I got the first text around 11pm. Iris is not a big texter or someone awake around midnight, so despite the incomprehensible content of the message, I worried. This is weird, I though. Then more texts came in, faster. For a second I contemplated the possibility somebody else was using my mom’s phone; she has never texted this fast and peppering sentences with emojis of all kinds, like teenagers sending each other encoded messages of febrile urges, only in this case trying to cancel ride-sharing trips.

Are you ok, I texted back. No answer, or rather, ignored, as more indecipherable messages rushed in.  I insisted: What’s the matter with Lyft? She answered “Payment”.  I started to understand she was desperately trying to cancel trips she didn’t order.

Iris and I use Lyft quite often.  Not separately but together, a triad.  Iris schedules doctor or clinic visits, I setup the trip in Lyft and she gets picked up and dropped off.  After some adjustments – wearing more identifiable clothing or waiting at more strategic corners – the system had worked regardless her limited technical proficiency and the 300 or so miles that separate us from me living in Fort Worth and she in Houston.

For seven years, Iris has lived down south with her sister and their mother, as a unit, who the family affectionately called “the girls”.  The three of them have a symbiotic ecosystem in which the daughters care for the matriarch and two cats that have lived longer any other feline I have known.

Iris letting me handle her Lyft trips was a welcomed change.  Her independence has always been an important and proud aspect of her life, but as she aged, it has turned into a necessity exercised by resisting to accept any help that may indicate a diminished capacity to take care of herself.

The strange messages could explain, I assumed, that she is trying to chat with Lyft support in a valiant effort to cancel trips on her own on their unfamiliar app, just for the maneuver to backfire, instead texting me, in her effort not to bother.

Unable to make sense of what was going on, Now I can only amuse how the silliness of those text messages could perfectly concealed the catastrophic events that were about to unfold.

I remember their home being always tidy, clean, with the same temperature no matter the climate outside.  Isolated as most houses are in rural Texas, it was part of a farm that shared the space with other two homes, many barns, and large unused fields, spotted with gas wells, sometimes graced by cattle rented from neighboring ranchers to help lower property taxes.

Each girl had her own room, which helped to know their personalities: grandma, a seamstress by hobby and nostalgia from past business ventures, had replaced her old Singer by a new one, always on display even though it could be packed away in its own cabinet with long metal legs supporting it.  The older sister, an athlete, shyly displaying trophies from yonder bouts of physical endurance.  My mom, a handcrafter, collecting all kinds of trinkets, swatches, yarns, ribbons, paper scraps and tools, neatly organized in her closet, encroaching the few clothes she still kept on hangers, hoping, no! knowing, one day, she would turn every piece of trash in there into something beautiful.

Their daily life was also segmented and disciplined, with a frugality only found in immigrant households with minimal assimilation, concentrated on one goal: caring for Grandma.  For the older sister, this was the natural way of things, as she has done it for over 60 years, unincumbered by nuptials or progeny.

My mother was a different matter.  When she came to the US twenty three years ago, she already had fulfill her duties as wife and mother, raising me on her own after a failed marriage that produced just me and ended 5 years into my existence.  After arriving with a tourist visa, she knew, the family knew, she was needed to maintain the house and help care for Grandma, who at that point, was already 76 years old. Iris had no option but to overstay her visa.

Besides the house, my mom was also the official pet caregiver, a full time job as they would show up at the farm with suspiciously good timing to fit in without abusing the space or resources.  Through the years, my mom cared for 7 dogs, at least 10 cats, a parrot, and one turkey.

Life at the girls house was uneventful besides the expected frictions from three people living together all the time.  As years went by, the other two houses in the farm became empty or rented out to strangers, leaving the girls alone, in their own codependent bubble, as sentinels of the coming and goings of the property, reporting back to its principals.

It was around this time a thunderstorm generated a mesocyclone, basically a wind sheer in which tornados are born, strong enough to dismantle a carport  built with c-channels, t-beams and corrugated sheet panels, hurdling the twisted rafters, like javelins, into the ground, and sending the roof up in the air landing 600 yards east, flying just above electric lines and the girls’ house.

Besides the broken branches and disturbed lawn furniture, serious damage was avoided, but the warning, inescapable: the girls could not be alone on their own.

That’s how 7 years ago they moved to Houston, closer to the rest of the family, transplanted into a house in which they replicated their lifestyles effortlessly; the Singer sawing machine on display, the trophies, the closet full of nick-nacks, and the perfect indoor temperature despite the now suffocating bayou humid heat.

I was able to speak on the phone to my mom the next morning after the cryptic Lyft messages. Sorry, she said, as if nothing needed explanation for the night before.  I pressed: what were you trying to do? Cancel trips I didn’t order, she said, distracted.  Her demeanor added more bafflement to the whole exchange.  I had checked the Lyft app and show 4 trips cancelled to a nearby McDonald’s, another puzzling clue, as she has never shown interest in fast food and the place was walking distance from their house.

The call, to figure out last night incident, ended with even less clarity than when it started.  I was ready to qualify the situation as a senior moment when, two days later, I got a new, more coherent text message from her:  “Your ancle needs to talk to you. He is at the farm.” She commanded.

Her brother is a veteran owner of the house where they live and patriarch of the family, so every incident needs to be reported back to him, at which point, with military bureaucracy and judiciary precision, an official inquiry is launched.

“I need to talk to both of you” he said when he called me later that same day.  Both being my wife and I.  The foreboding tone and required involvement of my spouse, crisped my nerves.   The call didn’t provide details, as if concealing its intent would diminish our resistance. We can only on Fridays I said, I will call you with details when and where, and then hanged up.

The meeting didn’t happen that Friday, instead, I got a new message from my mom: “I need the police to come, again.”  Again?  What is going on now, I thought.   I called her and she was in an uncharacteristic panic.  The Lyft drivers are walking around the house asking me for the money from the cancelled trips, she complained. I can see them through my window!  A window that faces the backyard, so they are inside the house.

By her account, the situation wasn’t any short of a siege by Lyft drivers banging on their door yelling her name and amounts of money owed to them.   Call the police, I said.  Already did once and didn’t come, she replied.  Call again.

This time officers showed up, did a walkthrough the house but found no evidence anyone was there.  She called me again: They are back!  I can see them outside my window. Those are the cops, I replied.  They are there to make sure y’all are OK.  I said with a reassuring tone to calm her down.  It worked.  I suggested they all went to bed together in the living room, which resembled more a hospital room for the medical needs of my Grandma who is now almost 100 years old.

The next morning, the older sister called me, with a disconcerting serenity delivering four dreadful words:  your mom attacked me.

The first sign something was wrong was when Iris collected her medications and hid them inside a closet, not hers, but one, she thought, harder to reach, next to Grandma’s bathroom.  Next, she hid herself in another closet, again, not hers, as there was no space with her handicraft material collection.

The three had hunker down through the night, as I suggested, in the living room, without incidents, but in the morning, my mom woke up agitated and erratic, switching back and forth between shouting and mumbling, alarming accusations everybody was trying to hurt her.

The older sister followed her around, first trying to calm her down and then demanding she stopped the nonsense as my mom labored to shut the closet’s door while crouched down inside.

Don’t know what’s the matter with her, the older sister told Grandma, who, in the hospital bed facing the only window in the living room, fiddled with the tilting control buttons to sit upright. Where is she, she asked.  In the closet. She says I want to kill her, the older sister replied shaking her head.

A fierce yank teared open the bedsheet held with two nails providing modest privacy to the living room, startling everybody inside. My mom, now armed with a broom stick without the broom part and a pair of scissors, charged the older sister in a surprise attack.

The fight moved to the kitchen, where my mom delivered multiple blows and punches to the older sister, who, recalling her martial arts training of youth, avoided and repelled most, until my mom landed several hits with the stick square on her face and then tried to stab her with the scissors, managing to injure the left ear.

While Grandma cried for them to stop, the older sister, splattering blood on the kitchen table and walls, fought back, pushing my mom against a wall in the entry way, hard enough she staggered backwards, dropping the weapons while falling, to land on the floor in an unnatural position, unconscious.

Her first call was to the police, the second to my uncle, the third to me. Your mom attacked me and I think I killed her, the older sister said on the phone.  Did you call the police, I asked. Yes, I think they are here, she replied and hanged up.

Her hot flashes started when Clinton was president and never really stopped, only became less annoying by getting used to them and taking medications for other conditions my mom suffered, or better said, inherited, as most were product of her DNA and less of her lifestyle.

She has always been an active and health-conscious person even before the holistic movement made it cool to eat grass and take homeopathic capsules at exact times of the day with gallons of water.  Growing up in a developing country of Central America, she was a vegetarian by force and not conviction: eating animals, besides chickens, was forbiddingly  expensive.  I have never seen her eat a beef steak, even when she migrated to Texas and gained a grater proximity to its source, feeding them scraps of her vegan diet through a chain-link fence in the backyard, only barrier separating humans from beasts eagerly expecting the tasty treats.

The most uncooperative part of her body has been her thyroid gland, with multiple health care professionals experimenting with different drugs to find the right cocktail to manage its hypothyroidism.  The hormonal imbalance propitiated hypertension and high cholesterol and later on diabetes, malady she initially dismissed as just a transitory condition signaling her arduous effort to eat and be healthy were working.

In contrast with her body requiring constant maintenance, her mind was impeccable and with perfect memory for sayings, proverbs, nicknames, and quotes from decades past, expertly applied to current situations to accentuate or ridicule.  One of her favorite quotes was from a Pastor from her childhood, Chilo, who, having a hard time convincing his Sunday School group of how closeness to Jesus would diminish their predilection for being naughty, gave up and shouted: “If you want to believe, believe, otherwise eat shit!”.   Forty years later, we still retort with “like Chilo used to say” to win arguments about the veracity of an statement.

There is no history of mental illness in our family and the closest my mom had to experience it was a tame version of anxiety and depression triggered from the increasingly demanding tasks to care for an aging parent coinciding with the loss of two or her most beloved pets: a calico cat who never learned to be pet and a dog named Hobo, that looked exactly as you imagine and would disappear for days, taking long walks around nearby fields, always returning with a look in his eyes as if he had discovered what’s wrong with the world.

I can’t sleep, she complained to her doctor.  A minimal daily dose of Zoloft should help, she prescribed.  For the first time in her life, my mom was taking psychotropics, reporting back in our weekly phone calls, the funny effects she was experiencing, none of which included paranoia, psychosis or the hostility she unleashed a year later on her older sister.

We didn’t talk much driving towards the airport.  My ancle had picked me up at home, coming from the farm, in a commercial road maintenance white truck he had purchased at auction and refurbished in one of his barns.  He had booked an emergency flight to Houston to go deal with the aftermath of my mom losing her mind earlier that morning without more details than her being alive and arrested and the older sister injured but without need of urgent care.

Still in silence, my uncle managed to insert our oversized vehicle into a parking spot designed for compact cars with the dexterity he learned flying and landing Chinook helicopters in the Gulf War of 1991. Can you take a picture of where I parked so I can remember? He asked.  I nodded.  And then send it to me, he added.  I didn’t respond but wanted to say “what else am I going to do with the picture!?”  As we started to walk to the terminal, he suggested we go to “the lounge” to have that conversion we didn’t have days before.  I didn’t know what either “the lounge” or the conversation was about, but I agreed.

“The lounge” was named after a credit card and its entrance was next to a Jamba juice.  The lobby had two orange couches facing each in the center of a small area with walls of glass and mirrors and silver sculptures.  This place looks like if a hotel and a bank had a baby, I thought.  Two women dressed as flight attendants walked around people and luggage, verifying, with a tablet, their right to be there by showing a credit card matching the name of the venue.

“The lounge” was reachable through two elevators at the end of the lobby and access was granted by order of arrival and only after another visitor appeared from them in the opposite direction.  We went in and when the elevator opened after a one-floor ride, I could understand my uncle’s excitement being there.  The place was a combination of waiting area, bar, restaurant, and convenience store where everything was free.  My uncle collected an eclectic menu of foods and drinks and then set camp on a table overlooking the tarmacs full of airplanes leaving and landing.  Get something to eat and let’s talk, he instructed.  I wasn’t hungry but still wondered: I can grab anything? He nodded.  I got a cold drink and sat down opposite to him.

He opened the conversation with the solemnity of a speech that was going to be long and sanctimonious: We need to talk about your mother… – she is coming to live us and that’s it.- I interrupted him. His eyes opened, not from surprise, but frustration I didn’t let him deliver his discourse I was sure he rehearsed and in which I was to blame for whatever was happening. We returned to silence, scrolling on our phones, me drinking the free cold beverage, him munching on his chicken wrap, sour I ruined his sermon and time at “the lounge”.

Our flight was late by two hours.  The terminal became agitated with commuter travelers exasperated with the delay; waiting is more aggravating when the flight itself takes 51 minutes.  The airline staff typed furiously on their computers avoiding eye contact so they didn’t have to offer any explanations.  Through the frustrated turmoil of the waiting area I heard my last name.  I approached the main station: did you call me?  Yes, you are now in first class, the attendant said.  Ok then I replied, surprised a one hour commuter flight had first class. What about my uncle, I asked.  Just you, he concluded while staring at his screen.  That’s my luck, I get upgraded to first class in the shortest flight ever while my uncle, who booked the tickets, gets to stay in the back, festering from my impertinence at “the lounge” and my new luxurious status.

“We will now board starting with first class” the loud speaker finally announced.  I walked down the chute with three more people and was seated in the first row, next to the window while the seat to my left remained empty.  People paraded into the aircraft for 20 minutes yet no sign of my uncle.  15 more minutes went by without anything happening, then he showed up and sat next to me.  No words.

Our flight attendant was a woman in her late 50’s from Birmingham, Alabama. Her favorite food was stone ground baked grits and she lived with her dog, who would stay with a friend while she flew. I know all this because she chatted most of the flight with my uncle while she sat right in front of us on a shelf she pulled from the wall, strapped to a harness.  I wasn’t part of the small talk as it felt betraying to my mood and gravity of my thoughts.  Instead, I stared out of the window, lightly amazed the flight was following the same path of interstate 45 south.

The Lyft took us from the Houston Hobby airport to the girls’ house, which showed no leftover signs of the convulsive episode just a few hours before where, officers from four patrol cars, an ambulance and a SWAT truck, breached the front door and side gate, weapons drawn, among a commotion of shouts, flashing lights, and sirens dramatically enhanced by the late spring morning fog.

Inside, the evidence of a crime was real.  The older sister and Grandma had managed to clean areas offering easy removal. But on the walls and grout of the tiled kitchen the blood, now dried and brown, confront us with the fact a bludgeoning had just happened there.

But nothing compared to the shock of seeing the state of the older sister.  Paramedics had placed a white gauze patch on her ear, which enhanced even more the deep purple hue everywhere on her face, with areas around the eyes and nose darker. She had lacerations on her arms and a limp, but was in good spirits, almost relieved, she hadn’t killed my mom, who now was detained at a psychiatric unit of a nearby hospital.  We all sat down at the same table where the fight took place and the older sister narrated the incident without following a timeline as one does when have to relieve a traumatic event.

Her bedroom was humble but tidy with two drawer chests and one matching daybed.  A computer desk with 2 laptops and 3 tablets, devices I provided for her through the years, displayed as souvenirs. And the closet. Its saturation of stock for handcrafting has dwindled to a corner and was overtaken by a collection of empty decorative boxes of all sizes; A new hobby maybe, I wonder.

Right in the center of the room, on the floor, there was a beige pillow case full of something, plopped there as if someone walked in with it, didn’t know where to place the unusual bundle, and left it where I found it.  I ignored it while I walked around to clear the top of one of the chest so I had a surface to take notes during all the phone calls I had to make.

The first call – straight to voicemail – was to a Detective who left his card with the older sister.  The second, to the hospital the police had informed admitted my mom.  The receptionist couldn’t find any records for her.  I think they said she was in psychiatric detention, I added.  Her voice changed to a whisper. You want the SAHA unit. I will transfer you now, she said. After a while, another voice, also  murmuring picked up and proceeded, without preambles, to  explain the visiting rules: Call before noon to schedule a 10 minutes visit at a specific time slot between 3 and 4 in the afternoon of the same day, but It is too late for that today. Don’t bring anything metallic, she concluded and hung up, without letting me ask if my mom was in fact there.

The entrance to the SAHA unit was next to the emergency one.  Instead of a receptionist, it had a police officer who, after checking on his computer for my mom’s name, instructed me to place all metal objects in a plastic bin and then to open my arms for further metal detection.  The area was small without any signs common in hospitals and the only furniture besides the officer’s station were two traffic cones and a mopping bucket in the corner.

A nurse in bright blue scrubs emerged from a door without knobs escorting my mom, who he placed in an even smaller area with space only for two couches.  You have 10 minutes he said as we waived me to go into the room.  I was expecting to see my mom with a similar bruising aftermath to the older sister, instead, I saw a smaller, fragile, sedated woman, completely unscathed from any physical injuries.  I sat next to her and started asking how she was.  Until then, she didn’t know I was there, and even in front of her she couldn’t recognize me.  Her eyes tried to focus on my face and after what seemed like an arduous struggle in her battered mind, she let out a cry: “I lost control!”.

I don’t remember driving back home after the visit.  My mind was effervescing with questions and fears.  One thing at the time, asshole, I said out loud to steady myself; head home and start packing!

Back in her room, still stupefied from the episode, I stood in the center calculating how many boxes I would need to pack up.  My foot touched the beige pillowcase on the floor and it was heavy.  I bent over and without lifting it, opened the top end and peeked inside.  There were at least 2 pounds of cheap mint candy, the white ones you get from the cashier at family owned Italian restaurants, some USB cables, a pair of glasses and a notebook.  My anxiety was overtaken by crushing sadness with the realization this was my mom’s bindle, right there in the center of her world, revealing the gravity of her mental illness.

A crisp Wednesday afternoon my wife and I sat down between two trees, on a blanket, to have one of our impromptu picnic meals at a local park. Our second date, 10 years earlier had also been a picnic I planned meticulously yet forgot the blanket.  She didn’t mind as it turned out, she loved picnics, especially next to water, like the spot I had scouted the day before on my bike ride by the banks of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia.

It has to be next year, she calculated.  I want a spring baby, I said.  Then our window to make one is July, she replied while counting 9 months with her fingers, August at the latest.  I will schedule my vacation for the end of July.  We agreed.

Our conversations about having kids had never been this specific before. We need the right time and right conditions, we would say, postponing procreation without affecting our married life.  But time was running out, biologically, to have a safe pregnancy.  This is it, she said.  If we don’t do it now, we will never have a kid and we are going to need to get more dogs, was her ultimatum.

But it was the right time and the right conditions with her having a good career at a Multinational Logistics company in a position and place she liked, at more benign bank hours than the twilight or sunrise schedules she had worked before.

We poured Prosecco from Costco and raised our glasses to the new plan.  She would continue to work and I would be a Stay at Home Dad, a natural progression from my Stay at Home career as a freelance software developer.

Conception was precise, both in time and method, and the gestation textbook perfection.  Do you want to have problems? Our OB would retort back at us when we kept asking if everything was fine, incredulous of how easy it was for my wife to grow a human inside.  This was, after all, a geriatric pregnancy, term my wife hated for its unfair age implications and higher probability of complications, so our anxiety was high, despite the negative results of all the genetic test we have done looking for something wrong.

Our baby girl was born on a sunny spring day just like I wanted. The 27^th, at 1:07 PM, weighing 7 pounds.  Seven is our favorite number and as such, lucky one.  My wife’s birthday is on the seventh, we got married on the seventh. We closed on our house on the seventh.  Our nurse at the delivery room was also married on the seventh, on the same day, month, year and place as us, happy coincidence we all agreed was an auspicious omen.

Maternity leave and our new life as parents was happy, full of meaningful moments and milestones we would track and compare with our child development app.  We are in the fuzzy phase, this is normal my wife would assure me, reading from her phone, as I struggled, stereotypically, to calm the baby down.  I think I want a second one, she added; she is so precious.  We’ll see, I replied cautiously, holding the baby in a soothing position technique I learned from YouTube.  Even now, with a flawless baby out in the world and gorgeous mom perfectly healthy, I was still worrying something was going to go wrong.  And unfortunately, I was right.

The rock hit the windshield right in front of my face and immediately a crack started to expand at the rate the car hit the potholes now hidden from the fluvial conditions the rain had transformed the farm road I have taken to avoid the highway under this sudden storm.  It’s the Buc-ee’s curse, I repeated to myself, angrily.

Ten minutes before this disarray I have driven in front of the behemoth gas station and neglected to stop.  Didn’t need the intake or release of fluids and I was good on gas, so I just kept going, watching the smiling beaver sign vanished from my side mirror in a way, I felt, carried an ominous judgement.

But this was an urgent trip; no time for stops.  Two hours before I had received a call from a Behavioral Clinic in Houston, informing me my mom was getting released from her detention that same day.  I Immediately went to DFW to rent a car and headed down south on interstate 45. I haven’t talked to her since the incident, 12 days earlier, during time I had packed her belongings from “the girls” house, drove back to Fort Worth in a U-Haul and transplanted her furniture into what used to be my office, then my daughter’s playpen and now my mom’s room.

The crack on the windshield finished to expand its full length when the car went into a pothole, or rather, missing asphalt in the parking lot of the Behavioral Clinic, an outdated one-floor brown building with 70’s style, neat landscaping and corroded signs pointing to the main entrance.  Inside there was only a large carpeted corridor with chairs lined up against the walls between doors without labels.  The only person was a receptionist inside a glass enclosure.  Picking up or dropping off, she asked through a small window gap.  My mother is getting discharged, I replied. Iris?  Yes, she said, handing me a clipboard with a release form through the same gap.

After returning the form, she handed me a manila envelope with toiletries and medications I had dropped off for my mom before leaving Houston with the U-Haul.  They are not allowed to have baby wipes, the receptionist said and then added, guessing from my confused look, “they can have alcohol”.

My mom emerged from the end of the hallway, walking slowly between two men dressed in brown scrubs matching the walls of the corridor.  It must be a behavioral thing everything has to be brown, I thought.  My mom, wearing red pants and a blue sweater finally reached me.  I am glad you are here, son, she said, emotionless.  Yes. Let’s go, I replied, holding her arm as we exited the place. These are not my clothes, she confided once inside the car, heading towards the hotel I booked closed by. They are from a donation bin, she added. I have your glasses, I said.  That’s something, she replied.

Nobody, at that point, had provided an explanation or diagnosis for her mental of physical condition, both of which, so far seemed fine although she was somewhat feeble and distracted.  It wasn’t until we were waiting for the elevator to take us to our room at the hotel that I realized the seriousness of her situation. “We didn’t take the elevator yesterday” she said.   We just got here today, I corrected her.  No! she argued annoyed, I have been here for days!

Later that night, as we ate dinner I had prepared, she recounted the few times she saw me, dressed all in black, flirting with the nurses at the Behavioral Clinic.  I nodded with sadness witnessing how convinced she was of the authenticity of her hallucinations. I made a belt with body wipes, she continued as she stood up and went to her room to retrieve a string of dry wipes tied together.  My cousin owns that place and they didn’t even had belts!

I was not prepared on how to deal or react to this new reality.  Some of my old mom’s mind was still there;  come on, a belt made out of body wipes, that was all her, but the conviction of her delusions and overall confusion made me realize I was going to need all the help I could get.

We went to bed, exhausted but I woke up agitated at 4 in the morning.  Got dressed and headed down to the hotel lobby. We need to stay an extra night, I requested from the attendant.  Change of plans, my mom needs to see a doctor today.  Is she OK, she asked.  I don’t know I replied.  I really don’t know.

This is intense psychotic medication, her doctor said when I handed her the piece of paper I had found inside the manila envelop with baby wipes and medications returned from the Behavioral Clinic the day before.  The prescribing doctor also included, in handwriting, SAD at the top of the page.

I had managed to get an emergency appointment with my mom’s doctor when I  reported the incident, aftermath, and her current condition.  I am stunned, she said worried.  I have never seen any signs she would have hallucinations and psychosis.   Besides the depression we managed with Zoloft, I was not aware of any mental health issues with her.  I don’t think she has Seasonal Affective Disorder, she refuted.  Is that like Winter Blues, I asked, she nodded and concluded: This medication is not prescribed for SAD conditions.  This is used to managed aggressive schizophrenia or extreme bipolar disorders.

The Walmart pharmacist printed a booklet with warnings, interactions and side-effects of the medication prescribed by the Behavioral Clinic:  Haldol and Divalproex.  This medication is serious, she said.  And it is not common to see it prescribed three times a day, for this long, with this dosage.  Please be careful and do not, without talking to your doctor first, stop taking this, she said directly to both of us.

Should I start tonight, my mom asked, back at the hotel.  Yes, I said automatically; take it with the rest of your medication.  She went to her room and came back with a calendar booklet she uses to track her pill intake.  I don’t feel anything, she reported with a smile while she annotated her calendar.  You shouldn’t and that’s a good thing, I replied.  Let’s have dinner.

My last task that night was to call my wife and report back our visit to my mom’s doctor: We are coming back tomorrow; we will be in DFW around 6 PM, I told her.  Silence, then she added: is she taking medication?  Yes,  everything is going to be OK, I assured her without conviction knowing her situation, prescription, and side effects made this a complicated matter we were navigating with limited information and even less clarity or diagnosis of her mental condition.

The next morning we loaded the car and headed north on 45.  I am stopping at every Buc-ee’s along the way, I told my mom humbled and determined.  That’s good, she said, I always need to pee… I love Juan Gabriel, she approved happily at the music playing.  I know.  I had downloaded the greatest hits from her beloved Mexican singer to ease her transition into a new life, a new place.  This is a big crack, she pointed out with her finger, tracing its path on the windshield.  Yes, I said,  when it rains, it pours, I replied: This is why we are stopping at every Buc-ee’s.

I want a house with a staircase, lots of trees, a big yard and something we can afford even if we are broke, my wife listed as her dream house when we decided to stay in Fort Worth.  A month later, I had found a two-floor, two-bedroom, 3 bathroom house with a very large yard and 14 trees, very affordable, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic but just before the housing market went crazy.  For Texas standards, it was a small house, perfect to counteract our irks: for my wife, cleaning, for me, clutter.

We are going to need to get creative with the use of space I told my wife, when soon after settling, our family started to grow.  First it was a malnourished runaway Yorkie-Terrier mix my wife saved from certain demise crisscrossing our busy intersection.  He had a tattered collar but no tag and after a diligent effort to find his owner failed, he stayed with us.  Then it was our daughter, who made us, happily, transform the house to her needs. Her presence was everywhere: the kitchen now babyproofed, our living room reduced by half to make space to a playpen connected to a carpeted area that extended the full length of the room and fenced with colorful panels.  In our bedroom, where she slept -in a second-hand crib I restored- position at the end of our bed.  My office, now cut in half, to make space to another play area with a mural I had painted where a rabbit leaps over trees, mountains and oceans toward the city, an allegory to our longing for our daughter to make it into the world with the blessing of her water rabbit sign according to the Chinese zodiac.

And now my mom.  This was beyond creative use of space.  My office had to go and her bed replaced the playpen but not the rabbit mural.  Her presence was challenging, not only because of her footprint, but the uncertainty of her condition and possibility of another episode with unimaginable consequences around our daughter.  Our home, previously noisy, hectic, and happy, turned gloomy and quiet with a tense discomfort while we meandered with our routines and childcare, around my mom needs, trying to coexist despite everyone’s manifest anxiety.

My wife, however, was struggling the most.  A few months earlier, right after returning to work from maternity leave, rumors started of job cuts at her facility, turning the operation even more challenging with unprofessional outbursts and toxic atmosphere from fearful coworkers and employees under her supervision.  There is a list, she said.  Nobody knows who is in it. I am afraid I am in it.  I can feel it.

She didn’t have a moment of calm. She was always distracted, somewhere else.  I had to ask questions twice, after a pause, noticing her blank stare, unable to follow our conversations.  Her supernatural effort to be present for our daughter as tired and emotionally absent as she was, depleted her will or ability to care for anything else.  I think I need to see a doctor she told me the day she forgot, while having lunch, a big milestone we had achieved earlier that year.

Then the day came when her fears became facts: she was in the cut list.  Two options were given by the company: find another position in 30 days or take our severance package.  The news produce in her a state of downright confusion and panic triggering what later was diagnosed as postpartum depression and chronic anxiety promptly managed with medication but relief didn’t come instantly as it is often the case with psychotropics.

She managed to find another position in the company, at a different location, working the sunrise shift, doing something she didn’t like.  Things improved slightly as we adjusted to the new schedule and routine, but our hope for normalcy quickly dissipated when my mom started to show a new condition creeping on her at an alarming rate of abrupt deterioration with implications beyond anything we would have imagined.

I loved being a stay-at-home dad, or SAHD, term I learned but refused to use, from the blogs, videos and podcasts I’d listened to get prepared for my new occupation which, I thought, fit seamlessly with my experience as a coder. Just like writing good code, new humans need attention to detail, understanding the language, and consistency.  And just like software, you have to troubleshoot bugs, in this case, crying, or feel delighted when they run smoothly, giving you a smile or going to bed without a fuzz.

In the 89 percentile for weight and height, our baby girl was hefty, strong, and impatient to develop her dexterity and independent movement, soliciting a constant attention and anticipation to possible harm.  Before she learned to play with toys, books were her favorites. Her eyes, still with pupils of a greyish undefined color, would follow closely the illustrations and big font words on the pages, until they would start to blink slower, signaling shu-shu time, our word for sleeping.

The two of us alone would follow a precise routine every day that started the night before when mommy would leave for work at midnight and would conclude the next afternoon when mommy was back, at which point I would hand-over the offspring and suspend my SAHD (shit, I used the term.) operations to take a shower, tidy up, then cook and eat a meal together and finally, put both mummy and baby to bed.  I would stay downstairs and take care of the dogs, clean the kitchen and finally have some time to code. I can work while she sleeps, I told my wife, with more ignorance than optimism, with the hope I could make some money and rise a baby at the same time, unaware of the intensity required to keep a baby happy and a house clean.  Always exhausted at the end of the day, I had to suspend my freelancing and accept my contribution would be limited to childcare and homemaking.

As our baby girl grew, her unpredictability expanded at a rate out of sync with my wife’s ability to anticipate danger while handling her after coming home, tired from work, drinking beer and struggling with her Postpartum depression, unfamiliar with the new human developing fresh abilities almost daily.  I started to hover creating the buffer zone: A large enough space for my wife to interact with our baby alone but close enough for me to catch her possible fall or head bump.  This sent a clear message my wife didn’t like:  “I got her” she would say, annoyed I would instinctively launch, arms stretched, when the baby stumbled.  “It is ok if she falls”, she added, “that’s how they learn.”

But I doubt there was any didactical benefit for her when one afternoon I heard crying from our bedroom on the second floor.  I rushed in and found my wife holding a wailing baby with one hand and rubbing her head with the other.  “She fell from the changing table” she said.  “I was trying to get the baby wipes and she rolled over”.   I took our girl from her and walked downstairs and outside to our yard where I examined her closely, expecting injuries since the changing table is almost 5 feet high.  There was a red area on her head and a mark on her nose.  I started yelling how irresponsible this was as I came back to the house, angrily telling my wife we had to go to the doctor.  We argued.  We never argue.  This was, in retrospect, our biggest fight and harbinger of the tribulations that would soon challenge the strength of our relationship.

“Why do like watching such dark movies”, my mom complained one day at lunch.  It’s your angle, I told her, as she was sitting at the edge of a recliner to the far left of the TV in the living room, next to the couch, where my wife, and I were having a meal.  This TV doesn’t have a good viewing angle, I added, knowing well she wasn’t talking about the optics, but the topics of the shows we like. “Everybody just whispers. It’s like evil” she said  shuffling food around with her fork.  She has been with us for about a month now.  Still fragile and aloof from the incident in Houston, she didn’t participate much in our daily life.  She would just sit in that same recliner, doze off, take bathroom breaks, eat meals with us and then go upstairs to her room at the end of the day.   I had tried to involve her more with our daughter’s routine, hoping it would help her feel part of the family and improve her recovery, but she showed no interest, either because of her mental state, or purely from lacking physical means: “she is too heavy” she told me one day when she tried to pick the baby up from the floor.

Then one day, again having a meal in the living room and her sitting in the recliner, I noticed her struggle with the fork.  Her right hand was shaking, with an involuntary tremor, preventing her to bring food to her mouth.  “what’s going on with your hand?” I asked. “It started a couple days ago” she said, finally managing to take a bite.  “I think it’s nerves”.  From that point on, I started to pay more attention to her behavior.  In matter of weeks, the tremor progressed to the rest of her arm and then right leg.  Walking became slower and every day she struggled going upstairs and even more coming down.

“We are calling your doctor” I told my mom alarmed by her sudden decline in mobility . At the scheduled virtual call from Houston, her doctor said It is the side effects of the Haldol. “The body will adjust to the dosage and it should go away; let’s wait a couple of weeks.  If it gets worse, let’s skip the afternoon tablet” she said as she concluded the call.  Two weeks later, it was worse, now both her legs were shaking.  “Can I just stop taking the medication?” my mom begged.  Remember the stern warning the pharmacist gave us in Houston I warned her.  “You can’t just stop taking psychotic medication”.

We reduced her dosage to twice a day and while we waited for the withdrawal of the side effects, I upgraded the house with a new handrail for the staircase, installed an assistive device next to the toilet and added a chair to the shower, but her seismic extremities never improved.  The opposite.

One night, after I put my wife and daughter to bed, I walked into my mom’s bedroom to say good night.  She was sitting at the edge of the bed, head hanging low, as giving up after her energy had abated from an unknown struggle.  “What’s going on” I asked her, examining the bed and her.  “I can’t get into bed” she replied.  “You mean you can’t get out of bed” I corrected her automatically.  “No, into bed.  It’s a lot of work”. I didn’t understand, so she explained she had to crawl, on all fours into bed, then turn slowly calculating her head would hit the pillow at the right position and finally bring over her bed sheet.  The maneuver would take about half hour often failing a few times, she added with a disgusted resignation.

I stood up and from her current position, I helped her lay down and adjust her pillow, cover her and turn off the light.  The next morning I contacted her doctor again.  She suggested speaking to a psychiatrist, so we scheduled an appointment for two weeks later.  From this point on, I had to help my mom get in and out of bed, take her medications, walk to the bathroom and hold her walking up or downstairs.

Soon, the bathroom and stairs were also an impossibility for her.  As her physical deterioration accelerated, her mental condition started to show new worrying signs:  she forgot she was a grandmother, the day of the week and repeatedly asked if she had taken her medication, which I had administered 10 minutes earlier.  She also forgot to tell me she needed to pee, soaking the bed, so she started wearing diapers and sleeping on top of pads, purchased in bulk to manager her aggressive incontinence.

“I will changed her” I told my wife one day, picking our baby girl up and heading upstairs. “I have to go change another diaper anyway” I joked, scornful of my new reality and deflated  by the realizations that just a month before I thought I had it tough, but now, in contrast, I coveted those days with all my heart.