I have read that in times of grave personal danger that the brain alters our perception of time, slowing normal time down to a crawl. It’s like the feeling you get on an icy road when you know you can’t stop the car and it seems to take forever until the final impact.
I thought of this at breakfast recently when, briefly, time as I know it stopped. It was a morning like any other. I was eating a bagel and drinking diet coke while checking my email. My partner was eating oatmeal and drinking coffee while reading the paper. The black cat was howling to come in and the orange cat was howling to go out but as soon as I opened the door to let one in and the other out they each changed their minds and howled even louder.
My partner cleared his throat; this usually precedes an announcement of some significance, so I looked up expectantly, my mouth full of bagel. “How would you feel,” he said, “if my mother moved in with us?”
What seemed like 20 minutes later I swallowed my bagel. “Excuse me?” I said politely and he repeated the question. I was immediately worried. My partner is not the kind of guy who says whatever pops into his head. If he broached the subject I knew that he had carefully thought this out and may have already purchased his mother’s plane ticket.
This was not wholly unexpected, and I knew what he was thinking. His widowed mother is in her mid- 80’s and lives alone in the crumbling house she moved into in 1948. Her mind is sharp but she is slowing down physically. She is afraid to drive at night, or in the snow, or if there is traffic, which means, in her congested corner of New Jersey, that she doesn’t drive. He frets every Monday on laundry day, imagining her carrying the heavy clothes basket down the steep, unlighted staircase to the basement. In addition, the demographic of the old neighborhood is changing rapidly. The 22-year old son of her neighbor, when he is not in jail, periodically shows up at her door to “borrow” some money, which, intimidated, she always gives to him.
My partner has one brother who lives two miles away from their mother. He is in his early sixties, unemployed and has never married, but he is resentful every time he has to change a light bulb or take her to the doctor or the grocery store; “I have a life of my own,” he says.
It is a combustible situation; his mother is fiercely independent and refuses to ask his brother for help. My partner gives advice long-distance to both of them. The brother is resentful because even though my partner moved to Florida in 1980, when his parents were in their robust early 50’s, you would swear that he bailed just to shirk his filial responsibilities.
I admit that my initial feeling was anxiety that our calm, well-ordered existence, so common to childless couples, was about to be upended. Personally I’m quite fond of my partner’s mom, and I get along with her better than he does: They are temperamentally so similar that they literally can’t be left alone together without an argument ensuing, an argument in which I am generally the referee. In addition, his mother has three very spoiled cats and we have three very spoiled cats; the idea of living in a feline version of the “Brady Bunch” is not alluring. There are also scheduling issues: his mother eats dinner at 5:00 and goes to bed early; we eat dinner at 9:00 and stay up late.
As the world slowly started spinning again, I said carefully, “I think we should talk about this.” (Translation: “I don’t want to talk about this.”) He nodded miserably. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “I’m just afraid that if I don’t ask her I’m going to regret it later.”
I couldn’t help myself: “Yes, but if you do ask her, you may regret it sooner,” I said gently, feeling like we were driving down an icy road with no brakes.