“Porn sites my mother favors,” I say, finishing his sentence so he doesn’t have to. Darren smiles weakly. “Call it a late-in-life hobby she picked up once she could no longer play tennis or bridge,” I offer by way of explanation that my posh, native New Yorker mother has not always been a sexual deviant. In fact, she was pretty much a prude until she hit eighty-five.
“I really like the ones where women crush men’s heads between their legs like walnuts.” My mom grunts for emphasis at a volume that rivals those coming from her computer. “They’re my favorite.”
Darren’s sympathy from a moment ago is now abandoned as his face appears horrified. Thanks to my mother, this is a kink I am now all too familiar with as her first line of IT support.
“You want to see?” With childlike glee, my mother invites a man waiting for his new Apple Watch to be retrieved from the back of the store to take in the view alongside her.
While a flush-faced Darren jabs at the volume button, I distract my mother with a watermelon Jolly Rancher for her to suck on so I can finish explaining our technological predicament to him, though I think he gets it now. “My mother lives in a Catholic memory-care facility, and the other residents don’t quite share her interests in the carnal arts. They’re more of a crafting crowd.”
“Except for Harry. He likes to watch with me after dinner when we have ice cream,” is my mother’s add-on to my explanation. Oddly specific for a woman whose brain is rapidly failing her.
Picking up on my heightened humiliation, Darren checks his watch and suggests, “Why don’t you leave this with me for a few. I think I can come up with a workable solution for you within the hour.” I’m questioning whether Darren can get the job done or if he’s going to take his lunch break to enjoy some adult entertainment, cued up courtesy of my mother. Though I’m dying to get away from the storewide stares, I’m not really keen to venture into the mall and run the risk of bumping into someone I know—or worse, someone who also knows about Thomas leaving. One hour out in the world has been enough for today. I want to go home and crawl back into my pillow cave.
“Okay, we’ll go get something to eat,” I answer with forced cheer, an attempt to convince myself that a visit to Cinnabon will erase the past six weeks and forty-five minutes of my life. My mother’s blank gaze indicates that she has already forgotten the whole thing. One benefit of having dementia is not remembering to feel humiliated.
“Tell Mr. Kingman I say ‘hey,’” Darren says cheerily, clearly basking in his A-plus customer service.
“I would, but we aren’t in touch much these days; he’s busy shagging his mistress. At least, I think that’s what they call it in England.”
Darren is stunned silent by my mention of infidelity. I thank him again for his help and tell my mother we first need to stop at the ATM before heading to the food court. This time, it’s going to take more than a twenty to erase Darren’s memory of my mother and me.
After our brief outing together, I hate returning my mother to Mercy Community Care, but I’m wiped out from an afternoon of walking farther than the thirty-two steps it takes to get from my bedroom to my kitchen. The people who work at Mercy are saints, doing their best to create a homey atmosphere. To my mother, they are questionably clothed strangers who have no sense of individual style. When we pass by reception, the nurses’ matching aseptic scrubs painfully remind me that my mother is spending her last years in a hospital-lite-like environment. Mom loudly declares that the nurses could at least accessorize with a print scarf or something. My explanation that the uniform is required appeases her until we get to her room. Opening her door, she cringes in disdain, as if seeing for the first time the sparse decor that highlights the sight of her roommate’s brown-orange-and-yellow-knit afghan. With a thigh-slapping laugh, Daphne Allen, the head day nurse, loves to share with me how many times she has caught my mother folding up the blanket and shoving it behind the radiator after her roommate has left for breakfast. I’m glad Daphne finds my mother’s haughtiness entertaining. I’m not so sure the night crew is as tickled when she hands them her cotton trousers and asks for light starch.
Days with my mother outside the facility are exhausting, given the vigilance I must employ to make sure she doesn’t walk away in search of my long-passed father, or Gucci. As a reward for my patience withmy mother’s recurring porn antics, now piled atop my own troubles, I pick up a stack of newly released books and old standby favorites at the nearby library branch to wean myself off early-2000s must-see TV. I then stop at the In-N-Out that’s on my way home. My order never changes, nor does the way I eat it. The burger can easily be reheated in the microwave at home, but the fries are best consumed immediately. Otherwise, they quickly grow cold and limp with no chance of revival.
Inching my way up the drive-through lane, I scroll through my phone’s calendar to check if I had planned anything for this week back when I was a fully functioning human. Mondays are Mom’s day. Check. Lucky for me my mother is unable to tell if I have been gone for a minute or a month, so my recent absence didn’t register with her.
My BBD—Before Being Dumped—memory is murky at best, so I’m shocked to see I had scheduled to update my résumé tomorrow after a longer-than-planned professional sabbatical. I have no idea what I was thinking I would do with a manipulated CV that reads like I’ve been up to something other than laundry and meal prep, but I’m tempted to snap a picture of my calendar and send it to Thomas to prove that I, too, had plans to evolve, to grow. I was obviously getting to it; it was on my calendar, for God’s sake.
I knew no one when we moved to Sacramento, and I wasn’t particularly eager to befriend anyone either. As I counted down from 365 to mark my promised return to New York and ascent to the world-news stage, I started a blog to keep my writing and reporting skills sharp. I called itMilkand marketed it as nutrients for the mind. It was a daily post—a short, simple, easy-to-digest version of the news targeted at the modern working mother who had spare minutes, not hours, in her day to keep up with what was going on in the world. I wrote my blog from 8:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. Pacific but set it to post at 6:01 a.m. Eastern time to maximize nationwide readership over the first cup of coffee. Resting on my laurels of a handful of years on the New York news scene, I didn’t reveal to my readers that I was typing away from anywhere other than the Upper East Side. I even paid monthlydues to a P.O. box around the corner from Quinn’s apartment and registeredMilk, LLC, in New York.
Six years into our maximum two-year stay in Sacramento and now handling two young boys, I was up to four million and changeMilksubscribers and earning a decent amount of money from ad sales. I was not covering the Global War on Terrorism from Kabul like Christiane Amanpour, but I delivered distilled breaking news in bite-size chunks that I knew mothers with limited time could consume. As far as I could tell, I had generated far more subscribers toMilkthan Thomas had to his newly launched LonGev supplements line, and I was doing it on six hours of sleep and around toddler naps, park playdates, and bath schedules.
But then I got too cocky and a little bit sloppy. At the first session of a Sunday-morning Three and Me music class, I met a woman who struck me, for the first time since arriving in Northern California, as real friend potential. Mutually starved for intelligent female conversation, we exchanged pleasantries, which neighborhoods we lived in, the names and ages of our kids, and how excruciatingly slow thirty minutes of “Wheels on the Bus” actually is. She shared that, when not engaged in the mind-numbing rhythm of running a household, she was a forensic psychologist. I immediately latched on, reaching for working-mom common ground, and told her that I was a CNN producer turned founder ofMilk. Putting away the tambourines and maracas, the woman gushed on and on about how much she loved my blog, how she read it most days over her courthouse-cafeteria lunch between the grisly trials she was called in to testify at as an expert witness. This woman looked cold hard killers dead in the eye for a living, and here she was, excited to know me!
That evening, energized by meeting someone I believed could become my first true friend and fan in Sacramento, I began my work session perusing the recent batch of comments and questions posted by my most dedicated readers. There it was, at the top of the heap: a message from sactoforensics1975.
The founder ofMilkis a fake. She’s not a New Yorker. She’s a liar. Chick lives in Sacramento.
After a barrage of hate posts—the most brutal contending I was supposed to be writing the news, not making it, and frankly I wasn’t doing either very well—my readership dwindled to a couple of thousand within a year and a half. I imagined most of those hanging on were like my mother and didn’t know where to find the “Unsubscribe” button. Eventually, I shut my blog down and became a kindergarten-class mom.
I didn’t need Thomas to tell me I should use my brain for something more than planning family vacations, that I should go back to work. I had known for years that I should, that I needed to. But as the months passed by and I hadn’t jumped back into a career, the idea of conjuring words to explain “what I have done and how I have made an impact on the world” required a level of energy and introspection I wasn’t able to muster. It became easier to volunteer to chaperone field trips than it did to craft a one-sentence professional objective. Blowing a loose strand of hair out of my eyes, I edit the “résumé reminder” for tomorrow and replace it with “shower.”
Nothing planned for Wednesday through Friday means I have enough time to read my books and start season one ofThe West Wing. I do see I have two voicemails. John and Andrew only text, Lisa is at work, and Quinn takes a painting class on Monday nights, so I can’t imagine who it is. Inching toward the food pick-up window, I press play.
Callie, I know we agreed no phone calls, but I’ve emailed you twice and texted once about shipping me a few things I forgot, and I haven’t heard back. Let’s not make this harder than it needs ...
Delete. They have stores in London; Thomas can buy whatever he needs.
Callie, this is Mary Jane at Dr. Kwan’s office. We are reviewing patient charts, and we see that you have not had a mammogram or an annual exam in well over two years. Please give the office a call at your earliest convenience to schedule both appointments. Thank you.
I squeeze my arms inward and realize I could lose a straw in my cleavage. Checking the clock on my dashboard, it’s barely after five, but everyone knows that doctor-office receptionists turn off the phones at 4:59 p.m. I contemplate putting in my calendar to call Dr. Kwan tomorrow, when it’s time to roll up to the second window and grab my order.
Fries between my legs, drink in the cupholder, and the bag with my burger on the passenger seat, I ease forward to turn left and head home when a pack of young moms pushing multiseat strollers crosses in front of my bumper. I bet they are headed three blocks south to the playground, with their swinging braids and long legs, to run out the clock on the day with trips down the slide for their kids and coffee-shop gossip traded between them. Not one of them has heard ofMilk.
Instead of heading left, I turn into the right lane and slowly follow behind the mommy mob, remembering my own days of breastfeeding an infant and chasing a toddler, my metabolism and my body on fire. Though it seems like yesterday, I, too, was a perky new mom. I’m sure if I were to park at the playground and walk up to these ladies, they would not see me as one of them. They wouldn’t believe that one day they will be me. In the vortex of early motherhood, it’s hard to imagine that anything could tire you more than the physical exhaustion of a baby’s repetitive eat, sleep, scream routine. It would be cruel of me to open their eyes to the accelerated aging that comes from parenting through the teenage years when the stakes of keeping your children safe are much higher than a tumble on the soccer field. These women do not yet know of the life-altering worries about their children, their marriages, and their aging parents that are coming for them. They don’t even have to have mammograms yet.
Seeing one of the stroller-pushers sip from a giant water tumbler before pulling back the canopy to check on her child, I’m reminded that I have two bottles of prosecco at home and a burger to heat up to salute my making it out of the house and through another Monday parenting my mother. I wipe away the tears I didn’t realize were snaking down mycheeks and hit “John” on my phone. I may no longer have a husband, but I still have my own babies to check on, even if they are adults.
