Comfort Food in Plastic Wrap

The taxi stopped in front of my mother’s Montréal apartment building and the driver pulled my luggage from his trunk. Harsh wind and small snowflakes hit my face and made my eyes water. The front of my coat flapped open, but my feet wouldn’t move. Placing my purse on the salted sidewalk, I searched for my lipstick in the pocket of my jeans, stalling. My mother had lived in this low-income housing project for over twenty years, and this was my second visit. 

After another deep breath, I turned toward the building and spotted her standing at the small window above the kitchen sink of her ground floor unit.

She had watched me apply my lipstick, adjust my scarf, and hesitate.

 I waved. 

She turned away. 

A thought that had accompanied me from my home in Vancouver back here to where I was born and raised seemed especially potent now. She can’t hurt me anymore.

I lifted my carry-on, which suddenly felt very heavy, and headed inside. 

Her door wasn’t open yet. 

I knocked. I waited. 

Finally, the door opened. The mother I hardly knew anymore stood before me, shrunken with age, her white hair set in tight curls, and now wearing a light blue sweater instead of the red one she’d had on when I spotted her watching me. My nose recognized her signature scent—Chanel No5—and I recalled her younger days when her appearance dominated most of our conversations. 

“Thanks for coming,” she said. “There was no one else to call.”

“I can’t imagine there was.” My nervous laugh didn’t take the sting from my flippant comment. 

With her eyes averted to her welcome mat, she stepped aside and invited me in.

After she hung up my coat, she led me to the kitchenette, where her table was set for two, and placed an egg salad sandwich covered in plastic wrap on my plate. “I thought you might have missed dinner.”

“Thank you, I haven’t eaten since breakfast.” I unwrapped the sandwich while she watched. Mayonnaise mixed with lots of pepper oozed from between the slices of white bread—a reminder of the comfort food I enjoyed as a child.

Unsure if I should launch into an update about her two grandsons, my husband, or my teaching career, I took a large bite. A full mouth made initiating conversation her job, but when she ran out of small talk, I asked about her health and her upcoming surgery. At her request, I had agreed to accompany her to the hospital for a hernia operation and to care for her afterward. 

While she explained the pain she was experiencing, her face revealed no emotion. Was her pain excruciating, dull, intermittent? I couldn’t tell.

“I won’t be able to lift anything. How long will you stay?”

“A week, but longer if you need me.”

Her tight curls shook as she said, “Oh no, that won’t be necessary.”

I babbled about how I would stay just as long as she wanted, and if she preferred, I’d get a hotel room and check in on her every day. Whatever she wanted, whatever she preferred.

With her hand raised, she interrupted me. “Let’s see how I do.”

Her honesty was jarring.

She poured tea and asked if I still took sugar. 

“Yes, I mean, no, I don’t,” but she picked up my spoon anyway, dropped one level scoop in my cup and stirred, letting the spoon hit the sides of the delicate cup. 

Did she remember those mornings when she would chase me from the kitchen for stirring my tea too imposingly—the sound of the spoon hitting the side of my cup could enrage her. 

We sipped our tea. What was there to talk about? Everything and nothing.

I took the last bite of my sandwich and began rolling the piece of plastic wrap into a tight ball, she took it from my hand and placed it on my empty plate. “Come, I’ve got something for you.”

Her mannerism and voice had not altered yet, but I was still on edge. 

I remember being in Grade Five and coming home from school to a completely different mother than the one who’d cooked me breakfast. The after-school mom didn’t like my hair in braids, even though her fingers had done them in the morning. “Brush those things out of your hair. You look like a goof,” she’d said. But the very next morning she did my hair again as if nothing had happened. I asked if she thought braided pigtails made me look like a goof. 

“Why would you think that?” She kissed my cheek and told me I was far too cute to ever look like a goof.

From that point on, no matter what my friends or teacher said, I imagined them thinking the exact opposite.

Soon after, I stopped bringing friends home because I couldn’t be sure if they’d meet the mom who offered cookies and smiled or the one who threw things and yelled at us to get the hell out of the house. 

Sometimes, she’d take to her bed for days. I’d tiptoe around the house trying not to disturb her while my father went to the tavern. For hours at a time, she’d cry and mumble incoherently before she fell asleep. I’d peek in, find her curled in a tight ball, and cover her with a blanket. I’d bring fresh water for when she woke up. When it was over, she’d say, “Don’t tell anyone our business, you hear?”

I never told anyone, not even my grandmother—whom I trusted the most—not even when my mother’s behaviour terrified me.

By the time I was a teen, I’d learned to read my surroundings and adapt to whatever “mood” she was in. The slightest shift in her surroundings could tip her off and I’d witness her anger, her sorrow, or worst of all, her disdain.

When I was sixteen, my father finally left us, and she tried to kill herself. I sat in the waiting room of the hospital emergency ward and listened to her vomit up the bottle of Valium her latest doctor had prescribed. She spent a week in a psychiatric ward and met with a psychologist every day. I remember feeling so hopeful. Things would be different now because someone qualified was saying she wasn’t well, someone who could get her to talk about her childhood. Someone who could save my mom. 

The day she left the hospital, the nurse said, “You need to learn to love yourself.” Those terrifying hours when we weren’t sure my mother would survive, and I couldn’t locate my father, that nurse had held my hand. 

My mother’s response to this kind woman was swift and sucked the last bit of hope from me. “Go fuck yourself.” Then she sauntered down the corridor of the hospital toward the exit as if leaving a party after a particularly fun time. I trailed behind, just far enough back to witness the pity on the faces of everyone who watched. 

After high school, I left Montréal and got a summer job in Banff. When the tourist season ended, I headed to Vancouver Island and remained there until my mother had no expectations that I’d ever return to her. Yet during those first few lonely years, I longed for her to contact me and say, “Get yourself home, I miss you.”

Our relationship dwindled to phone calls at Christmas or on birthdays. I heard, through my father or extended family members, about my mother’s boyfriends and her run-ins with the law, restraining orders, shoplifting, bankruptcy. 

My commitment to stay away grew stronger. 

The years passed.

As I watched from a distance, I hoped someone would figure her out before she did herself permanent damage. 

A diagnosis that seemed to fit only came in her senior years, as she approached her sixtieth birthday. After an alcohol-related incident that involved police and social services again, an emergency room doctor, who had met her once before, diagnosed her as suffering from dissociative identity disorder. She was tired by then, so she agreed to counselling and medication and stuck with both. 

I read everything I could find about this disorder, from how the transitions from one personality to another was often sudden and startling, and how memory loss, delusions, and depression were a part of it. Dissociative personality disorder is often brought on by long-term physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. My mother never spoke of her childhood.

She did not accept her diagnosis wholeheartedly; however, she did admit to huge chunks of time where she could not recall anything. 

I made contact more often, offering money and a listening ear when I could, as she struggled to stay sober and to rebuild shattered relationships. She made progress, but the mean mom still surfaced, occasionally.

As she led me from her kitchen to the living room, I watched her eyes, her steps, and anything else that could warn me.

Loud voices from the hallway of her building and the heavy bass of a neighbour’s music imposed themselves on our reunion, yet during our more recent conversations, she had never complained about living here. Guilt flushed over me as I thought of my home in Vancouver and all the comforts that I took for granted. If I had known about her illness sooner, would I have left her here, alone?

She directed me to sit on her sofa. “I’ve knitted you something,” she said, then reached under the coffee table and handed me a small bundle wrapped in white tissue paper. I could not recall the last time she’d given me a gift.

With the tissue paper opened, I stared down at two quite different socks. One was longer than the other and the colour patterns did not match. 

I held them both up in front of me. Was she joking? Of all the unfortunate things I could say about my mother, she’d always loved a good laugh. 

“Wow, geez, thanks mom.”

“Not everything has to match. That would be boring.”

“True enough.” 

“Sometimes I knit for thirty hours straight when I can’t sleep.” Our eyes met and for a moment, I thought we shared a memory of when she used to roam the house during the night. The shadow of her feet standing just outside my bedroom door had scared me. I’d remain perfectly still beneath my quilt and listen to her breathe. 

She slid closer to me. Her old hands shook as she took the socks from mine and spread them across my knees. Our thighs touched, and I could feel the warmth of her hand on my legs as she stroked each sock flat.

“I think of you as I knit.” The corners of her mouth curled down, as if her thoughts weighed too much. 

She’d become so thin.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” 

“The socks?” I was still wrestling with what to say about them.

“No, that you still want to see me.” She rested her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her, and she nestled in like a small kitten.

“I wasn’t always nice to you.” 

“No, you weren’t.” Another flippant remark I regretted, but I couldn’t deny how satisfied I felt to finally hear this admission. 

“But we had some laughs, didn’t we?” She raised her head to face me. 

I patted the socks. “You’ve always been funny.” She looked at her creation then focused on my face, and I knew the socks were not meant to be a joke. 

Locked in that stare, I remembered how her eyes had always been my warning when I’d come home from school. On good days they were brown, on the dreaded days they were green. That night, they were somewhere in the middle.

No one ever believed me when I said my mother’s eyes changed colour, and this was how self-doubt managed to seep into me. If I imagined her eye colour changing, did I imagine her extreme behaviour as well? Did I cause it?

Her diagnosis never completely answered those questions for me.

“We had some good laughs,” she said. 

“Yes, we did.” Like the time she took me to a movie in downtown Montréal and her lipstick fell from her purse and rolled under the seat in front of us. She got down on all fours to reach for it and accidentally (at least she told me it was accidental) touched the foot of the person occupying the seat in front. The woman screamed so loud that an usher came running. We laughed all the way home, imitating the woman’s high-pitched scream. 

Another time, my dad slid on the ice of our driveway, and in his frantic determination not to hit the ground, his arms shot out in front of him like a drunken marionette. Thankfully, he didn’t fall, and over dinner that night my mother and I laughed and laughed, squeezing every drop of humour from his panic.

The laughter we’d shared meant I’d be safe for a time, so I’d keep the joke alive for as long as I could, milking those moments.

After reminiscing about the laughs we’d shared, this tiny old woman whose cruel words used to crush me and whose behaviour terrified me, started to cry. First, weak sniffles that gradually grew into agonized moans. Her body trembled. She gasped for air and her hands clutched at my shoulders. I stroked her head that rested against my chest. Her tears soaked through my sweater, and I held her as I had always wanted her to hold me. 

All the time and distance that had passed between us, the memories that I could never shake off, the trauma that had woven itself into my being had shaped me into the woman I’d become. 

She needed something from me that night, unconditional forgiveness, or acceptance, but I couldn’t let my guard down and trust that her display of sorrow, love, and regret was genuine. It’s not that I didn’t love her, quite the opposite. But her sickness had always preyed on my love, leaving me suffocated, my heart wrapped in plastic. 

I put her to bed that night and tucked her in as I had my sons when they were little boys. I fluffed her pillows and promised to cook her favourite breakfast in the morning. 

“Scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese?”

“Sure, mom, I can do that.” It dawned on me that I knew none of her favourite things.

Stretched out on her sofa, I listened to her gentle snores and wondered what personality would greet me in the morning. 

I slipped the socks over my hands and admired the perfect, soft stitches against my skin, took note of how she switched from one colour to the next, and wondered what had caused the abrupt changes … just as I had wondered what exactly I had done or said to cause her personality to shift. All the research I had done to understand her mental illness could never erase the guilt I felt each time my good mom slipped away from me. 

With the streetlight outside her window revealing fresh snow coming down in large, soft flakes, I decided to trust in the closeness we had shared that night. My mother had knitted me socks.