Trying to Move In

Feigned fancy, wheelchairs, and stealing my sister's inheritance

Two weeks ago, I started moving into my mother’s house. I tried to make it feel like I was going on a fancy vacation instead of what it really was: a long Friday afternoon stuck in LA traffic on the 10, hauling boxes of beloved belongings up a flight of stairs and forcing them to fit in wherever they could get in amidst my mother’s own messes.

I rented a luxury SUV because my ex’s ex-fiancé’s nearly twenty year old car he gave me has a broken side-mirror holding on to dear life with Scotch packing tape, and smoke started wafting from the hood. I dusted off the set of metal suitcases that matched his and finally put bequeathed designer luggage to use, packing each to the gills with archive-worthy gowns from award-seasons past, every handbag I’ve ever cried over receiving (all of them), and my beloved shoe collection.

I arrived and schlepped all my shit into the living room, swatting away my mother’s incessant but earnest attempts to help. This isn’t because I’m too proud or some shit, like I’ve got something to prove by emptying a trunk stuffed with Disneyland memorabilia on my own. It’s because she broke her back and has no damn business moving anything but her bony ass safely from any given Point A to Point B.

At this time,
Point A was the garage
and Point B was the couch.

There was no joy in forcing my mother to sit the fuck down. I felt like an agitated parent and tried to hide it with jokes. She felt like a powerless child and tried to hide it with laughter, but she told on herself with the deep sorrow of her eyes. We were once again playing the roles we’d played most of my life, roles neither of us have ever wanted.

I sheepishly asked if I could show her my dresses; dresses she’d never seen, that she never knew I’d worn, that I never got to share my memories of. Her eyes lit up, her smile no longer forced. She was a mom, and I was a daughter.

I unpacked and presented each piece while she laid on the heating pad for her back. Oscars, Emmys, galas; Vintage Dior, Halston, Pucci, Rabanne. My mother was always an incredible seamstress. She took each fabric between her fingers with equal parts enchantment and expertise, absorbing their construction and admiring their shapes. She looked proud of me, and while it doesn’t make sense, it somehow felt like it made up for all the times I’d broken her sewing machine growing up.

She said she was craving corn dogs, so we had corn dogs for dinner. We drank half a pack of La Croix and watched Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar. She told her boyfriend on the phone she couldn’t talk because she was having too much fun and assured him she was being spoiled. We laughed until our stomachs hurt making dark jokes about her life in a nursing home while I raced around on her marble floors in the wheelchair I found in a corner of her garage.

---

We spent the next day organizing mountains of paperwork; my mother slicing through grocery bags of unopened mail while I labeled folders and filed everything that wasn’t “junk they send her trying to convince her to go paperless but never will because that’s how MS13 hacked her phone.”

By the afternoon her back was hurting and she was tired. It was another struggle to get her to the couch to rest while I continued working around the house. I could see the frustration on her face and could relate— I also feel the need to work if people around me are, as if I will be devalued for not putting in the same effort, at the same time.

“Mom, I’ll come sit with you as soon as I get a few more things done. You don’t need to get more done. I can do it. But there’s a lot that needs to be done so I can move in, and because I’m only here for a few days.”

She had forgotten I wasn’t already moved in.
And was offended “a lot needed to be done”
and by the implication that she couldn’t do it.

“I can still do things, Marissa.”

I apologized and tried to explain that I wasn’t attacking her or saying she was incapable. But also that it was true: a lot needs to be done for me to move in and get the house handled.

Trying to explain that was as fruitless as trying to explain to her that no one hacked her Netflix account because her profile name had been changed to “Momskfjhsdkfsnvshakhygyhdf.” That she probably had just rolled over on her remote while sleeping. (Although she felt confident that she wouldn’t be hacked again once I deleted the “skfjhsdkfsnvshakhygyhdf”.)

While pushing heavy boxes of vintage magazines I couldn’t carry upstairs around her dining room, I spotted a few vintage floral ceramics amongst the piles of porcelain and collections of china on the table. I doubt she remembered they were there or that she even had them, but I didn’t want to move them without asking her. I’ve found that that sort of thing, in the unlikely scenario she went looking for these random pieces of decor, can really set a bitch with early on-set dementia offfffff.

So while eating four different kinds of ice cream I’d bought her from the store, I asked if I could put the ceramics in my soon-to-be bedroom. She said that was fine. And after she dozed off watching Rizzoli and Isles on the couch she prefers over her bed, I took the pieces upstairs. I organized the two guest rooms while she slept: one with all of her things and one with all of mine, and tried to take joy in decorating the same nightstand that was in my bedroom twenty-five years ago.

---

I woke up the next morning
alarmed by the sound
of my mother shuffling
around the second story.

I immediately knew I’d upset her. She’s actively avoided the stairs since her back surgery. But I wasn’t sure how I upset her— consolidating clothes? Sorting old bedding? Making sure we could fully open the doors and safely walk around without tripping on shit? Because I had done anything at all?

I yelled up the staircase
to see what she was up to.
”Laundry.”
For the first time in months.
And “NO!”
she did not want help.

“Can I help you pack your car?” she asked once she came downstairs. She knew it was already packed. She just wanted me gone. “Well, then I can hold your water and walk you out.”

I grabbed my purse and my dog, my mother on my heels ushering me out like she was a paid stadium employee trying to clear the place. As we passed through the dining room, a lightbulb went off: the floral ceramics! That’s what she had to be mad about!

“Hey mom,” I said gently. “I just wanted to remind you I moved the Italian floral ceramics upstairs to my bedroom. I asked you last night if I could and you said it was okay, but I just wanted to make sure you remembered in case you went looking for them and couldn’t find them.”

It turns out that was not
what she was mad about.
But good god damn, now she was.

“I never told you you could move those!” She wasn’t yelling, but it was one of those tones that make you feel like you’re being yelled at. I tried recalling the night to her— the ice cream! that (bad) Netflix show! me working on my bedroom!— but it was no use. Neither was trying to explain I wasn’t “stealing” from her because I moved two candlesticks and a vase I’ve never seen her use in my life from one room to another, in her house, that I’m moving into. Like where the hell am I even stealing this shit to?!

I pushed my palms against my eyelids, wondering why I’d even asked— or now told—her to begin with. She probably didn’t even remember they were there, and if she did remember and gotten mad down the line, I could have just been an asshole and told her a lie that was this entire truth. They would be the same to her.

“Even if you’re not stealing from me,
you’re stealing from your sister.”
“How am I stealing from Valerie?”
“Everything must be separated equally!
You’re stealing her inheritance!”

I knew my sister did not give a shit about this vintage floral shit. My sister is more than my sister— she’s my best friend, she’s my everything. And not only do I know her well enough to know she would never give a shit about this shit, there is no world in which I wouldn’t give her anything and everything she wanted. I would never, could never, steal from my sister (aside from all the Halloween candy she had under her bed when we were kids and other older sister bullshit I probably pulled, I’m sorry Val). And I told my mother just that.

“But you are still stealing.
Those are worth thousands of dollars!”
”Mom, they are worth like $100.”
”YOU DON’T KNOW THAT.”
”I do, I looked them up.”
”SO YOU ARE TRYING TO STEAL.”

I sighed and resigned myself to my mother’s reality, where I was a thief out to abscond up her stairs, to her extra bedrooms, with her decorative plates and silver flatware to fuck my sister out of her “estate.”

I called my sister on the drive home.
Of course, she didn’t want the fucking ceramics.
And we laughed about it all.

---

Although, apparently, this was not a laughing matter. Within 24 hours, my mom let me know she was packing away the vintage floral pieces, called my sister a dozen times about it while she was at work with autistic toddlers and called my professional pickleball playing aunt probably just as many times during league games. Then got on our group chat to say I was manic, imply I was bipolar, that I was trying to change her whole house and made a mess of her paperwork.

To be fair, yes, I did tell her she had to get a new rug because her rug smells like it came from a nursing home for cats and I’m convinced it’s going to slowly kill us. It would kill her first, but I don’t want to be second.

I am not going out
being slowly poisoned
by a thirty-year-old rug
emanating high levels of ammonia.

Either outright murder me and
get me at least a Lifetime movie
or get the fuck out.
But I digress.

I don’t know what I did was so wrong; I don’t know how the hours I spent working were so wrong. I don’t know if anything I ever do will ever be “right.” It felt like I never did anything “right” growing up and I still don’t feel like I’m doing anything “right” as an adult. But god damn, am I trying to do right.

---

The following day she called me to tell me how much she loved me, how much fun she had, how she hadn’t laughed that hard in so long and how much she loved my dog. How she couldn’t wait for me to come back, and couldn’t wait for me to fully move in.

No vintage floral ceramics mentioned.

So maybe I’m doing something right.

---

On the Street Where I’ve Lived

Adventures in Caregiving

---