Our writer suffered “ambiguous loss” after her son was born and her mom slipped deeper into dementia.
After our son was born, I took him to baby story times at two different local libraries and started meeting other moms and dads, most of them about 10 years younger than I was. At 40 years old, I’d given birth at an “advanced maternal age.” I’d finally met my husband at age 36, and we gotten married when I was 37. When we’d decided we were ready to have a child, it didn’t happen easily, so I was elated to finally be a mother. With our babies on our laps, the other parents and I listened to stories and sang, “The Wheels on the Bus,” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”
At the same time, three hours away, my mother was unraveling. Before she was diagnosed with dementia about a year before, she and I had spent hours on our phones blabbing about our respective jobs or brainstorming what we were each going to cobble together for dinner. She’d always been “my person.”
At the beginning of her decline, my husband and I invited her to stay with us in New York where we cared for her until her frustration with her condition led to a physical volatility that became unsafe for all of us. We then decided, reluctantly, to set her up with 24-hour care in her own home back in Delaware. Seeing her plummet cognitively and emotionally was heartbreaking; she’d always been my biggest supporter and now I had to support her in the way that was hard to even fathom.
I spent every morning as a dutiful daughter, trying to calm her fears from afar over the phone while our son dozed off in the baby swing. I emailed her doctors, untangled frustrating health insurance knots, and checked in with a rotating cast of caregivers who quit frequently—either because that’s the norm in this difficult line of work, or my mother was particularly difficult.
Midday, I switched into mommy mode, bundling my son up for outings at the library. I sang with animation during those 30 minutes, my heart singing as well. Seeing my son’s face light up when he recognized a song filled me with a sort of manic joy, perhaps super-charged in juxtaposition to what was going on with my mother. Afterwards, he rolled around on the floor with the other infants, and eventually started to crawl and clap his hands.
These were all developmental milestones my mother couldn’t witness alongside me like I longed for. Though I printed out photos for her at the pharmacy as often as I could and we’d taken our son down there to visit her a handful of times, my mother was missing all of this. She knew who he was, and adored him, but her anxiety had become all-encompassing. It was now challenging for her to come outside of herself. She was detached and shut down; I couldn’t even convey to her how sad any of this made me.
I hadn’t heard this term yet, but what I was experiencing during this time was something called “ambiguous loss,” a term I discovered in an enlightening book about grief called So Sorry for Your Loss by Dina Gachman. Ambiguous loss was coined in the 1970s by Dr. Pauline Boss, a family therapist and professor, who has researched and written widely on the concepts of unresolved grief and loss without closure. This can be the result of psychological absence, due to memory loss, as in my mother’s case, or mental illness. The term can also refer to unresolved physical absence, like estrangement, missing persons, or unconfirmed deaths.
What this ambiguous loss meant in my situation is that I missed my mother long before she was actually gone. I was entering into motherhood without her guidance and TLC, even though she hadn’t passed away yet.
Sometimes moms would bring their moms to story time. These women, most of them probably in their 60s, looked so fit and full of confidence. I tried to not stare, but I couldn’t help noticing how easily they lifted the babies out of their strollers to soothe them, how they so nimbly ran to the nearby restroom to rinse off a pacifier that fell on the floor. It was impossible for me to not feel envious of this help and attention. I tried to picture my mom with us in that cheerful space, spry and effervescent again, but I couldn’t imagine her that way anymore. She’d become so hollowed out in the last year; I was an old mom with an old mom.
I knew I was fortunate my mother was still alive, when many tragically lose their parents far younger. Her own mother had passed away when she was 23 years old. She’d been a motherless mom to my brother and me, and had done all of this stuff essentially by herself, too. Unlike mine, the loss of her mother had been sudden and without ambiguity. There was no way for me to determine which was worse.
One day, a particularly attentive grandma showed up. Some combination of her well-applied lipstick, her dangling earrings, and her easy smile reminded me of how stylish and vibrant my mother used to be. My tears started flowing as she doted on twin babies while we were singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” I watched my son from behind. He was sitting up steadily on his own now, excitedly shaking one of those little maracas shaped like an egg. To distract myself, I crawled my fingers up his back like a spider, then rushed them down again like a water spout.
He was wearing hand-me-down pants from my friend Susan, and an adorable typewriter onesie gifted to us from my friend Ann-Marie. My friend Martina had given us all kinds of books, burp cloths, and bibs she no longer needed. I had close friends like them around the country, too, who’d already had children and had been unspooling practical advice about breastfeeding, sleep training, and diaper-changing at a steady clip.
I swallowed hard, making sure to not look across the room. Though none had been able to accompany us to storytimes, I quietly channeled all the other supportive women in my life. I had my mom’s friend Nancy in Delaware who drove three hours to my baby shower; my mother-in-law, Sandy, in Ohio, who’d quickly driven eight hours with my father-in-law to support us before and after the birth; and my step mother, Sherill, in Wisconsin who always assured me when I was doubting myself. They were all loving me from afar and, whether they were conscious of this or not, were providing for me a lot of the information my mother might have, if she had been able. Exhausted, I sometimes asked them to slow down so I could actually take notes on little-known remedies for the sniffles or the titles of parenting books they’d found helpful.
Together, these women, each from their separate corners, spun a web of love around me that held me up. What I didn’t yet know was that many of the women in that storytime room would also gradually become friends, and that we’d soon become integral parts of each other’s motherhood webs. Yes, this included the mom of twins, with the enviable and stylish mom. I’d learn over time that these other women had their own individual struggles and challenges, of course. Even if they did still have some help from their own parents, they were dealing with things like marital tension, or health issues, or balancing motherhood with their careers. It was a gift to have the direct assistance from grandmothers, but it also didn’t solve everything.
I clapped my hands along with our son and kissed his cheek. I wanted my mother to be the attentive and thoughtful grandmother I knew she wanted to be; I wanted her to be okay and she wasn’t. But before her decline, she had been an incredible mom to me, a champion listener who could help guide me in the direction she knew I wanted to go. In turn, I would try to love my son similarly.
I cleared my throat and wiped my eyes again, re-situating the socks on my son’s tiny feet, just so. I tried to tap into her strength and love from afar, now located hundreds of miles away yet demonstrated to me through all the years of my life.
Tonight, I told myself, I’ll print out another batch of photos for her. And tomorrow I’ll put them in the mail.
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