Senior Barbie

by Lauren Cuttler

Yesterday, I took my mother to get her haircut.

Ever since my mother moved to assisted living, I’ve been dressing her up like she is my own personal Barbie Doll.

“You’re my Senior Barbie,” I tell her, and she laughs.

She doesn’t remember Barbie dolls, but she is a good sport and doesn’t mind wearing what I pick out for her, which not so different than what she would have picked out for herself.

She has always been a colorful dresser. Before she moved to assisted living, when she still walked to the YMCA to swim or to the local market to buy healthy vegetables, when she was busy wearing out the wheels of her walkers and the soles of her shoes, she was famous for her striped socks and her jaunty pink berets. Up until recently, she was a frequent and delightful sighting by the neighbors, like an exotic parrot.

Now, at ninety-nine, after a series of falls, my mother mostly sits safely in a wheelchair, though she never sits still. She pushes her chair up and down the hallway or waves her arms in the air. She bends and lifts her legs like a can-can dancer. “I’m doing my exercise,” she says.

 She still wears her berets, but now that she is dependent on someone to help her get dressed, she prefers to wear whatever is “easy.” Easy to put on. Easy to take off. Easy to manage when using the toilet. When she first moved to the facility, she wore the same stretchy black and white skirt that was too short, often exposing her adult diaper, and collecting stains like souvenirs from her meals. She wore socks that, within minutes of being put on, sagged around violet-blue calves, doing nothing for the tired circulation of her edematous legs.  

I hid the skirt and baggy socks, replacing them with pink and red knee-length pencil skirts that stay up when she uses the bathroom and stay down when she’s sitting in her chair. I make sure she wears the colorful compression socks she already owns, socks with rainbow stripes, pink hearts, red Toucans, and yellow flowers. Just like the Barbie dolls, everything on Senior Barbie matches: the skirts, the socks, the berets. I even picked out bright red glasses frames, also matching, to replace the bent and misshapen ones she’d owned for more than twenty-five years. And we started going to the hairdresser regularly.

Before Administration confiscated her scissors, she had been cutting her hair herself. In between her poor eyesight and lack of skill, her hair was still too long in parts, sticking straight out or missing altogether in others.

Last year my mother moved into an Assisted Living facility and then was quickly transferred to the memory care unit. She is not as diminished as some, but her poor memory made it difficult to adjust to less supervised surroundings. She couldn’t remember when people told her they would be back to help her. She couldn’t remember what she was doing there, or if there was somewhere she had to be. She hadn’t yet mastered pushing the wheelchair herself but, if she had, she wasn’t able to remember where there was to go. She would panic. She would scream, “I’m dying!” or “I want to be dead!” or “This is it!”

Administration talked about the personality changes that come with dementia, but it wasn’t that unusual for my mother to threaten us with her early demise when we were growing up. She could be perfectly in charge, cheerfully managing family and home, competently meeting adversity with pragmatic calm. But then suddenly she would explode. No warning. Messy rooms, sassy teenagers, grumpy husbands –– storms just blew in, ‘You’re killing me!’ or ‘I want to die!’ exploded like a clap of thunder, and just as quickly the sun came out. It was never discussed. We just took shelter until it passed.

At ninety-nine, she is sweet and congenial most of the time, appreciative, and— no longer in charge—just a little bit lost. At ninety-nine, her outbursts are a shadow of what she was capable of when she was younger, although they can be fierce enough to those who never knew her, and reminiscent of the slain monsters that come back to life in horror movies to those who did.

So when my mother started yelling that she was dying while sitting in the lobby of the facility, when her outbursts were the first thing residents and prospective residents saw when they walked into the building, Administration called to arrange emergency meetings. I felt like I was being called into the principal’s office for my mother’s misbehavior. I wasn’t surprised. Nail clippers and scissors were confiscated. Inpatient suicide holds were proposed.

“Ma”, I said, “You can’t keep threatening to die, it upsets people.”

She clicked her tongue. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But they should know it’s just for emphasis.”

Then, we all agreed that the small, contained, and better-staffed memory care unit might be a better fit.

In memory care, there are little boxes outside the residents’ door where it says, “Welcome,” and the name of the resident. Families of the resident fill the boxes with photos and mementos, trying to convey who their parent or spouse is. Who their parent or spouse was. Tom loved to hike, so there he is, hiking with his wife. Sara is posing with her large extended family in front of a holiday feast. For the most part, the person in the pictures looks nothing like the person now. Tom shuffles in the hallway, lost, without language. Sara, who no longer recognizes her family, is slowly being fed by a young woman in scrubs, coughing violently between bites because as Alzheimer’s progresses, the brain can no longer regulate swallowing.

I filled my mother’s box with pictures of her dancing.

My mother does not have Alzheimer’s. She knows who she is, she knows who I am, she has language, she eats like a horse. She is unable to walk independently because of severe spinal stenosis, not because of any failure of that part of the brain.

But she is the first one to tell you that her memory is “not so good.” When asked if she knows where she is, she says, “It’s an assisted living,” without hesitation.

When told it’s also memory care, she immediately starts to laugh like the joke is on her.

“I didn’t remember that,” she says.

She is sympathetic to the other residents. “They’re all dealing with a lot, and they all have a different way of dealing.” When a confused resident wanders into her room, she shoos them away like a stray cat, “No, no! This is not your room.” But to me, she says, “They don’t know what they’re doing. I have experience you know.” Then she tells me about her beloved grandmother who lived with her when she was small.

“We called it ‘hardening of the arteries,’” she tells me.

Then, because my mother’s memory is “not so good.” a few minutes later she tells me the story about her grandmother, again.

I want my mother to be taken seriously, difficult enough for aging women. Long before my mother’s memory failed her, long before she was ninety-nine in memory care or sixty-nine or seventy-nine, or even eighty-nine, living her independent, full life—cooking, dancing, swimming,  book clubbing, tutoring—even then, doctors and shopkeepers were apt to talk about her in the third person if I was there.

When she first moved to memory care, my mother would call to tell me, “They just left. They treat me like I’m a dog, like I’m not there.”  I believe her. I know for some of the caregivers, not all,  and the low-paying, back-breaking, unappreciated job is only that. A job.

Barbie was the doll of possibility, of potential, of what could be. I dress my mother so that when the caregivers see her, they see a human being still fully intact. There is nothing I can do about her memory, or even her teeth which are finally falling out after almost a hundred years, but I can be sure her clothes are bright and clean, that her underwear isn’t showing, and that her hair is styled. True or not, I believe these things will keep her safer, better cared for by the strangers we now depend on.

Yesterday, when I went to get my mother to take her to the hairdresser, lunch had been served late. Then she had to use the bathroom. By the time we were outside, it was only twenty minutes before her appointment. Instead of a slow and cheerful outing, pushing her wheelchair a mile to the salon, and enjoying the fruit stands and shops along Mission Street, I had to hurry. I went as fast as I could go without bouncing my mother out of the chair, getting short of breath, and feeling my own mortality. 

My mother laughed the whole way.

“Oh, this is wonderful,” she kept exclaiming, her legs in the striped socks, sticking straight out in front of her the entire mile.

“Tell me again,” she says over and over. “What is this appointment?  Dentist?  Podiatrist?”

“Haircut,” I say, and she laughs.

“I knew it was something that needed attention!”

When the haircut is done, she looks 10 years younger, she looks like she‘s 89. Her very thin, very white hair was made wavy with a curling iron and propped up with hair spray. For the walk back, we leave the pink beret off. Her new glasses look extra stylish with the haircut. And maybe this is another reason I like dressing up Senior Barbie. It’s a bit like turning back the hands of time.

BIO: Lauren Cuttler (she/her) lives in San Francisco. She received an MFA in playwriting from San Francisco State University. Her play “Home Visit” was professionally produced by Theater Rhinoceros and an excerpt from her play “Learning to Swim” was printed in Transfer Magazine. Most recently she has had a story published in the on-line journal “You might need to hear this.” Since retiring from nursing last June, Lauren finds it impossible to ignore the persistent feeling of wanting to write – a feeling that has dogged her ever since her first-grade teacher gave her a gold star for writing a poem about a clown.