Motherland

It’s Mother’s Day in the US. All over the country, moms are getting cornflakes and muffins in bed, receiving handmade or Hallmark cards, being taken out to brunch and are hoping there won’t be too much of a mess left over to clean up tomorrow.

So, let’s talk mothers. I’m thinking of two, for starters: my own and my Mama II.

I’m struggling with trying to understand how Mom shaped me—or how she could shape my two sisters and me so differently. I’ve often posited that babies were switched at the hospital when I was born, but that doesn’t account for the nurture part of the equation.

You know how you go through a period (usually from about ages 13 to 26) where you hope to God that you won’t turn out anything like your parents? And then—from any time after maybe 30—you find that you are indeed replicating them in more ways than you’d have expected? And finally you see some areas where you wish you’d paid more attention and had followed this or that advice or example?

Somehow I inherited my mom’s propensity for clutter without getting her natural ability to organize key elements of the environment. (This may be why one of the protagonists of my novel built out his flat with not one thing "out" on any surface: floor, kitchen counter, walls, tables—everything is as bare as a Zen monastery.)  I only just realized this a few months ago, and was so gobsmacked by it that I’ve had to write a bloody list of areas of clutter to clear and schedule time on the calendar to file papers so I can actually, you know, find them when I need them. Like for taxes.

And that brings me to lists.

My mother had so many lists, she actually had a list to keep track of the lists. There is something in me (maybe my Bulgarian gypsy genetic structure—you know, from my birth family; before babies got switched at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan) that absolutely refuses to do that. But as I come across my various lists written on the backs of grocery receipts, sticky notes and hotel notepads, at least I think about it.

Here’s my last memory of Mom: we were in another hospital, Huntington Memorial, one night. (I was in my senior year of college, so I took night shift to be with her and then went out to Claremont for classes.) She was pretty well wasted, between the cancer and the morphine, which was a dreadful thing to see. All my life she was competent, efficient and coherent, so the changes wrought by the disease were terrifying and to be in a room with basically the shell of this woman felt like I'd fallen into a Dalì painting.

My family mostly did not hold with extravagant expressions of emotion, and I don’t know whether I wanted her to hear it or for me to hear it, but she was lying there so small and frail in that dim hospital room, so I said, “Mom, I love you.”

That seemed to penetrate, and she said, “I love you too, dear.” As last words from anyone to anyone, not the worst.

Some days after that as a family we agreed that the doctors should give her morphine around the clock, which essentially…well—the soul was separated from the shell.

My Mama II was Elizabeth, my BFF’s mother. Now that I think of it, Mama II was in many ways similar to Mom—civic-minded, card-playing, quick-witted. Yet so different as to be exotic to me. She raised her daughter alone, and was well ensconced in the Episcopal Church, which seemed pretty way out there to me.

But here’s one of my most vivid memories of Mama II: she was leaning against the counter in her cousin Char’s kitchen (where she and BFF lived), telling us a joke about a newlywed and Lent. And when she got to the punch line, which she practically howled, “Well—to whom…And for how long?” I about wet myself.

She told it with such zest and had the most amazing laugh (which my BFF has inherited), and I could not imagine my own mother coming up with such a story (yes, I was a little prig).

It’s a hard job, being a mother; there are about twelve bazillion ways to screw things up. (I’m thinking half a banana and a glass of milk every afternoon after school, here.) I’m betting that there are very few moms who don’t worry about that. And I also bet that the vast majority of them are doing the best job they can.

I personally am very grateful to have had two mothers in my life, to get a wider perspective on the world, and to have as part of my makeup.

That Lent joke still cracks me up.