A Tribute to My Mother

Yesterday was Groundhog Day. Don't think he saw his shadow here, but anyway, I can't remember what's supposed to happen if he does or doesn't. If it means winter is almost over, or that winter has a long way yet to go. Either one is OK with me. We had another two inches of snow overnight, and I like it when it snows. Every window has a beautiful scene outside, while it's warm and cozy inside. Good time for making soups and stews, which are a couple of things I seem to do all right by up here in this altitude.

Yesterday was also the 18th anniversary of the day my mother died. I often get the date confused with the 4th of February, which will be the 20th anniversary of the day my grandfather died. Both days have a poignancy for me, but for now, I want to focus just on one.

My relationship with my mother was tempestuous, to put it mildly. We often went months without speaking, generally because of some way she perceived that I had slighted her. She was quick to hold grudges, even against her children. She went to her death without speaking to my brother. She also had a nasty habit of saying critical things in a hurtful way, and in what my aunt (her youngest sister) called of being tit-for-tat on everything. When she sent out Christmas cards she made a list. If someone on the list reciprocated with a return card, they got a check beside their name. At the end of the season, those without a check got crossed off the list and those names would not get a Christmas card the next year, maybe not ever again. She also expected quick Thank You notes whenever she sent a gift. If she didn't get that Thank You, the gift recipient would hear from her. She was shameless about such things.

People are complicated. Mother was certainly no different. She could be difficult, yes indeed, she could. But she also delighted in holidays, would rather get a sentimental card or note than a funny one, or even a gift. She would sit vigil bed-side when someone was sick or in the hospital, and take over food to the family back home. She loved to dance. And sing. And did both rather well. I remember teaching her The Twist when I was about 9 years old, which made her only about 35 but I thought she was ancient, and so funny for wanting to learn the latest dance craze. Of course, long after The Twist was well out of fashion, Mother continued to do the dance whenever what she called "a fast song" was playing. I think she Twisted way into the 1980s.

She loved to play games, and was also good at most of them, most of the time, especially complex games with tricks and trumps and partners. Although she couldn't be called a good sport because she lost poorly. I remember once when she was playing Monopoly with me and my brother, and was losing pretty badly. When her token (always the Tophat) landed on Park Place, which my brother not only owned but had added several houses to, she refused to pay the rent and instead picked up the board and tossed everything on it across the room. So much for good sportsmanship, but later, probably feeling a little remorse over her behavior, she made peanut butter cookies. She let me dip the fork tines into sugar then mash the dough flat before she put them in the oven to bake. I was proud of the cookies she claimed we made together.

Once when I was in the fourth grade, Mother came to school to have lunch in the cafeteria with me. It was parents' week, and she took off from work to be with my class that day. She wore a boat-neck pullover top in a color of blue that perfectly matched her eyes. Her hair was done in a kind of Jackie Kennedy pouf, and her skirt hit her just at the knee. She wore the pair of fake-pearl cluster clip-on earrings my brother and I had given her for her birthday, and I thought she looked beautiful. When she appeared at our classroom door, I jumped up from my desk and went to take her hand, pulling her into the room to meet my teacher and the other kids in class. I seem to recall that there were a couple of other moms there that day, but mine was surely the best, and prettiest, mom on the planet.

As the years go by, 18 of them already, these sweet memories are the ones that have taken over inside me. I have not forgotten the arguments, the clashes, the butting of heads that she and I did as I grew into womanhood. But it does me more good to dwell on better memories.

At the end of her life we seemed to silently agree to believe in the good that was between us, the love, the devotion if not outright adoration. She was so sick, had lost all her hair and finally couldn't get out of the hospital bed set up in her front room. I spent one afternoon shortening her nightgowns so they wouldn't tangle beneath her, and applying Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion to her bald head because the new hair coming in made her scalp itch.

She struggled with her oxygen hose, and came and went in a drug-induced fog that made her grouchy and abrupt. She ordered me around, ordered Daddy around, too. She didn't have enough breath to couch her orders in kindness. The afternoon I spent sewing up her gowns, she interrupted my task endlessly. Do this, do that. Come over here and help me. I felt like a jack-in-the-box that day, jumping up and down from the sewing in my hands. Finally, she said to me, "Cindy," in a sharp tone that I knew would be followed by some sort of order from Colonel Mom. I sighed and prepared to put down the sewing yet again.

"What now?" I said, probably with some impatience in my voice, too. I looked at her and could see the glaze that had settled over her eyes. Whatever thing she had wanted me to do for her this time was lost in the pain killers, the confusion caused by the tumor in her brain.

Finally she said, "Come over here and kiss my head." She sounded forlorn and pitiful. I laid aside the gown I was hemming, got up from the couch and went to do just that. Her tiny new hair smelled like Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion. Her skin felt baby soft against my lips.

These are the memories I choose to keep close to me. I do this for myself as much as for anyone. It's easier to forgive than to hold onto hostilities. And it's a painful thing to lose your mother, no matter how difficult she might have made things from time to time. So much of your own self-definition is tied to your mother, and to those early days. These are things I see more and more clearly, after all these 18 years without her physically in my life.

Onward ....