Author: Maya Shanbhag Lang
Genre: Memoir
Rating: 4 out of 5
Pages: 288
Date Started: 28 December 2021
Date Finished: 30 December 2021
I have no specific memory of choosing this book to read. The book was available on Kindle from the library and was easier to carry while I traveled. I have not read many memoirs and thought it was a good chance for me. I did not know about the subject as well!
Maya, who has given birth to a baby girl, Zoe starts her story about her mother, and her relationship with her mother while growing up. Maya is fascinated by the courage, resilience, and thoughtful attitude of her mother and thinks she is perfect. Maya continues to talk about her mother being diagnosed with dementia and becomes the full-time caregiver for her mother.
The struggles of being a new mother, postpartum depression, exhaustion, and the attitude of her mother towards the situation make the author seek help, and she explains well about her struggles and triumphs. The book is mostly about the struggles Maya suffers as a caregiver to her mother who is losing herself to the disease. The caregivers' guilt, problems, and making a life around the disease and the patient is explained well.
Having a personal experience with a close relative who suffered from 'Parkinson's induced Dementia', was not only hard but heartbreaking at the same time. The struggles of managing the tantrums, fears, and stubbornness were not easy to read. The mother accusing her own kids of scamming her and treating her like a slave is not unusual, but also disheartening. But at the same time, I felt that the author sounded like she wanted the credit for taking care of her mother. She justifies the suffering she and her family took while caring for her mother, which was totally optional if she had chosen to admit her mother to the senior care center. Hence 4 stars instead of 5!
Favorite lines from the book:
Noah's family never expected him to put himself through law school or move to New York City. My Indian parents never imagined that it was acceptable to read books all day. We had proved them wrong.
I learned that pharmaceutical companies often put x and z in product names (Xanax, Zoloft, Prozac) because it makes them more memorable.
I learned that people's insides were more complicated than their outsides revealed.
I longed for an arsenal of beauty products. I didn't want to enhance my features. I wanted to escape them entirely.
She refused to call her birthplace by its new name after it was rechristened Mumbai. It would always be Bombay to her.
While I recognize that my thoughts are distorted, I can't regain perspective. Then I feel even more worthless. I am trapped in an endless negative loop.
It is a cruel feature of memory that trauma retains its vividness while love fades to a blur.
I don't want Zoe going through life thinking that I gave myself up for her. I don't want guilt to be her inheritance.
Misery shared is misery lessened.
Her whole life has been about averting disaster. What about pleasure?
It seems the woman in the river can't choose correctly. Choosing herself, she faces judgment. Sacrificing herself, she faces it, too. That is the real lesson of the story: A woman faces judgment no matter what she chooses. No wonder my mom hid the truth from me. She didn't see that a mother's story affects a daughter's choices.
Forgiveness has never come easily to me. I have the opposite problem of my mom: a too-sharp memory.
Alzheimer's is devastating because it annihilates one's story. It vacuums it up. My mom no longer belongs to me. She belongs to her illness.
All her life, she saved for a rainy day. She was so busy preparing for rain that she never stopped to feel the sun.
The story is about the woman choosing herself. Once she makes that choice, everything follows.
My mom recognizes me, I tell them. The problem is that I don't recognize her.
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