My mother is losing her hearing.

It drives me crazy because she won’t admit she can’t hear me and yet the other day was talking about us going on a trip together. At that point, I pretended I couldn’t hear because of what happened the last time we traveled together.

In 2001, we went to Italy for 9 days to celebrate my mother’s 70th birthday.  In the months prior to our departure, according to my mother, she had become quite the athlete. She’d brag about how much she’d walked, the weights she’d lifted, how she’d hired a trainer. She was also working full time during that period and in my mind sounded just like your average 40 year old.

Anyway, on the day of our departure, I knew something was up, when, as I was waiting outside the Delta terminal at JFK and my father pulled up to the curb, I couldn’t help but notice that in the time it took for him to get out of the car, open the trunk, pull out the luggage, walk it over and put it down next to me, my mother, the urban Olympiad, still hadn’t fully pulled herself out of the passenger seat.

We spent our first four days in Rome. Everywhere we went my mother insisted we walk.  I had no problem with it except we’d sign up for tours and end up arriving late to every one of them because, no matter how early we left, Flo Jo, just couldn’t seem to pick up the pace.

My mother’s hearing problem turned out to be the only self- diagnosed disease she’s ever actually suffered from. Please don’t think me insensitive when I say I could have killed the mute but as the days ticked by it got harder and harder to hang onto to my patience when every conversation between us sounded like this.

JESSICA: Ma, do you want to get tickets to see the statue of David?

MY MOTHER: Okay, but I’m not really very hungry.

The one time my mother seemed to fulfill the image she’d painted of herself as a true athlete, was when we were shopping. Inside every store, she would speed walk from rack to rack, her ears so clear, she could hear a hanger drop in a haystack.  This woman who couldn’t add two and two together on a calculator was suddenly able to figure out the vat tax on every item and the cost in U.S. dollars.

After Rome we headed to Florence. As we rode through the countryside my mother fell fast asleep.  I couldn’t help but watch her. I felt so so sad and afraid all of a sudden because, trust me,  when a person my mother’s age falls asleep, mouth open, head back, I can’t help but build an imaginary wooden box around her and picture her as “gone to a better place”.

After Florence, we headed for Venice, where my role as caregiver to the elderly and people who lie about their physical abilities, continued.  That was until “it” happened. “It” being 9/11.

My mother and I had now been together for eight days.  At that point, we were like two strangers who’d been thrown together by circumstance rather then choice and the only thing we could really agree on by then was how much we hated the pigeons. Being true New Yorkers and Jews, my mother and I couldn’t look at a pigeon without thinking, “exterminator.”  Time after time, as we walked through San Marco Square, we’d flail our arms and yell to the birds, “uchh, get, get out of here, go” while all these other people with birdseed on their heads and arms, standing perfectly still while the pigeons ate off them, would look at my mother and I like we were the crazy ones.

The day of our scheduled departure we went to the airport, even though we had no idea whether or not our plane would take off. After a lot of pleading and cajoling, a ticket agent found a flight from Milan to Toronto to New York. The problem was there was only one seat.

Lying through my teeth, I told my  mother:

JESSICA: Go, I’ll be fine.

even though I was really thinking:

JESSICA’S THOUGHT: If you leave me here alone, I’m going to flip out. In no way am I remotely sincere when I say it’s okay to leave so for the love of God, do NOT take me up on my offer.

Happily, I didn’t need to say anything. As it turned out, my pain in the ass, quasi-deaf, delusional about her capabilities mother, turned out to also be a mind reader and a fighter.  With a look of determination on her face, she said to me,

MY MOTHER: We’re leaving here together or we’re not going.

Ten minutes later, thanks to my mother, I was headed for my flight from Milan to Los Angeles with a stopover in Montreal.

It’s been several years since that time and her hearing is worse. Any conversation between us sounds more like an argument.  She still shops.  She has a band of friends who could listen to her talk forever and they do and she does.

The difference now is I’m a mother and if there’s one thing this whole experience taught me, it’s that if I were Phoebe, I don’t think I could spend nine days with me anywhere.

When my parents were here, we took a trip over to the Griffith Park Observatory.  My dad is an engineer. Phoebe loves science and math. My mother and I were English majors. Who do you think had a better time?

Now that’s not to say that I didn’t learn anything. In fact, I learned quite a bit, such as:

1. The big bang theory is not based on my past sex life and worst yet, zero predication of my future sex life, which frankly, was a huge disappointment to me.

2. On the planet Pluto I weigh a pound and a half and am now making plans to move there as soon as possible.

3. The average daily temperature on Pluto is 400 degrees below zero.

4. There is a good chance I may be able to give up my gym membership and live in a bakery.

5. The seats in the planetarium are so comfortable I may or may not have fallen asleep during the show.

6. That after two hours the only thing that really stood out for me was that whole on Pluto I only weighed a pound and a half, thingy.  With regard to the daily temperature, that I mentioned earlier, I actually had to look that up post visit aka: 2 minutes ago..

We hung around the place for close to two hours. By that time, I was semi comatose to the point where my mother actually told my father:

MOM: Dad, we need to go. Your daughter has left the room, so to speak.

DAD: What are you talking about? She’s right there.

MOM: Look at her eyes, there’s nothing in there.

DAD: (looking at me closely) Oy. Yeah. Let’s go. Sorry.

Believe me when I say that my mother’s eyes were hardly sparkling.  In fact, at one point, she was so bored she actually started following Phoebe around pushing all these buttons on the different exhibits and then yelling things like, “Woo!” look at that!” every time something lit up or spun around or did anything that wasn’t nothing.

I would have been humiliated had I not decided to actually join her.  Nothing like standing in a room full of people screaming, “Wee!” because you turned a nob on something and found out your body is made up of oxygen and something else I couldn’t see or touch or remember the name of, probably because I was too busy trying to figure out if the spaceship I was taking to Pluto would allow me to take fluids on board and my dentist and the entire staff of Cedars Sinai hospital oh and an MRI machine.

When we left,  we had to walk down this long path to the car because as we were driving up there we saw this huge blinking sign that said, “LOT FULL” which it turns out means, “Well, not totally” as after we had hiked a mile up to the entrance we saw 6 empty spaces looking directly at us and yelling “suckahs!”  I swear to you, I would have tried to have every one of them fired had that entire scenario not been just a figment of my imagination and written to make a point in an amusing way.  Seriously, I really would have because that was just totally uncalled for.