Things Consumed

 

Time with my Mom.

Last Tuesday night I boarded the Amtrak train out to Modesto, to visit my mother for several days while she was recovering from her big surgery. (As I'd mentioned earlier, she had some large granulosa cell tumors removed from her ovaries, along with her reproductive system.)

I went out to visit her and help her around the house as soon as she would accept the help, which was Tuesday night. I know how difficult it is to recover from surgery, and figured she could use some company, some home cooked meals, and some help around the house.

*

I had expected to spend most of my time reading while my mother slept. However, she had quickly decided that the Vicodin didn't do much for her aside from make her delirious and give her nightmares, and so she was awake but very weak. She told me that she had worked up the energy to eat up to one canned peach at a time, but otherwise she had dozed.

I had my father take me grocery shopping at the local supermarket (which had once been a big deal, as it was the town's FIRST supermarket, and still has just one rival after about a decade), and then set to work on inspiring my mother's appetite.

Over my Tuesday through Saturday visit, I prepared:

-Tibetan noodle soup: a warmth-spreading concoction of ginger, garlic, spinach, tomato, potato, egg noodles, and spices
-potato, kale, and garlic soup: exactly what you think, blended just enough to have a thick potato smoothness, with chunks of potato and kale to make it interesting texturally
-whole wheat spaghetti with tomato sauce (this was intended for my dinner, rather than hers, but she managed to eat a bit of it anyway)
-broccoli with garlic over rice stick with a bit of soy sauce: simple, easy to eat
-a moist and saucy stir fry of garlic, ginger, tomato, spinach, and rice stick with soy sauce: the delicate rice noodles are so easy to eat, and feel very light even as they absorb the other flavors.

I was thrilled that Mom was able to move from having a single canned peach to having an entire bowl of noodle soup at a time. Her energy came back, and her color improved. I made large pots of each soup, and divided them into several small containers in her refrigerator: when she wanted a snack or got up in the middle of the night, it was very easy for her to serve herself up another small bowl. I also bought a nice sourdough loaf, which she was able to eat with butter as a side dish to most small meals I served her.


I tried not to eat very much during my visit, since I stayed indoors with her nearly all day. I'm not accustomed to going without exercise, and so cutting back on food seemed like a wise choice.

*
There isn't too much to do when you're taking care of someone who is recuperating and needs lots of rest. During the day I would cook, wash dishes, and chat with her between her naps.

We spent some time making fun of old issues of Martha Stewart Living and Food and Wine which a friend of hers had left there, both of which were completely unhinged from reality as my mother and I know it. It is odd how publications like that could take things that are fundamentally wholesome - keeping a clean house, making handmade gifts, serving tasty food - and corrupt them so completely. These basic pleasures are turned into something quite different, something concerned with status, price, and purchased forms of legitimacy. Buy this specific color and brand of paint, arrange these specific designer/custom/expensive flowers/vases/artifacts, eat this imported foodstuff along with these other specialties that you should spend improbable periods of time preparing...

No one should spend weeks of their lives accessorizing their napkins for specific holiday meals, okay? It is not healthy. It is not proportionate. It is a sort of obsessive-compulsive brand of materialism that has no place in a well-adjusted life. Please.

Also, F&W was almost entirely about pairing wines with the flesh of the dead. (Zombies, take note!)

It was also interesting that, in both magazines, the world beyond the U.S. merely exists as a source of decorative elements for home entertaining, rather than as a place where real people live with their families and have normal aspirations for long, healthy lives with their loved ones. Other countries were referenced as sources of inspiration, color palettes, and wine. But that's it: no one is home there aside from winemakers and people who sew pretty scarves.

*

When my mother had more energy, we sorted through boxes of loose photographs that my mother had amassed and wanted to have in better order. About half were test prints from my father's darkroom experiments of the 1970s, and the rest were family photos, which we reviewed (especially with regard to hairstyles) with great hilarity. (One of the benefits of this project was that I have more material for my biographical photo essay. As I approach 40, I am assembling a set of photos representing me in each year, one per year. This project helped me cover the years 1968 - 1976. Sadly, my mother has stored nearly all of the family photo albums in some inaccessible, unspecified place, and so I could not complete the project during my visit.)

There were quite a few photos that my father had taken and printed in his darkroom that I had never seen before. Photos of the apartment that I was conceived in, and of the apartment down the hall where I was first taken home from the hospital. These photos inspired stories from my mother about the Madam and her prostitutes who lived in the apartment building, and who worked the fancy hotels downtown. My mother told me stories about the doctors who delivered me during my mother's 24 hour labor, including the doctor who had survived the Japanese internment, and told my mother her story while they waited for me to be born.


*

I spent my nights listening to trains rumbling past, since the same train tracks I arrived on pass by just 30 yards or so from her house, directly across the street from her home. The train traffic is mostly freight, which allowed me to wake up repeatedly during the night, attempting to differentiate between passing freight trains (common) and earthquakes (less so), which became easier after the first night.

The only real exercise I got during my visit came from a few floor exercises I did to stretch my back, and from walking my mother's three dogs. All of her dogs were eager for walks, though my mother had insisted they were fine since they could play in the yard. I decided to walk each of them, even though it was hot out. They all appreciated it, though my mother's 72-pound pit bull managed to yank me off a steep slope and drag me briefly through loose gravel before the leash came off my wrist as I tried not to bounce any more.

I was also able to refresh my memory about how much dogs drool and pee. That was an added benefit.

*

My parents joked about keeping me chained up in the house so that I could continue to cook and clean for them, but I pointed out that Steven would come rescue me if only to have me cook for him, and so they dropped that idea. :-)

My mother gave me tons of credit for all of the improvements she made while I was there, but I was really just happy to have been able to help out for a few days. It was much more satisfying for me to be there, cooking, cleaning, and chatting, than it was for me to sit at work, worrying about how her recovery was going. So I think it was good for both of us.

Labels: healing

posted by Arlene (Beth)10:05 PM