My hair was falling out when my mom came to visit for two weeks. It was mid-November, and I was trying to cover it up with fun hats. I don’t know why I bothered, it wasn’t like anyone was looking at me. Not at work where I spent my days managing an optometrist’s office; I was just a faceless person in a pair of scrubs. Not at home, where it felt like I was always talking to the top of my sons’ heads or their backs or their closed bedroom doors. I was the only one who saw my hair falling out in clumps in the shower, staring down at handfuls of it like a horror movie. I was at my lowest point then. My rent was always late. The dog was sick. My kids were moving further and further away from me. I was lost.
Until my mom visited from her regular life in California to be my wife for two weeks.
She moved a five hour flight away when my youngest son was around 6 years old. Which means her visits moved from a weekend drop-in to a week or two at least, something I’ll admit I have sometimes resented. It always felt too long, too much, too presentational for me. “Is your room clean or is it Grandma clean?” I’d screech up the stairs to my sons as I tried to nervously scrub dog pee out of the carpet. I wanted to be excited to see her, wanted to take care of her and make sure there was enough of her favorite food in the house, a bottle of wine for her arrival, a comfortable bed with clean sheets where she could sleep. I wanted to be a host for her visit but the truth was, I could barely be a host for my own life. And her visits sometimes just reminded me that I was failing as a single mom in front of my own former single mom.
This time, I didn’t have time to clean for her. I didn’t have the energy. She rented a car for her visit because we didn’t have a car then, the kids and I walked to school and to work and the grocery store no matter how far it was. When she pulled up after dinner that night I was still in my scrubs, my ponytail tied in such a way to try to hide my thinning hair, the sink full of dinner dishes.
And so began my mom’s two weeks as the kind of ‘50s-era wife I recognized from classic TV shows. She took one look at me when she arrived and though she never said a word about it, I think she made some kind of decision. Every day she got up in the morning and we made school lunches from the groceries she picked up and put in my suddenly clean fridge. She walked our dog while I got ready for work. She drove the kids to school and me to work in two different trips, since there were too many of us for one.
When I walked home at the end of the day, I arrived to find the kids had been fed and had drawers full of clean laundry instead of baskets full of laundry that could have been dirty or clean, I could never remember. She’d hand me a glass of wine and tell me to have a bath, and our dinner would be ready in 30 minutes or so. We ate adult food the kids would hate. She did the dishes even when I sort of feebly offered to do them. We all curled up together to watch a movie or TV or even play cards together, homework done and dusted, before going to bed.
“No wonder men were such fans of having wives,” I kept thinking over and over again when my dog stopped peeing on the carpet and my kids started to help with the laundry and my hair stopped falling out. Who wouldn’t want this, at least for a little while? My home was organized, my life felt easier. I was better at my job because I wasn’t always thinking about what I had to do at home. I was easier on my kids.
When she left at the end of her two week visit, I cried harder than I had cried in ages. I was terrified to lose all that support. But what my mom actually gave me was more than two weeks of an easier life. She gave me a fresh start. A better system for our house. She made me see I could actually do all of these things. Joyfully even. She helped me get my feet back underneath me, and made me see that I could manage things — without some tough-love talking-to. Instead, she just gave me love.
She told me after that she slept for two weeks straight when she got home. Being my mom/wife really took it out of her.
Jen McGuire is a contributing writer for Romper and Scary Mommy. She lives in Canada with four boys and teaches life writing workshops where someone cries in every class. When she is not traveling as often as possible she’s trying to organize pie parties and outdoor karaoke with her neighbors. She will sing Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” at least once but she’s open to requests.
