Nancy McCabe Stuck Together

I’ve told my daughter the following story before, maybe more than once; she says I repeat myself. In it, I’m twenty-two or twentythree, in a Dillons grocery store with my mom, who releases her hold on her cart to gesture toward her ear. It’s the same motion my daughter will someday make to indicate that I have ink on my face or something green in my teeth.

“There’s a Band-Aid behind your ear,” my mom says when I ignore her gesture.

“Oh, I know.” I wave her off impatiently. I’m always sticking BandAids in the place where my ear connects to my head. My glasses are heavy, and the frames tend to dig in.

“But—” My mom waves frantically toward her own ear, where her round hearing aid is tucked.

I ignore her, stalking off down the bread aisle. She follows me, looking resigned. Is my mother pained at the way I ignore her, the way I will be someday when my own daughter does the same thing? My mother peers at me skeptically several times through watery blue eyes that have come to look bluer than ever in contrast to her hair, which has changed from stone gray to knifeblade silver and now to cloud white. Age has dulled her sharp edges, started to vaporize her. She follows me to the car, lips flattened together, damming up the words, or maybe the laughter.

I glance in the rearview mirror. A glob of piled bandaids has come loose and is dangling from my ear. I’ve been trooping around with a contorted bandaid earring like a demented woman who’s mixed up her first aid kit and her jewelry box.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask my mom, who just shakes her head, lips pressed together, chagrinned and amused. Not long after, a graduate school classmate mistakes the bandaids piled behind my ear for a hearing aid.

My daughter just shakes her head at these stories. She knows that I didn’t have hearing aids. I didn’t have hearing loss. Sometimes I just refused to listen to my mother. Maybe I was getting back at her for all the ways she refused to, or could not, hear me. my dad’s uncle Joe hopped a train when he was twelve and was never seen again. My mother’s greatest fear was that one of her children might do the same thing. “I’m afraid that you’ll leave and never come back,” she once said to me. I was twenty-one. We were at a mall, standing by the railing, watching the endless flow of crowds below. I hadn’t called my mother in more than two months.

I don’t tell my daughter this. I don’t want to be giving her any ideas. She already rolls her eyes and treats me like I’m a little bit feeble.

“I’d never do that,” I insisted, but there was a little part of me that thought maybe I could ruthlessly uproot myself. I felt bound to my mother by guilt. I wasn’t sure if I knew how to make choices or have feelings apart from that.

Now my own daughter is in her early twenties. She has moved away. Sometimes she texts every day or two and sometimes weeks go by between phone calls. I think of my mother. I wish I could talk to her about this now. I listen to other mothers. The thin edge of grief of mothers whose children have drifted away. The relief of mothers whose children come home for weekends now and then. The secret fears beneath the scorn of mothers who avoid talking about their children.

“Some mothers and daughters are best friends,” my mother used to say, sadly. I was never sure what she wanted from me, and none of my words or actions seemed capable of dissolving her disappointment.

“You’re my best friend,” my daughter has always told me. Now, though, she is financially independent. She has a serious boyfriend. When time goes by without contact, I understand my mother’s persistent doubt and fear. “We’re different,” my daughter sometimes says, as if our own relationship is stitched together with a stronger thread, stuck together with a stickier glue. And it’s true: we’re closer, which also means more volatile. More prone to misunderstandings and expectations and eruptions. When she criticizes me or vehemently thrusts me away when I try to connect with her, I cringe, thinking about my own karmic debt, how merciless I was toward my own mother. Is payback inevitable? What if my daughter distances herself the way I did? at twenty-three, because of persistent tachycardia, my daughter has to wear a heart monitor for a month. “This is a pain,” my daughter says on the phone. She’s three hours away, in Pittsburgh. “These things are designed for sedentary people in their eighties. How am I supposed to run with this thing on? And I can’t take a shower because the stickers that attach to my chest keep coming loose.”

“I know it’s inconvenient, but I wish you wouldn’t be so cavalier about it,” I respond.

“How can you say I’m not taking this seriously?” Her tone is defensive. “You’re treating me like I’m a child.” my mother and i were never fully estranged, though when I was in my twenties, there were entire seasons when I had no contact with her. On a couple of occasions, upset that she put my brothers before me and her other grandchildren before my daughter, I even wondered if I was capable of severing our connection. Our bond always felt fragile, makeshift, like the duct tape I once used to repair things around an apartment: a dresser that had come apart, a plug that kept falling out of an outlet. Like slapping Band-Aids on wounds rather than fixing the underlying cause. And yet, somehow, it still felt as if we were stuck together in some profound way that could never be pulled apart. i don’t want a relationship with my daughter that feels patched together like that. My mother raised her children not to need her, she often said, and I didn’t. I’ve always encouraged my own daughter’s independence, but I don’t want her to stop needing me. During the teenage years, when most kids are gradually withdrawing into their own lives, my daughter suffered from a mysterious immobilizing illness that interrupted the normal detachment process. I wanted her to need me, but not like that. Not in a way that made it harder for her to go, harder for me to let her go. We were each in a perpetual tug of war, wanting to stay connected, afraid of being confined. It was the classic push pull of fairy tales: fear of abandonment alongside fear of being smothered. my mother used to call me every Sunday. She’d follow the same script every time, asking few questions, delivering her health update, retreading old memories. On the rare occasions she’d veer off script, I’d shift into alertness. “When you were a baby, I affixed tape to your arms and legs because picking it off kept you occupied for hours,” she said once, a story I’d never heard. I laughed at the wicked humor that she usually hid behind Bible verses and clichés and her fervent wish that I remember her as a saint. When I was six months old, she’d weaned me abruptly and given me over to the care of aunts while my older brother was sick. Maybe that’s why we’d never really bonded. someday, maybe my daughter will have a child. She’ll struggle when her own child leaves home. Even if I’m around, will she talk to me about it? If my mom were around, would I talk to her? Or would I stay as defensive as I was when I was young, deflecting any possibility that she might criticize me even though she was never especially critical? I would like to say my own daughter isn’t afraid of that. But she so often hears criticism when I don’t mean any. there are times i wish i could call my mom and say, what was it like for you? How did it feel when your children left home? I want to say, remember this, remember that, remember the time when I was little, how you taped tan construction paper labels to all of the furniture, like museum labels, intended as reading aids for me or one of my brothers? couch, closet,mirror. I thought of Sunday school stories about Adam naming the animals. How labeling things can help you suddenly make sense of them. my daughter is complaining on the phone about the heart monitor again. “These stickers are leaving permanent scars,” she says, sounding overly dramatic though in fact this is not an exaggeration. Her skin is so sensitive that sweat and tears cause swelling and rashes. Her skin is so sensitive that sometimes mosquitoes leave marks that fail to fade with time. She had to have laser treatments to reduce the scarring left by allergy shots. So I mean to sound sympathetic when I say, “You’re probably the only person they’ve ever treated who has this problem—”

How often did my own mother want to say, maybe you’re not a child, but you’re my child?

How am I supposed to not worry about my daughter’s heart?

Finally well enough to wrench herself away, my daughter went off to college. I suggested that we establish a time to talk each week, but she was having none of that, and later I figured out why: she wanted to be free to text me every day when she felt like it, and not at all the rest of the time. There were few days that we weren’t in touch, which gave me lots of opportunities to say the wrong thing.

But I understand the all-consuming experience of having a sick child. I wished I’d talked to her more about that when I was grown. And I’m weirdly touched by this picture of my mom keeping me occupied by tearing off bits of tape and slapping them onto my skin.

I kind of wish I’d thought of that when my daughter was little.

I think of how my mom gave me language, gave me this tool for making sense of things, for cobbling together my memories and worries and fears, to reach out over time to some future version of my daughter, to reassure both of us about the ways we are stuck together.

My daughter interrupts. “Why would you say that? When you say that I’m the only one who’s ever felt that way, you diminish my experience.” sometimes i wish i could call my mother and say, remember how I used to twist my hair around my finger into tangles you couldn’t unsnarl, so when I was nine, you made me get a pixie cut? I hated that haircut the same way my daughter looks back and hates the bowl cuts hairdressers persistently gave her. Remember how when I was older, I’d say to my mom, you’d place tape across my bangs to trim them evenly? It was one of the few things we did together. One of the few things I needed her for. in my twenties, when i returned home for visits, my mom and I talked nonstop for two or three hours, catching up and exchanging family gossip. Then the talk died down. It was like my mom just ran out of energy, and after that, her attention drifted, and she started delivering platitudes and shifting into stories that she’d already told me a million times. There was only so much intimacy she could stand, I thought, though now, looking back, I wonder if in fact listening to me took more out of her than I realized. Maybe she retreated into rigid routine, repressing all spontaneity, to disguise or compensate for her hearing loss.

“That’s not what I said. That’s not what I meant,” I try to explain, but we’re still tangled up in a frustration that feels unknottable when we hang up.

My daughter and I have, by contrast, always had a million things to talk about: books, politics, fashion, TV shows, friends, relatives, health issues, memories. When she was in college, those conversations began to taper off, be cut short, our interactions mostly texts that pinged in: she needed more contacts, another pair of glasses, she needed to make a doctor’s appointment, she needed to pay for allergy shots, her rent was due. “I’m stressed,” she’d say. “I have so much to do. You have no idea how much I have to do, Mom. Can’t you call the doctor for me/pay the rent/mail me my favorite shampoo?”

Now we have fewer of those exchanges: a positive development, I guess, but I miss hearing from her. When she comes home, we talk nonstop for a couple of hours and then she drifts away to go for a run or call her boyfriend. She goes to bed early now instead of staying up with me to binge watch a show or pick out a movie. She doesn’t like to go shopping anymore or out to eat. The things that have always connected us feel like they’re gradually dwindling away. not long ago, i found a story that I wrote when I was about twentythree. A mother and her grown daughter are in a car together, the unfocused road blurring by, the mother’s face dwarfed by her oversized Eighties glasses. The mother and daughter both have fair skin.

Blemishes tend to resurface whenever they’re upset, scars where cold sores or cuts or pimples have healed suddenly blazing bright red. As she drives, the mom keeps saying things she’s said a million times: “I’m afraid to say anything because you’re always snapping my head off” and “I try so hard to please you, but you are never pleased,” and “Sometimes I think you could go away and never come home again,” and “I hope you feel guilty for the rest of your life about the way you’ve treated me.” when i was a child and I didn’t want to listen to adult conversation or long sermons, I patted my hands fast against my ears. That made people’s words sound like “quack quack quack.” Or I put my fingers in my ears and kept my eyes from focusing, pretending that I was underwater. Sometimes I also distracted myself by rapidly pressing one eye closed, then opening it and pressing the other closed in quick succession, watching objects in front of me jump around. Sometimes, as a teenager, I’d put my fingers in my ears, so that water pouring down in the shower sounded like rain on the roof. Is ceasing to listen inevitable, evolutionary, a way the young survive and keep pushing into their own lives, refusing to be suffocated by anyone else’s cautionary tales or hard-earned lessons? in the story i wrote at twenty-three, the mother sets the cruise control and lifts her foot from the accelerator, then lets the car slow to twenty miles an hour before she gives up and speeds up again. She has an unlined face, a halo of white-gray hair. Out the window, trees and porta-signs and fruit stands blur by. Unfocused, they warp as air does above a barbecue grill or through the smoke of a bonfire. The speedometer hovers just below fifty-five, then moves again gradually down to thirty-five, twenty-five. at twenty-three, my daughter visits, and though we try to recreate old rituals, we can’t get through a single TV show. She’s been renting a room in Pittsburgh on a month-by-month lease, cheap enough to manage on her Starbucks paycheck. She pushes pause on the remote sitting on a tray between me on the couch, her in a wide chair. “Should I move?” she asks.

I’ve vowed never to say these things to my own daughter, yet sometimes they threaten to rise to the surface. Not the one about feeling guilty. I don’t want her to live with that blurred confusion of love and guilt that tangled up my relationship with my own mother. But my daughter is always snapping my head off. I try hard to please her, and often she is grateful, but maybe I remember more the times that she is critical. Once a couple of years ago, in the heat of an argument, my daughter said, “I don’t need you and I’m never coming home again.” My own submerged fear rose up, my memory of my own moments when I imagined severing ties with my family. Now, I read the story I wrote years ago, and am struck most of all by the cruelty of the young, the singleminded self-sufficiency of the daughter, both the character and the story’s writer who can’t recognize her mother’s grief.

In the rearview mirror, the daughter counts three cars backed up behind them. “Mom, you can go faster,” she says, and her mom starts to accelerate. Then, passing a police car parked on the shoulder, she slows to twenty again. Reading this now, I’m a little irritated by the daughter’s persistent focus on speed. Now I understand a little more the mother’s desire to slow things down.

We discussed this topic a week ago. We agreed that she needed to find a job first. Or I thought we agreed on that. It’s as if the conversation never happened. As if she hadn’t heard me.

“It’s just that the guys I live with are gross,” she says. “They never clean anything.”

“But you really can’t afford anything else on your current income.” in the story i wrote at twenty-three, the daughter dodges the mother’s questions. “How are things going?” the mother asks. The daughter says, “What things?” “Your life,” her mom says. “Just in general.” The mother won’t ask whatever it is that she really wants to know, and this irritates the daughter. “Sometimes you act as if you don’t want to be around me,” the mother says. The daughter explains that adult children are impatient with their parents, are trying to achieve independence from them, as if her own mother never experienced this same transition. “Sometimes I think you’d be happy if you never saw me again,” the mother says, and the daughter answers, “I’m here, aren’t I?” i would never say to my daughter many of the things my mother said to me, but sometimes I have similar thoughts. I try to push down the words that rise up in moments when I most keenly feel the loss of all the time we used to spend together. There are so many moments these days when we can’t seem to meet in the middle of the stages where we find ourselves: me aging and appreciating slow routines, her young and rushing headlong into her own life.

“It’s not that much more expensive. But never mind.” She punctuates the end of the sentence by stabbing at the play button on the remote.

Sometimes I don’t think she listens to me. But maybe I’m not hearing her. So after my daughter has brought up the subject of moving to a new apartment, I grab the remote from a tray between us and push pause. “I just don’t understand why this is still an issue,” I say. “I mean, when we talked about this a week ago, you decided that moving right now wouldn’t make any sense.” i used to have more confidence about the ways that my relationship with my daughter were different from that with my mother. But so often, just as I used to, my daughter tunes me out, accuses me of repeating myself, asks me why I let her walk through the mall with eyeliner smearing a cheek. She’s impatient with me, says to me, “You’re so deaf, Mom.” I cringe, not just because it’s insensitive, but because I’m pretty sure I said equally cruel things to my mother, despite the fact that she actually did suffer from hearing loss. my daughter is squished down in the chair and a half in the middle of the room, half-sitting, half lying, legs flung over the side. She keeps tapping on her phone. I don’t think either of us is paying attention to the TV show. I pause it again. “I just don’t think you’re thinking this through,” I tell her. When she doesn’t answer, I storm off to the kitchen to wash the dishes. during her last years, my mom called me every Sunday and monologued about her doctor visits, tests, diagnoses, dialysis treatments, prescription side effects. I’d jump into a pause, tell her about a funny comment of my daughter or an award she’d won in school.

“You’re treating me like a child,” my daughter responds, and pushes play again.

I mean, is it so wrong to want my daughter to make responsible decisions?

My own mom was good at backing off. At letting me make my own mistakes. A child of the depression, she did worry to an unnecessary degree, I thought, about how poor I was in my early twenties. I thought that being poor was just part of being young, something you got through until you had a decent job. Why can’t I allow my daughter to take her own risks?

“Let’s just watch this,” my daughter calls. She sounds defeated. Conceding. I huff back in, and she pushes play. I flop down on the couch, barely attending to the show. Push pause.

“I’m just worried,” I say.

“All right.” My daughter’s inflection suggests she’d do anything to put a stop to this conversation. She clicks to resume the show.

But I pause it a second later. I cringe inwardly. My own mother never let an argument go. She’d poke her head in the room periodically to make a new point, then storm off. “I mean, as soon as you get a job, you can move right?” I say.

“Okay, Mom.” She pushes play.

“You’re such a good mother,” my mom said, shutting down the conversation, returning to her litany of medical issues.

Often I just stopped listening. I rationalized: I had given up after a lifetime of her not listening to me, of her changing the subject when I told her anything about my life, reverting to recounting some story I’d heard a million times before. Maybe it wasn’t that she wasn’t interested, I told myself. Maybe she was just masking her inability to hear me.

“God, Mom, you’re so deaf,” we used to shame her, as kids, irritated that she was always mishearing us, as if hearing loss was something she’d chosen. After years of denial and embarrassment, when she finally turned to hearing aids, it was still hard for her to make out words over the phone. Sometimes I thought she just wasn’t interested. That she didn’t want to hear me. all of a sudden, my daughter sits up in the chair, grabbing the remote and pressing pause. “It’s just that this other place is such a good deal,” she says. “Not that much more than what I’m paying now. And the roommates there are women who are older than me. Quiet, with jobs, not people who party or are messy. But never mind.” She pushes play.

I used to vow to be different. To hear my own daughter.

I push pause. “But won’t you have to put your dreams on hold again if you sign a year’s lease?”

“Well, I’d be taking over the lease for someone who’s breaking it. I’d just find someone else to take over mine.” She pushes play. She slides down in the chair, legs up on the arm, once again blocking my view of her face.

I wonder: could it be that my daughter’s not stubbornly clinging to some childish fantasy but has weighed her options and concluded that moving is a good idea? She’s had ten interview requests this week. And why wouldn’t I want her living in a cleaner apartment with mature female roommates?

Does some part of me secretly hope that my daughter will move home and let me look after her, ensure that she stays healthy? But I know that’s a bad idea. I know she has to learn to take care of herself, and is getting better at it, keeping medical appointments, watching her diet, getting exercise. I know that she is perfectly capable.

Maybe my mother never really understood who I was, but it’s also true that she managed to keep quiet every time I broke a lease or moved to a new apartment or quit a job. She kept quiet when I married and then divorced young.

My mother wanted me to remember her as a saint, an aspiration I couldn’t fathom, but despite her flaws, I see that there were times that my mother had a wisdom I fail at. If she were here, she’d remind me that I have to let my daughter make her own decisions, and not all of them will be mistakes. playing nearby, my daughter only used to hear bits and pieces of my side of phone conversations with my mother, and I’m afraid that what’s embedded in my child’s memory is the way I tuned my mom out when she deflected spontaneity. My mother never really knew who I was or what mattered to me. But is that fair? She was there when I first brought my daughter home. I was there a few years later for her mastectomy, went to Walmart afterward to buy her surgical tape, thick, strong strips that stayed firmly in place. Did I ask her how she felt about that loss?

I remember my own first apartments, things duct-taped and stapled together without the world collapsing. Do I want a relationship with my daughter like the one I had with my mom, like a house patched together with makeshift tools, Band-Aids slapped over old wounds, no reliable keys to open the doors between us, only loose coins and butter knives? I look at my daughter, and I think, why wouldn’t I help her open her own doors?

I push pause and she heaves a sigh, slumping even further down into the chair as if she wishes she could disappear.

“maybe you’re right,” I said. I felt like I was speaking to empty air, my daughter completely out of sight in the deep cushions of the chair. “Maybe I just wasn’t getting it. Maybe you should move.”

My daughter’s legs swing to the floor. She pops up and stares at me. “Wait, what?” she says.

“What you’re saying makes a lot of sense.” I reach for the remote. “I think you should take it.”

My daughter snatches back the remote. “That’s not fair. I was so sure I wanted it when I thought you didn’t want me to. But now that you’re encouraging me to take it, I’m not sure it’s the right decision after all. Is this reverse psychology?” above our heads on a shelf is a row of photo albums from my childhood. The tape holding in the photographs has turned yellow and fallen off, leaving marks where it used to be. I think that my daughter doesn’t know yet how things disintegrate over time. when my daughter was little, she sometimes said mean things to me. “Why do you do that?” I asked her once.

I remember a friend whose mom had Alzheimer’s. “We can’t take her to Walmart anymore,” my friend said. “She gets too obsessed with peeling stickers off the floors.” That was the first time I noticed the smiley faces flattened in the entryway, smudged by footprints. I remember believing that I didn’t really have to listen to my mother. I remember believing that she’d be there forever to repeat herself, until she wasn’t.

“i guess a part of me wants you to tell me what to do,” my daughter says.

“So that you can do the opposite?” I tease.

She rolls her eyes. Sinks back down into the chair, disappearing. I hear her stabbing keys on her phone, e-mailing the new roommates that she’s decided to take the room.

“Because I know you’ll love me anyway,” she said.

By that logic, her pushing me away is a kind of affirmation, just as my distance from my mother meant I took her presence, her place in my life, for granted. I didn’t fully comprehend the firmness and fragility of our bond, but somehow, underneath, I did understand the inescapable, unpredictable ways we were stuck together.