UNCLAIMED BAGGAGE

Sheridan discusses becoming the caretaker of her emotionally distant expat mother in this debut memoir.

In 1977, the author dropped out of college and took a job as an aide at the Driftwood Convalescent Hospital in Santa Cruz, California. “None of my nine patients were intact, fully functional human beings,” she recalls. “Every morning, I woke, fed, toileted, washed and dressed my charges, helping those not bedridden into their wheelchairs.” When she told her mother Amy about the job, Amy’s only response was to make Sheridan promise never to put her in a place like that when she was old. By that point, the author already had a slightly strained relationship with her mother. Due to her father’s work in agricultural modernization, Sheridan and her four brothers grew up moving between California, Libya, England, and New Mexico. When she was 16, her mother left the family during a vacation to the Italian Riviera, after which Amy remained in Italy with her new boyfriend. From then on, the author felt like an afterthought in Amy’s life, a rarely considered artifact of a time the older woman had left behind. Later, when the octogenarian Amy decided to move back to California to take up residence in a retirement community, the twice-divorced Sheridan, now in her 50s, was forced to step into the role of daughter in a way she’d never known before. The situation became more strained when Amy broke her pelvis in a fall and the author, wanting to keep her long-ago promise to her mother, invited the ailing woman to move into the little bungalow beside her house. After nearly a lifetime spent residing on separate continents, Sheridan finally had her mother close enough to begin to understand what made her tick. With this time-hopping memoir, the author explores the contradictions of a relationship she never fully grasped until its final chapter.

Sheridan’s fluid prose captures her relationship with her mother in all its humor and horror. Here, she tries to ignore the baby monitor she’s set up in her mother’s bungalow during the woman’s slide into dementia: “Returning to bed, I lay in the dark, still rigid with tension. My mother singing lustily away in the monitor…Like a bad daughter—or was I finally now the mean, uncaring mother?—I switched off the demonic device and assumed the fetal position. I’d deal with everything in the morning.” Amy is, in the author’s telling, an enigmatic woman of vexing tics and vast pretensions. (When Sheridan visited her in Italy, Amy charged her daughter for the groceries she consumed and didn’t like them being overheard speaking English, lest anyone realize they were American.) Amy’s villainy seems mostly unintentional, though it is primarily directed at her lone daughter, whose quest to win her approval forms the unstable basis of their relationship. Presented in quick chapters with occasional flashbacks to moments from Sheridan’s younger years, and illustrated with several photographs, the account moves quickly. The memoir offers many moments that anyone with a difficult or aging parent will surely relate to.

A thoughtful memoir revealing that mother-daughter relationships don’t necessarily get easier with age.