The trip was mostly uneventful. One I have done many times.  On this particular occasion I flew through Vancouver. The remarkable thing about connecting from New Zealand to Chicago via Vancouver is you actually go through US customs & immigration at the Vancouver Airport, before you even enter the USA.  I followed signs that directed me away from the Canadian border control and towards a special area with a ‘US CItizens’ sign pointing me towards a very short queue.  As I approached the front of the queue I was instructed by a man in a uniform to stand near a line of masking tape on the ground and look at a screen.  As I looked at the screen I saw a mirror image of my face, and a green box around it appeared.  The man in uniform nodded at me to continue under a sign that said ‘Welcome to the United States of America’; here in the middle of Vancouver airport.  As I walked through the doors and found myself in a food court I felt like I had no idea what had just happened.  Yes I had been awake for 24 hours and I felt a bit dizzy and like I wanted to puke but it was more than that.  All I could think about was Palantir and babies being killed in Palestine and how I wasn’t even given an option to opt out of surveillance capitalism techno fascism.

In some ways I was also grateful that it was so easy. People have been warning me to delete my social media, I even tried to memorise Warwick’s phone number in case I did get detained, but they just let me breeze right through. One of the perks of being a dual US-NZ citizen. I always get slightly anxious entering the USA, that I might get held up due to my unpaid student loans, but what are they going to do? Throw me in jail? Garnish my wages? I have none lol. But for now I can live to worry another day when my past will catch up with me.

I don’t feel compelled to even browse duty free any more. There is nothing I want from those places. Disgusting perfume, overpriced liquor, what is even the point?  A nice lady at a cafe filled up my thermos with hot water and I dropped a pinch of nettle and lemon verbena leaves into it.  I managed to get all the way from Holloway Rd to O’Hare without buying anything other than the plane ticket I had prepared earlier.

I fell asleep immediately when we boarded the flight to Chicago, waking up to be told to put my seat in the upright position as brown farmland gave way to grey suburbs outside the window.   Landing in Chicago it was a perfect spring day, but everything always just feels grimier, grittier, more depressing than Wellington, my other home.  

While waiting for my luggage I try to find somewhere to put down my backpack. I have been planning this voyage for 4 months.  The first order of business is to try to ring the number given to me to arrange interim care for my mother.  But I can’t find a single chair or bench or seat anywhere near the baggage claim area.  

Oh right I thought… that’s to discourage unhoused people from sleeping here, remembering the bitterly cold winter nights walking back from the CTA station to my dorm on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, seeing people sleeping on ventilation grates in the middle of winter, as warm air smelling vaguely of hot dogs seeped up from who knows where.  

Of course there are unhoused people in Wellington too but it’s never as cold there, it’s never quite as raw.  The people never seem quite as desperate.  

Of course I only got through to voice mail so I left a message. I tried ringing a few different numbers I had… no one seemed to know who or what I should do, eventually I got referred back to the original first number I had rung, so I decided to give up for the day. It was 4:30 on Friday 20 March. 

My suitcase appeared and I got in a taxi to Park Ridge. I am so extremely grateful to have a very generous friend letting me (and eventually my mum) stay in her house for free for the next few months.  This is another long digression on how this whole situation came to be, involving smuggling drugs in Europe, COVID, online gaming, and other strange serendipities, which will be told in due course, but not right now.  

The taxi ride was interesting. The driver kept calling me ‘miss’. Like why bro? I am older than you! Also it’s doctor not miss! Just Nicole is good! I asked him not to call me miss which I felt kind of weird about but it felt weirder letting him call me miss so I had to say something.  I think I made things weird for both of us.  

Everything is in fahrenheit and feet and miles and I don’t remember any of it.  I have a quick shower and then immediately get in the car to go see mom.  I feel more human after sleeping on the last flight a few hours and washing my hair.  Katie is even letting me drive her car- a fancy SUV that is the most high-tech thing I have ever driven! It keeps beeping at me and telling to keep my hands on the steering wheel (they are?) and not to change lanes (I’m not?).  It’s feels so unlike me to be driving this modern and pretty fuel inefficient vehicle.  Somehow the car even talks to my phone?

Even though I haven’t been here since August, the nurses all remember me and immediately point out my mom in the dining room. I’ve arrived just after the residents have had their dinner.  Mom’s hair is long, too long, as are her finger nails.  She has a cough and her feet are swollen.   But she is happy to see me, and I am so glad to see her.  I take her into her room and I put some compression stockings on her feet, hoping they will help with the swelling. I struggle with the tight socks, having to stop and start over at least twice before I manage to get one one, and then the other, pulling them up over her ankle bracelet, but eventually I get there. She has a device called a ‘wander guard’ that sounds off a very loud alarm if she tried to leave her floor. All the residents on the memory care floor have one.

I feel guilty because I can’t remember the nurse’s name. I used to remember them but they changed so much I gave up. But it has been mostly the same 5 or 6 the last few times I have visited so I should know her name. I think it is Gladys or Judy. She is Filipino. Her other caregiver on duty tonight is African, I was to say Zimbabwe or Kenyan but I am not sure. Whenever I come visit we always talk about travel and flights and how long the flights are from New Zealand to Chicago and how long it is for them to visit their parents in Manila or Nairobi or Harare. It blows my mind everytime how fucked up this situation is.

The nurse who’s name I don’t remember asks me how long I am in town for. I say a while… and I tell her I am planning to discharge mum for a while. She looks genuinely sad and says ‘oh no!” I was surprised – do they actually like my mom that much around here? I didn’t think they actually had very close relationships with any of the residents. I couldn’t imagine getting that attached… considering it’s a private for profit health care system, what would you expect? But maybe I am too jaded and hateful. Gladys/Judy say “I have been taking care of your mom for a long time.”

I shouldn’t be that surprised, she’s probably one of the easier residents to look after. A few weeks ago I was talking to mum on her tablet and one of her caregivers, an African man, came in and joked with her ‘I tried to wake you up earlier today and you told me to fuck off!’ and she laughed and shrugged her shoulders. And I said ‘yep… sounds like my mom’, a weird 3rd party to this intimate relationship between my mum and a black man.

For the last year or so when I want to talk to my mom I have to ring the reception of the nursing home, and ask for the 3rd floor nurses station. Sometimes no one picks up on the 3rd floor, but if someone does, I say, “Hi, this is Tina Martin’s daughter. When you have a chance can you please wheel her in her room and have her call me on her tablet please?”. and they say “Tina? yes.” and I say ‘No rush!”.

I bought her a 2nd hand Facebook Portal device a few years ago because its the easiest device for old people to use apparently. And I have to say – it really is. All it really does is make calls though Facebook messenger. No battery, no charger, no apps, no passwords, no browser, etc. She used to be able to use it to call me on her own, but not anymore. She stopped being able to use a phone a few years ago. Unfortunately being on a memory care floor means that stuff dissapears all the time. Last time I visited her the Portal had been missing a few months. They found it in someone else’s drawer in a completely different room. I bought some zip ties and secured it to a bookshelf so it couldn’t be moved. Now when I call her from NZ I can see the blue zip tie ends in the corner of the screen.

Even though mom has literally just finished eating she suggests we go out for Mexican food. I put some warmer clothes on her and get her into the car. This is always a challenging maneuver but I am pretty experienced at it by now. First of all you have to make sure you have enough space on the passenger side of the car to pull the wheelchair up close to the door, then I open the door, and help her transfer from the chair to the car. I am very lucky she can still manage to do this without too much help, just something to hold on to. Then I buckled her in and close the door, then run around to the back, fold up the wheelchair, and heave it into the boot.

Then I run back around to the driver’s side and get in. We repeat this in reverse to get out. I take her to the Tacos Del Norte restaurant not far from her nursing home that we usually go to. I don’t like the sound of her cough so I ask for some hot tea and honey, they bring me agave syrup and lemon. It is perfect. I have veggie fajitas and she has a little soup and we demolish an entire basket of corn chips and salsa. It’s just like old times. As the eldest daughter of a solo mum, mom and I have always been besties.

We again repeat the elaborate minuit not of citational politics but of the car and wheelchair manoeuvres, I drive her back to her nursing home, and more wheelchair/car hijinks ensue. Visiting hours are technically over so we have to wait to be let in, while alarms buzz form multiple corners of the corridor.  I push her back into the lift to the 3^rd floor. It’s about 8:15pm. I ask her if she wants to hang out in the dining room and watch tv or go to her room. She says ‘I think I’ll go to bed’ but the nurse says ‘No it’s too early! If you try to put her to bed now she’ll just wheel herself back out here. She likes to watch tv.”.

There is a strange performative nature to it all – the nurse wants me to know she knows my mother’s habits better than I do. They have a right to want to assert this power dynamic – they are not well paid; caregiving is thankless work. I do not begrudge this performance. All I can think is ‘thank you – thank you for caring for my mother when I haven’t been able to.’. Damn don’t need to tell me twice who’s the boss bish up in this long term care facility! It surely is not my absent ass.

So I kiss her soft skin goodnight and leave her in the dining room. It’s not the worst place where she is, there are good people there.  But it’s a for profit health care system, exploiting not only the resident but the workers.  

I drive home and stop at the only independently owned supermarket on my way back. Not factory-farmed milk is $7 USD/ $15 NZD for 2 litres but I feel like it’s worth it. I spend 20 minutes looking at the Mexican and Polish tea selections. I have slept 4 hours in the last 34 and I am beginning to feel delirious.  But honestly it’s one of the best tea selections I have ever seen in a super market. I lot of them are only labelled in Polish or Spanish but I can usually figure out what they are. I am so sleep deprived I want to buy them all but I settle on a lemon ginger one for mum’s cough and an orange hibiscus rosehip blend for myself. I am the last customer in the super market and they are closing as I pay.

I drive back to Park Ridge and I lay down in what I am wearing and as soon my head hits the pillow I am asleep.  Welcome to America.