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Until late in my mother’s life, I had managed to be the proverbial good girl. I fulfilled
all of my mother’s expectations: I got the education she never had, I achieved the career that
was so important to her, I built the family that completed a woman’s life. My occasional “bad
girl” performances amounted merely to episodes in a life, not the way my mother saw me as a
person. But tap gently, I later discovered, and every good daughter with elderly parents seems
to have a “bad girl” caregiving story. Don’t you remember, says a childhood friend whose
mother I adored, how I went to Bermuda four days before my mother died of cancer? You
should hear me talk behind my mother’s back, said another friend, cracking jokes about her
mother that her mother can no longer hear. We act out like the two-year-olds we once were.
My mother loved white blouses, crisp and tailored. All of the pictures of her at the
peak of her career, in the prime of her life, featured a white blouse. Whenever I wore a white
blouse around her in those last years, she would recall how much she loved that look. In advance
of what would turn out to be her last Mother’s Day, I bought the largest crisp white tailored
blouse in the store. (My mother was now formless, sagging, her breasts dragged down to meet
her bulging stomach, her body slouching in the wheelchair.) I set the shirt aside to bring.
Then in mid-March, I had heart surgery and didn’t tell my mother. I felt sorry for
myself, having a mother and not being able to tell her I was having heart surgery. I said to
myself there was no need to make her anxious. But what I meant was that she was no longer
my mother. She could no longer be there for me—so what was the point? In early May, I
brought the blouse with me on my caregiving weekend. But I couldn’t give it to her. She was
not my mother. It would have been like dressing a manikin. No, worse: I would have to look
at her in the crisp white blouse and think about what she was not.
I returned the blouse and spent the credit on some t-shirts to cover my heart’s scar.
As I began this piece, my mother died. Going through old photos, I found one of
my mother with her own then aging and ailing mother. I recalled, seeing this, that my mother
placed her own mother in a nursing home—and never forgave herself for being, at the end,
a bad girl. A nursery rhyme my mother used to recite to me goes like this:
There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid.
Marsha Hurst, PhD, is on the faculty of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, where
she teaches graduate courses on illness/disability narratives and on narratives of death, dying, and caregiving,
and co-chairs the University Seminar on Narrative, Health, and Social Justice. Hurst is co-editor with
Sayantani DasGupta of Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies (2007) and author,
most recently, of articles on palliative care, end of life, and narrative. Her advocacy work focuses on end of
life care and on families of children with special health care needs. marsha@marshahurst.com
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