a memory and a lesson

Reflecting on a century

The clouds anchored the show early this morning before the Carolina blue sky won the day.

Ten minutes later this expressive scene.

I am the next in a long line of tough Scots, especially the women. The Dutch are also tucked in with a handful of other ethnic groups I am researching.

Today I commemorate the centenary of my mother’s birth. She and I had fraught relationship, to put it mildly, though I am not sure I will ever understand why. I could regale you with many tales, some of which are so incredibly admirable but many would make you ask if I am serious. I will share a bit about her. As my old graduate school friend used to say, ‘Then there is your mother’ before she said something else.

My mother spent the bulk of her first eighteen years in the Ozarks from where her parents hailed. At some point, there was some upheaval leading her to move both to Iowa and Texas but I don’t know the details. She had her secrets, I now understand.

My mother was incredibly protective of her own mother, a woman who lost my grandfather before reaching middle age. It turned out my grandma was not as frail as I thought but my mother’s experiences related to all of this triggered fears of early, sudden death in my family. This was a theme throughout my childhood: you are likely to drop dead from nothing at the drop of a hat so be fearful of everything. My grandmother, however, lived a long, long, long life, albeit not as financially secure as one would like. If there were ever a case for Social Security, she was the poster child.

My mother never went to college but, liberated from school as World War II began, patriotically sought war work. I never met ANYONE—male, female, or anything else— who could fix a television as my mom could in the 1960s when the old General Electrics were rather finicky creatures. To meet her, you would assume that was my imagination. No, turns out when the War started, she worked in a factory fixing adding machines. Some sort of similarities, somehow, existed with 1950s televisions so she could figure out why our tv kept going kaflooy far better than the many repairmen called in. (And so much for the argument less tech is better tech as this most assuredly was a black and white set).

If you’d met her later in life, one would never believe she would strike out for California from the Ozarks during a war. She did and thrived. Not sure why she returned to the Ozarks but probably my grandmother.

My parents met as he was preparing to deploy in Korea; they married after two dates. Seriously? Two dates? He had been dating her roommate, a woman with the same first name, so it was massive confusion for his sisters when my dad announced the wedding before he shipped out. My aunts assumed he had to mean the other one but it was my mother.

Marriage seemingly flipped a switch for her as, best I can reconstruct, that adventuresome, confident women must become homebodies of epic proportions. Yes, she continued working as a teller in a series of banks and Savings & Loans. My mother humbled anyone, including my dad who the numbers whiz, when it came to balancing a checkbook. She had a withering look when someone foolishly offered that the bank had made a mistake. Her next words inevitably were ‘Well, I suppose that is theoretically possible the bank erred but I strongly doubt it. How about I look at your check register and statement for a second?’ The afflicted person soon heard the scrape of her chair as she arose triumphantly to show the error the individual, not the bank, made. In the final years of her banking, she absolutely pooh-poohed ATMs, not because they were inefficient but because they made people even less competent about balancing their check books. All true and all vintage mom.

But, she stopped working when she had kids with no intention of going back. She did violate that once when she wanted a walnut dining room set. She worked long enough to get it, quit, and developed this Betty Crockerish persona. Lots of rules, to boot.

She had kids and did the mother thing really well. She made me the most beautiful smocked dress when i was about four. It had to be green and white as she would not allow me to wear other colours. Redheads can’t wear colour and she controlled my attire. My brother and I didn’t wear jeans as she didn’t like them. I have no idea why but she didn’t. And I had to take piano. He didn’t but became a far better musician than I did after the years of half-hearted piano lessons.

We had the chances to live overseas beginning in 1966. Those years gave her the opportunity to play bridge which she absolutely loved; she was wickedly good and it was the only thing she loved rivaling shopping and ‘bargaining’. But otherwise, she was unhappy being overseas. She wasn’t one to hide her unhappiness, either.

My folks accepted assignments in Colombia (twice), Southeast Asia, Egypt, and Bangkok again (which fell through) but each and every move was at risk. My father turned down a request to go to Brasil in 1967. In each and every case, the issue was that we would be farther from my grandmother. My father had a wanderlust so this created plenty of tension but my mother was dedicated to her mother, if nothing else. Those extremely rare international phone calls, now daily occurrences, were a major deal so my mother prepared for them for weeks in advance. They put my mom in voice contact with her mother.

But, she was prone to accepting conspiracy theories, some of which I suspect were conspiracies only between the neurons in her brain. The number of things she disapproved of was endless. Rather than simply answering, ‘I wouldn’t do that’ or ‘I don’t know that you’ll like that’, she would inevitably tell me that whatever my desired activity, it would kill me. Seriously. Ballet? No, it will kill you with thickening your already massive thighs. Cook something without a detailed recipe? It will kill you if you substitute the wrong thing. (Hmmm.) Since I have always been an intuitive person, you see difficulties arise by my elementary school years. This went on endlessly.

She may not have meant to be difficult but it was so pervasive. My father traveled for work so often (accidentally?), the constant criticism shook my confidence in my own choices some times. Since I was red headed and fat while my parents and brother were all blond and more average in shape, one can understand why I wondered if I was adopted. I look back on those days now and laugh as she most definitely was my mother. She was too possessive to be anything else.

I am sure I was guilty of overemphasing grievances, too. I learned from someone rather grievance-prone so why wouldn’t I have learned that?

As I aged and became ever more independent, our relationship got more distant which drove her nuts. My mother in her older years, especially after my father died of a stroke not too many years after they retired to my grandmother’s location on my mother’s insistence, became the early prototype for a QAnon voter. We could not discuss any politics, not ANY, by the 1980s when things retained a veneer of civility in this country. She didn’t think women should be anywhere but home, with their bling, nail polish, and television. No one set her off like Hillary Clinton for reasons I could never grasp.

But she was the only mother I would ever have. As the years accelerated, I recognised things were not what they could be. I was not always patient with her, either.

In an attempt to reconcile, I invited her to live with me after she announced she wanted to be nearer to her family than to my late grandmother. She had stayed in the retirement house for too long with way too much stuff. She managed to sell the house the week before the financial crisis hit but she was unable to unload all her stuff because both of the volume and she had hidden cherished things throughout. I suppose she had been assuming she would either know where she had put it or have time to find it. Deciding she wanted to move in with me, my brother thought he would merely need drive her here. Little did he know she could barely move in her retirement room for all the schlock she still had. He did Herculean work getting her out of the place over a single weekend in October. The next challenge was she and I living together.

I would not let her smoke in the house. I wasn’t happy with smoking at all but I knew addicts have a difficult withdrawal after almost seven decades. I wanted her to walk. I knew she wasn’t getting 900 steps a day. In the grocery store during about the third month, she accused me of trying to make her exercise by bringing her to the store. I had to smile as I was busted but she was furious. The most comical event was when I walked in the living room one day as she had the yellow pages open. I asked why. She said she was going to get a cab to move somewhere else. I had to stifle a laugh as I knew she had no idea what our address was. After finding cabs, she asked for the address.

I came home from work one night in mid-2009 to find her frantically packing. I asked why. She told me she had to get home to daddy as she had been gone so long. Since her dad had been gone fifty years and mine for almost twenty-five, I was of course confused. I stated these facts, not meaning to cause her deep pain, then assumed it was just that she had awoken from a bad dream or something.

At 0330 the next morning, she had all the lights on, coming into the bed to tell me it was time to leave. I still didn’t get it but these two incidents were the end of it after I reminded her she lived with me.

Her granddaughters, able to drive, came to see her regularly. One of them still adores Grandma for sharing their mutual love of jewelry, purses, and nail polish. My nieces saw her more than my kids who weren’t old enough to get to her on their own but spent as much time with her as they could stand until her moods became more erratic.

After a horrible winter and spring of ‘09-’10, it became unavoidably clear that she needed to be in care: mounting evidence that the merciless thief, dementia, had another victim. Her mother lived to be 97 with no signs of it but we could not longer assume proliferating incidents were unrelated.

We also learned the heartbreak that the decades of long-term health insurance my father set up before his death had lapsed as she had forgotten to pay premiums. My brother found a place which was willing to work with us on costs but it was almost a daily negotiation. Aging is expensive in this country. Affordability was why she moved in with me from the beginning.

By the time we celebrated her 90th birthday a decade ago today, she remembered my name but not brother’s, a man she so completely adored and who had done so incredibly much for her in the final years. He and I both took off work on 15 October to arrive at her room with a cake and balloons. I think we might have had a sign, too.

She was bedridden as so common for those in hospice, showing that vacuous dementia smile as she looked up at us. She could still communicate for another few weeks but we knew the end wasn’t too far away. She smiled like a child the whole time we were there.

My mother passed before the end of the year following the cake and balloons. When the phone rang at 0700, I knew. We buried her in a snowstorm, returning her to my father’s side. Few other contemporaries or even relatives were still around, either because they were ill or my folks were long forgotten. My mother’s wonderful first cousin did come, along with the son of another friend. That latter fellow’s father, the last remaining close friend, died of dementia soon after my mom. Its varieties are truly heinous and unrelenting.

Would I have liked a far different relationship with her? Of course but she offered me the context that made me the good person I am and the one upon which I can have to improve upon.

She had her light which could shine so brightly but she also exemplified how our lives shape our priorities and our fears.

She taught me to pay attention to details. Banking, sure. Not to lighten my hair after 7th grade because it would grow out looking pretty ugly. But, how could I have missed examining details indicating dementia was increasingly capturing her until we had merely a shell weighing 75 pounds? It’s seductive to look for alternate answers when the truth results from accumulated data. I so regret that. If you see something, AMTRAK says, say something. I wish we had seen, then asked for an assessment but we did not comprehend what we were seeing. We wouldn’t have won over the illness but we could have not replayed pain when she asked questions or we could have assured she was safe all of the time. Nothing reversed the reality, however.

The final comment reminds all of us that time is the one quantity in our lives that is not recoverable. Each day is here, then written irrevocably into the past. Cherish the good and the bad every bloody day as they are life, regardless of wishful thinking to the contrary. We truly have no idea how many more opportunities we have with others. I wasted far too much time worrying about stupid stuff.

Who have you cherished today and what could you have discarded as completely incidental?

Thank you for reading Actions Create Consequences. I welcome your thoughts on family, mothers, loss, dementia, superb moments, or anything else. I especially thank the paid subscribers who support this column.

Be well and be safe. FIN