December, 2021, at her bedside
My mother was a chameleon. Adapt, she taught me; blend in, be what others expect to see. I remember suffering because of her adaptability, her conviction that everything would work out fine in the end. My father moved us to a new town every year for the first 16 years of my life, the four of us kids in tow, all our belongings in a few boxes in a tiny U-Haul cargo trailer.
She never complained. She accepted. I learned.
My father was a high school teacher, and a pretty good one. I know that because all four of us kids had him as a teacher in high school. No school was big enough to have more than one chemistry teacher, so he taught my 3 brothers and me in succession, bam, bam, bam, bam. He had a flair for the dramatic – things smoked, exploded, changed color. Eggs were sucked into bottles, ammonium volcanoes bubbled, and sparks flew through thin air.
But sparks flew at home, too. He brought home imagined insults, perceived slights and complaints about rude administrators. His tirades would go on for an hour, and we kids knew that we fared best if we were invisible. We blended in to the walls, or disappeared outside, where we explored wooded gulches, balanced on water canal parapets and occasionally stole neighbors’ crab apples.
I resented my mother for her weakness – for not complaining, for not setting ultimatums, for her relentless optimism.
I’m reassessing that now. What strength it must have taken to adjust – over and over again – to my father’s instability. Who else could have weathered my father’s stormy tempests, calming him gently, ignoring our relentless poverty for the first 20 years of their marriage, and dismissing the long distances to family and friends who might have been a support.
A single-minded peacemaker , she was the figurehead on the bow of our jerry-built little ship, and she gave the ship unwarranted worldly status. She was pretty and extroverted, smart and hard-working, but blithely unaware of those strengths.
She made the best of our hardships; sighed and feathered the new nest every time we moved. She read to us into our teens, she marched us off to swimming lessons, and drove long distances to let us visit grandparents (fully knowing that Dad would spend most of his time around them in cantankerous incivility).
What she really excelled at was survival. And crisis management, and forgiveness. Again and again. Admirable? Reproachable? I still don’t know.
She had a choice – just like a tightrope walker has a choice to leave the rope behind. A more modern woman might have walked away. To what, though? A different tightrope? A better one? A worse?
What life is free of drama? Can we choose our own life script ? “I’ll take a stage tragedy with intervals of comic relief”? Or just one long episode of “Pollyanna”, please?
But me, I had an Emily Dickenson mother. Healing broken wings, the feathered thing perched perennially in her heart, at her happiest with her nose in a book – her one safe frigate.
She spent her last months in assisted living, endearing to the end, loved by her caregivers. She and I grew close for the first time during those last years as I did my best to lead her through the labyrinth of memory loss and pandemic.
Ah, Mother, we are overlapping circles, daughters caught in enduring echoes since the start of time. I now know that I do love you dearly, Mother. Whether a curse or a blessing, I am you in so many ways.
LIFE AFTER WORK 