I sit at my desk and stare out the window: skies of slate, puddles vibrating with raindrops. Mid-afternoon and the day feels as long as my spirit feels heavy. Each day, moments of grief as I watch my mother struggle with the loss of memory—moments of seeing her joy are fleeting and poignant, like a ray of sunshine on a splash of water.

This is not the essay I want to write.

A couple of weeks ago, my almost-eighty-three-year-old father, a once-upon-a-time minister, packed a white Speedo and flew to Florida for beach and sun and snorkeling. He traveled with my brother-in-law, a quickly but thoroughly planned trip, a break from the constant, ever-present challenges of caring for his wife of fifty-eight years, my mother.

My younger sister and I made a plan to stay at my parents’ home to keep our mother’s routine and environment familiar. On day three, my first day with Mom, Kim gave shift-report as she and I switched places—they had seen turtles crawling over mossy rock in an indoor botanic garden, taken walks in the neighborhood, arms linked, cane in Mom’s left and her dog’s leash in Kim’s right. Stories told, repeated over and over. I tried to listen and laugh, just like my sister does.

The two of them have a language of their own, heads shifting to the side as they banter. “I am the mango lady!” Mom says, again and again as she describes the store where she used to shop for mangos and chutneys and basmati rice from Dehradun, remembering the tastes of her childhood in India. “He says, ‘I know you! Mango lady!’” and the two chuckle themselves into laughter.

After the handoff, my mother comes to my house, and she, so she tells me, has a “horrible, so horrible” time.

This is not the essay I want to write.

I felt smothered by the prospect of her home’s still, warm air, the foldout couch spreading the length and width of the tiny guest room, the inconvenience of it. “I won’t get my morning coffee,” I said to my wife, anticipating my three nights at my parents’ home.

“Just enjoy her,” she said.

On my terms, I thought.

So, I asked Mom if she wanted to stay the night at the Yates Street Hotel—what I jokingly called our house on Yates Street.

This is not the essay I wish I were writing.

We gather her things: a round brush—my sister has showed her how to use it instead of hair spray, a pink flannel nightgown, a toothbrush, a down feather pillow, and all her makings for her breakfast muesli. I place all of it in a white plastic laundry basket, grab the dog who has been sitting patiently in his crate, and off we go to my house.

I don’t pause.

I don’t stop to think that I’ve given her no real choice but to come with me. I am, after all, so cheery. “This will be fun,” I say. “Dad has his vacation and now you are getting yours.” She’ll see. I can be fun too.

Damn this essay.

I show her the route to the bathroom even though she’s been in our home many times over the years. “Don’t go down the stairs, Mom. Just keep walking,” I say, convincing myself that the instructions will keep her from wandering down the stairs and out the front door, or, worse yet, falling down the stairs. We tuck Oreo, her black-and-white, slightly rotund shih tzu, into a crate we’ve assembled in her bedroom, recently vacated by my stepson. (This vacancy is not to last long but I don’t yet know this, which is a mercy, really, as change and I have a volatile relationship.)

I turn on a space heater and give her the large eiderdown. She’s always cold, her ninety-pound frame doesn’t retain warmth.

“You can wake me up for anything,” I say, knowing and not knowing this isn’t likely to happen.

I sleep deeply, unusual for me. Bringing my morning coffee, my wife tells me that Mom’s light is already on. I haven’t taken more than a sip when in walks Mom, right into the bedroom, and she is angry.

“You take me home right now.”

Wait, I think.

“I don’t know who you are or why you’ve kidnapped me but take me home right now.”

She walks to the bed and sits down. I try to put an arm around her but she’s having nothing of it and shrugs me off.

“Who are you? Why do you have me here?”

“Mom, I’m Kris, your daughter, and you’re at my house,” I say.

“You are not and why am I here?” Her eyes are wide and hard. “I’ve been kidnapped,” she says, almost shouting with certitude and bravery.

This essay.

What happens next is surreal, foreign, and the hours pass in a succession of endless moments. My mother has no idea who I am and where she is, her mind colonized by a merciless disease. She has woken up in my home, under my care, and is now a person-who-is-not-my-mother. I want to undo the past twelve hours. I want my mother back. If only I could tell my mother about this angry stranger who is not-my-mother but is glaring at me as though she knows me. My mom would know what to do.

This.

“Who are you?”

“I’m your daughter.”

“You are not,” looking at me with a disbelief that feels like scorn. “She’d never do this to me.”

“I’m your daughter. You gave birth to me in Jordan.”

“What? What are you saying? I knew he had another family.”

“He doesn’t have another wife, Mom. He doesn’t.”

“I knew it. You look just like him. Knew it all these years,” she says, convinced I’ve just admitted to a sordid past of being both my father’s other wife and his other daughter.

The next few days pass and my mother has no idea who I am. She does know my sister, who takes over the nighttime duties. I am paralyzed by regret. I’ve forced a change on her, the very thing I struggle with when it happens to me.

I’m three and refusing to curtsy to the headmistress at Talitha Kumi preschool. I’m nine and asserting that the tuna noodle casserole is the same meal we always have for guests so why is this
a special meal? I’m twelve and refusing to be friendly to the kids playing kick the can outside the front door. I’m fourteen and church is dumb and my mother doesn’t talk to me for days. I apologize without ceasing. “Mom, please just look at me.” I’m twenty-five. “No, I don’t ever want children so stop pestering me for a granddaughter.” I’m forty-two and have fallen in love with a woman. There’s no recovering.

I couldn’t be the daughter she needed.

I can’t even take care of my mother for a night without losing her.

We think we’ve lost her forever. The reappearance of my father, back from his five-day vacation, sends her to her bedroom in terror, the door locking the one-forever-faithful out. She prays to her parents’ wedding picture—a portal to the past. It is perched on a stand before her on the dining room table. Her body rocks and she murmurs in Hindi, the language of her misshapen youth, mother, the only word I understand.

I’m sorry I lost you.

Please come back.

She does, in bits and pieces of her old self—inhibitions and conventions falling to the wayside of forgotten memories, at her core all mother.

“Who are you, again?”

“Your daughter,” I say.

“Ahh. Yes. You know, I have two wonderful daughters. They live nearby.”

“Yes, they do,” I say.

“They take really good care of me,” she says.

I burst into laughter and my mother joins. We are laughing together, a language of our own.

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