Mother By Law

I am sitting in room 413 of a hospital in South Jersey watching my mother-in-law stare at me. She is unable to speak, half her body stilled by a stroke. Her nails are manicured; she is tan from her recent trip to Mexico. No bra, hair flat. She is not wearing her glasses. Her eyebrows are tattooed; it is the first time I notice. We are alone together in her room, and I am in the midst of her catastrophe, something she had always feared.  

She has just turned eighty. She is still beautiful, hardly any wrinkles, somehow elegant in her blue gown. 

She had barely aged since I met her. I was thirty and she was in her late forties. She watched what she ate, went to the gym; she traveled and, for the past three years, adjusted to life as a widow. She and her husband were married for over fifty years. Before he died, they had their own flower shop, where she worked on her feet every weekend and holiday and didn’t seem to mind that she was mostly overshadowed by his charisma. 

We went on a cruise once and took an exercise class together. I couldn’t keep up with her. Not only that, she stayed for the more advanced class while I hobbled out. 

At weddings, she was the first to get up and onto the dance floor, teaching my grown sons to dance Persian-style, her hands twisting and swirling in the air.

She welcomed me into her family even though we are different religions and I am older than her son by more than two years.  

When my husband and I divorced, she hugged me and whispered in her Iranian accent, “I know you will get back together,” and when I looked at her, puzzled, she kissed me.  

When my husband and I did get back together a few years later, she was again untroubled, glad to have me, making me feel like all this was normal and that I was still loved.  

Now as I sit here, she struggles to communicate with me. She stares a lot, fidgety with the functional side of her body, sleeping on and off, wearing a diaper, unable to pee, anxious, her face locked into a mask. I busy myself with her tray table, gaze out the window at the flat wintry landscape, anything not to look at her.  

Night falls on her first full day in the hospital, we leave her there and go to her house in a senior community on a cul de sac. Her daughter, my husband, and I eat sushi at the coffee table. Her scarf is at the edge of the couch where she had left it. I remember it is New Year’s Eve. At 10 p.m. my sister-in-law goes home, I click off the television, and the two of us go to bed. I turn off the light, and for the first time in a long time, I spoon him. I know what it is to lose a mother.  

Three weeks pass. My son is with her at the rehabilitation center. He FaceTimes me while I’m shoveling in front of our house in New Rochelle. She appears on the screen of my phone, and I drop my gloves and shovel into the soft snow as I take her in. The mask-like stillness is gone and her eyes are expressive; she is even smiling a little. This makes me so happy and excited. I try not to say anything complicated or ask any questions because she still can’t speak. I talk more loudly than usual, as if I am bridging the distance between us. I’m not sure what she understands. And then I say, “You know, you have been my mother-in-law longer than I had my own mother.” I watch her eyebrows rise and her face crumple and I understand that she is crying. My jaw starts to hurt. “It’s funny, right?” I say, and I smile, or I think I am smiling, but when I see myself on my phone, I realize I am trying not to cry, too.