Monster-in-Residency

When Carolita Johnson became a live-in caretaker for her 87-year-old mother, reimagining this new life as a multi-year writing residency helped her make peace with a difficult living arrangement.

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Six months into the Pandemic of 2020 I booked a moving truck, not to somewhere "safer," but to my mother’s house in Queens, NY, a hundred miles downstate from the town and apartment I loved. But this isn’t going to be a Pandemic piece. This is going to be a “how-I-turned-my-most-dreaded-cargiving-responsibility-into-a-writer’s-residency” piece. A writer’s residency unlike any writer’s residency you’ve seen or heard of before.

So many of the writer’s residencies I used to think I coveted required what I perceived as inconvenient displacements, having already spent most of my 20s and 30s traveling and living abroad. And I now had my mother to take care of. Some residencies required the ability to (legally) drive a car, which, committed as I am to living in walkable or mass transit-friendly locations, I couldn’t be bothered to acquire even if I were free to roam. No, my dream residency consisted merely of one year rent-free so that I could work in place.

Because, anyway, did I really need a cabin deep in the forest, even with baskets of lovingly prepared food left on my doorstep? I’m a city girl: I’d be obsessed with the swarms of ticks waiting to pounce on me, and probably cower indoors the whole time. And I don’t require an ancient stone terrace where I can serenely sip a glass of red wine while gazing past my laptop at the setting Tuscan sun. Did I need a desk in one of the rooms Edith Wharton once breathed and sighed in? I imagined the gentle rustling of her window curtains in the soft breeze, whispering, “You could be great, too, if you just let all this inspire you. But no pressure!” Such residencies only reminded me that almost all the writers I grew up reading in school came from money and privilege I’d never known or aspired to. The premise of these retreats seemed to rebuke my presumption that having a job (or two or three), multiple domestic responsibilities, plus a few physical and mental obstacles thrown in could actually be a place to write from. 

This isn’t going to be a Pandemic piece. This is going to be a “how-I-turned-my-most-dreaded-cargiving-responsibility-into-a-writer’s-residency” piece. A writer’s residency unlike any writer’s residency you’ve seen or heard of before.

They also awakened a little voice in my head that asked me why these prestigious residencies would be awarded to someone like me, an artist rather than an established writer, someone with no awards and only the wrong diplomas. As a writer I’m self-taught, and when the big writers refer to “craft,” I feel like a kid who studied for the wrong exam. Was I dreaming of residencies, I wondered, when I could probably use a couple of years back at university instead? Well, I didn’t have the time or money for that. Rather than dwell on what I couldn’t have and probably wouldn’t get, I decided to ask myself what Edith Wharton had (besides genius) that I envied most: housing security. At my mother’s house, I would have this — although it would cost me, in other ways.

***

It so happened that my mother, nearly 87 and all alone in the house since my father’s death a year earlier, began making it clear to my brothers that because she was falling down a lot, and also because the house was haunted by my vengeful father playing loud music in the basement (with other miscellaneous spirits tramping through the house at all hours), she wanted someone to live with her. 

It went without saying that it wasn’t going to be either of my brothers, not even the one who would have benefited most from living rent-free, and who had been the most devoted to her all his life. Even he, and I quote, “would rather be dead than move in with her.” Our other brother, having finally settled down after three decades of serial monogamy, wasn’t about to leave his long-desired life behind, though, had he been available… Well, let’s just say lucky for him and his partner, it’s a moot point.

I understood. My mother is a monster. By “monster,” please understand compulsively mean, and by “mean,” understand sadistic. For example, she’s always admitted (more like bragged, actually) that as early as her own childhood, she was fond of cracking the knuckles of infants to watch the expression of surprise on their faces just before they began crying. (Yes, eventually my brothers’ knuckles, too, and possibly mine, but I didn’t want to ask.) She’s also unable to resist the urge to destroy all of her relationships, especially the ones that count most (like her relationship with me), and has a history of frightening violence.

Rather than dwell on what I couldn’t have and probably wouldn’t get, I decided to ask myself what Edith Wharton had (besides genius) that I envied most: housing security. At my mother’s house, I would have this — although it would cost me, in other ways.

To give credit where it’s due, my brothers had already had to bear the five-year-long brunt of our father’s grueling decline into old age and death without my help, while I lived with my late husband upstate. As for our mother, who never had a nurturing bone in her body at the best of times, she was useless and apathetic by then. Also, while my poor brothers were accommodating our father’s growing needs and ungracious demands, I was frantically trying – and failing – to save my dying husband, after whose 2016 death I spent a good amount of time grieving and trying to claw back toward my life. I’d been in no shape to lend a hand. So, when it came to our mother’s care a few years later, it was as simple as now it was my turn. 

They tried to persuade me that with her health issues she couldn’t possibly live very long — two years, max, one of them speculated. Yes, we were used to being flippant about lifespans: our mother had been talking about her imminent death since we were young children, another form of torture and manipulation. So, not knowing how much longer the Pandemic could go on, merging our households only made practical and moral sense to me. My apartment had much more space than I needed for “sheltering in place,” and at least my mother wouldn’t sell her house and evict me unceremoniously, as so many landlords were doing. Even better, moving into her house on my own terms gave me financial and psychological advantages with both my landlady and my mother. 

The latter was very important because my mother and I had been estranged for a very long time and there was no way it could appear as if she were doing me a favor, rather than the other way around. She had not had my phone number or address for a good fourteen years, the first six of which were 100% contactless. Why? Her violent, manipulative, and destructive ways had been damaging even when not directed at me. My brothers, being male offspring and therefore higher-value, she’d spared, but only relatively. We had all spent our childhoods waiting for the chance to move out as soon as possible. But twelve years after I’d left home to travel for a decade (not so much to find myself as to lose her) I’d come back to New York thinking I was finally out of the woods, only to find she’d developed an uncanny knack for calling to pick a fight with me the night before a professional deadline. 

It so happened that my mother, nearly 87 and all alone in the house since my father’s death a year earlier, began making it clear to my brothers that because she was falling down a lot, and also because the house was haunted by my vengeful father playing loud music in the basement, she wanted someone to live with her. 

As a late bloomer who'd finally begun a career as a writer and cartoonist that paid the rent, I couldn't afford to miss deadlines while lying on the floor exhausted from her torment and unable to breathe for sobbing, so one fine evening in 2006 I peeled myself off the floor, dried my eyes, and decided she did not have the right to destroy my life. I changed my number, made it unlisted, and thought that was that. The next morning, when I called the building super, begging him to go to the lobby and tell my mother, who had come to stalk me, that I wasn't home, he said, “But she gave you life!” Later, he, and those of my friends who were blessed with "normal" mothers (or who’d normalized the abuse they'd grown up with), looked at me as if I'd pushed my mother off a cliff. 

I know you want me to say it was hard to cut my mother off, and that I felt guilty about it, but it was the easiest and best thing I ever did. Tellingly, no one in my immediate family questioned my decision. The only thing my father had to say about it was, "Don't give me your number. She'll just get it out of me." 

It had been nice not being in touch with her for so long. Did I say nice? It had been heaven. During the six years of zero contact, all my relationships flourished, my career took off, and the more obviously stress-related autoimmune issues I’d been plagued with finally released me. The only thing close to regret or guilt I experienced was to wonder if I was possibly a monster for feeling so good about my decision. Was I a monster? Well, so be it, I thought, then I’m a monster. A happy monster. A monster who finally has real friendships and who can at last pay her taxes on time. Hear my barbaric yawp!

My mother is a monster. By “monster,” please understand compulsively mean, and by “mean,” understand sadistic. She’s unable to resist the urge to destroy all of her relationships, especially the ones that count most (like her relationship with me), and has a history of frightening violence.

I know. We all think we have dysfunctional families. Everyone says, “My mother is crazy!” Am I right? But my mother took a meat cleaver to her marital bed in front of her children. That's the truth! No one knew why, except maybe my father, who is dead and can’t tell us. But is there ever a good reason to apply a meat cleaver to one’s marital bed? All I remember was thinking “I never knew we had a meat cleaver in the house. She must have bought it specially.” Can you tell I wasn’t surprised? Need I list her additional horrors? There were more, but this isn’t a story about my traumatic childhood. Just take my word for it as a fellow human being with feelings and skin and mattresses all soft enough to succumb to a meat-cleaver-wielding mother. 

The Day of the Mattress was a forbidden subject for the rest of our childhood. But thirty years later, the scene would float up through the haze of my father’s evaporating memories now and again, and he’d say, with a shock undiminished by time’s passing, “She murdered our bed!” None of us got over it. To wit, and to get back on the subject of my residency, when I moved in to care for her, the first thing I did after grandly tipping the movers and waving a wistful farewell to them, was go straight to my room and unpack the security door bar I’d ordered the minute I committed to living with her. 

Yes, you’re right, I probably wouldn’t have had to do that at Yaddo.

But it soon became evident that my mother’s frailty had rendered me physically safe from her former violence. I didn’t even bother installing the lockable doorknob I’d purchased for my bedroom: she’d be too out of breath or dead of a heart attack by the time she mounted the steps. The rusty machete under the credenza and the dagger under her dresser, neither of which had budged for over twenty years, now just seemed… rude. And while she was still prone to her manipulative shit-stirring ways, for this I was prepared. I’d found a couple of books, called, Understanding the Borderline Mother and Stop Walking On Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder. 

During the six years of zero contact with her, all my relationships flourished, my career took off, and the more obviously stress-related autoimmune issues I’d been plagued with finally released me. The only thing close to regret or guilt I experienced was to wonder if I was possibly a monster for feeling so good about my decision. Was I a monster? Well, so be it, I thought, then I’m a monster. A happy monster.

I'm not a mental health professional, but reading those books helped me make sense of my mother’s cruelty. Or what appeared to be cruelty: they allowed me to understand that as cruel as she seemed, she, too, was suffering. Not that knowing this made her any easier to bear. As I once told a friend, she’s like an extreme weather event: when a tornado rips through your house with you in it, it’s nothing personal, but it’s no less a destructive and terrifying force.

To live with my mother again without slipping into dynamics of the past, I resorted to the mental acrobatics of pretending she was somebody else’s mother who I was taking care of as an urgent favor, and that all I had to do was keep her safe, make sure she didn't break a hip or burn the house down, or give herself food poisoning with all the old, expired food she left lying around wherever she lost track of it. 

I recommend this trick, which even made cleaning the toilet several times a day more bearable somehow. Not to mention all the little invisible things I did and continue to do daily, which somehow take all day – “invisible” because they would only become evident if I didn’t do them. Anyone who’s been a caregiver will know what I mean. Everyone else can just give me credit for spending a month cleaning and disinfecting the house from floor to ceiling, and then another emptying the house of all the junk making it a fire hazard, before going on to repair and reconstruct whatever the contents of my tool box and Dad’s old tool room could handle. 

To track her movements without appearing to hound her or lose my ability to sit at my desk and work, I deployed various surveillance devices, including a dog tracker attached to her walker in case she went out for a walk without telling me and got lost again, like the time (pre-surveillance) she had to be escorted home by the Pizza Hut delivery van whose driver reprimanded her in Spanish (to her delight) all the way home as he drove very slowly next to her. She took this as evidence that she was still cute enough to inspire benevolence (rather than the more likely crimes of opportunity) in strangers.

To live with my mother again without slipping into dynamics of the past, I resorted to the mental acrobatics of pretending she was somebody else’s mother who I was taking care of as an urgent favor, and that all I had to do was keep her safe, make sure she didn't break a hip or burn the house down, or give herself food poisoning with all the old, expired food she left lying around wherever she lost track of it. 

You name it, I thought of it and did it, mostly at night while she was in bed and couldn’t object. Eventually, I claimed nighttime as my creative workspace, while mornings I reverted to concierge slash janitor slash assisted living provider slash prodigal daughter who had returned to do her duty. Our boundaries established, my mother transferred her combative tendencies to the bird feeder, toddling outside waving her cane menacingly above her head, wanting only to feed the “nice birds,” and feeling insulted by the sarcastically slow retreat of jaded squirrels.

Meanwhile, to make the dissociation complete, I began referring to her by her first name when discussing her with my friends. With a few exceptions when she caught me off guard and turned my insides into soup with her expertly aimed verbal jabs and showy withdrawals of respect and/or affection, this worked like magic.

***

The next step was to persuade myself that all it would take to turn what looked like a career and soul-destroying surrender into a good thing for me, too, was perspective. If I squinted, I could see my current living situation as the residency I’d long desired. Living at my mother’s house, I had no rent or utilities to pay, and there was a train station right across the street if I needed to head into the city to visit a museum or use the library for research. Apart from not dying of Covid (or the black mold I suspected was lining all the drywall in the house) (or of constantly encroaching depression), the only other thing I needed was a modest stipend for my nutrition and personal care. I could provide this for myself by selling one or two of my cartoons a month. Would that be so hard? In principle, no. 

The real question was whether I could remain sufficiently funny and pertinent while living with my toxic mother in her depressing, unhealthy home during a global pandemic. But if I failed, well, there would be no shame for me in spending the next few years living on rice and beans, with non-payment of taxes as a last resort. After all, who with a heart could reproach anyone for failing to come up with humorous drawings while, among other tragedies and cataclysms, the world was literally burning down? There were valid reasons to be unproductive, reasons like despair, compassion, grief, anger. I knew I would forgive myself, if no one else would.

I knew exactly what I’d do with my residency because it was something I’d been thinking about for years, though it might be more accurate to say it had been stuck in my craw, because the only thing stopping me from pursuing it before (besides having three jobs until the Pandemic Shutdown) had been my estrangement from my mother. I had two lifelong mysteries to solve, and they both revolved around her. One was the mystery of why she was such a monster — could it be related to whatever characterized her life in mid-20th century Ecuador? The other was the identity and whereabouts of a “servant girl” brought over to the U.S. in 1962 to work for my aunt, and who ran away shortly after I was born. These two mysteries eventually converged historically and sociologically to become the subject of my writer-in-residency project.

If I squinted, I could see my current living situation as the residency I’d long desired. Living at my mother’s house, I had no rent or utilities to pay, and there was a train station right across the street if I needed to head into the city to visit a museum or use the library for research.

The first order of business was to nudge my mother into reminiscing of her own accord. This way I could get the information I needed before she realized (1) that she was connecting with another human being with feelings, and (2) that having connected with another human being, it was time to immediately commence the ritualistic destruction of that connection/that person. As a backup plan, I decided that if it looked like she wasn’t going to come through with any useful memories or information within a year, I’d start writing the crazy novel I had outlined a few years earlier, and that you don’t need to know more about because my mother began babbling about her life in Ecuador almost immediately. 

I forgot to say that time was an issue. She was going increasingly deaf, and with her vehement refusals to get a hearing aid, the window of opportunity was closing quickly. At the time of my writing this, she’s nearly impossible to converse with at all. Sometimes I think forcing us to repeat everything we say several times (while holding back tears of frustration) is just her last grasp at power over us. But before she closed shop, her memories provided me with a wealth of material that helped solve mystery number one: what was it about growing up in the first half of 20th century Ecuador that had made her so monstrous? (Ah, so many things, so, so many!) And though she carefully continued to reflexively lie and try to hide facts from me, I managed to get what I needed for my preferred part of the project, mystery number two, solved when I found the little girl — a cousin enslaved by the family, it turns out — as a 73-year-old woman living an enviable life (to my great relief) in Connecticut.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t once dream about that residency at Edith Wharton’s mansion. Why wouldn’t I want to see where one of my literary heroes had lived and breathed? But what if Edith Wharton had lived like I do, taking care of a belligerent, incontinent and antisocial old mother in a dilapidated little house in Queens? Then maybe my life is what an Edith Wharton House residency would look like, and I’m not sure I’d say no to inspiration by toilet brush. 

And what if my mother’s house was that little cabin in the woods where they bring you baskets of food and leave it on your doorstep? It kind of is, except here, instead of food for me, it’s daily meals delivered by a Catholic charity for her. The deliveries are her only brief, voluntary contact with the outside world, and they save me having to cook for her, which is good, because feeling indebted in any way to anyone for even the smallest thing triggers in her a deep, dangerous resentment. It’s much better to let her direct that bad energy to the food politely delivered to her by oblivious strangers who drive away perfunctorily, rather than demoralize me by letting me waste my efforts cooking food that she sees as a form of oppression.

While other residencies require or encourage you to congregate a little with your peers, maybe get some feedback from them, or “give back” to the community, nobody in my family cared about my genealogical and historical research, and nor were they interested (surprise, surprise) in my search for my mother’s runaway servant/relative. But the negative feedback was illuminating! I was not deterred from dutifully providing a running account of all my sociological, historical (not to mention genealogical) discoveries, especially the ones I thought solved many of the mysteries shrouding our mother’s troubling personality. Maybe they’ll thank me later.

I had two lifelong mysteries to solve, and they both revolved around her. One was the mystery of why she was such a monster — could it be related to whatever characterized her life in mid-20th century Ecuador? The other was the identity and whereabouts of a “servant girl” brought over to the U.S. in 1962 to work for my aunt, and who ran away shortly after I was born. These two mysteries eventually converged historically and sociologically to become the subject of my writer-in-residency project.

My self-imposed exile during this very long, strange residency also allowed me to discover and read history books (amongst them, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents) that unveiled the lies I was taught growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as so many books by Latine and Ch/Xicanx writers it never occurred to me to seek out or read before, because both my parents had raised me to be resolutely "American." It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it’s been life-changing, and that every little thing I learned and identified within these books triggered, and continues to trigger, repeated recalibrations in my mind and spirit. 

And I may not have been given a place in a writer’s workshop to help me learn “craft” (which, like cryptocurrency, remains a mystery to me), but I did find a free, remote “life coach” for 28 weeks during the lonely heart of the Pandemic, who encouraged me to seek out and receive, with deep gratitude the scholarships to Anne Liu Kellor’s online writing workshops for multiracial writers at Hedgebrook and Hugo House, as well as Maud Newton’s Ancestor Trouble workshop, which helped me make peace with the stubborn elusiveness of some of my more mysterious ancestors. 

At present, I check in weekly with my “runaway” 75-year-old second-cousin/fellow black sheep who’s become something of a mentor to me, sharing memories and wisdom, giving me insights I can't find in history books about her own life as a multi-racial woman in 1950s Ecuador and 1960’s New York, with all their infrastructure and social subtleties. I find myself literally saying, “I’m so grateful,” out loud to myself after our calls.

Nine months into my search for her, thinking to banish fears of wasting my time and energy, I’d begun using my monster-in-residency to write a 250-page first draft of a book, fictionalizing it, to give a home to my speculations and frustrations. Once I found her, I went to town and threw in some Black pirates, a couple of fugitive German war criminals, and the lost emeralds of Atahualpa: all gifts to myself because my mother’s parenting style had crushed my dreams of writing when I was in the first grade. There was no way I wouldn’t throw myself into an epic tale when I finally got around to overcoming my fear of writing in my late 50s.

Not everyone gets (or conjures up) an opportunity like this. True, in no other residency does a writer routinely have to clean bathrooms and scrub someone else's soiled underpants, and yes I face more adversity and skepticism here, or at least a different kind than I would have at Edith Wharton's mansion, or that Idaho workshop. And true, I have not benefited from the kind of support and community I would have expected at a Yaddo type of residency. True, I sometimes feel deeply depressed and hopeless. But who doesn’t? And the facts are: I’m 58 years old now, broke, and (thankfully) single; my mother is more deaf and ornery than ever; and even if, to some, these last few years of caregiving (and possibly the next few) won't look like anything more than a gaping black hole on my CV, they’ll have been more writer-in-residence than many a woman in my position could reasonably hope for. That I was able to use this time (and my imagination) as I did is something I’ll be forever grateful for. 

Before it’s over, things may certainly get harder, and I will have to be very clever indeed to survive and move forward. How will I swing that, I wonder? That, my friends, is TK.

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Carolita Johnson has written other essays for Oldster Magazine, and responded to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.