Another Victory For Your Unconscious

The dream that morning, my last before waking, began with me sitting at a little cafe table with George Michael, who did seem a little surprised to be there too. Like maybe I’d summoned him back from the world of shadows for this: a coffee, with me. He said nothing, I said nothing. Who is this novelist, perhaps he was thinking. We drank our coffee quietly and looked at each other across the table, and then I woke up.

It was Mother’s Day, 6AM. I was in a hotel room in Southern Maine, my husband asleep beside me. The room was cozy, masculine-coded, as my husband had observed just before we fell asleep—I’d admired the wide grey and blue herringbone carpet, the king-sized bed across from a dark blue and wooden contemporary couch and table with an ottoman also, one that I’d even used to put my leg up, per the doctor’s orders. I am recovering from a minor, masculine-coded injury: a log hit my shin while I was helping my husband chain-saw a tree that had fallen in a storm almost directly onto our wood-pile.

I should mention, I have boring dreams quite often. Years ago, I dreamed that I asked my husband for a Kleenex, and when I woke up, I told him about it. “Another victory for your unconscious,” he said, and went back to sleep. His dreams are baroque by comparison, often with celebrity cameos, and usually more active. His dreams are potboilers, mine are indifferent to plot. This was my version of one of his dreams—still boring, but with a celebrity cameo. And I do believe my boring dreams are one way my unconscious mind regulates me. As I sleep through a night in this burning world, my unconscious is like “ok calm down a little, ok great. Now it’s almost time to wake up, here’s a dream about coffee with George Michael.” A favorite singer and crush from my teen years set down in my dream like a stuffed animal set beside a cranky toddler. And then it tells me to wake up and get to work.

The thread I followed out of the dream was the smell of fresh coffee. The cafe in the lobby was brewing the first pot of the day just a few doors from our room. We were the first room down that ground-floor hall. I don’t know what message George Michael had for me, and I may never know, but his expression, a kind of serene regard, has followed me since.

I woke up, took my laptop to the lobby and wrote until 8:30, and then I brought coffee back to my husband and we left for Mother’s Day with my mom. The plan was for my husband and I to bring her flowers, make her brunch and do our best to cheer her up. Since her stroke, her live-in caregiver has the guest room and so I am in hotels when I visit, easy enough as Southern Maine has many empty off-season hotels near her, for now. The practice has been healthy for me, for my boundaries, and getting some work done. I know from experience last fall that it is impossible for me to work in her house at what was once my step-father’s old desk in his former office, surrounded by the museum of power cords to forgotten devices he collected, sitting on the window ledge as they have for decades as each device was abandoned or lost in turn. My mother’s two brothers, both gone now, used to do this also, and my stepfather is in memory care now. And as we pack the house up for my mother and prepare to move her to California later this summer, where she’ll live in an apartment near my sister, if we are missing a cord, we will come to this window first.

A Bouquet of Flowers In A Crystal Vase, Nicolas Van Veerendael, 1662, Flemish, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access Collection.

We pulled the brunch off. We got the second-to-last asparagus bunch, some potatoes, the florist had the flowers I ordered. Mom had some goat cheese and spinach in her fridge for the quiche we made, along with some of the most beautiful eggs I’ve ever seen, a weekly gift from one of her care-givers. She is well-looked-after by a team of shrewd and kind women who are not put off when she doesn’t remember their name or doesn’t answer right away—the stroke—and little touches like this, they make me tear up. Helping my mother with her care has been an education on the way misogyny inflects, or really carpets, floor to ceiling, so much of our lives. And so I’m now especially grateful when people are, well, human.

My sister had sent flowers, a beautiful bouquet of roses and some other spring flowers that sat on her now immaculately clean coffee table, clean as never before. My mother had put her house up for sale and so the house had the feeling of a place readied for the photos a realtor takes and the viewings also. My mother and I have in common the habit of keeping a coffee table covered with books and magazines, though I have several times the number that she has, and on two tables, not one. Her house sold before the first showing to a couple who had moved away to South Carolina the year previous and then moved back. My mother, at their age—the new owners are in their 50s, my age also—had done something similar, moving to Florida before moving back with my stepfather, who she found there in Jupiter, FL, after just three years. I imagined the woman—a nurse apparently—walking among my mother’s rooms, and I found myself hoping the house would be good for her and her husband.

My mother was in one of her quiet moods on this visit. Sometimes when I call she is listening to the television, typically MS NOW as it is now called. But she did not want music, or television, or film. She did not want news she did not already have that day, unusual for her, though we did have a short laugh about the repulsive gold statue of Trump. Sometimes she looked out her window at the street. Sometimes at the birds on her deck. She pointed out the photo of the barred owl one of her caretakers took this last winter. We more or less just sat and talked. When I put her flowers in an enormous crystal vase we’d found in her closet while cleaning it out, a gift from someone, forgotten for decades, I noticed her table had daffodils from her garden too. She spoke of how she and my stepfather had bought this home to age in place here. I thought of how they’d resisted many of the improvements that might have helped them do that—laundry upstairs instead of the basement, for example, repeatedly rejected. No way, she would reply, as would he. I have since made a study of their stubbornness, in case it shows up in my house also, like her habit for making piles of books and magazines.

My mother is 87, and last year’s stroke was her first. When I see her every two or three weeks she has changed, noticeably stronger, and I tell her this. She thanks me. “I feel like an inchworm,” she has said. But she says it with a smile. And then she asks, “What choice do I have?” She has said that phrase my whole life. No one ever suggests anything when she says it, certainly not me. I remember it from back in the 1980s, after the death of my father, when people would praise her for handling being a single mother so well while working, and she would say this. “What choice do I have?”

Now she is preparing to go West again as she did when she was young. She and my sister’s mother in law are moving to the same independent living apartment complex near my sister. It’s nearly a set-up for a sitcom.

*

Each visit to my mom has a lesson for me and this is no different. Back home again, I feel the need to see myself as my mother was when she moved to her house 30 years ago, when she was making plans a little like I am now. She is where those plans took her. The question flickering around me then: Where will mine take me? Of everything she taught me, she teaches me something new now, even just in the comparison.

I have spent much of the year thinking about her but also, thinking about how I will age and who I will become, where I want that to happen. How Dustin and I can take care of each other. My friends and I talk about this all the time now, even as we also talk about taking care of our parents. I even asked my mother how she cared for her parents in part just to learn what she did and whether there were any tips she had.

I have been hearing a yoga teacher of mine from the 90s in my head every so often. We do this so we can wipe our asses as long as possible, she used to say, and while her face and name are lost to me, her voice is not when I get down on my mat. Aging successfully is about being yourself as long as you can, as much as you can, as you prefer, from what I can see. Yoga has turned out to be what I need to do just so I can walk downstairs and make coffee. I now do quats and push-ups as my coffee brews and my eggs fry. I am making my appointments, taking my medicines, doing my routines, adjusting them, adding to them. Looking after my diet and exercise and my pleasures as well, and maintaining the network of hypervigilant habits I’ve learned in a life spent in what still feels like this country.

But last week, according to my phone, I read about 1500 pages, mostly of fiction, surprising myself once I counted. And while it is is a big part of my job as a writer and a professor, it seemed more than I usually read while teaching. I say it’s my coffee tables, but really, my house is full of books and magazines in piles, and I want to grow old with them, this house for a TBR. And I want more weeks like that. But this last year I have felt myself caught in the medusa stare of the phone that I associate with Trump being president and I am trying instead to read the many books around me when I feel the urge to pick up my device. Or to read the many books also in my device. A different scroll. The stats came from my social media blocker app, Opal, which doesn’t recognize my reading as useful and told me I could have read Moby Dick in the amount of time I spent on the app called “Books.” I am reading, basically, like I did when I was a kid. When I read to hide myself and my fears.

It’s late and I don’t know how this ends, but I suppose that’s really the point of getting older. All of this preparation and you still can’t see what’s next. And meanwhile, I do know the yearning for other places, a feeling that grew at my mother’s side, is as strong in me as the one I feel to stay and read.

If you see me out of my house, out and about, hauling books around, or just reading, you’ll know why.