With each passing birthdate, I somehow find time to reflect on my mother. How she repremanded me, the times she chose not to. I often think of times when she would offer a teachable moment. Unfortunately I was way underwater to be able to listen well.
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It's 2017 and my mother has been gone a very long time. In this time I have experienced another passing that is fresher and new. This passing wasn't of my own family bloodline but of my husband's side- my mother in law.
Death is amazing. It has a way of tearing inside you peering into your cavity and ripping out your heart- just to see it's working and then replaces it within you all over again. Just when I thought the pain of losing someone was buried way back behind my deepest places. Another death comes forth. It's like my creator stated without words- Cyndi, you can't just forget, I won't allow you to become numb- YOU ARE BETTER THAN THAT. But, I don't want to be better than that. I want to forget deaths reach. I want to plummet into my own type of healing or maybe allow a part of me to quietly die. Nope, my mother in law came to live with us after her stroke. I did not see this coming. One day my husband gets a call from a doctor in Oklahoma and my world opens up and threatens to swallow me and my numbness. The doctor tries to explain to my husband over the phone that his mother has been in their care at such and such hospital. My husband gets overwelmed so he hands me the phone ( strong spirit that I am) takes the phone and asks all the right questions and I listen intently. The doc explains how my mother in law has has a stroke, was found by someone outside her apartment building and she came here with just her pocketbook. She has had some memory issues and is weak. We both( my husband and I) cry abit. This woman had been a rock for my husband most of his life. He only knew her as strong and competent. I think we were in shock. We didn't know what to do really. Neither one of us was considered family oriented. I have a great love for my own children, my parents and a handful of family members always close to my heart- but for me most of my family that I felt close to had passed already. My grandmother, grandfather, cousin Joey all on my mothers side. On my fathers side was Auntie Joanie, who also passed. I have other cousins on my fathers side but we seldom if ever have seen each other since we were teens. So no love seems to be missing- if you don't remember having it. My cousin Antonio seems to be my singular thread back to those fond memories with my cousins , aunt and uncle. For my husband, he has a tumultuous life. I can't say he has strong family bonds even close to mine. This mother was his fondest memory of everything that was good in his life in terms of family. His mother brought all goodness he had really known to him, whereas, no one else did. Now we had to think of a way to help her. She was alone, in another state and 89 years old with a stroke. The thing is she survived cancer twice but lost both breast at a time when reconstructive surgery was not an automatic option. Still she seemed somewhat vibrant. She lived in a senior community and did well on her own with friends and partners around her. Now it was my husband's time to be there for her. He geared up to have us travel to her and bring her home with us so we could care for her. Something I wanted to do wholeheartedly at first. Then the idea of sickness and death sank into my thoughts- I got scared inside but didn't show it too much outside. I remained supportive only throwing in alot of "what if's" to my husbands ideas. In the end I was the main caretaker of my mother in law. I healed her through long talks, laughs and many teary conversations. I was her constant companion for 1 year of her life. I fed, clothed and washed her. I shopped for special foods for her demanding dietary needs( later on we found out she was dying) and her mood swings that related to having a stroke of the brain. It was a long year, It may have been more like 9 months. That's me subconsciously forgetting dates and times to protect my heart and my mind. Yea, I believe it was like 9 ish months. It doesn't matter, in the end it seemed like 1000 years and a day late. My mother in law died January 27th of 2016. Here comes the pain again. Last night yet again, I had a dream in which my mother paid me a odd visit. I awoke to find we had a power outage sometime during the night as I was fast asleep in bed. Once I awoke, I realized my husband should report the outage. As we headed back to bed, I realized my mother woke me. I know it seems odd to automatically believe that, but It's just a daughter thing.
I also realized, she doesn't want me to write about my life as her child, but she wants me to remember the good lessons, the smiles and the mothering that kept us connected. So, that has led me to stop jotting down all these actual memories and focus on the essence of it all. That will be somewhat harder to pile into actual words. From here the image I get is the entire Alphabet poured onto the floor, and me walking through just picking up giant letters - like one would pick tomatoes from a vine. This means I have to translate the feeling she left me or transmuted - rather than the actual My Thanksgiving is rather quiet these days. My daughters are older and I moved out of our home state a few years back. Since they are over the age of eighteen, they now have the choice to throw their own holiday bash. I haven't attended one- yet. When I spoke on the phone to my oldest daughter earlier this week. She expressed a love for holiday's I never really had. I began to wonder where she got this crush on the holidays. What is funny is my mother loved decorating on the holidays and she cooked big for us. Oh and when I say us, I mean my parents and me, and later on my mother divorced my father and found her a boyfriend. Any meal she made seemed to be a full menu. - Salad or a mini antipasto, main dish and dessert, never mind the snack later on. My point is; she enjoyed supplying a homey sense of family-everyday. This feeling ran over into the holidays- so I can only assume this is the birthplace of my own daughter’s love of cooking (eating) and sense of home. It kind of skipped over me (not the eating part- that never skipped over me). With that being stated, I can remember too many family oriented holidays spent at my grandmothers. The aunt I grew up with was more of a sister than an aunt. I can remember a few holidays spent at my aunt Cheryl's- but mainly the Thanksgiving close to the end of my mother’s life- stands out the most for me now. It is also one of the few times, I remember seeing my cousin Joseph last. This memory is over 10 years old now. My oldest daughter is cooking this year; my daughter has her clan to tend to; a boyfriend (lets save my feelings on the boyfriend for another post), her sister, father, a step sister and numerous other extended families to entertain at her own modest holiday table this year. It is now my daughters time to express love through her turkey meal with all the trimmings- I am sure she will do her namesake and me very proud. Still, I can't help but feel left out of the festivities and hominess being so far away from my babies and her first holiday table, set out by herself... I won't see the tree being put up, ornaments being added, the holiday movies or over stuffing our faces with holiday faire till we are ill. I can only imagine it all. Instead, I will remember my own holiday's when they were younger, which in no doubt my own mother shaped...the numerous holiday meals when my oldest daughter wore more of her meal than ate, and the meals of my own mother reflected in our own current family traditions. I will be a little sadden that I am missing how she pulls it all off, How she manages to artfully not burn the turkey top but still cook the inside properly, put together the green bean casserole and how she prepares her own stuffing flavors and the candied yams... but I know I taught her some of what she knows as my mother taught me.. Now she has the opportunity to perfect the tradition and maybe she will raise the bar a little too. In my pre holiday- sulking, I realize as my mother molded me with regard to holidays, family and traditions (and so much more). So too, have I molded my daughter(s) in some of the traditions they will no doubt incorporate into their homes, and tables in the years to come- in that regard, I am with them this holiday and all future holidays and in that regard, mommy you did good too. It's three days before Christmas, and I am away from my own grown daughters. I am missing them terribly, and yet I am reminded of my own holidays with my mother Elaine. Christmas with my mother and father was pretty nice if you take into account, I was an only child. I had the whole lot of it all. When I was a kid, we seldom did the Catholic Mass. When I was it kid, it was about something spiritual but the focus was about family and food, a celebration. It was about rituals too. We shopped for gifts at the begining of November, we put the tree up the day of Thanksgiving and we spent more than we could really afford on gifts. My mother was big on that- I had it all too. I had doll houses with real wooden furniture, and porciline cats. I had a tanned faced doll that kinda looked like Cher, and you could pull her hair out from the middle of her head and it would get longer. I had race tracks with remote controlled cars, I had new clothes and lots of collectables from Auntie Tootsie. I had Hawiian grass skirts from my cousins in New York/New Jersey and I had my mom. She made Christmas special. Each year, it was about bags and bags of gifts- all to make me feel special,loved or wanted. She went way above her means to accomedate me during the holiday. I felt like a princess- in fact I was my parents princess. The meals I remember were mainly modest, since it was just me and my parents. It was ham, or turkey or roast- the variation of the three of these each year. The real treat for me, was heading to grandma's house for Christmas evening. There I would find my cousins, aunts and uncles and of course my grandparents. Never mind the piles of crazy good Italian food- like fried smelts, antipasto, italian cookies and red wine- which I couldn't have anyway. It didn't matter, I listened to my boastful uncle talk about my cousins adventures, and my grandmother constantly warning us not to annoy her any longer with our can we have that, or when is that gonna be ready? My grandfather was often in front of the television and talking with my uncle as he slowly faded into a sleepy stupor during the evening. The chasing my cousins around and being chased back was fun..
My cousin Joey and I would investigate my grandmothers post war stash of canned goodies. Neither one of us had such a stash of canned foods like my grandparents house. When my mother brought me to her mothers house, It was like a vacation from my usual world and it was a chance to listen to family gossip and I never really knew who would be visiting at the same time we were. Did I mention the wads,plates,pans,dishes and canisters of food? We ate well,laughed,made grim faces and drank in the presence of my mothers side of the family. I was a rude girl. I had the whole 'emo' thing going on before it was a trend in entertainment or in school. My mother had something to do with it, but mainly I reacted to a super strict father who was bordering on abusive. He meant well, like most wacked out military fathers who suck in all their aggression- rather than express it in some creative way, they feel they need to be powerful all the time. My father had no short list of hobbies. He swam, jogged 10 miles every other day and had a nice gun collection and he wasn't adverse to using them if provoked. He also was a great adventurist, and if it wasn't for our middle class lifestyle- he would have travelled the world for sure outside of the military. His other hobbies which he was able to share and teach me were; metal detection, collecting coins, reading, oil painting, karate and poetry. Oh, but this blog is about my mother's influences on my life today. Exit,dad memories...
Mom, she was a sweet, feisty short Italian risk-taker. She wasn't well traveled or well schooled (my father told me my mother had a diploma as a Pharmacy Technician) she was a risk taker, why else then would she have married a young Panamanian immigrant in the sixties? I can't say they complimented each other. She was short and he was 6'3tall, she was fair skinned and he was well, Panamanian, she was natural born and he was an immigrant. He was melancholy and she was open. My mother was light and somewhat airy and he was so grounded and very grounding. I always say a bird can't fly, if tethered. I can remember being out with my mother shopping at a grocery store. I had been filling my mothers cart with beauty magazines, cosmetics and things only I found interest in. My spunky mother, would quickly toss out my picks as fast as I placed them in the cart. One trip I placed a few magazines and lip gloss in her cart and she bugged. She began schooling me about how she doesn't think I needed a cosmo and redish pink lipgloss at my age. I can't remember if I was thirteen or older, but my opinion differed from hers on the subject. I defiantly began to tell my mother that I must have those things, I even went as far as to demand I have them. We hit our personal views on the topic vehemently. Needless to say some fellow shopper decided to comment to me, while my mother was cashing out her groceries and my goodies. This stranger leaned over and said" you know you shouldn't talk back to your mother like that miss". Oh, I can remember how I turned to him blankly and told him off. Yes, I was a rude kid. Here I am, a product of my mother( and father) and obviously I have some of that feisty, Italian five foot tallness my mother projected and it goes without saying I had some of that moody, mysterious creativity of father. Today, I like to think I learned from a child and young adulthood of being pouty and feisty. I learned to be forgiving, like mom. I learned to be a hardass like dad, and I am open at heart like mom. My mother 's smile, her face and somethings she told to only me her only daughter- reverberate daily. Like a few things she told me on her deathbed. While close to her last days on earth, I sat with my mother(which was difficult for me to do- watch her whither away) and she began to tell me what she felt I needed to know. It was a short list, my mother was an uncomplicated person; she said Cyndi, you never gave me any trouble, you were always a good kid, I am proud of you. Be a good mother for your daughters and always go to Cheryl -she is here for you, you two will need each other. That's it. From a rude pre teen, to a daughter who never let her mother down. Wow... I am not sure if that is true for each and everyday of my daughter-hood. What is most important is, she felt SHE needed to say that to me. My mother needed to convey that with me at that very moment. I carry it each day and no one and not one thing can interfere with the feeling her words imparted. These bird aren't tethered any longer. I find myself thinking about my mother often lately. Maybe she is connecting with me edging me forward into this project. She was a go,go,go person. She taught me much by example and did not lecture me, nor did she become long winded on right or wrong.
So what did I learn from her by example? I see her laughing alot in my minds eye. If I dwell on the memory, I can almost hear her laugh- what a infectious laugh she had. Of course when I was younger I didn't look( or listen) with wisdom. I couldn't have because I simply had no wisdom. Today, I have some wisdom. I have age. I have an empathic heart. I see my mothers lessons clearer. To me, it appears that she didn't spend time being vocal with her discipline. She never warned me to stay away from this type of person or, watch out for that result. No, she let me make my own mistakes. Once I made a mistake she would let me know if my personal decision resulted in making my mother disappointed with her. If my poor choice effected my mother in a negative way- well then that is the time I distinctly got some type of punishment. My mother was Italian, so depending on the severity of the result of my choices- I got a big wooden spoon across the hands,forearms or the backside. That only worked until I was about fourteen years old. After that, the sauce spoon was uneffective- and I would tell her"that didn't even hurt", My mocking only upset her more. A short time after whatever I did to disappoint her- she stopped resorting to the spoon and simply adjusted to the fact that I would, however infrequently at some point disappoint her. The good news is, I disappointed her a little less as I matured. We talked more in between my finding myself and learning that my mother wasn't just a mom but a woman. Today, I raise my children with a great deal of the values she imparted with me as a kid. I taught my kids, never strike first, be equally kind, don't pretend to be stupid and know your beauty inside and out. Of course the simple compassionate rules exsist without saying like, say thank you and please, look at someone when they are talking to you or vice versa and honor family. Those simple old school rules where priority in my house. I made mistakes and tested waters within my parents expectations and designs for my life- but ultimately my mothers wishes have come up to the surface of my life and I see her far reach today. Since I decided to write about my experience in remembering my own mother, I noticed I actually think more about her than ever. Well, maybe not more than ever. That would make me seem like a bad daughter or, a very uncaring woman. I mean to say- this is a most excellent way to chronicle my emotions.
In a world gone mad this seems the very clear way for me to transfer what is lying around in the recesses of my heart and mind- about mom. Maybe it is even about mom and more, it could be more about me. I can't really be sure what I am trying to share here, until I have no more things to write. Today, a thought popped into my head. I suddenly remembered that I was a spoiled and rude teen. Do you know what it's like to feel as if you are a smart,caring and complex person- then a rotten memory comes crashing in on a pretty little idea of self? It ruins it. I first shook my head as if doing that makes the though pop out of my ear or something. Then I smirk, as I replay the memory, finally I shake my head with a curt laugh. I was a brat! What comes crashing in behind that memory of myself is, how my mother dealt with me? I must have driven her mad. I am sure she has been disappointed in me at several times in my life, like when I had a child with a guy she never was introduced to but I myself adored. She never told me what kind of man she would have wanted me to end up with. I guess I took that as run with it Cyndi. I dated whomever I wanted without a slur or pout from her. I could say she trusted my judgement in friends and lovers. In my mothers family, I see a group of people who just ended up doing whatever the hell they chose to. They seemed to marry who they wanted even if the outside world could say it may not be a match made in heaven. Maybe I have that trait too, like my mother- I tend to care for all the mismatched sorts. As far as memories of mom go- she never put expectations on me on the class of person that could associate with me. She let me choose even if it meant failure or success. She taught me to own my choices without regret. Beside my bed I have a photo of my mother and I. I think I am about ten years old and maybe my mother is in her thirties. She has a head full of nicely styled dark hair to the nape of her neck. Her arms are wrapped about me around my upper waist, in a gentle but secure way. My arms are outstretched and I appear to be in a feety pajama. Nothing else marks this photo in my heart as deeply as the sincere wide smile I have on my face in the photo. It gets me everytime I glance at the photo.
This photo is one of very few I have of my mother and I. I can't figure out why, I don't have a million photos of my mother and I here and there over the years. I just don't have many. I suspect, with the divorce of my parents and their new relationships- a lot of photos were destroyed. Maybe at one time in my life- my parents or my aunt gave me photos they came across and being young, just placed them aside without thinking. I believe when we are younger our minds are cluttered with the here and now. I don't think I really thought about the future of things, until I was about thirty years old. Oddly looking back, it seems as if I really only started to wonder about the depth of life in terms of it's meaning and my purpose- when I was in my thirties. Now well into my fourties I see many things vividly, or at least I think I do. What I see in my mindseye are faces of important places and people in my life. My mothers face is always there. It's like she is trying to tell me write how you feel and share it. Even though I sometimes feel very alone in my thoughts of her. I feel as if she would be honored by me sharing the little things. So to remember her, I blog it. As I sit here looking out the window to my right, over the busy street below. I listen to the traffic going by and the energy seems to rise up to peer into this window. I'm reminded of my mother. Her, soft curly reddish-brown shoulder length hair and deep brown eyes. I remember her vividly,even though she has been gone for over ten years now.
I don't think it matters what took her away because it is much like what so many daughters have lost their mothers to. That ugliness that strips our mothers of their sparkle and their physical beauty but never takes away the imprint they leave within us. When she first passed away, I couldn't tell you what she left me if you asked. In fact if you asked me, I would be hard pressed to see through the clutter of her death. You know the chaos and pain, is what I call clutter. My head was loaded with it and my heart weighed fifty pounds over it, the death of the person who watched me come into this world. Ironically, it took me all this time, ten years or more to figure out what she left me. Hell maybe I still don't have it figured out. I mean who really has death, illness or love figured out? What I can tell anyone who asks me what she left me is truth, some papers,confusion and a whole lot of fears. Fear of dying , because I am getting older too. I am watching my body,mind and emotions change. I am seeing a world differently. She left me confusion because- how was I to know how to deal with the shock of losing her,before I even knew how to be a grown ass woman? She left me pen and ink, a few words she put to the paper in the form of birthday cards a note or two and maybe some of her doodles. She doodled when she was on a long phone call. She doodled when she sat at the kitchen table while cooking or in between domestic chores. She left me truth in so many ways. Ways she might not have intended and truth in ways she wanted me to know directly. Like saying, take care of your girls Cyndi, they are the most important things. Yep, she used her last words to me to issue me a direct order- without being pushy or bossy, but she was motherly-warm. |
AuthorA daughter who is also a mother blogging for my children. Archives
January 2019
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