Nana's mansion

The story of how I manifested a mansion, left my husband, and started living through my trifecta of fuckery.

The house on the hill with the weathervane

The house on Ocean View Street looked like a mansion. And it was for rent. We lived so close to the mansion for rent, under a highway overpass, and in a different world.

I walked there from our old house, sweating up the super-steep hill that had prevented me from walking up that block before. I got to the top and saw the house.

It was steeply gabled, the roofline rising three stories above a driveway. A huge set of stairs flanked by old rose bushes led up to the front door. Plus, on the roof: a magical omen.

A weathervane! So high up top of the mansion for rent near our house. The weathervane was big and black and it turned in the wind. Incredibly, it was in the shape of an owl.

I wondered: Who decided to put a large black owl-shaped weathervane so high up on that fancy house?

Our old house

I was desperate for something to change. I was living in a cute 3-bedroom house but had long ago lost my mind in it. Every surface of the old house was covered in snot and smoodges and scrapes and bits of brik-a-brak.

I’d nursed a baby and wrestled with toddlers there. Worked really hard and supported my family there. I tried so hard to find my husband there. He lived somewhere within its walls, but not in the same house.

Stuck even more during the pandemic in 2020, I stared numbly at the dirty floors and walls. I dreamt of ways to make our home calm, peaceful, clean, and beautiful again.

Since external changes seemed impossible, I spent more and more time in the universe of my mind.

I learned to mediate. I found friends who shared my interests. I joined online Zoom communities. I went to therapy. I listened to abundance mediations at night, every night, softly buzzing soothing messages into my head with earplugs made for sleep.

I tried my best to keep my kids happy, though it wasn’t possible, given the amount of isolation my youngest child especially experienced.

Then, my mom moved in with us.

My poor mom

My mom Dianne had been disabled with chronic fatigue syndrome and poor for decades. After she moved from rural Colorado to a little town called Sebastopol in Northern California, I helped keep her head above water. She declined there in a sweet space for low-income seniors she’d found herself.

Before the pandemic, wildfires were burning in Santa Rosa, right near her apartment. I kept driving up to rescue her, bringing her to our house temporarily, then driving her back home.

Years later I found and moved her into a low-income studio apartment in Berkeley. It was almost impossible to get, but I had done it! The new apartment had potential. She no longer did.

Once she moved to Berkeley, I knew things were really bad. I took over medical care. My mom was finally diagnosed with Alzheimer's and vascular dementia. I saw the MRI of her brain and the white plaque. Her “swiss cheese brain,” as I’d joked about, really had holes in it. She wasn’t really my mom any more. I don’t know who she was.

In 2020, as we all went into quarantine, it was very hard to keep her fed and her apartment clean while not giving her COVID.

Then I found out she had bedbugs. And they were biting her! And they kept coming back.

“From another dimension,” someone told me about the bedbugs. It was like the bugs and the dementia were intertwined. A hellish parallel reality. But this is not a story about bedbugs in detail. (I can’t! It’s too traumatizing.)

Those nasty fuckers pushed my mom right out of that studio apartment and into the basement of our worn-down house and my dead marriage.

Nana in the LBO

Nana, as we called her, moved into what was formerly my only alone-space in the house. (Having an alone-space is needed for my mental sanity. In the first apartment I shared with my ex, I’d literally made a shitty-trashy-closet into a sweet space for myself, with books and curtains and a little desk. I needed it conceptually to breathe easier.)

In our old house, the space my mom moved into was a teeny room in the basement. I called it my "Little Blue Office," or LBO for short. As soon as she was there, though, I knew. She'd never be able to live on her own again. She couldn't remember to eat anymore. She got lost on walks around the block.

She couldn't be put away in a nursing home because she was far too active. Also, we had no money to pay for a nursing home “out of pocket” with no savings and no income. So, she'd live with us.

Margot makes a plan

Instead of going even more insane in my booger-stained-too-little home, I proposed we rent a 4-bedroom house temporarily so we could take care of her until she was ready to really “be committed” to a facility. An extra bedroom to rent, believe it or not, is WAY less expensive than the monthly fees at any assisted living or nursing home.

The plan: Lightly renovate our old house while we rented temporarily. Add a separate unit for her, or for future rental income. I’d supplement the care we’d naturally give her ourselves with the local social support services I’d learned to mine for her. Plus a budget in cash for an amazing caregiver a few hours a week.

Hence looking for a 4-bedroom to rent in our neighborhood, as quickly as possible, to make the renovation process time-and-money-efficient. Not an easy thing to find!

Inside the mansion

And yet! Here was this beautiful-looking big house at the top of Ocean View street, listed for rent on Zillow, with lots of space for Nana and our kids. Walking distance from our old house! When the landlord showed it to us a few days later, I was blown away. It was one of the nicest houses I'd ever been in, much less lived in!

The living room was like a ballroom. High, high ceilings. Parquet wood floors. A huge and ornate fireplace. Gems of colored light shone through stained glass windows in an atrium off the living room, quietly dancing on its walls and floors.

The kitchen, like the living room, and the house overall, was huge. As if one was supposed to be cooking for a household of twenty! The stove was a fancy brand, with a thousand burners, most of which, I later learned, would not light.

Over the stove was the ultimate rich person kitchen brag: An extra faucet set into the wall. To add water to your stock pots without going to the kitchen sink steps away! Heaven forbid.

A bathroom on the first floor contained a beautiful stained-glass window of a hummingbird. Another omen!

I’d go on to find animal talismans hidden in ornate fixtures throughout the house. Each time I felt like I received a gift from a former eccentric owner that was made for me.

Who shared my love for a home and its things to be a little magical?

Best of all, for my mom: There was a beautiful big bedroom with an ensuite shower on the first floor for her. She'd be okay there.

There were nice bedrooms for each kid. And I haven't even told you about the primary suite at the top of the house yet!

The ultimate no

When it came time to decide whether or not we should rent this gem, my now-ex decided “No.”

It was the last big no in a series of 10,000 no's that had come to define our relationship for more than a decade. When I asked what we'd do with my mom instead of rent this perfectly nice mansion that was in our price range and current neighborhood, he said,
"I don't want to move at all. I just want to stay here."

We had this discussion in the car in the front of the old house. The landlord of the mansion for rent needed to know if we were interested that night. We were hiding from all the maniacs who lived in the grungy house in front of us. I stared at it, and thought: How great it would be to have it fixed up, and to have enough space to take care of my mom there without losing my mind even more!

No? That's when I decided I would rent Nana's mansion by myself.

Because I would have been paying for it and doing all the work to make it happen anyway. It was my mom, and it was my need for a real fucking change, and my plan to take care of everyone as best I could.

So I moved, with my dementia-mom, shortly followed by 2 teenagers, into Nana's mansion. And my marriage was over.

Life in Nana’s mansion

I was so lonely when I drove home to that house on Ocean View. I climbed 3 flights of stairs to my space. I wasn’t complaining. It was a blessing.

The primary suite, flanked by huge square windows along the rooftop that opened up Bay Area-wide views, became my sanctuary. Where I could dance naked and cry like no one was watching. Because finally, at last, no one was.

The kids and I cried and fought and set up new part-time lives together. We watched as Nana got worse. And we survived.

I tended the old roses and the rest of the mansion. It spoke to me, and I thanked it.

Sundowning

My mom tortured me in Nana’s mansion. While she had a good life there, her disease progressed quickly. She'd crawl up the stairs to my room moaning. She left sad scribbled notes accusing me of things around. She'd get out-of-control-angry and worried at 4:30 or 5:00pm every night. (It’s called sundowning, and it’s very real and sad.)

She snuck out of the house and wandered. She chopped down bushes in the backyard. She threw medicine and remote controls and laptops and her ID away. Worst of all, she was so unhappy and anxious–especially at night.

And I couldn't help her.

I was going through a divorce, and the trifecta of fuckery that was my life at that moment of time in Nana's mansion.

I couldn’t keep her safe or happy anymore. It was horrible for both of us.

My mom’s and my freedom

Eventually, and with the help of a dear aunt, we found her a nursing home that would take her. It was in the little town where she'd grown up in rural Minnesota. Family coordinated to move her there. It was the sweetest, best nursing home in the world. In a community of people she remembered. And she got to bring her kitty Poppy!

Months later, as I slept in the now-far-too-big-top of Nana's mansion, I got the call.

She had passed away. Just days before I planned on moving everything and the kids back into our old house. (A different story, another time.) She had passed! I felt a beautiful joy and lightness. I felt her again: Happy.

Back at home

Days after she passed, I moved back into our old house! And I got to update it beautifully, just for my kids and myself. Without a “no” in sight.

After I got the kids and myself settled, I started a flower garden here.

My mom's free now.

She appears to many of us in the family, and to me, in different forms.

Did you hear the crow cawing this morning at the top of the tree? That was her.

She knows I'm home. And here with you.

🖤
M