I Want My Mommy

My mom once bit a forest ranger. The family had adopted an orphaned fawn, and the ranger came to take it away because it was a wild animal, and she bit him. I don’t know how old she was, but it’s interesting to note that biting runs in the family. My daughter’s a biter too, and if you’ve read my recent posts you know I have the urges.

Mom grew up in Pennsylvania, and as far as I know except for visits to San Diego when my dad was in the Navy and Arizona after my grandparents (her parents) moved here, she never left it.

I don’t know, of course. She died before I grew out of myself enough to care. Most of my stories of her were told me by family who had the chance to know her. Judge me if you must, but I was an oblivious child. I was twelve when she died and I feel like I should remember a lot more of her, but I don’t.

My mom was awesome, and all the more so for being very young. Once as she stood at the kitchen sink doing dishes, I asked why she had blue veins on the back of her legs. She said it was because she was old, so I asked how old she was. She was twenty-four.

From the vantage of about five, I thought that was amazingly old.

I remember she caught me reading past bedtime many a night by looking out the window downstairs and seeing the light from my window on the walnut tree that grew outside it. At eight I had no grasp of such things (see: oblivious). I now catch my daughter the same way.

When I was a kid you didn’t have a chance every semester or so to see your kid in some play or something. I remember Mom (and Dad, but I didn’t expect him) missed the only show I was in during elementary school because they had to go get a couch. There were many more shows in high school; she probably promised herself she’d catch the next one.

I know now that the night I needed a drink of water and stumbled downstairs to find her angry and wrapped in a sheet that I’d interrupted ~things in the living room. Back then I had no clue. I do remember she stepped in front of the TV if a soap opera commercial got a bit too steamy. And she was so uncomfortable talking about ~things that when I was eleven she gave me a book with a picture of a fetus in the womb on the cover, and told me to ask if I had “any questions.”

Explaining the use of pads was so hard for her I never dreamed of asking her anything.

She used to chase us out of the house and not let us back in until my dad came home from work to see she’d cleaned the house. That may sound awful, but I grew up on a farm. We had millions of things to occupy us, and if we got hungry and mom didn’t have a snack for us, we just raided the garden or the “orchard.” (Also, there were three of us, and things like “mud-baths” were much fun, and my dad didn’t call us “heathen” for nothing. Just sayin’.)

She loved us and my dad, but being a housewife and a mom didn’t fulfill her. She was pretty unhappy for a while, but she was working things out. She’d gone back to school to be a nurse when they found the cancer.

I often wonder how much alike we are. Once I wrote a letter to my aunt, and she wrote back that the letter had given her a shock because my handwriting was so like my mother’s. I found stuff occasionally that might have been her writing, or it might have been stuff she liked so much she copied it down in the age before c&p and bookmarking favorite sites. I do know the first typewriter I banged on, a manual Smith-Corona, was hers. I think she bought it for school, but I’m not sure. Maybe it was around before then.

I’ve had little success at emulating her triumphs, but for good or ill (some of both) I’ve tried to learn from her mistakes. I feel like my daughter could use a little more “devoted mother” and a little less “chasing self-fulfillment” but she’s doing okay. And I’m not so frustrated I’m yelling at eggs for breaking. Mom would be glad of that.

I never miss a show. I never told my mom how I felt about her missing that one show, but I remember, and in her honor I go to every one of my kid’s and I pray Mom sees her grand-daughter through my eyes.

She made me promise over and over I wouldn’t get married till I was 25. I waited until I was 27. It was still a foolish choice, but at least by then I had some grasp of who I was, and when things went downhill I knew I could stand on my own if I had to. There’s great power in knowing that, even when you’re not planning on leaving.

I didn’t know her. I have impressions, but I never talked to her. She fought the cancer for a year before it took her, but I knew nothing of cancer and she’d told me everything would be fine, so I stuck my nose back in my book and went on being oblivious. Now I write letters to my daughter. She knows the mechanics of sex (and thinks it’s gross) and “womanly hygiene” and that I’m not going to blush and run if she tries to ask me a question. She knows I don’t want her sexually active for a long time yet (and I watch her closely because dear heavens her judgment is awful even when not heavily influenced by raging hormones), but if I find out she is and that she’s not using protection I will kill her.

In our grief and loss group after my husband died, facilitators warned me to be ready–my daughter would always grieve her father. Each stage of her life would bring a different need for him, and bring the pain back. I already knew that. When he died I’d been missing my mother for twenty years.

You never “get over” these things. Your reality changes to make room for it, but you don’t “get over” such a loss any more than you “get over” becoming a parent. Whatever comes next, your life has changed forever.

I miss you so much, Mom. I missed you when I was twelve and newly bereaved, and I missed you at fifteen when I was so alone, and I missed you at seventeen when I suddenly felt like a grown-up and didn’t know what to do with it. I missed you at nineteen when I didn’t know how to escape, and I missed you at twenty-one when my first lover cheated on me, and I missed you at twenty-five when I thought I was stuck forever in stupid jobs I hated. I missed you at my wedding, and I missed you so much when my baby was born. I miss the long talks we should be having about kids and growing up and writing stories, and I wish so hard I could spend this day pampering you just as much as you deserve.

My mother died at 32. When she applied for nursing school she had to have a physical, and that’s when they found the cancer. It was a routine physical, not looking for anything in particular, so I have to think that had she gone to the doctor sooner things might have been different. I’m not judging her–I’m just saying if you are a mom who neglects herself, always putting the family first, please get yourself to a doctor. We need you, we love you, never make us live without you because you thought we couldn’t spare you for an hour and a $25 co-pay! Please!