This Mother's Day the mother of my children is going to be sitting with her mother - my "other mother" - who is recovering from a two-week gall bladder infection and surgery. I was thinking that it was kind of sad that they have to be spending such an occasion in such unpleasant circumstances and (through the odd kind of ADHD-like association that you all know me for) something odd occurred to me.
I never think of my mother on Mother's Day.
My mom died in November of 1990. It's been almost two decades (really?) since I have had occasion to call her on Mother's Day - or any other day. But while that may seem sad, it is really more sad that I don't actually miss her. I should, right? She was my mom and this is that special time of year. I guess I should be going to Baltimore and putting flowers on her grave. (I've only been there once - at my father's funeral. I didn't attend hers.) But I'm not really inclined to do that. And it's not fair. She deserves me missing her. I think most people here know that my childhood wasn't particularly great, and she was less to blame for that than my father. But in dealing with the many things that I went through as a kid, my father had a cruel sort of advantage. He was openly abusive. I learned to deal with him faster than with my mom, because it was not until early adulthood that I began to face her abuse. It was less aggressive than Dad's - and she had a lot of redeeming factors - but it caught me by surprise when I realized that the mother I had loved and counted on as a buffer between me and my father was almost as abusive as he was. Anyway, it seems terribly unfair, but I was able to forgive my father far faster than my mother.
So here it is, in what would have been her eightieth year, and I suddenly realize that I haven't been fair to her - and I want to. So if you will all forgive the intrusion on the flowers and praises for mothers we'll be seeing over the weekend, I'm going to use the Saloon - as I so often have - as a sounding board.
My mother was born just before the depression began, back in late December 1928. Pearl Harbor happened three weeks before her 13th birthday, and she observed that anniversary until she died. She also called US Savings Bonds "war bonds" and had many other expressions that came from that era. She was a lifelong Democrat and didn't hesitate to make her opinion known to anyone. More than once she wrote a letter to Mayor Tommy D'Alesandro (whose daughter, Nancy, now serves as a minor functionary in congress. Pelosi, I think, is her last name . . .) or later had no problem buttonholing Willy Schaefer (Mayor, and later Governor) to let them know in no uncertain terms what she thought needed to be done around town. Sometime in the seventies, she began admiring a fiery, feisty community activist who was running for city council, and she sent us out door to door handing out flyers for some lady named Barbara Mikulski. (Barbara won the election, and a few others afterwards . . .). The radio talk shows and the local newspapers heard from her too. Her opinions were awfully wordy sometimes, but the words, if copious, were well-chosen. As to any risk at taking on a politician or even, in one case, a police officer who tried to run interference, she was fearless. She was small but feisty when necessary, and though nobody's radical, she wasn't afraid to stand up for her opinion.
She was, nevertheless, badly abused in life. I didn't know until later how very bad it was, but I saw quite a bit of it. She married a high-school sweetheart and had one child, a boy, with him. But he left her for another woman. It broke her heart, but that was the tip of the iceberg. She took her son and moved back with her mom. Soon after, she started dating my father, a former national-class track star who seemed to have bright prospects. He had recently lost his first wife to adultery as well. It was a match made in some other world, but not exactly heaven. It was shortly after their marriage that my father, in one of the most cruel acts I have ever heard of, called her ex-husband while she was out and insisted that he "get this brat (her son) out of my house!" She came home to a husband but no son. She didn't even get to say goodbye. I can't imagine how she survived that.
She had four more children, with my Dad. It soon became apparent that my father was not able to hold a job, but he was very able to dominate her. He moved from house-to-house and town-to-town, always looking for the "dream job" that would ever elude him. I remember my poor mom, in my very early childhood, hitchhiking from Arlington, VA. to Philadelphia, PA. to follow him. She was toting three small boys, including one in her arms. At one point, she cleaned hotel rooms and was compensated only by the use of a hotel room. So after work, she had to beg from door-to-door to feed us and herself. Later in life, I find that she was forced by my father to prostitute herself. With that, and the constant beatings - all punctated by the fear of once again losing her children, her self-esteem was abysmal.
Yet she had a fierce courage in spite of all of that. In a time when women could not expect to find good jobs she settled for working her way up. From cleaning hotels, she went to a front-desk clerk. Later, she worked as a beer-garden waitress and then hawked "Chignons" - a type of wig as I recall, at a local department store. Eventually, she got a job with that State of Maryland as a clerk-typist and worked her way up through the years to a Clerk-of-Court position. She never learned to drive, and we seldom had a car anyway, so she rode the bus downtown every morning and home at night. She worked hard and tried to take care of four of us, with little help from my father, either financially or in any other way.
When her mother died, in the late seventies, she inherited a home. It was then that something dawned on her that she had never realized before. She had stayed with my abusive father for some twenty-five years for fear that she would lose her children if he wasn't there to support them. But she realized now that he had NEVER been there to support us. It was she who had, through all of those years, worked, cleaned, struggled and fought to support the family - even in the face of my father's abuse. When she moved into her family home, she told my father he was not moving in with her. She was emancipated, by her own hard work and the dubious good fortune of her mother's death.
What more can I say? She was abusive. She could be very cruel and was often negative and depressed. (Who could blame her?) But she stood up for me when my father was abusing me - in spite of her own abuse at other times. She had courage, drive and self-sufficiency. She was artistic. She could draw well, write poetry and stories and even helped me write my first song, in the second grade, which was really mostly her musical setting of some lyrics I had penned and she improved. She attended my choir concerts and the musicals I was in, when her schedule permitted. She was, in many ways, a pretty good mom. It's wrong, when all is said and done, to define her by her abuse. It was part of who she was - not all of it. Given her life and the things that she went through, the wrongs she did cannot be condoned, but they can be forgiven - even understood. She worked hard at life. Some of it she got badly wrong. Much of it she got very right.
In the late eighties she was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. Eventually, it moved into her bones and her course was set. On the day she died, her retirement paperwork from the State of Maryland was on the adminstrator's desk. That lady kindly refused to process it so that we children would get a full worker's insurance settlement rather than the much lower one a retiree would get. Ironically, her last act was to die just in time to provide for us.
So yes, she deserves better than my indifference. I'm glad I wrote this, because it makes me remember that she was, in the end, warts and all, a remarkable woman. I get a lot of who I am from her, and whatever her faults, she worked hard and deserves respect . . . and love.
Happy Mother's Day, Mom.
