family, the incredible announcement was made that the Russians had programmed their satellite to land in her very backyard. The fallout would be overpowering. Even as the realization that she was in immediate danger soaked in, fluorescent green particles began floating through the walls and closed windows. The radiation would be deadly. She retreated to the safest place in her little house, the bathroom. Water would help protect her, according to the news commentator who had interrupted the regular day’s programming to help her. Call 911, she thought. Yes. Grabbing a phone and pulling the cord across the hall from the bedroom, she called. But did they come? Not quickly enough. She called again. Even if it is the middle of the night (or is it day?), they should come save her. Who else could she turn to?

 

 

 

June 3, 2004