Opinion | Finding Myself in My Mother’s Calendars

My mother didn’t outsource her life. Her calendars for 1969, 1978 and 1991 track her duties as wedding planner for her daughters, each reception held at our family’s magnificent Victorian house. Weeks before “The Big Day,” as she called one wedding, she records her tasks: order linen and cake, call the caterer, see florist.

Through that large house also traipsed 40 years of pets: “Cyrano [a dog] bit by a rat;” “take Cassie [the cat] to the vet — if you can find her;” “Demeter [another dog] to Happy Tails.” Out in the barn, Rosie (the pony) needed a tetanus shot.

Each reference to me speaks of our relationship, but the one on May 24, 1989, “Carol in labor, 4:10,” causes a catch in my throat. I am becoming a mother for the second time, but we were 1,300 miles away, and so her calendar received her excitement.

Over time, the calendars began to reproach me. Throughout the 1990s, why wasn’t I visiting more? Her earlier calendars reassure me; my life in the 1990s was her life of the 1960s: balancing children’s appointments and activism. In those years, she recorded so many health appointments for others that when she made an appointment for herself she wrote in parentheses “me.” It reminds me that sometimes mothers are the afterthought in care.

As my calendar-reading project unfolded, I sprained my ankle. Feeling frailer than usual, I became haunted by the record I encountered of my mother’s aging body in the last years of the calendars, when medical appointments vied for primacy with social engagements. Jan. 3, 1990, “hurt knee in tub;” a broken hip, heart arrhythmia, stress tests, cataract surgery, blood tests, bone density scans, varicose veins, heart medication, ambulances to the ER, EKGs. I knew the end, too: the empty calendar of 2004 as Alzheimer’s lacerated her mind, and 2009, her death.

Each morning my parents came to life as another year unspooled before me. At night, my dreaming self became an unmoored time traveler as I encountered my parents of the 1960s and 1970s — my father in his favorite casual jacket, my mother in her kitchen, pets from those decades romping by. Should I tell these dream parents they will be dying soon? Recently I reached for the phone to call them — dead for a decade — and tell them of my day.

Time is like that coiled spring binding each calendar. Daughters’ weddings spiral into anniversaries, five years, then 25 years. The calendars function in reverse now, not a record of what is to come but of what was.