Last night I slept on my mother-in-law’s gold couch.  This is the couch I convinced her to buy a few years ago to replace her ratty forty-year-old one.  We shopped all day, first going to all the places she wanted, cheap furniture stores in dicey neighborhoods. I pushed her wheelchair through messy aisles of Formica dinette sets and shiny laminate desks and couches upholstered in nubby synthetic fabrics.  She found nothing that would fit her décor, but she liked the prices and tried to talk herself into something.

Then I took her to the chain furniture stores.  The prices shocked her.  “$750 for a couch?” She found one she liked at La-Z-Boy, a compact sofa with clean lines, upholstered in a slightly shimmery gold printed fabric.  She handed over her credit card like she was relinquishing her newborn child to a fortune teller.  She was in physical and psychic distress spending this much money on a piece of furniture which would rarely be used. She wouldn’t dare sit on it, because she’d never be able to get out of it, and she didn’t have many friends still alive to happen by and sit a spell.  But she needed a couch as a place holder in her living room.

As we drove to her home after the purchase, she needed reassurance.  “I think it will look pretty on the wall with the Japanese pictures, don’t you?”  “I think the blue chair will pick up the blue flowers in the couch, right?” “I think is couch will be a nice change.”

The first time I sat on the old black couch, the predecessor to the printed gold La-Z-Boy, was 49 years ago.  I was sixteen; Mom was 48.  That black couch was fairly new back then, still encased in protective plastic, I think. It took up one entire wall of the living room.

That night, Rick, his mom, and I had dinner in the tiny adjacent dining room.  I don’t remember the main course, but I remember my mother-in-law dropping the green bean casserole on the path from the kitchen to the dining room.  She was embarrassed, but I was reassuring. We were both trying so hard to impress each other back then.  I helped her scoop the spilled green beans into a dustpan, and we went on to eat the remaining clean ones.

My mother-in-law thought I was a good catch, a rich girl from Finneytown, (a middle-class suburban neighborhood about a half step up from Rick’s Dillonvale), and within months of that first meeting, she asked me to call her “Mom.” It seemed a little creepy to me, and more so to my own parents.  I was only a junior in high school, after all, and although Rick was in college, we were years and years away from a wedding, my parents must have thought.

I really didn’t like calling her “Mom,” would have rather called her Flo or Florence or Mrs. Lingo. She had become a single parent of three boys, ages 26, 16, and 15, when her husband, Mel, died after years of struggling with heart disease.  “You have been the daughter I never had,” she said, so what could I do?  From the time I was sixteen, I called her “Mom.”

Rick and I did some heavy necking on that black couch in those first few years.  Maybe his mom was in the kitchen making dinner or down in the basement doing laundry, and we’d go to it like crazy until we heard her coming.  Thank goodness the floors creaked.

One night when I was home from college for the summer, I fell asleep on the couch while watching television.  Rick’s mom called my mom and asked if I could just stay there so they didn’t have to wake me up.  Honestly, I was awake, just didn’t really want to get up for the half hour trip back to Finneytown, but I played possum while Flo assured my mother that Rick would be upstairs while I was sleeping on the first floor.

But the truth was, I had visited Rick’s room upstairs many, many times.  Up ten steps, a landing, and another four steps, brought us to the hall separating the two bedrooms, each with a slanted ceiling on one side of the room where you couldn’t stand up straight.

The room on the right was where Rick and I read, together, Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask,” a sort of how-to manual for two virgins, and then we practiced what we read, over and over, until it was time for his mom to return, exhausted and reeking of workplace cigarette smoke, from her job at General Electric.  My body was beautiful then, but I didn’t know it or appreciate it, though Rick clearly did.
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Last night, I slept on Mom’s newer gold couch, but not for the first time.  I slept on it when Mom was recovering from a broken shoulder, when she came home from a long stay in a rehab center, when she was distraught after getting bad news from the ophthalmologist.  And last night, because she had a fall yesterday.

“Not a fall,” she clarified.  “I just lost my balance… but I wasn’t dizzy at all.  I just lost my balance and kind of slumped against the door, and the doorknob got me in the back.”

A trip to the doctor reassured her that nothing was broken and, no, her kidney wasn’t bruised, as she had feared.  Dr. Mezcua said, “It takes a lot more than a fall against a door to bruise your kidney.”

“But it wasn’t a fall.  I just slumped.” I chuckled a little at her correction, and I saw the doctor’s slight smile as he turned to add notes on the computer.

The doctor hinted Mom wasn’t safe alone, that maybe the time had come when she needed a caregiver during the night, because after all, she was 97.   She wanted no part of paying another person to invade her privacy and rob her independence.  The doctor sighed, then placed an order for a physical therapist to evaluate her, her home, her walker.  “Nobody is going to take my Winnie Walker away,” she said of her beloved red three-legged walker.  “I don’t want one of this big bulky ones.”

So I stayed to help her through last night, but also to observe her nocturnal mobility.

Rick and Randy with their dad

It was a version of a slumber party, I suppose.  Before bed we each had a snack: she her customary snack-size Butterfinger; me, many Butterfingers. Then I tucked her into bed and lay beside her.  She retold the story of how she and Mel secretly eloped while she was still in high school.  I told her about some stupid quarrel Rick and I had.  “I love your son,” I said, “but sometimes he can be a real jerk.”

“I love my son, but sometimes he can be a real jerk,” she said, and we laughed about the man we both love.

When I got tired, I retired to the couch in the living room, now made up as a bed.  I quickly fell asleep, but I imagine Mom lay awake for some time, waiting for her medications to do their magic on her arthritic joints.

Every time she called my name, I jumped up and ran the 15 feet from the couch to her bedroom.  I helped her sit on the edge of the bed, then stand, and she used her Winnie Walker to get to the bathroom door. Then she grabbed the doorknob, then the towel rack, then the vanity, and finally the shower door to work her way over to her elevated toilet seat.  The floor boards and her rusty knee joints creaked in unison.

I had to get up close and personal to pull her Depends down.  When she finished, she handed me a folded square of toilet paper to wipe her.  Sometimes she washed her hands after this bathroom routine, but not always, and in truth, it was only my hands that needed disinfecting.

Each time, she’d say, “I know I’d really feel better if I could just have a BM.”  And I know when she does finally have one, she will tell me on the phone, offering details about the consistency, quantity, and ease of passage.

My mother-in-law has lived in this house for 69 years.  Despite fresh paint (mostly old lady shades of rose), despite new bedspreads that I’ve bought her so she can have some variation in her tiny world, it is still that house.  And though that old black sofa is gone, the newish one is in the exact same location. The single chair in the room is now a lift chair, and the television has evolved into a big screen TV, and even that she can no longer see.

It’s such a quiet house now.  There is a grandfather clock that chimes the hour, and Flo often has the radio on to listen to FOX News or sporting events.  Her caregivers chat with her like friends, and they actually are her only living friends.

It is hard to imagine that this was once a place where three boys ran in and out of the house, letting the screen door slap shut, tracking in mud.  Where kids wrestled and watched cartoons.  Where Mom and Rick’s dad, Mel, had card club, and maybe even cuddled up on that old black couch.

The house is tidy and clean, always, but every once in a while I catch a whiff of that old person smell, that odor of bathroom accidents and loose dentures and stagnant too warm air.

How many times had I sat on that old black couch, I wonder.  I remember once reclining on it, wearing short shorts, while Rick shaved my legs with an electric shaver.  I sat on that couch in miniskirts and peasant dresses, homemade lace prom dresses and dotted Swiss maternity smocks.

I watched General Hospital there, drinking frosty Fresca in front of an oscillating fan.   I nestled in the corner of the couch to nurse my babies.  I sat there surrounded by Christmas presents and wadded wrapping paper.  I studied Spanish vocabulary words and graded English essays while sitting cross-legged on it.  For over four decades, that first couch and I grew older together.  Flo replaced it with a new model, and time kept marching on, for all of us.

Last night I slept on the gold couch, the expensive one.  “Mom, this was a good purchase.  This is a great sleeping couch.”  And when I say “Mom” now, it seems natural, and it has since my own mother died four years ago and Flo said, “You have always been my daughter, and now I will be your mother.”

This morning when I woke up, I was barely stiff or tired, though my hair was wonky and my breath was foul.  I dressed in yesterday’s clothes, raked my hands through my hair, and brushed my teeth with my finger.

I looked around this house:  the dusty artificial flowers; the porcelain figures Mom bought in Japan; the tea cart covered by at least 100 Beanie Babies she was sure would be valuable some day; and the gold couch.  We will have to dispose of all of this, sooner rather than later.  Will we pitch the Beanie Babies which aren’t, after all, valuable?  Will we sell the couch for $50 to someone who would think it a bargain, just some outdated piece of furniture that would do until they could buy something better?

It is 8:30 AM, time for me to head to my writing class.* I sit on the end of Mom’s saggy bed and we talk about how fast time travels.  We find it hard to believe that Rick and I have been married for 45 years.   That our daughters are all grown up.  That Mel has been gone for a half-century.

“I love you,” she says.  “I don’t know what I would do without you.” She takes my plump hand in her bony one, and looks at me with her bright blue, unseeing eyes. Then she squeezes my hand and lifts it to her cheek, a signal that she wants me to pet her.

“I love you, Mom.”  The two of us are now two women alone on this island, two women staying in place, moving through time.  And the man we both love is quite beside the point.  We are close in a way only two women can be.

I remember the time Mom told me about the things she missed doing in her dotage. “I just wish I could wash my windows and hang my summer curtains” she’d said.  So this morning I didn’t complain to her about having to go to the dry cleaner’s and filling the tank and mailing a package, as I might to my daughter, because Mom misses these ordinary chores.  She misses ways to occupy her active mind trapped in her diminishing body.

She wants me to read another chapter to her from Doris Day’s biography, but I have to go.  I have important things to do.

“We’ll read tonight.  I’ll be back at 8:00.”   I kiss her flat cheek and say, “I hope you have a big poop today.”

“So do I,” she says.  And she slowly lets go of my hand.

*I wrote this, all 2300 words, in my writing class in under an hour. I felt like it fell right out of my heart onto the paper. The muse (and Mom) were with me!  “Mom” died  about six months later, in August 2017.     This piece was first published in Seven Hills Review in 2020.

More posts about moms:

The Club: Motherless Daughters
Reading Babies Cries
Pro-Life Birth in Norway
You Found What in the Cake?  An Homage to an Indifferent Cook, My Mom
10 Things I Learned While Cleaning Out My Parents’ House
Bedtime Stories With Mom
I Loved My Purple Grandma
My Grandma Name