Nine

Nine

When I married in 1971, Mom made my Victorian style wedding dress complete with leg o mutton sleeves.  At first, she made it out of muslin to ensure a good fitting. The cotton fabric was soft and she enjoyed sewing it.  I could always count on her for follow through in anything I needed that was of an instrumental task.  As a preteen, she wired my new upstairs room, even tuned her own car.  Mom was one determined woman.  The word ‘no’ simply was not in her vocabulary.  She always found a way to work something through.  She also had a good sense of humor when the timing was right.

When my son was born, it appeared shortly after his birth, that he might have a breathing problem.  Mom stepped in immediately. She found the floor head nurse and the pediatric resident who came into my room to explain what was happening to my newborn.  He had just swallowing a lot of mucus on her way into the world.  They aspirated copious quantities of mucus and did a variety of blood tests on his tiny foot.  Three days later, my baby and I left for home.  Both of us in good health.

Mom remarried in 1977 to a Marine engineer with a degree in chemical engineering.  He was the best thing to happen to our family.  He and I bonded almost immediately.  It was nice to have a father figure and he was so easy to talk to.

He became an instant grandfather when my own children were born.   He also had a great sense of direction unlike my mother and I. 

It was humorous that Mom could traverse the same space over and over, each time passing familiar ground she swore we were on our way to our destination.  I remember one particular time when she took Dave and Lisa with us to Calvert Cliffs in Maryland.  As a child, I went there with my parents to look for shark teeth.  Walking along the ocean searching for shark teeth was such fun.  We were always rewarded with a find.  I wanted my own children to have that experience with my mother.  However, neither of us could find the path to the beach.  While my sense of direction isn’t too good either, I concluded we were just plain lost.  We decided to go for lunch, laugh at our travails and return home.  Sadly, we never reached Calvert Cliffs.

While mom had a limited sense of direction, she made the best crab cakes.  She insisted the crab meat had to be deftly hand picked, lest shells would be found in the meat.  Never once did I encounter one single shell.  Mom prided herself on a clean picking.

When I relocated to upstate New York, Mom made several visits, each time helping with projects. 

On her first visit the day we moved in, she took us out to dinner.

Mom ordered chocolate mousse.  The server brought it to our table.

“This isn’t mousse!  This is pudding,” screamed my mother as she pulled away from the table.

Our heads dropped in shock.

But the visit that changed everyone’s life  happened that fall. She and her husband were on their way Thanksgiving of 1985 when a flat bed driver decided to play cat and mouse with my mother who was driving.  Mom got into this power struggle, refusing to pull off the side of the road.  Just as she was crested a hill in Pennsylvania, the flat bed hit her van, sending it into a house.  A large tree had to be removed in order to get her out.  Mom’s husband sustained a broken ankle and sent by ambulance to a hospital.  Mom’s injuries were worse, sustaining seven broken bones.  She was helicoptered to a trauma center where she underwent a long surgical operation to repair her tibia and put it in traction.  There were other injuries which were also repaired.  She would require a hip replacement since her acetabulum was torn.  That would require the rest of her body to heal which would take months.

I visited her daily making the eight hour round trip to her hospital while I was working on my bachelor’s degree at Cornell.  After both mom and her husband were stabilized, I had them moved back to their home in Maryland where Mom remained in a hospital for months.

Mom was never the same.  Her mobility was limited because of the hip damage and her arthritis spread to more areas.  She continued to visit me.  I remember well, when she successfully made the trip to visit me in Ithaca.  I worried about her the entire day and was relieved to see her new car pull into the driveway.  Her van had been totally in the accident six months before. 

A year and a half later, I moved to central New Jersey.  Mom and her husband came to visit every three months.  Her husband ,  a five handicapped golfer always found a golf course to play. I think he was just about to be away, to have some time to himself as Mom required more assistance now. 

But mom never recovered.  Fully.  The anger that had been present throughout her life was worse than ever.  So was her pain level. 

On several occasions, I tried to talk with her.  To get her some counseling.  Again and again, she refused. 

Mom’s face softened.

“You are a much better mother than I was,” she told me.

“Yes, I am, but we all have our things to work through.  I don’t care about the past as long as the present is palatable,” I told her in a loving way.

Even looking back, I am surprised as a then forty year old I had the insight to share that.  More than anything, I wanted to help her.  And so, once again, I became her mother.

Over the years, she became more bitter, more angry.  She talked about her past, about her lack of freedom as a child.  About her marriage to a man she deemed as autistic.  She thought my father and his son were similarly having aspects of autism. 

The same inability to process emotions also seemed to plague Mom.  They say if we name it, we claim it.