Groundhog Day, 1998

Twenty years ago I was 19 years old. My infant daughter was 6 weeks old. I was living in Portland. My 16 year-old sister and the rest of my family were in Salt Lake City.

My mother is acutely psychotic, diagnosed with paranoid-schizophrenia, and some other stuff. She has been institutionalized for most of my life — she is federally incarcerated in a women’s psych unit in Texas right now, her federal defender said he has 50 boxes of medical records for her, and told me that the Utah State Hospital said she’s one of the hardest clients they’ve ever had. But 20 years ago she was on one of her increasingly rare sabbaticals from institutionalization, and had been living with my grandmother for the previous couple years.

I spent the first 3–4 years of my life living with my mom, early in her mental deterioration, while she tried to prove she could be self-sufficient. Or, I was in foster care, when the state had determined that she had failed.

We lived in a few apartments (I remember “FOR RENT — NO KIDS” signs whenever we were on the hunt), but we also spent a good part of those years living as nomads on the Olympic Peninsula, where my mother had retreated to find sanity and to escape the scrutiny of the police or social services.

I have lots of memories of foster families from this time, and very few of my mom. My earliest memory is of being in a crib gazing up at a mobile, and two doting strangers; many years later I realized this haunting memory was likely my first foster parents. I remember when I was about 4, that when my social worker knocked on our apartment door, even if everything seemed fine from my perspective, that I needed to put some clothes in a paper bag because she was coming to take me back to another foster home. And my mom would cry, and I would too.

I know that she wanted to be a good mom, and I have a few sweet memories and rituals associated with her valiant efforts. But in general, I have very few good memories of her, and mostly very sad and scary ones. I was emotionally, psychologically, and physically abused by her (and in foster care). I was sexually abused by some of the men she kept company with while she self medicated with various illicit drugs (and also while in foster care).

Schizophrenia is so tragic, as is our society’s collective failure to adequately support and care for those with acute mental health issues.

But I digress.

When I was 4, a few days after being taken to a new foster home (with a very evil woman who kept me locked in a room, fed me only orange marmalade sandwiches on wonder bread, and cut the satin ribbon off of my beloved baby blanket) I met my social worker at the zoo, who informed me that my grandfather — ironically, a psychiatrist — had died. I’d learn later that he died right after finding out we’d been taken away again, of a bleeding ulcer that ruptured due to the stress.

The experiment of my mother caring for us and living on her own, was deemed a failure. My sister and I, and my mom when she wasn’t in jail or a hospital, moved in with my grandmother.

My grandmother put me into private school so that social services wouldn’t take me away. She read me Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Just So Stories’ and had NPR on at all times of the day. She made me drink cod liver oil with fresh squeezed orange juice, always added a garnish of canned pineapple+cottage cheese+lettuce to every meal even a TV dinner, took me to the Unitarian church, drove me to piano lessons, picked me up from school with a chocolate e’clair waiting in the front seat, and talked incessantly (but usually to herself) about politics.

For a well-pedigreed Utahn, directly descended from Mormon royalty and significant economic privilege, she was anti-establishment and probably anti-capitalist (I wouldn’t realize this until recently). Though, she was a fan of having lunch at Nordstrom’s. Well before the words “social justice” were in the collective lexicon (or at least before they were in mine), she was a fierce defender of it, and proudly associated with those in our family who had challenged the status quo.

And she was the real deal. It’s hard to relate to folks who dread going home for Thanksgiving to their conservative relatives, because my grandmother raised a brood of socially and environmentally conscientious feminists (her 5 kids plus me and my sister). And she seemed to do it without really trying, but just by living those values and soundly remonstrating anyone who didn’t. I recall her recounting a story of the Great Depression, of a hungry and homeless person coming to her back door, begging for something to eat. She was a child, and she made him a sandwich. She was scolded by her mother, but told the story with recalcitrance, and without regret. She was clearly still haunted by his hunger and desperation 50 years later in the retelling of the story.

The moral was that when the world isn’t taking care of its people, it is our job to do so.

She got a humble living allowance from a trust fund left by her mother. We lived comfortably but not extravagantly. I was never allowed to order soda at a restaurant, and never had the trendy clothes that all my friends wore. The idea that someone would spend $50 on a pair of jeans was beyond offensive to my grandmother. Yet, when friends of my mom’s (or mine and my sister’s when we were teenagers) needed money, she would find odd jobs to pay them for. Once someone painting the house stole some cash that she’d stashed away. She demanded it back but let him keep working to earn the money he needed.

She never gave up on my mom. She never believed that my mom shouldn’t have agency and self-determination (though she was also probably in some denial about how serious her illness was). My mother could be an absolute nightmare, terrorizing my grandmother and our neighbors. But she was my grandmother’s daughter, and my grandmother was all she had, and my grandmother didn’t flinch in doing everything she could to take care of her. She all but drained the trust fund on lawyers to get her out of whatever jam she kept getting herself into, and urged my sister and I to testify on the stand to what a loving mother she was, to help her get out some bigger jams. She faithfully visited her when she was locked away, and more than once drove through the night to bail my mom out of jail and my sister or me out foster care after my mother would sneak us away in a VW bus to somewhere-in-the-North-West, running from the law. (This happened a few times up until I was 12.) My grandmother never believed that my mom couldn’t get better, and refused to allow my mother to be defined by her mental illness, speaking only of what a treasure she had been, still was, still could be. She helped me learn how to not trigger my mother, and to not hate her, to not give up on or abandon her.

My grandmother didn’t give up on anyone. She instilled in me a sense of responsibility to do the right thing, to do right by people, and to persevere. She and my grandpa had moved to their dream home to retire right before he died, and instead of living out their twilight years together, enjoying the peace of an empty nest, she instead became a widow and full time single parent to her two little grand-daughters. And never expressed a moment of regret or resentment for having to fulfill that role, or toward my mother for putting her in it. It was a simple matter of doing what one needs to do, even when it’s hard, even if we’d rather be doing something else, even if we deserve better.

She taught me to be selfless by being selfless.

She told me I was smart and trusted me to make good choices. When I didn’t, she expressed her disappointment quietly and sadly, in a way that made me realize I wanted to do better. So I’d do better.

She wasn’t perfect. She smoked cheap cigarettes like a chimney, drank boxed wine and cheap beer like a fish, often while driving (but the only time she got in accident was when I was having an insolent temper tantrum in the back seat and she turned left at a red light — I rightfully bore the brunt of the injuries). She often went to bed at 5 or 6 PM, leaving my sister and I to fend for ourselves, while she listened to talk radio all night long. But it was a different time then. She expected us to be resourceful, have integrity and use good judgement, and we usually did. We watched a lot of TV.

We were really independent, but I never felt neglected. I felt trusted, trusted to be capable and decent.

When I was 17 I bought a VW bus and moved to Oregon. There were lots of (mostly silly) reasons for it, but it wasn’t to get away from her. I missed her terribly. She flew up to help me register for my senior year of high school and cosigned on an apartment that I shared with some friends and my boyfriend. She was supportive of my independence, and visited a lot, and connected with a long lost relative (2nd cousin, maybe?) in Portland to keep an eye on me.

We talked almost daily. Working enough to pay rent while going to high school is hard, it turns out, so I moved back to Salt Lake briefly so that I could graduate. When I broke up with my boyfriend (who had moved to and from Oregon with me), I crawled into my grandmother’s bed, the same bed I slept in throughout much of my childhood, where she let me cry and sleep.

Then I found out I was pregnant (same guy, so, we got back together). My grandmother was devastated and exasperated, but didn’t pressure me to get an abortion when I told her I wouldn’t. I pursued adoption for awhile, an option that she was very supportive of. But she was also supportive, if somewhat resigned, when I decided to keep my baby.

She gave me her wedding band to wear so that people wouldn’t judge or stigmatize me for being an unwed mom. (A teen mother is totally acceptable and normal in Salt Lake as long as a wedding ring on). And she gave me the second band when I graduated from high school a month later, with an opal, my birthstone, in place of the diamond that had fallen out years before.

She had done so much for me, I felt bad that I had let her down.

When I was about 6 months pregnant, I remember the day, my grandmother called to tell me that she decided she “loved my little sweet potato” — I marked it on the calendar because I was so relieved and overjoyed.

I moved back to Oregon a few months before my daughter was born. My grandmother flew up to be there for the birth, predicting my daughter would be born on December 11th, the birthday of her beloved father. But instead she was born in the wee hours of the 17th, and my grandmother had to fly home later that morning (after already rescheduling her flight once). I named my daughter Frances London, after my grandmother, Frances.

I flew home two weeks later for a friend’s wedding, so I was able to spend some of that magic new baby time with my grandma, and the comfort of home proved so overwhelming that I decided to stay an extra week. I’m glad I did.

Twenty years ago today, Groundhog day 1998, sometime in the afternoon, I was home watching bad daytime TV and nursing my 6 week old baby girl, when I got a distressed call from my mother to tell me that Fran had died.

At some point that day, I remember grappling with the reality that I was only 19. That I would have to live the rest of my life without her. The thought of that was unbearable. I couldn’t even fathom it. It felt like there had to be other options. But the only other option was to not live, another unfathomable option — I had a new baby and a younger sister who, at 16, was even more orphaned than me.

Two months later we would find out that my mother was 8 months pregnant with my brother, Sam. (Sam would later live with me in 2nd, 4th, 8th and 9th grades.)

A couple months after that, London’s dad left me.

A month after that I was given a 30-day no-cause eviction from my Portland apartment. A truly confusing and disorienting event. I had to move to Hillsboro, where I would need to find new childcare and be dependent on public transportation to get to work.

My mother, in a very brief burst of relative lucidity, gave me $800 from her inheritance to buy a car. I think it’s the only time in my life that she’s given me money, I’ve spent most of my adult life sending money to her. (My grandmother, shockingly, did not leave a will. Her assets were split evenly between her 5 children, including my mother, who somehow managed to spend a rather large sum of money in under a year with nothing to show for it. Alas.)

I bought a Honda from someone in North Portland. Mold was growing all over it and the seats had been slashed, probably during a drug search. They didn’t want to take my check, and I had to get to work, so I gave it to them as collateral, making a plan to meet them a few days later with cash. We met and traded cash for the car, the car was running with the key in the ignition. it turned out the key was for a BMW, not a Honda. So that night I had to get a new ignition for the car.

Then they ended up cashing my check anyway. I couldn’t bring myself to call the police — they needed the money more than they needed to go to jail, and I didn’t have the stamina to go to small claims court.

A week after that, the alternator died.

I used all my tip money to take cabs to work because the new MAX line wasn’t running. I was fired shortly thereafter for being late.

I was losing ground, fast.

My grandmother had always been my rock and my safety net, she was the one I would call during these times, she was the one who had saved my mom over and over from much more dire situations. Now there was no one to save her, or me. Now I had no rock, no safety net. And I had a baby daughter who needed me, and a baby brother who probably did too. I wanted desperately to succumb to my grief, to be a victim of my circumstances. But I had no margin of error. There was no time for self-care.

1998 was a fog, but if I blinked I would lose my balance on the precipice of survival I was precariously perched on. Perseverance was the only option.

Now it’s been 20 years. I have officially lived more of life without her, than with her. I still think about her all the time, but it’s been years since I reached for the phone to call her. The real-as-life dreams of her are less frequent, but no less real — she is always alive in my dreams, having never really died; I am always so viscerally relieved to see her in these dreams, and so worried that it’s just a dream. I am disoriented when I wake, and then sad.

As a mother and woman in these confusing times I often reflect upon my values and personal character, my superpowers and flaws, my story and my purpose.

I wish I could do more for my mom right now. If there’s a heaven, or whatever, I desperately hope that my grandma understands why I can’t, but also knows that I haven’t given up on her. My grandmother’s bottomless capacity for grace and enduring love for my mother has shaped me as a person and informs how I deal with challenging people in my life.

I know that my confidence, sense of self, world view, politics, and my commitment to my family, community, justice and dignity is very much informed by her. She showed me that it is easier and clearer to forgive, to suspend judgement, and to extend grace than to not. To fight, but to do so righteously, fiercely, and with a clear conscience and humility. To live life as the best person one can be, and accept that that person will be really really imperfect — and that’s really really okay.

She was a letter writer. I’m not, but I wish that I was — she instilled that talent in my sister instead. Meanwhile, I have paid hundreds of dollars in quadrupled parking tickets because I can’t seem to get checks, stamps, envelopes, and mailboxes all in the same place.

She taught me that a life without whimsy, humor, spontaneity, eccentricity, and tiny indulgences (like chocolate e’claires and matinees) is not a life worth bragging about.

She loved the movies Princess Bride, Walk Like a Man, and Clueless.

She also loved the movie Groundhog Day.

My ability to survive and persevere, and to make time and ability to care for others is because of her. And because I had to do so without her. And because I know what she had to sacrifice for me. And because of who she thought I could be. She really believed in me.

I don’t mean to end this with trite platitudes. I’m not sure what the moral is, except that grief is real, our trials shape us, life is short, and the people in it matter. But also, believing in someone is a really powerful thing.

Onward.