Hi,
My mother won’t self-isolate. Our entire household has become recruited into a 24-hour high-stakes game of hide and seek, where my mother disappears and we have to find her because she shouldn’t go outside as someone who is elderly with pre-existing conditions and hence vulnerable to coronavirus.
"She escaped!" my sister reported last week, bewildered to find that my mother had managed to circumvent our surveillance system by leaving the house early when all of us were still asleep. I called to find her sitting in the car outside a street market (a street market! In a pandemic!), waiting for it to open so she could buy groceries we did not need.
My mother is the most hypochondriac person I’ve ever met. We live in fear of her headaches (or as she assumes them to be, brain tumours), stomach cramps (kidney stones), and anxiety attacks (strokes). When coronavirus struck, I expected her to lead the charge in disinfecting the house and self-isolating. Instead, she has counterintuitively decided that she’s afraid of every fictitious illness there is, but not the actual pandemic that’s shut down the entire world. That one she’s happy to take her chances on.
Our family isn’t alone. So many of my friends are embroiled in frustrating tussles with their parents; some have led to tears and shouting. It gets extremely difficult when terror mixes with helplessness in uncharted territory. How do you get your parents to listen to you? Why aren’t they listening to you?
The answer is complicated. My own mother finally broke down and told us that she just can’t handle being cooped up in the house all the time. She has managed her mental health and general life adversity – such as young widowhood and being a single parent – by doing stuff; structuring her hours; setting milestones in the form of routine achievements that buoyed her from day to day. I became kinder to her once I realised that she couldn’t do her job from home. She couldn’t wake up every morning with her day mapped out, her kitchen stocked and ready for her daily innovations. Her compass was broken, which was a more immediate concern to her than contracting a virus that she is, beneath her stubborn surface, absolutely terrified of.
So many elderly people are caught between this rock and a hard place. Shouting at them and pointing out their frailty and their susceptibility to the virus may fall on deaf ears, or agitate them further. I realise that what my mother needed was a sense of structure to her day, more company and little projects she could look forward to. And so my siblings and I engaged with her more; frequent chats, calls from those abroad, more small cooking ventures, longer meals. We have to take chunks out of our day – we all work – but it’s been rewarding, and has given her enough life inside the house so she doesn’t need to seek it outside.
In a way, it feels like a microcosm of how the pandemic keeps pointing us to the simple obvious solutions: more communion, more empathy, and a little bit more time invested in helping others.
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