Bubble Yum can go fuck itself. Like forever. Of all the crap that came along with being the sole caregiver of an elderly parent, the literal piss and shit, having had to dress or bathe my parents, or the endless fights, nothing haunts me quite like seeing or smelling a package of Bubble Yum Original bubble gum.
Let me set the stage a bit. It was 2017, I was 39 years old, was soon to be re-married, and was now the sole caregiver for my mother who had by this time had three strokes, just fought through two bouts of breast cancer, and had also just lost her husband (my father.) I’d just recently moved both my folks from Florida to Maryland after my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer and had spent the previous 6 months as his only real caregiver. On top of this, I myself had just moved to Maryland the year before from Atlanta, had quit my beloved job of 16 years to make that move and been unemployed for almost a year, had bought my first home, was only a few years out of a divorce, and was seven years removed from the suicide of my sister which had drastically changed my life. So, to say that I had a few things going on seems to generally cover the situation I believe.
One of the few pictures my mom allowed of her self at my wedding in 2017, a month before her descent into gum addiction
Being my mother’s caregiver was…hard. She was full of piss and vinegar in much the same way that Imelda Marcos had a lot of shoes, which is to say that if you somehow managed to drain all of my mother’s piss and vinegar you could make enough piss-flavored pickles to support a small country. Thinking back, I kind of had two moms really. One that was amazing, was always there for me, nurtured me, and introduced me to the Beatles and the Kids in the Hall, one who let me watch all the horror movies I wanted at a precariously young age, and who, honest-to-goodness, knew the names of all the action figures I collected. She basically died in 1992 when my father lost his high-paying job of 20 years and gave up on trying to support the family in the same manner my mom had become accustomed to after the couple of decades that they’d been married. She died and, like a real bitch of a phoenix, rose from the ashes of her previous self and became one of the most spiteful, bitter people I’ve met in my entire 46 years on this Earth. Mom 2.0 was vengeful, razor-tongued, and spent the next 28 years making my father’s life a living hell, alienating my sister, and filling me with constant dread that I might one day have to be solely responsible for her.
So, after my father succumbed to his cancer, it was the 1st of March, 2017, I found myself in the position that I’d been dreading for three-quarters of my life. Honestly, the previous six months were no cakewalk either. My dad really put me through the wringer having to change his diapers, to hold his portable urinal while he couldn’t get off the couch, and was routinely awoken at all hours of the night because he desperately needed something. At least my mom wasn’t bedridden. She could shamble around the apartment I secured for them fairly well, and could still do most everything by herself.
Except shopping. That was my first and main chore for her in the beginning. One that I thought might actually bring me some joy as I actually enjoy the routine of it. Though I’d already been doing the shopping for the two of them, my father’s needs were completely overshadowing my mother’s and I was still acquiescing to them a bit and buying them both cigarettes. But as soon as my dad passed, I put my foot down and refused to continue buying my mom her precious smokes. Not only do I hate smoking with a passion, but I also hated the drain on my mother’s meager finances and her brand loyalty that sent me 20 miles out of my way each week to get the very specific Virginia Slims Superslims Menthols that she just absolutely had to have. In addition to smoking, she’d taken up chewing gum, and after I refused to support her tobacco habit any longer, she began to lean on gum in a crazy way.
Her brand was Bubble Yum, the pink, chunky blocks of super sugary gum in the “original” flavor. Innocent enough on the outside and at first it was a welcome switch from buying cigarettes. I picked up a full box of the 10-piece packs which contained 12 packages of gum from the checkout stand in Target, and I figured that should last her a while. I mean, that was a solid 2 pounds of gum. That was on a Friday or a Saturday (when I typically did her weekly shopping), and by Monday it was gone. Like completely G-O-N-E, gone. With cigarettes, which were about $7 a pack, she was forking over about $50 a week on smokes at her pack-a-day level. The gum was a buck a pack (one of the last things in the United States you can still get for a buck now that Dollar Tree is charging $1.25 for everything), so I was hoping to shave off $35 for other essentials. But she blew (bubbles) through that in 2 days. Who the fuck chews 6 packs of gum a day? That’s 60 pieces of gum, a full pound of it, a day. Can you imagine the jaw fatigue from chewing that much gum?
That’s how it started and it only escalated from there. At one point in that first month, she was ripping through 10 packs a day. I managed to get her to cut her gum consumption back down to 6 packs a day, but that meant she needed more than three and a half boxes of gum a week. It was roughly the same habit, price-wise, as the cigarettes. When I broached the subject, she would always get super nasty and defensive. Leaning on my father’s death (and blaming me because I took her smokes away), she exclaimed that gum was literally the only thing left in the world that even remotely made her happy. The fact that I didn’t do anything to make her happy was not lost on me in these conversations. I mean, what the hell was I supposed to do? It was a harmless habit, she’d just lost her punching bag of a husband, and she was still reeling from the death of my sister (her first and favorite), and it made her happy. So what if I thought it was weird?
Well, that was until I bought the last pack of gum from my local Target and they didn’t restock it for like two months. You see, your basic, average everyday Bubble Yum is just not that much in demand. Add to that the racks at the registers aren’t exactly high-priority shelf space in a store like Target. Making sure they’re stocked to the gills isn’t all that important. So began my two-and-a-half-year hunt for gum that kind of drove me to the edge of madness. In Bel Air Maryland, at least in the Bel Air Maryland of 2017 through 2019, there were only three places I could go into a store and buy Bubble Yum Original bubble gum. The closest Target, an Exxon station, and Wal-Mart. After I bought out Target my next thought was Wal-Mart, which they indeed had a lot in stock. Like I was doing at Target I picked up 4 full shelf boxes, 48 packs to satiate my mother’s need for the week. I dropped off the gum and her other groceries and didn’t get too concerned until she called me on Sunday begging for more gum. I immediately drove over to my mother’s apartment to figure out how she had managed to chew 8 fucking pounds of gum in two days.
Well, she didn’t. You see, the gum at Walmart must have been sitting at those registers for a while because, in my mother’s estimation, the pieces were too hard. She could only chew about a third of it. She’s even tried microwaving the hard gum but had only managed to get a nasty burn on her left index finger on a molten piece of gum. So now, being the very placating child, the dutiful son who just wants to give his mother what little happiness she can find in this world, I was out and on the hunt for more gum, softer this time. As I hit up the registers at Wal-Mart this time, I found myself literally massaging every single pack of gum they had in the place. I put together about five boxes worth of what I thought was suitable gum, charged the $60 to my mom’s debit card, and dropped off the bounty for her approval. Only about half passed muster in her estimation, and the reality of the situation started to make me crack under the absurdity.
The screaming matches I found myself in with her took the concept of an absurd gum addiction and blew it up to Tim & Eric levels of insanity, like change Totinos to Bubble Yum.. This 67 year old woman would have fits like a toddler, slamming her fists on the kitchen table top where she spent 75% of her waking life at this point, and demanding gum. “GUM! GUM GUM GUM!!!” I felt like I was living in a lost, demented Kids in the Hall sketch, and I had no clue how I could wake from this nightmare. “I’m having the Bubble Yum dream again…” But again, though I was cracking up, sometimes so angry after leaving her apartment that I’d be punching the roof of my car and crying uncontrollably, I still went out dutifully and preformed the ritual hunt for more gum. I thought about ordering in bulk from Amazon, but realized that without having a way to confirm the…firmness…it was just potentially throwing away money. I considered, seriously, writing to the marketing department at Hersey’s to try and see if there was anyway to get her some sort of sponsorship. She had to have qualified for at least being interviewed by the Guinness Book folks for some sort of ridiculous record.
I also wish there was a happy ending or a moral to this story, at least one where I figured out how to stop the insanity. But real life doesn’t work like a story. My mom stopped chewing massive amounts of bubblegum a week before she died because one morning she fell into a coma after her complications with her third round of breast cancer. The only post script to this experience that I can really share is that since I was able to get her into a nursing home before she passed, I wasn’t required to clean out her dressed drawer full of gum. Some orderly or nurse got to find her remaining stash of 60 or 70 packs of gum.
