Within a couple weeks of hip surgery, my mother was doing physical therapy at a skilled nursing facility. c 2010 B.F. Newhall

Barbara Falconer Newhall

Ten reasons why I’m finding it impossible to write about my 92-year-old mother, even though she’s all I can think about right now:   

1. I love my mother, and I don’t know how to write about that.
2. My mother is difficult, and I don’t know how to write about that.
3. My brothers can read, and they know about this blog.
4. My mother can read. So can all six grandchildren.
5. My mother has osteoporosis, dementia and a messed-up stomach. She is losing herself, piece by piece, like dandelion feathers floating off in the wind, and I don’t want to think about that.
6. My father is dead. My in-laws, Scott and Ruth, are dead. If my mother dies, there will be no more grown-ups left in my life.
7. I don’t want to be the grown-up. 
8. If my mother can die, anybody can die, me included.
9. If I write about my mother I might find out something about myself that I don’t want to know.
10. I’d rather grab a Clausthaler, curl up with the afghan that once belonged to my mother-in-law, and watch “House” re-runs. Except I’ve already watched every last one of  them in the three months since my mother broke her hip.

Note: My mother died on December 18, 2010. I still don’t know how to write about her. One of these days I’ll figure it out.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I don’t like daffodils. I feel about daffodils the way I feel about some of my writing – too damned cheerful. Too nicey-nice. Too tidy. Too certain that in the end everything’s going to come out just fine, that all shall be well.

I prefer irises. I especially like the bearded irises that are volunteering up and down the hills of our neighborhood right now.  Their swooping, swooning petals are downright lascivious. So are the fuzzy, yellow-brown genitalia cascading from their centers. These are not nice flowers.

Daffodils, by comparison, are starchy, unequivocal. They are trumpets of optimism playing to the sun. Last month, there were daffodils blooming all over the neighborhood, as if there had not just been a winter. And if by chance there had been a winter, as if there would never be another.

The trouble with daffodils is they have no subtext. They are all cheer and sparkle and optimism. They are avatars of perky. They get on my nerves, no doubt, because of that daffodil place in my psyche, which from time to time locates itself in my writing.

In my daffodil brain, everything happens for the good. Problems can be solved. Human beings are redeemable. God is in God’s sweet heaven. And my 92-year-old mother, who’s been lying in a hospital bed with a broken hip for the past five weeks, is not going to die. Ever. In just a few weeks, my mother and I will head over to Nordstrom again for lunch. As usual, she’ll order the chicken salad with berries. I’ll get the one with artichokes. After lunch we’ll hijack Nordstrom’s loaner wheelchair and scoot over to Macy’s where things are more affordable. She’ll sit in the wheelchair with her purse in her lap, credit card at the ready, and I’ll roll her around the petites department. She’ll ask me to back up to take a second look at the crisp brown and white linen jacket. She’ll offer to buy it for me, I’ll decline.

My mother will come through this hip thing just fine. She always has. She always will.

My daffodil brain does not write about my mother’s spine, which is as curved and uncertain as question mark. It averts its eyes from the sun-damaged splotches darkening and growing across her cheeks. It makes excuses for the strings of nonsensical sentences coming from her mouth. (It’s the painkillers talking.) My daffodil brain is too polite to type words like constipation, commode, diaper, droopy buttocks, crepey skin, thinning hair, boney knuckles.

Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall

No, my mother’s days are not numbered and, therefore, neither are mine. My mother will not spend her last days in pain and uncertainty, wondering how God, or death for that matter, could possibly be real. And neither will I.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

One . . .

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

It’s done. Those blood-red snapdragons are gone from our front yard, and my rock garden is the better for it.

But what do I do with the blossoms? I’d take them to my 92-year-old mother –  except she doesn’t like maroon any more than I do.

I can’t just toss them in the compost bin. They are trying so hard to live, to be the velvety, deeply colored snapdragons they were born to be.

. . . two . . .

I take pity and invite them into the house for their final days.

I look around for a vase. I try one, then another. Then another. Nothing works. On the fourth try, the blossoms and stems arrange themselves artfully in a glass vase.

Jackie O used to say that a woman can’t be too rich or too thin. I say a woman can’t be too rich, too thin, or have too many vases.

. . . three . . .

© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall

Photos © 2009 B.F. Newhall

. . . four. This works for me.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I don’t like the snapdragons growing in my front yard. Their color, somewhere between scarlet and maroon, gets on my nerves. I don’t like scarlet. I like maroon even less.

The snapdragons are innocent. They are doing what they are supposed to do. They’re sending down roots, sucking up water, opening up blossoms. If I rip them out of the ground – now or just before they go to seed – am I an assassin? They may be ugly, but they are alive.

When I spotted the six-packs of baby snapdragons at the nursery, all I could see were a few creamy buds. And something pinkish. They looked good to me. But now they are taking over my garden.

Their dark, aggressive coloring shouts in my face, leaving the more modest blossoms in the yard, the lavender and the bacopa, to go unnoticed.

My mother, who turned 92 on Wednesday, has shelves and tables of potted plants growing with fervor out on her patio. One plant, philodendron, is not doing so well. It has only a few leaves, most of them dead or yellowing. 

“Do I throw it out?” she asks. “It doesn’t look very good.” 

I think of my snapdragons. And my cypress tree.

When Peter was little, we found out he was allergic to cypress. “Hmm,” I said to the pediatrician. “We have a cypress tree growing in our back yard a few feet from the house – and Peter’s bedroom.”

 ”Cut it down,” the doctor said.

Jon and I conferred. Our cypress was massive — five stories tall — and older than both of us put together. It was a magnificent tree, timeless, a steady presence at our house. Its branches had grown over and around our deck, so that you could go out there at any time, day or night, stand inside that tree and forget where you were in time and space.

No way were Jon and I going to get rid of that cypress tree. Peter would have to take antihistamines. Or grow out of his allergies. We’d move to another house.

Peter outgrew the allergies. The cypress tree, as stately and self-sufficient as ever, lives on.

But the awful snapdragons? The scraggly, deadish philodendron in the pot on my mother’s patio?  They’ve got to go. Somehow.

© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall

Photos © 2009 B.F. Newhall