A Different Sort of Mother?

A different sort of Mother’s Day. Gives me time to reflect.

Different how? For years the classic Mother’s Day has been a morning rushabout by us three boys to fix breakfast and wrap stuff and scribble in cards and present it to Her Mothership amidst hugs and flowers followed by a day either of she doing exactly what she wants (i.e. gardening) or the four of us trekking down to Dixon to spend it with my mother and my mother’s sister and my mother’s sister’s daughters and grandchildren and so on – in other words, away from home with my family. My wife didn’t really want to do that but often enough she did.

My mother’s sister died last year so no Dixon for us (though I wanted to go last night, Pat Benatar was performing, and Creedence Clearwater Revisited), plus my son is in Irvine and my other son just left for work. Everything’s different. So I got up and en-vased some flowers and made breakfast and wrapped presents and wondered what I did with the card I bought and gave hugs and now she’s going to go do her gardening. Actually she’s going to build planter boxes. So everything’s all different, right?

And me? Plenty to do. I could finish my retaining wall today, and/or work on my Burning Man wheelchair project, and/or go through the garage and separate yard sale from keep items, and/or try out the cordless weed-whacker we bought yesterday, and/or plant the cherry plum tree we got yesterday, and/or pull the Jeep out and make a list of what needs doing to it (because the odds remain fifty fifty that I’ll be needing a vehicle by summer’s end), and/or get some writing done because I have been feeling more and more drawn to that particular activity not only in terms of crafting plotlines but in cracking open the lid so I can dip into the inkwell of my artistic soul and actually come up with some shit worth spending the time on, and/or take the dog for a run, and/or et cetera. We’ll have presents and dinner after the twenty year old gets back from work. He’s a waiter and will hopefully have worked hard and made good money working the brunch shift on this here Mother’s Day, but I will pay for dinner in spite of that.

Between now and then, I am going to reflect briefly on my own mother. It’s her day too – but at this moment she is on an airplane headed to New York. This peculiar fact is what inspires me to write about her a wee bit. She’s flying with a friend to go see New York City, a place she’s never been to and always wanted to visit. They will stay in an elder hostel for just over a week and check the place out. She’s eighty two, and I’m beginning to understand why my cousin’s girlfriends like her so much.

“When I get old, I’m going to be like Aunt Jane!”

Certain women about my age are finding in my mother someone to admire. I’m proud of this and of her, and this is a new set of feelings for me to have about my mother.

She’s had a life. Born in 1927 up in Chico, where her folks had eloped to, raised on a farm outside of Dixon, married in ‘49 to a Navy vet she met at Cal when they were both in a Glee Club production of Pinafore. Within a year he realized he didn’t really love her but he kept it to himself. Instead it came out a decade later when he had an affair, sometime in and among me being born and the discovery that their firstborn had a terminal cancer. Her turn to religion had a counterpoint in his turn away from it, and Jimmy died, and the marriage ended in 1962, well before divorce was fashionable. As my barber once observed, they were ahead of their time. In ’65 she moved her remaining little family out of the ‘burbs and into Berkeley, I think as a means to prove to her family she could make it on her own in the city, but in retrospect I don’t know why she went back to the town where the trouble all started. At any rate, I’m glad she did. Berkeley in the 60s and 70s was a great place to grow up, any substantial bitching I’ve done about it to the contrary.

In ’78 she got married at the Faculty Club in a Scientology service to a guy no one in the family ever liked; with the possible exception of my cousin’s husband, but since he fucked around behind her back while their four children were teenagers I don’t much value his opinion. Back to Mom: Her hubs was a piece of work too, and they finally split up in ’97, and he killed himself in ’98, and as a newly single woman in her seventies my mother did what I now think was a fantastic job getting fully onto her feet.

An aside about what makes this a new set of feelings. Mom and Dad are or were both fairly self-absorbed individuals and spent their post-divorce lives figuring out who they were and not who their children were. I responded to this benign neglect by becoming very shy and socially awkward (though I might have been anyway). My high school girlfriend was very critical of my mother not giving me the attention I needed. Of course, I took my mother’s side. Many years later, my wife’s opinion, augmented by the experience of raising children of my own, was that my mother had failed me. There are more reasons than one that have nothing to do with my mother why she might say such a thing, yet there is merit to the thought. When my own marriage was unraveling due to a growing internal crisis over identity, I found it a pretty straightforward exercise to connect that with the relentless isolation and confusion of my early twenties, a crop sown by my mother’s alleged neglect in my teens. And so it goes on, the pernicious influence of a mother of a different sort having an effect on me, how dare she. I’ve tended more often than not to be distant with her, and unaccountably cranky when we had to go visit, despite the fact that I love her and admire her, and am grateful for those positive characteristics we share.

Anyway. Today she lives alone in a three-storey condo with lots of windows that is near the Benicia waterfront and has a view of the Carquinez Strait and of Mount Diablo, if you overlook the water treatment plant. Benicia is a great choice she and I both appreciate because it is one of California’s most historic cities, founded in 1847 with high hopes it would thrive at a strategic confluence of land and water shipping routes. It had the Capitol briefly, and had shipbuilding and many other industries. But it could never compete with San Francisco and is now little known. It’s an interesting little place, with some lovely old homes and gardens.

Anyway, her house is light and airy and full of books and nice furniture and quilts. Upstairs she has a quilting room and often has guests over in connection with quilting, and she goes on quilting trips, and enters quilts into shows, the whole bit. She is a quilting maven. She also serves as a docent at the Asian Art Museum down there in San Francisco. If you’ve ever taken a tour there led by a little old lady, that might have been her. She also does, or did until recently, Scottish Country Dancing. She’s very spiritual in a non-denominational sort of way, gives the impression of being centered within herself, of being essentially content. I admire this about her. Oh, and she quit the Church of Scientology many years ago. She and many, many people took what good learnings they could and left behind what they believed had become an evil and controlling corporation. She attends an Episcopal church near her home, a beautiful old place built in 1859. It’s about a mile away and typically she walks.

Since her flight left Oakland at six o’clock this morning, I had to extend my Mother's Day wishes yesterday on the phone. The whole thing is best summed up with what I wrote in her card, which was something like

You bring such joy, creativity, and energy to life
You are an inspiration
I love you very much