The Mother Of My Reinvention

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She’s tucked in her lift chair, chilled and uneasy, waiting for the tea and dry toast to work their magic. With raised eyebrow and a sardonic grin she says, “It ain’t easy gettin’ old…” She’s tired, though she’s been in bed since breakfast; it’s a long day by 2:00 and not necessarily a good one. There are good ones, though, ones in which she plays cards with other tenants, joins the sing-alongs, exercises from her chair and gets to Mass, even if it is video Mass projected on the community room screen. She enjoys a good movie and relishes her three squares. She uses a walker consistently now but still listens to rock and roll and finds it astonishing that I’m the age I am (as do I!). She’s almost 81, a widow for over ten years and a diagnosed dementia patient for the last two. She is my mother.

I left home – and her – a long, long ago.  I left hard and fast and with blind conviction.  There was no quibbling, no waffling, no weepy boomeranging. After too much family and just enough college, I left the state of Illinois in my little blue Porsche (my first car, courtesy of rock n’ roll) and didn’t come back for over three years. And when I did, it was all short stints with long spaces in between. My exodus was decisive and exhilarating, and for the first time since conception I felt unencumbered by obligation to anyone or anything but myself.

My mother referred to this as “when Lorrie ran away.” For me it was Necessary Freedom.

my mother in 8th grade

I am the third child, the third girl, in a family of eleven children. My two older sisters and I, by virtue of gender and placement in the family, became Little Mommies, caring for smaller, younger siblings while we were still smaller, younger siblings ourselves and while the responsibility and high task demand did lend a certain skill set found useful later in life, being truly “in charge” of an infant brother when you are six years old is, perhaps, too steep a learning curve. Particularly when there were several more brothers and sisters to come who would also require hands-on involvement.  I learned how to change diapers, feed a baby, wrangle a toddler, do laundry, make meals, iron a business shirt, clean a house, and run interference for a mercurial, often erratic, always confounding mother…and that was all before I got to high school.

By the time I did get to high school, I was bone-weary of family life and chomping at the bit so hard my teeth hurt. Graduation couldn’t come fast enough and after a short summer, my departure for college was so swift that old high school friends claim I vanished before anyone could say good-bye. I came home between freshman and sophomore years but spent the summer working in Chicago, and by the end of my sophomore year, was gone for good. Real good: My first apartment was a $90 a month single with lousy furniture and a stuttering landlady and it may as well have been heaven.

It wasn’t just the weight of trading too much childhood for Little Mommy-hood. It wasn’t the just the burden of bearing up under my parents’ religion and their restrictive views of interpersonal relationships (re. boys, sex, dating, sex, commitment, sex, etc., sex).  It wasn’t even that the one-on-one time allotted to each of us in such a large group was spare and seldom satisfying.  It was that I could not find an honest way to consistently and compassionately tolerate my mother.

She was a true paradox. One minute clever and creative, the next enraged and irrational.  She was impossible to predict and easy to trigger. The moments when she laughed and dragged boxes of construction paper and lace doilies out to make Valentine’s cards for the entire neighborhood were golden and so thrilling that every kid on our street would tell me how lucky I was to have the mother I did.   She loved passionately and could make any day a party.  She played music, did a mean jitterbug and had a wildly romantic relationship with the handsome man who was my father. All of those things provided The Good that pushed against…The Other.  The Other was her dark side; those terrifying moments of fury followed by weeping or cold silence.  Rages that shook the house and scattered us all like terrified animals.  As a child, I would literally tremble at the sound of her stomping down the stairs to mete out some punishment for failings I could never seem to avoid. She was physical and vocal and unrelenting and when the controls snapped and life got the best of her, we all suffered.  And life got the best of her too often.  She had a good heart, she tried; I believe she sincerely tried, but she was undeniably overwhelmed.

So I stayed away and kept her away…she and my father didn’t even meet my husband until a year or so after we eloped and I had already given birth to our son. They were that distant and I was that intractable. But life is a surprising thing and it changes you.  You grow older and live longer and you begin see how difficult it can be when expectations are not met or you feel the sharp, twisting pang of disappointment and heartache.  You look around and realize that not all dreams come true and the promise of what life has to offer is not necessarily within reach. Life humbles and sometimes softens you. And as you experience more, you begin to accrue compassion for the stories in life you might not have previously understood or empathized with and that alters and expands your view.  It wasn’t until I got married and had my own child that I began to see my mother outside the childhood box I’d kept her in for most of my life. When I attached to my own child I began to have some inkling of what she went through, many times over, in her own role as a mother. When my marriage met challenges or I felt distanced by a distracted husband, I began to realize that some of what she suffered was the result of her own husband’s penchant for distancing. Basically, I began to see the human behind The Mother.  And I began to have empathy.

She was a third child herself, a brother and sister preceding her. Her mother died shortly after her birth and her father abandoned all three to be raised by her mother’s extended family of a grandmother, maiden aunts and Irish uncles who loved and took good care and kept kegs flowing in the dining room. She claims it was a happy life – I’m sure some of it was – but when my father died many years after that childhood of hers, she cried about having been abandoned by all the men in her life, wondering plaintively how a father could leave his three children without a look back. Because regardless of her revisionist view of her childhood, she suffered for all of it.  She suffered for growing up without the immediacy of a mother’s love and guidance, she suffered for the raging alcoholism in her family, for the lack of intimate role models and mentors, and all this left her ill-equipped to be the wife of a loving but internalized and sometimes preoccupied man and the mother of eleven individuals who were wildly independent and self-possessed. As an adult, a mother, a wife, a survivor, I could understand what her story had been. It made me ache for her.  It made my heart open.

Many people I know, most of them women, are caring for or have cared for their aging or dying parents.  It seems a Rite of Passage for women in mid-life. It’s a task like no other and requires a certain kind of heart and an enormous depth of soul. Heart and soul I had never felt for my mother and wasn’t sure I could conjure.  But ten years after my father died, my aging, rudderless mother was lost and in need.  Her short-term memory was diminishing more every day, she was often sick and in pain, incapable of caring for herself responsibly, and my siblings had run out of people and places to care for her in the ways she needed and with the income she had.  Last summer we celebrated her 80th birthday, wondering if she’d make it to the next.  I took that moment to assess: I looked at my life, my capacity for change. I looked to my dear brother who lives in the same city as I, I looked to my husband, my sister-in-law, my son, and I could see, clear as the day I left home, that I had to step up and take it on. To get my mother to a place she could once again call Home.  To participate. But a voice kept interrupting to say, “No! Not you! You don’t have to! You left her 35 years ago for damn good reason and it’s not your job. You have your own life!” Damn, that voice was loud.

But I could feel it.  It was my job.  It was my turn. It seems a louder voice had crept into the dialogue and was making some sense.  It assured me I knew what she needed and…I did. I found a place that would be a sanctuary for her, perhaps for the rest of her life, and in the blink of an eye, it seems I was in.  No turning back, no quibbling, no waffling; no lack of conviction.  I was bringing my mother to live in my town. And with my brilliant and indispensable brother, Tom, his family and my own, I was going to participate in the day-to-day care and feeding of the mother I so long ago had fled.

I am not a saint.  Seriously, I could not be further from it. Some days I suck at this job. I wake up and feel my teeth grinding again, resentful that I have to leave yet another unreturned message with her doctor or rifle through reams of paperwork to get some insurance issue worked out. I don’t want to drive over to her facility to have the same conversation over and over in a two hour period or play that infernal card game she loves so passionately (Kings In a Corner, if you’re interested!). I sometimes feel real anger when it seems I’m just expected to schedule my life around her myriad of doctor appointments or give up time with my family to get her over to Target for items she’s lost or broken. I shudder when I see the name of the facility on my caller ID, waiting to hear she’s been taken to the hospital or she’s confused because she doesn’t believe they administered her meds.  My workout schedule has gone to hell, I’m stuck in freeway traffic more than I’ve been in years, and I can’t seem to find the rhythm of my own schedule. Sometimes I feel, once again, like a Little Mommy, only this time the child I’m caring for is my Mother.  The irony is inescapable.

But there’s another side to this. The growing awareness of some sprouting evolution. In her case, the dementia that is creeping more and more into her personality has done a curious thing: it seems to have stripped away her anger and narcissism. It seems to have pared her down to a purer essence of herself, a human being who can be grateful and appreciative.  Who can smile even when she’s nauseous and tell me it makes her happy just to see me across the room.  A woman who can be gentle and attentive to her new great granddaughter and patiently (if reluctantly) teach a more challenged housemate how to play her card game. A woman who can genuinely thank a son for a dinner out or a daughter-in-law for doing her laundry every week; who can be delighted by a grandson who makes her laugh or another who brings in a crew of fellow students to interview her for a class. Who can listen and take note of the person in front of her. This is different woman, a different mother. And this different mother is allowing me to be a different daughter.

I often look at these photos of her because it’s important for me to remember, and to show evidence, that she was once young, as young and vibrant and concerned about her looks and appeal as any of the ubiquitous young girls we endlessly read and hear about. She had sexy legs, a smashing sense of style and dance steps that could knock ‘em off the floor. She was flirtatious and sought after, ultimately loved by a man who found her beautiful and exciting. She could laugh raucously and make others laugh as loud.  She adored her husband and loved her eleven children – she still does.  I look at these pictures of her and say to myself, “She was young once, just as you were.  And you’re going to become an old woman just as she is.”  We all are going to grow old. All of us who are lucky enough to endure.  Even that perfect three year old, that gorgeous teenager, that seemingly impervious young man. We’re going to grow old and need help some day, just as she does. It’s not an anomaly – it’s life. For all of us.

And so my mother and I continue our Mutual Reinvention Tour. I’m learning patience; she’s learning humility. She looked up at me recently and said, “I’m scared.” When I asked why, she said, “Because I’ve made so many mistakes, especially with you kids.” She further clarified that she was concerned that at the Gates of Heaven she would be harshly judged, but mostly she wanted me to know that she loved us all and was sorry for all those mistakes. I felt a tug.  I took her hand and said, “Mom, don’t worry, if you’re truly sorry, you’ve already been forgiven.”  And as I said that, I realized that, like St. Peter at the Gates and God in the Heavens, I, her third daughter, her runaway, her lost child, had forgiven her as well. And in that swirling eddy of emotions, sweet and simple love could be found.  Precious and timely as the Tour continues…

All photos courtesy of Lorraine Devon Wilke

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