Narcissist Down
By: Colleen Creamer
Tags: Daughter, Mother, Facelift, True Story, Narcissism

My Mother’s Budget Facelift

For Medium.com

Decades ago, when facelifts included something like a staple gun and a six-month supply of schedule III narcotics, my mother talked me into taking care of her after she’d had a “budget” facelift. This was no weekend lift or mini-lift or “Lifestyle Lift”; this was deep-coma invasive surgery done on a shoestring. No one in the family had been willing to take this on, certainly not my dad who had long since thrown up his hands at my mother’s Lucy-like misadventures, and certainly none of my three siblings who all had grown chicly apathetic by the time they were 11.

On background, as they say, my mother is a F5 narcissist, diagnosed, mean to wait staff and immune to insult, so I made her pay me. It was only like 50 bucks but certainly an extra 50 bucks I didn’t have in my twenties. The arrangement was that I was to come to the clinic and pick my mother up and help transport her to the motel across the street (hence, the budget part of the deal). A nurse would check in on her later that night, and I was to drive her home the following morning, or to the morgue, depending.

Shortly after the surgery, a nurse calls me into the recovery room where an unrecognizable and unconscious woman wearing my mother’s cream-colored pantsuit is wrapped in a head bandage the size Wile E. Coyote would wear after being clonked; it was enormous. “She’s just now coming out if it,” the nurse tells me, like I was just going to just heave my mother onto a gurney in broad daylight and roll her outside

Which is pretty much what happened. First, however, I had to find out 1) what in God’s name they had done to her, and 2) her “care”. As it turns out, mom elected at the last minute to “get it all over with” everything that could legally be done under anesthesia without killing her, which included the earliest (and nastiest) of chemical peels, and permanent eyeliner. How the conversation about permanent eyeliner could have come up is still a stumper; “aestheticians” were pretty much a thing of the future. The surgeon was a big man with large paddles for hands and the apparent dexterity of a polar bear, so there would be no catlike flair at the ends of my mother’s tattooed eyes, just a heavy black line. Clearly, he’d simply rotated the ink tool around in perfect circles and called it a day, because, when all had been said and done, my mother looked a little like Uncle Fester from the Adams Family — if Uncle Fester wore pencil skirts.

The receptionist gave me a printout of “dos” and “don’ts,” about not taking a shower, what she could not eat, which was anything. The nurse then handed me a small plastic bag, inside two shrink-wrapped bullet-shaped things — suppositories, as it turns out, in case the pain “became severe.” Because there was no way I was getting anywhere near my mother’s ass, they went in the trash on my way out of the clinic. The nurse wheeled my mother out, her face a small bruised oval surrounded by white. I recall feeling sorry for her and then remembering that she refused to get my dad library books when he was undergoing chemo because she had a belly dancing lesson.

Mom’s big bandaged head bobbed as we creaked long via wheelchair towards the traffic light to the motel. The three of us looked like characters in a Fellini movie: grim nurse in crisp white dress and nurse’s hat completely out of context on a busy road, me in low bells, sandals and flowing gauze blouse, my woozy mother a yet-undiscovered archetype: “The Victim”.

When we got to the ground-floor room, the nurse opened the door and wheeled mom up and onto the bed, tucking her in with one deft move. “I’ll be back at around 11,” she said. “She’ll be out for a while.” She then left a glass of water on the bed stand along with some oral pain meds I was quite relieved to see. I checked mom’s bandages. Some blood had seeped through from the staples at the top (this after I was informed to not touch the bandages). A little later, my mother’s face was beginning to blister and her eyes were very swollen. I called the office and the nurse said all was normal.

“Is she throwing up?” the nurse asked.

“Is she supposed to?” I snapped.

“Sometimes there’s a reaction to the anesthesia, but that would have happened by now,” the nurse reported.

I watched my self-battered mother, irritated. After falling asleep, I woke up startled. She was out flat on her back and still swaddled but snoring. Because I was sure her face was going explode lying down, I slipped some pillows underneath her head. Then I peeled open the curtains to the sliding glass door (a “patio” motel) and saw that we were in direct line to a dark, cheesy looking bar right across the lawn.

“Mom, I’m going out to get some ice,” I lied, slid open the sliding glass door and made it to motel bar with its heavy fake Spanish double doors in about 14 seconds. If I opened the bar doors, I could just make out the foot of my mother’s bed; I wouldn’t be able to see if she were choking on her own vomit or anything, but, as that was no longer likely, I ordered a Heineken. Within minutes, a skinny drummer in the lounge band, balding but with a clerical fringe, was listening to my story. He called over the guitar player, long-haired Jeremy, tall, early 30s, square-jawed in cowboy boots with ice-blue eyes and a perfectly trimmed “Fu Manchu.” Now, I wasn’t going anywhere, at least for a while.

I settled in unaware that my near-to-immediate future held not only dancing and drinking but screaming and crying. Jeremy slid me a beer and a shot of Petron. We exchanged personal data: age, relationship status. Just as that panic sets when one is both guilty and altered, I said, “I’ll be right back.” From across the lawn, my mother’s poorly lit space looked like a recovery room for hookers with particularly rough pimps. Back in I slipped.

Mom was still quite under, for the most part, her puffy lids rendering me at best a vague shape, so I just said,“the bathroom.” Thankfully, she was still easy to confuse. I asked mom how she was feeling and she half-heartedly raised a limp hand about two inches off the bed and then dropped it. The bandages looked fine, but now her eyes were really bulging. At around 8 p.m. another nurse answered the clinic phone.

“Hi, it’s Mrs. Creamer’s daughter. Are my mother’s eyelids supposed to be like really almost bulging like out of her eye sockets?”

The nurse said that indeed it was normal and that she was scheduled to come and visit my mother “in a few hours.” I reported back that it would be in my mother’s “best interest” to know precisely when that would be.

“I should be there at 11,” she told me.

At 9 p.m., I got mom to sit up and take a drink of water. She was due for a dose of pain meds at 10:00 p.m. an hour away. As it’s not too difficult pulling off the “prestige” part of an act when your audience is high on morphine-based drugs, I said nothing — and vanished. Galloping to the bar, I thought ‘please don’t let me kill my mother.’ The ways they could prove it included a room full of witnesses from the bar; credit card purchases from the front desk, the person at the front desk, everyone at the clinic, me laughing maniacally (later in the evening).

In full canter, a sprinkler attached itself to my sandal and hurtled me face forward to the ground. I unhinged my shoe and walked into the bar, the left side of me moist from having landed in newly sprinkled Bermuda grass. I assumed I was the most interesting person there; that’s the kind of thing alcohol does for me and millions of others. Drummer boy bounced over while Jeremy put away his guitar. I was so in. He had this shy glance. Where, I wondered, would we have sex? In his van? On the bar stool?

It was the Seventies.

“How’s your mom?” Jeremy asked looking at my clothes. Little needed to be explained in detail back then; people just took for granted that shit happened and some of it was messy. I showed him my wet side, and he showed me his tattoo, a peace sign. Some section of my mother’s story then sent him into a laughing attack.

He was adorable.

I started a tab just as they were called back to work. I expected more Depeche Mode, but Jeremy, who by now had factored in as my future husband, leaned into the mic and said in a low voice, “This is for the blond in the bleachers” and then launched into a stunning version of “Layla.” That he had just referenced Joni Mitchell and then turned into Eric Clapton made me want to drag him into the women’s bathroom and coyly punish him with a riding crop. Two beers later, Jeremy made a bee line toward me as I looked at the clock. It was now a little before 10 p.m. I ran back to the room and slipped in just as there was a knock on the front door.

Frantically, I ran into the bathroom and gargled hot water, which had the effect of acting as a vaporizer turning the contents of my gullet into a fine, hot mist of beer, Petron and tobacco smoke. I opened the door trying not to breath. My mother’s surgeon, still in scrubs, opened the door.

“Hi,” I gushed, squelching a gasp. He seemed in a hurry. “I came to check on your mother,” he said eying me and moving towards mom’s bed. He peered under the bandages. He checked her pupils. My mother had apparently just slipped from anesthesia coma to a pain pill coma; this worried me — a little.

“How’s she been?” he asked.

“Pretty good, considering she’s been through major surgery and is not in a hospital,” I told him, thinking that would be funnier. But, then again, I was now a little drunk.

“Has she been talking?”

“Not really. I don’t think she can yet. I think she’s probably still in pain.”

A vague memory of me throwing away some suppositories drifted my way. The surgeon looked through the plastic bag while I became white with fear.

“Did the nurse give you pain suppositories?” he asked me.

Here’s the thing about alcohol: when you are really trying not to act drunk, it’s like you’re navigating a fast pylon course in a Yugo. I went to sit down on the edge of the bed but missed and landed on one knee and then used the top of my mother’s IV-bruised hand to get up.

“Ooohh,” mom moaned.

“Oh, sorry mom,” I blurted, then added, “Well, she’s talking.”

I explained to the doctor that I had received no such things as suppositories for pain. He peered underneath the bandages again and asked, “Miriam, how is the pain? … Miriam?”

“Her name’s Karen,” I said.

Mom tried to open one bulging eye and then mangled, “Do I look younger?”

He laughed and said something like, “You do” and asked me if she was on schedule for her pain meds. I told him she was due right about now as I turned my watchless wrist towards me. I was an idiot.

“Is the nurse coming, still?” I inquired, and he said he was there in her stead.

“I think she’ll be just fine as long as she stays still and slightly upright.” He patted my mother’s knee. “She can have a bath in the morning, but make sure the bandages don’t get wet.”

I let him out and asked mom if she could scoot up. She did but sort of sloth-like, her prehensile fingers splaying out like she’d just noticed she was airborne. My poor mother. I got her to take a pain pill and stuck another pillow in back of her and looked at her eyes. I placed a straw in her mouth, which almost, but didn’t, stop her from slurring, “I know Merv Griffin.” It was then I knew all was well. Out-of-the-blue declarative statements like that were common with my mom, perturbing, but common.

Liar, horrible daughter, and now, with any luck, whore, I got mom into a respectable 45-degree angle and left; I had hit a bonanza with regard to the male species, and no major elective surgery was getting in my way.

Skipping on my way back to the lounge, I wondered what Jeremy’s last name was, where we would live; I figured in an adobe house in New Mexico where I would paint while raising our two well-adjusted children who would act as muses and who would be either homeschooled or maybe in the Montessori system. TV would be out of the question.

I rounded past the sprinkler and into the bar while the band was beginning “I’ve Got a Line on You” by Spirit. I danced that generic hippie flail made famous by Woodstock footage the entire set — alone, usually the sign of someone who doesn’t have the good sense to be embarrassed or someone who was drunk. I happened to be both. I thought I was adorably quirky what with the story of the near-comatose narcissistic mother and my pirouettes.

The band played for another 45 minutes. Jeremy and drummer boy both bought peppermint Schnapps, which we all threw back collectively. I was losing track of time. I slipped through the bar to the lawn to see if I could see part of my mother’s bed and saw what could only be described as the outline of a dementia patient trying to escape, but there were two of them — because I was seeing double.

I ran full steam barefoot, not so much across the lawn, but in a kind of serpentine. This wasn’t exactly strategic, more a function of trying to stay upright while hurtling forward. I got to the sliding glass door and stood face to face with my mother now naked apart from a bandaged head and trying to open the door. It was, and remains, the most frightening thing I’ve seen outside of a movie theater.

I pulled on the door, which was locked, hit the glass with the palm of my hand and screamed “Mom!” which sent my somnambulant mother away from the glass door to where she thought the knock was coming from — the front door.

“Mom!” I screamed again and banged on the glass while my mother ambled toward the motel door. This made me run — first to the left, then to the right, away from the walkway to the bar, then to the walkway to the bar, which opened to a parking on the left side of a restaurant, not the motel’s restaurant, a barbecue joint not remotely attached to the motel. I looked around and up to what seemed to be the top of the motel sign, wound through cars and traced my hand along a chain link fence crying until I found a road, the wrong road.

Along this road, I walked, bawling and barefoot for no less than half an hour. People honked, wolf whistled, a man asked me how much I charged.

A cop pulled up.

“Everything OK?” he asked. He looked at the bottom of my bells wet and green with grass stain, and then up at me. It was before the days of really good waterproof mascara, so a mean shade of black was running down my face and collecting under my chin. I felt like I had really accidentally murdered my mother, and no one knew…yet.

“I can’t find the motel?” I told him.

“What motel?” he asked me. I told him, and he told me to get in.

“Have we been drinking this evening?” he inquired.

“Yes, sir, we have been drinking. I’m sorry. I need to find my mother.”

In that amount of time he had pulled up to the overhang. Where the motel came from out of nowhere also remains a mystery.

I was sloshed and emotionally exhausted but not too exhausted to not notice a woman wearing a nurse’s uniform ambling across the street from the clinic. I started to hyperventilate and literally goose step towards my mom’s room. This nurse I had not met, so she had not met me. She bustled by me, apparently going the wrong way, I thought.

I found the key I had randomly stuck in my pocket, opened the door and saw my mother asleep on the bed still naked, and again snoring. I threw the covers over her, got in the other bed, pulled the covers over my head and waited for the nurse’s knock — a knock that never came.

The fact that my mom did not make it through the front door is a miracle I am still thankful for. The fact that she didn’t accidentally drown in the bath she had drawn for herself that evening is also something I am grateful for. As it turns out, there were other women also being poorly supervised at the motel. My mother is still alive at 92 and kicking, and, if she reads this, which is unlikely, she will deny any of it happened, including the facelift.

But it did.