A Mother’s Silhouette

To all of our mothers.  Thank you for your love~

 

A Mother’s Silhouette

I awoke for a moment in late afternoon, the hospital room spare and efficient.   I looked over and saw my mother sitting with a rosary in her hand, a cool dark silhouette before a window fiercely illuminated by the hot desert sun.

“You don’t have to talk,” she said noticing I was stirring. “I’m just going to sit here.”

Thank you.  It’s exactly what I needed.  An immense, familiar peace filled me, her profile eliciting early memories as I continued to drift in and out of sleep, my body ridding itself of the anesthesia from an early morning surgery.

I dreamed of sitting tall beside her as she drove the white station wagon with two sure hands on the wheel down bright summer streets, and squinting up from my canvas raft to see that she still sat in the striped beach chair in case I needed her to rescue me from the crashing waves.   Then I was suddenly spinning on the old brown naugahyde covered stool in the kitchen as she prepared dinner, her black wavy hair in sharp contrast to the fading glare of a snowy afternoon through windows over the kitchen sink.  I felt the weight of her as she perched on the edge of my bed saying prayers with me, the hall light streaming behind her into my room cloaked in night. Her slight frame in the living room window as I pulled up to the house in an old blue Ford with my first boyfriend.

All of these memories, backlit, glowing.  A mother’s silhouette.  Anchoring, soothing, solid.  As an adult, going about the daily routines, I had forgotten about the calming, restorative effect of having my mother simply sit in my presence.  I looked to her as I always have.  My mirror, my friend, my ever present reminder-er that my hair cut is all wrong and my weight is too low.  All these years she has been the constant in my life.  Now sneaking around the edges of my heart is the knowledge that she will someday be gone.  It is an unbearable knowing. Where will she be when I need her?  Who will be backlit for me then?

The ability to have children may end, but mothering endures.  It is a singular and beautiful calling to become the silhouette to God’s light here on this earth.   In this room, helpless and still, I saw clearly that my position in the chain of motherhood would remain unchanged.  A child doesn’t stop needing his or her mother simply because he or she is turning fifty, and a mother’s instinct to love her children never ends.

My thoughts turned to my son and daughter, young adults trying to find their way and make sense of their circumstances.  I wonder if my silhouette holds the same power. If I was there when they needed to peer from their own darkness and look toward the light. If I understood when they were young that love shines brightest during the simple moments of mothering that become so routine that we perform them without thought.  I look forward with a new understanding to the many years I have left  with them.  Even if that means just sitting in a chair in a shadowy room by a sunny window, a chance to remind them of the immense, familiar peace of a mother’s love in this often harsh world.

I awakened again, my head pounding.  She was there in a second with ice chips and a cool cloth.

“Do you want me to turn off the ceiling light?” she asked as she leaned over me.

“No, leave it on,” I replied adding one more image to my my treasure box of silhouettes.

Sheets smoothed, pillows adjusted she stood searching for some other detail to attend.

“Thanks, Mom.” I said as I felt the tug of sleep once more.

“I’ll just sit over here,” she whispered. “You don’t have to talk.”

Mother of the Year

Lately, I have been sifting though some of my old “mom-oir” pieces.  This one sent me into a nostalgic giggle. My son, Matthew, didn’t go through the terrible two’s until he was four.  During that tumultuous year, I learned more about the inability of men and women to communicate effectively than I did from the previous ten years of marriage.  Every conversation was about power and control, but I didn’t realize it until it was over.  I fell for it every time, like a child that is continually surprised to see the Jack in the Box explode from the can after five cranks of the handle.  A perfect example was a cloudy day in March when we went to Safeway for a few groceries…

 Mother of the Year

After circling the block three times in my navy blue mini-van, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that Matthew had finally calmed himself. He gazed at the tree-lined street, one pudgy index finger tracing circles on the window as the other twirled a chunk of sweaty blonde hair into a knot.  I exhaled with relief knowing that the dreaded Phase One of Every Car Trip was complete. Weeks earlier I had resigned myself to the reality that every excursion would begin with a wrestling match that would result in my pushing against his rigid little body of steel with all of my might to get him to bend to a point that I could buckle his car seat. Without fail, it would leave us both out of sorts and screaming.

Heading toward the grocery store I put in his favorite tape, the one where his name had been electronically inserted into every song.  Both of our moods lifted as we sang together about Matthew going to the moon on a magic rocket ship, and Matthew sailing the high seas with pirates.

The third song was about to begin when he called my name.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Is stupid a bad word?”

I turned and gave him the exaggerated head nod and wide eyed stern look, “Yes!  Stupid is a terrible word. You should never call someone that.”

“What about shut up?”

“Shut up is awful!  An insult to the person you are talking to.  Never, ever say shut up.”  I saw him pondering my words, his blue eyes shifting left and right as he thought about what I was saying.  It felt so good being able to impart manners and social skills to my little guy.  Mother of the Year, that’s who I was.

“What about jerk?”

My jaw dropped with another dramatic expression of horror as I looked back at him again. “That could be one of the worst words of all time.”

“Hmmm.”

“Where are you getting these words?”

“I don’t know.”

“They’re all bad. They hurt people’s feelings, and  we don’t use them in this family.” I turned off the music for the remainder of the trip so my motherly wisdom could sink in.  Finally, he was listening to me.  I hadn’t connected with him on such a level in days.  We were forming his conscience together.  He would grow to be a fine man. A priest, or the president.

We pulled into the Safeway parking lot and he climbed into the cart without incident, an event so rare it made me grab the handle with sure hands and whistle while I pushed him up and down the aisles. I even took my time for a change, scanning the shelves for new products and the usual staples.

When I rolled the cart down the cereal aisle, I could sense a mood shift.

“Can we get Captain Crunch?”

“You know the doctor said no sugar cereals.”

His hands tightened around the cart’s handle until his knuckles and fingernails turned white.  “I want Captain Crunch.”

“We’re getting Crispix.”

His heels pounded a slow, tribal rhythm against the cart. “I-hate-Crispix.”

“You love Crispix.”

His kicking picked up speed and the sound of the vibrating metal turned heads toward us. Our empty aisle was now crowded with carts. Where did these other shoppers come from?

“I want Captain Crunch!  Captain Crunch! CAPTAIN CRUNCH!”

“WE’RE GETTING CRISPIX.”

“I WAANNT CAPTAINNN CRUUNNCH!”

Like a freeze frame in an action movie, time stood still as I looked up and down the aisle. Staring eyes to the left.  Staring eyes to the right.  Everyone was unabashedly waiting to see how Mother of the Year was going to handle this.

I took a deep breath to regroup, flashed my best fake smile to my growing audience, and dropped my voice to a gravelly whisper, “With that attitude we are not getting Captain Crunch or anything else today, Mister.  We are going home right now.”

Matthew looked me straight in the eye, and at the top of his little lungs he screamed with the utmost confidence, “SHUT UP, YOU STUPID JERK!”

My mouth dropped in unison with all of the other mothers in the aisle.  Shocked that he would string together all of the worst words he knew against me, I pulled his rigid, screaming body from the cart, and carried him over my shoulder, like a writhing sack of potatoes, toward the door.

Humiliated that all of the other mothers saw me as a failure, I gave them a final glance.  Imagine my relief when I saw them clapping with looks of sympathy and understanding as Matthew screamed unintelligible sounds and pounded his fists into my back.

“Go Mom!” were the last two words I heard as I stepped outside, thankful that my cheering section wasn’t coming with me to witness the upcoming wrestling match at the car seat.

The Woman with All the Answers

In honor of Mother’s Day.  A gentle reminder to spend time with the people you love~

The Woman with All the Answers

As a child, I loved going to the movies and live theater with my mother.  Though neither happened often, the experiences captivated me.  The Sound of Music became an obsession, Fiddler on the Roof almost did me in. I knew that ‘Sunrise, Sunset‘ would be sung at my wedding the very first time I heard it.

I also learned other important things that have come in handy in life. Such as: there is nothing like a dame, a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down, Gary, Indiana is the place where I belong, the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, Oklahoma is where the wind comes sweeping down the plain, when you’re Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, and the Phantom composes the music of the night.

I shock my family, sometimes, when I belt out a few stanzas from show tunes we might inadvertently hear on on the radio as we are searching for something more hip.  “How do you know that song?” Matt would implore as I channeled my inner Carol Channing.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped going to live theater, other than school plays.  I stopped seeking the magic of performance for no good reason other than it cost money, and I was too lazy to plan ahead. I stopped spending art filled afternoons with my mother because I was busy with important things like shopping at Walmart and Home Depot.

Yet, any time I would fill out some silly questionnaire or worksheet that would ask for my hobbies and likes, I would always include theater.  And every time I checked that box, I would smirk to myself, ‘Big Fat Liar! You used to, but who are you now?’

When the theaters in town sent out their pre-season info this time, I made a conscious decision to put this experience back on my priority list. Why do we do that? Why do we stop doing the things we loved to do when we were growing up? I met my mother for coffee and we made an afternoon of it, poring over the glossy brochures deciding which performances we’d choose.  We decided to be sophisticated and choose three dramas we had never of, wrote out checks on the spot, and sent them in before we could come up with reasons why it was an unnecessary extravagance.

We met on a Sunday at the Phoenix Art Museum where my mother had been a docent for many years and dined in their café.  An artful, fitting start  to our year of theater.  Afterwards we followed our map-quested directions further downtown to the Herberger Theater, a lovely venue in downtown Phoenix. We were seeing The Woman with All the Answers, a one woman play about Ann Landers. Okay, it wasn’t exactly Phantom of the Opera, but it was a start.

Once settled into our seats we looked around. The place was packed.

“I’m the only one younger than seventy,” I whispered.

“More proof,” she began with a knowing nod, “that older people know how to enjoy life on a Sunday afternoon.”

I had a flashback of the two of us, thirty years earlier, side by side on plush red seats in a theater on Broadway, my patent leather shoes barely scraping the floor.

“I feel like such a lady.  Don’t you?” she said as she smoothed her skirt and patted her hair into place.  Her eyes were gleaming. I did feel like a lady, dressed in my Sunday best, hands folded, waiting for the curtain to rise once more and take me on a journey.  I loved this feeling of doing something with my day other than chores and ‘getting ready’ for the week. Getting ready for what? Being busy? How many Sundays had I passed up the opportunity to feel like a lady? How many Sundays had passed in my life without taking advantage of quality time with my beautiful mother?

Suddenly, the lights dimmed and onto the stage waltzed Nancy Dussault, an award winning actress of stage, film and TV, looking every bit like the photo of Ann Landers that graced the cover of the brochure.

We were transported to her living room, June 30, 1975 as she was trying to pen her infamous column about the break-up of her thirty-six year marriage to her beloved husband, Julius.  Because she was utterly heartbroken she found all sorts of other topics to talk about rather than writing the column.  And through her humor and the reading of letters and conversation with the audience, we learned about Ann Landers, the woman.  Eppie Lederer, the sister of Pauline Lederer, the double-crossing identical twin who went on to become her adversary, Dear Abby.  A simple, yet complicated human story that reminded me that all of our lives hold opportunities for greatness and none of us escape sorrow.

We learned of her rise to fame, how she won a contest to take over the column after the death of the original Ann Landers, and became a trusted advisor to the public for many decades. But though her life was full and exciting, it also had its share of pain and betrayal. Though her words held great power in society at the time, she was powerless in situations that deeply plagued her.

There was one particularly moving scene in which she recalled speaking with President Johnson, personally begging him to end the Vietnam War.  To drive her point home, she traveled to the war torn country for three weeks, visiting the bedsides of wounded soldiers, a few thousand by the end of her stay.  She recalled the moments sitting by those bedsides, holding the hand of one and touching the forehead of another, asking about their homes, listening to their stories. Her mission was a powerful one, to stand in for the mother they desperately needed.

This was the moment in which I remembered why I loved the theater when I was young. It connected me to a life bigger than my own, broadened my understanding of the human experience, made me a better person. In the glow of the stage lights I could see tears glistening on the cheeks of many, cloth handkerchiefs lifted to eyes and noses; a powerful silence filled with a grief so real I could reach out and touch it. Like the whole place was afraid to exhale, afraid to unleash long buried terror.   This audience bore those memories in a deeply personal place, some of whom may have been in Vietnam themselves.

Finally Ann finished her sad letter to her fans, humbly admitting even she, the lady with all the answers, after all of her years of preaching against divorce, could not hold her own marriage together.  She asked, “How did it happen that something so good didn’t last forever?”  I could see a thousand heads nodding with her in the darkness. Acknowledging that good things in our lives do end, and it hurts.  Living proof that memories do not stand all alone in the moonlight.

When the curtain came down, I did not want to move. I wanted that feeling of human connection to last. I wanted to think about the reasons why we let things that are important to us slip away.  Why is it always a shock when the very things we stop paying attention to end?

“Maybe we should sign up for a few more of these,” I said as we searched for our purses and waited for the majority of people to file out.

“I was thinking the same thing,” my mother said as she buttoned her jacket and adjusted her grey silk scarf.  “That was wonderful.  I didn’t want it to be over.”

“Me, neither.”
“Let’s make sure that these Sunday outings together continue.”

“Well, you’ve already convinced me that older people know how to have more fun on the weekend,” I began as I looped my arm through hers and walked slowly out of the theater.

The World is Waiting

I would like to propose a moratorium on the phrase “empty nest”.  It causes me to cringe. I hate the image of birds moping around and tweeting somber tunes as they pick old threads and burrs from tangled twigs. Honestly, have you ever seen a bird just sitting in a nest by itself just for the heck of it, wondering what to do next?

I am utterly done with the following conversation:

“So, Matt’s off to college!”

“Yes, can you believe it? And your son (daughter) too!”

“How did this happen?” Both of us widen our eyes and shrug together. “I feel like I just brought him to kindergarten.”

“Are we that old?” Both of us shake our heads and secretly compare crows feet.

“At least I have Jimmy and Shannon still around, but YOU… Wow.  Ready for the empty nest? How are you going to handle that? What are you going to do?”  Like this is the first time I might have pondered such questions.

“Actually, I…”

“I’m going to hate it,” she cuts me off and proceeds to wail, ”  All those empty rooms. What will I do with myself? Am I actually going to have to talk to my husband? I don’t even know if we have anything in common anymore. What does a 50-something woman do then?  Oh boy… Phew…  not looking forward to that empty nest. Now, what were you saying before?”

Well, let me tell you, sister.  The first thing I am going to do is stop hanging around with whiny, windbags like you who have forgotten that they are multidimensional. While you are dreaming up clever quips to spice up the small talk with your husband at the dinner table, I will be planning to cross the globe with mine so we can enjoy the gifts of this planet. God willing, I will have decades of time to explore life, discover new passions and affect positive change in a broken world that needs every single skill that we have honed through years of parenting.

My knees weaken at the thought of standing at the door of Matt’s first dorm room while he counts the seconds until we leave him alone, and I will grant myself sufficient time to pause wistfully in my children’s bedrooms and cry tears of salutation to days gone by, but I refuse to look at this ending as ‘job over’. Mothering never ends, it just changes like the seasons.  We stand like the great, spreading maple for so many consecutive years of summer that we forget to look forward to the brilliance of our leaves in the fall.

Words can not capture the power of nurture. Imagine our collective ability to bring comfort to the lonely and fight for the bullied. Imagine the wisdom and pep talks to those in despair, the simple power of a mother’s hand on a shoulder, the positive energy of a pat on the back. Imagine thousands of children going to bed on full stomachs for the first time. Our communities need us. The world needs us.  This time of life does not have to be about emptiness at all.  It is about the opportunity to soar so high on wings of love that we let our homes grow dusty and our gardens untended.

So I propose that we rename this time in our lives to something more positive and life giving.  Let’s leave  the nests to the birds to worry about, our world is waiting…

Do you have any ideas?

 

 

This Finishing the Last Piece Thing

Most mornings I have coffee for breakfast, but today I felt like cereal so I opened the kitchen cupboard and saw three boxes of it, shoulder to shoulder like soldiers in the war against hunger.

 

I grabbed the box of Frosted Mini Wheats and gave it shake.  Urrgh, empty.  I peered inside to see three lonely bite sized morsels in a sea of crumbs.  Not one to be wasteful, I poured it into a bowl and finished them off.

 

Next, I grabbed the box of Honey Graham O’s and gave that box a shake.  Urrgh, empty. I pulled out the inner bag and held it up.  More than a handful, I decided, so I poured them into my bowl and splashed on some milk.  As I crunched away, I eyed the box of Total Raisin Bran now standing vulnerable and alone.  I didn’t have to shake that box to know what I was going to find next.

 

Fifteen bran flakes and four raisins later, I was both full and teary eyed.  My adventures in fiber, sweetness and crunch did nothing but remind me that my days of polishing off the last of the cereal were numbered. One year from now the house will be quiet and the cereal boxes full. I am thinking of switching to eggs.

 

It starts when they are babies, this finishing the last piece thing that mothers do.  It becomes one of our jobs.  We eat the crusts of the grilled cheese sandwiches, the last bite of ice cream melting in the dish, and the pieces of steak they just learned to cut for themselves.  We clean up the last of the toys before nap time, read the last few sentences of the storybook, and sneak in the last few math problems of homework so they can get their weary bodies to bed on time.  Even now, as I insist that he learn to do his own laundry before life in a dorm, I find myself pulling his clothes from the dryer and folding them. Finishing the task for him.

 

It’s a sacred dance. The child starts and the mother completes, the startings and endings woven in layers so complex that I barely notice anymore the fine line where his starting ends and my endings start.

 

But I am painfully aware of this one.  The chapter that started eighteen years ago is ending.  I still have ten months, though, and I will chew those slowly and cherish the adventures in laughter and sweetness and crunch, because this last year is an important one.  The dance changes after this, and I am not looking forward to learning the new steps.

 

Mothers Stick Together Like That

I boarded the plane on a muggy July afternoon in Columbus and spied an empty aisle seat three rows down on the right. Two pre-teen aged girls sat, backpacks on their laps, in the middle and window seats. “Unaccompanied Minors” was like a neon sign floating above their heads.  I plopped myself down next to them in silent collusion with their mothers whom I was sure were somewhere biting their fingernails and figuring how to assuage the hollow pit in their stomachs.  I would protect them on the flight, keep all n’er do wells at bay.  Mothers stick together like that.

As passengers filed by and the plane filled, I couldn’t help but overhear the girls introducing themselves to each other.  They spoke with an openness that surprised me, like they had known each other since kindergarten.

“I’m going into seventh grade,” announced the Window Seat girl with her shoulder length auburn hair and riotous flash of freckles across her face. “I hope it’s better than last year.”

“Well, I’ll be going into Miss Connors’ class I guess. She’s the fourth grade teacher who loves worksheets,” answered the Middle Seater as she dug through a well worn, pink Hello Kitty backpack with marker stains bleeding though the front pocket. Old homework, broken pencils, and a variety of half eaten items spilled out as she spoke, her face hidden by cascades of chocolate brown hair.

“Here, let me help you with that,” I offered as I caught some of the items before they hit the floor.

“Thanks,” she mumbled as she dug out a twisted metal headband and slipped it on, pulling back her bangs to reveal chubby cheeks and hazel eyes that held something older than fourth grade.

“Where are you girls headed?”

“I’m going to grandmother’s. She lives in California.  I used to live there before my mother married my new father,” said the Window Seat, “I live in Indiana now.”

“How do you like Indiana?” I asked.

“It’s okay.  I guess new dad likes me.”

“ I’m sure he does,” I responded.

“We laugh and everything,” she smiled and her braces gleamed. “He calls me his new side-kick.”

“I don’t have a dad anymore,” announced the Middle Seat.

“Oh,” her blunt announcement caught me off guard.

“It’s no big deal,” she said unwrapping some Oreos, “my mom and I are a team.”

“I bet you have an amazing mom,” I agreed.  This conversation was making me a little nervous.  I did not want to tread on dangerous territory so I laid my head back and took out my novel.

“What do you do?  Who are you?” inquired the Middle Seat who did not pick on up my non-verbal cue.

“Sometimes I’m a teacher and sometimes I’m a writer,” I answered.

“Hmmm,” she said, “interesting.”

“I think I’ll read for awhile,” I added with a smile and nod toward my book.

“Okay.”

The girls continued to chat and giggle through take-off, sharing information about movie stars and reality TV shows.  As the plane settled into its cruising altitude, they settled into Ipods and Sudoku.

About a hour into the flight, as we sipped on soft drinks and crunched on pretzels, the Window Seat leaned forward and stared me straight in the eye.

“I didn’t have any friends this year.  No one liked me at my new school.”

My hear fluttered at this announcement.  “I am so sorry.”

“They all called me California Girl. They said I thought I was cooler than anyone else because I grew up in California.  It wasn’t true.  They don’t even know me on the inside.”  My heart ached immediately for this emerging young woman.  A child so filled with pain that she couldn’t help but let it spill into the laps of strangers on a plane.

“Jerks and bullies,” offered Middle Seat matter-of-factly. “All schools have ‘em.”

“Some days they would wait for me after school and want me to fight them. I hated it.”  She leaned her head to the left and rested it against the window.

“Did you?”  asked Middle Seat tearing into a sleeve of Fig Newtons.

“No, my mom said I’m too good for that. But they would call me things like ho, and bitch, and the F word.”

“Oh my goodness!” I gasped. Continuing to be shocked by the revelations of my seat mates, I searched for the right thing to say. “I didn’t even know those words when I was your age.”

“Well, I’ve known the word prostitute since I was four,” Middle Seat stated.

“You have?”

“My mom used that word when she yelled at my dad all the time. When he left, she finally told me what it meant.”  She turned to Window Seat and stated plainly, “You are NOT a prostitute.  I’ll tell you that much.”

We all nodded our heads in agreement.

“I read a lot.  I love books,” the Window Seat said.

“Me, too,”  I said.

“I could take ‘em or leave ‘em,” Middle Seat started another puzzle.

“You know,”  I said, “Let me tell you a little something about words.”  Window Seat raised her defeated brown eyes and looked into mine.  “Words are like mirrors. They reflect what is on the inside of the person who chooses them. Not the person they are spoken to.”

Her eyes glistened. She inhaled sharply. “You’re the new girl,” I continued, “They don’t know what’s in your heart.  If they did, I bet they would say words like courage, and strength. It’s hard to start your life over in a new town.”

She slowly nodded as she listened.

“Any coward can hide behind ugly, powerful words and pretend that they are mighty. I think your mom is right. You’re too good for that.”

We all sat in silence for a long time. Window Seat looked out the window, Middle Seat opened a bag of M&M’s, and I picked up my book.

“Want a few?” she asked me as she shook the bright yellow bag in front of me.  “They have peanuts.”

“Sure.” She poured a few in my outstretched palm.

“You know what I think about those bullies?”

“What?”

“They can go to H-E-Double toothpicks.  Do you know what that means?”

“You bet I do.”