What about Mom?
Article published in Northampton Living
(March 2023)
Funny how you can spend a quarter century raising kids with your blood, guts, tears and bottomless love. Then one day something changes and you don’t have a clue how to keep your family together. And then, finally, you begin to wonder if it’s your job anymore.
When my mom was 50 she was left with a daughter in her first year of college and three older sons who could be aimless at times. We were trying to figure out our young adult lives without Dad. But what about Mom?
I didn’t really understand my mom until I was close to 70 – only seven or eight years before she died at 96. Before that we were always disappointing each other. She’d forget my birthday or, when she remembered, she'd give me a bargain sweater that was much too big. I was never exuberant enough when visiting with family at her home in Mount Desert Island. My hugs were too brief. She needed more compliments than I could ever muster.
I am not saying I didn’t love my mother until her 90th year. No, l always loved her. And I always knew she loved me unconditionally. But it took a lifetime for me to know and like her, which is different than simply loving her. Eventually I appreciated her independent spirit and quirky personality, as well
as the harder stuff: her annoying forgetfulness, her disappointing prejudices, her selfishness. Finally, toward the end, I could almost see all of her. Of course by then, as Shakespeare wrote, she was “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste.”
We started having fun together even when things were hard. Something I learned about Mom those last few years was how much she loved Frank Sinatra, whom she dreamily recalled seeing in concert long ago. After a fall, I rushed her to the ER suspecting another stroke. While she was lying on a stretcher, I played “Witchcraft” on my phone, and, like magic, she lit up and started dancing with only her hands and arms. I took her hands in mine and we danced together, neither of us caring who saw.
Anything is possible when you understand and love and like someone all at the same time. My disoriented, scared, proud, spirited mother – sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste – was beautiful. At the very end of her life, my beautiful mother, while looking up at me and my sweetheart with a tiny smile, said she was ready for her next adventure.
How do families make it through the hardest times? I honestly don’t know. But love probably isn’t enough. You may have to get to know and like one another. And forgive, while there's still time.