I had such a day to day with my mother. As regular readers may know, my relationship with my mother can be at times fractious at best. We get cross-ways for one reason or another and it may takes weeks sometimes to come to the realization that what seemed a big deal when it happened is really a minor event in the sum of our ongoing relationship.
My mother was a small-town girl from Perryville, Missouri when she met and married my father, a big-city man from St. Louis, Missouri.
A few months after turning eighteen and graduating from high-school she married my father in 1958. Between 1958 and 1963 she found herself far-removed from her rural family and with her own "city" family of three rambunctious boys in a small walk-up apartment on Chateau Street in St. Louis.
What a wonderful time it was for us kids and what a stressful time it must have been for my parents. My mother, trained only in high-school home economics, typing and shorthand worked during the daytime while my father worked at night. It was a rare day indeed that I did not spend completely in the presence of one of my parents. So different from today, with daycare and after-school events.
My parents saw to it that, with exceptions so rare I can not remember them, that one of them was always there for us. What a great sacrifice it must have been for an eighteen to twenty-three year old "girl" to have missed out on the things young women today take for granted as their right in their late teens and early twenties. But, I doubt my mother ever conceived it should be different.
She worked with what she had, which wasn't all that much by today's standards. She was back then, the perfect mother only conceived of today, in TV commercials and an idealized view of the past. Between she and my father, they had all the bases covered and never thought that things should be otherwise.
As children, we got made from scratch breakfast lunch and dinner. There were no PopTarts or "GoGurt" drinks. My mother made breakfast, lunch and dinner from scratch each and every day. We never had a meal that did not include potatoes, meat and vegetables. When it was cold we had made from scratch pancakes, oatmeal, or bacon and eggs, or French toast that my mother never imagined at the time might one day be served from foil packages from a cardboard box.
Ours was indeed a charmed childhood. Never rich, but never poor and never without my parents who somehow made it all work. We grew up in an environment that was centered around a celebration of one kind or another nearly every week. Their were birthday parties, Christmas, Halloween with costumes made by hand by my mother late at night when all we children could do was dream of what use we would make of them.
My mother was the kind of woman who put every strand of tinsel on the Christmas tree piece by piece. The kind of woman who stayed up late at night to back cookies and traditional German pastries to give out to our neighbors and visitors to our home during the holidays. She had a cake tin for every occasion, from an Easter lamb to a Christmas Santa because, well, that was just how things were done back then.
My earliest memory is of the day we moved into our first and only family home - ours from the time I was four until the time I was in my early twenties. It was a home much like that which my partner and I first purchased. Old, charming, much lived-in and much in need of care in return. And like my partner and I did, my parents struggled with the all to often thought of "where in the world will the money come from to pay for that." But somehow, in time all needs were met and life for us kids sailed along without fear of any want or need going unfilled.
Much like today they struggled with being unemployed, in-debt, more needs than funds. And yet they managed it all and provided all of their children with a private school education that was beyond excellent, even by todays standards.
All throughout my life at home until I left for college and subsequently moved out on my own, my parents were an ever present force in my life. Every weekend was a camping or fishing trip, baseball leagues, summer camp, riding, swimming and tennis lessons, and just to fill in the blanks, weeks and weeks spent on the family farms of my mother's many many relatives in Southeast Missouri.
So, today, while spending the day with my mother as I made Christmas cookies, while we talked and reminisced about these days I made the comment to my mother, in regard to a conversation with my niece, I told my mother I found myself thinking after the conversation that, "my God, I sound like my parents."
But, how "not" like my parents I am today. I have never had children and yet find myself pressed at times to understand how I can be expected to deal with so much from so many distractions and needs. But somehow, my parents managed exactly the same things, under worse circumstances, and never once as a child did I feel their anxiousness or worry. My parents were much better people than I could ever hope to be.
My father passed away on December 6, 2000, the very day after my mother's step-father and my step-grandfather passed away. He died at the hospital, before they could do surgery, during the time that my mother should have been packing for my grandfather's funeral. I can remember the call to my hotel in Europe where I was working.
My grandfather had cancer and had decided not to have treatment, before I left for Germany, so it was no surprise to receive a message at my hotel that he had died and I needed to call home. But due to time delays and my work schedule, by the time I got the message that he had died and called home, my father had passed away and I was confused at first to make out the details of all that had happened.
I remember the hurried, hugely expensive efforts made by my employer to get me home to the United States in time to be at my father's funeral; a trip that took place over the course of more than 24 hours and through the airports of over half a dozen European Capitols. Then the funeral, and the after hours when my two brothers and I stood outside alone in the backyard , grown men, and wondered aloud about how special our childhoods had been, how things could never be the same and simply expressed how alone we felt that day. Since then I have wondered often how particularly alone my mother must have felt that day.
I don't mention the death of my father to my mother on the day of his death these years afterwards and she doesn't mention it to me. I reflect on that day how particular my father's understanding was of his three so-completely different sons. We had so little in common, my father and I, that I wonder at all that he could accommodate such a difficult relationship. But, he did so with the patience that is unique to those who understand, through their own faults, that their children were not with to be without faults uniquely their own. My mother and I share this day, the anniversary of my father's death, quietly and on our own and in our own thoughts. But we share it never the less.
So, today we spent a completely unremarkable day. I made Christmas cookies, she made lunch and we made plans to attend Christmas church service and the dinner afterwards.
But all during today I thought of my mother. She is so different than those mothers I think of and envision in my world today. She had no real youth, no time in her early twenties or thirties for a life of her own. She persevered, endured, did what was expected, never complained and never since has ever murmured a word that she wished or expected that things should or could have been different.
She is 73 this year. She no longer wears those tight-fitting sweater dresses, stylish stockings, always in stiletto heals, with matching purse. She is slower and less able, but not disabled. She finds means to fill her days with meaningful charitable giving that I would never consider.
But to me, she is still the young woman who worked a full day, stopped at the market to get me bananas, something to make for dinner, and then sat down at the kitchen table after doing the dishes by hand to make sure that her very difficult, stubborn, willful child did his lessons, learned the hard lessons of life with a kindly tousling of my hair, raised me with a sense of being part of life without being the center of my own life, so that I could accomplish those modest achievements that I call my own today.
So, this is for you mom. I haven't forgotten. I remember in my quiet moments all that you've done that makes these ordinary "small" days, like today, something to remember.
I love you and all that you did, do and will do.
Norris
Rdio
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