The neighbors move on....

Ann and Sam moved the last of their stuff today. They lived in their house 22 years and next door to us for 8 of them. I will miss them.

The runaway, part 3

While I was visiting my mother last week, she once again told me the story of how I wanted to run away from home when I was 15. I once again claimed complete lack of memory for the whole event. When the story was told this last time though, there was a bit of a twist. She  told me I had given her a long, grievance filled letter. No, she could not show it to me because she had not kept it. When she got to the part of the story where my grandmother took me upstairs to talk me out of my plan she said to me "When she came downstairs, my mother told me I was a good mother. She had never said that to me before". Then she cried.

After all those years of yearning for her mother's approval, she was finally thrown a bone. It was a small comment and obviously a long time coming but she won something that day. Finally I understood the significance of an event so meaningless to me I couldn't even remember it but which my mother considered terribly important. I also understood why she did not keep the physical evidence, the letter, from this altercation that seemed on the surface to define our parent/child experience. It wasn't about the relationship between my mother and me, it was about the other mother and child in this story. The letter was not all that important.

I assured her she had been a good mother but since I am not an effusive person, I'm not sure she was convinced. She certainly has not been a bad mother. When she had the most responsibility for our lives, she was often stressed and overwhelmed with my brother's antics. She once said her entire goal in life was keeping my brother out of jail, a mission that she did achieve. She did not act like her mother, she doesn't have that sadistic ability to knife you in the back while wearing a pleasant and purposeful smile.

I am not condemning her with faint praise, she was more than just what she wasn't. She was adequate to the job when she needed to be. She has been stellar in the years since I left home. She has always been there for me when I needed her which thankfully has not been too often. In our later years, we have become friends.

It's interesting to me that even today she worries that she was not a good mother. Not being a parent myself, I don't know why it would matter at this point. The parenting is done. I suppose our insecurities live on in perpetuity, manifesting in new and painful ways as the aging process marches on.

I can see why so many relationships between human beings "fail" because of misdirected anger or disappointment. The potential to react in the present in response to the past, conscious or not, is always there. I live with the past every day--mine, my mother's, my husband's and my friends. Does knowing our own weaknesses save us from future failure?

The runaway, part 2

To understand my mother, you have to understand her mother. My grandmother had the veneer of the kindly old lady but that veneer covered a dense, bitter core.

My grandmother's public persona was of the lovely gentlelady so common in Indiana--polyester clad, hair-sprayed bouffant, regular attendee of church on Sunday. She was a farmer's daughter that was worked hard by her parents but not particularly loved by them. When she married my grandfather, also a farmer, and had two daughters I don't think she had the learned skills to be a kind and loving parent. She was a mother that was hard to please. Both my mother and my aunt seemed to spend their lives seeking my grandmother's approval right up until she died at the age of 85. I remember marveling at my mother's desire to please her when it seemed to me more rational to just give it up as an obviously futile exercise.

I would have thought years after my grandmother's death, my mother would have exercised the demons that were her mother's lasting legacy. Unfortunately, she seems to carry with her the insecurities of that emotionally battered childhood.

She spent her life trying to be a mother as unlike her own as she could be. Yet she seems convinced that she failed at this enterprise. I remember a few years after I graduated from college, my mother commented that she was sure I had gone so far away to school just to get away from her. I was shocked when she told me this. To this day, I don't think I've ever consciously thought that.

I went away to school because I didn't like Southern California. I didn't like who I was in Southern California. I was an introvert with a few friends but not much of a social life. My brother was what they called at the time "hyperactive" and spent most of his time testing my parent's coping skills. I was shy but fairly self-sufficient. I kept to myself and let the activities of our household just swirl around me. I think I saw opportunity for escape from the stress of living at home but I don't feel like I left for college specifically to get away from my mother. She obviously felt otherwise.

I think if I experienced any resentment it was with the division of time and attention between my brother and I. As I said, he sucked up a lot of their time and resources yet I was the smart kid. I was the one with untapped potential. They started me out in life with a jumpstart, they skipped me a grade in school which was a good first challenge but somewhere along the way they gave up working on me. If I had been more extroverted or demanding, I might have been able to push my way forward on my own. I wasn't one of those driven overachievers. I needed to be pushed. Once I was pushed I was perfectly willing to excel. When I was in my 30's, I often wondered why my parents did not get me on the AP track in high school. I still remember that by the time I graduated, the guidance counselor didn't see me as college material despite the fact I was an "A" student. Maybe it was just sexism from a dimwitted middle-aged man but seriously, what happened here?

So, yes, life isn't fair and it's rarely equitable. I don't think I've carried an abiding resentment though. I don't think I did at the time, I don't think I do now. Yet my mother still worries she failed....

-to be continued-

The runaway

I wanted to run away from home when I was 15. My best friend, Lucy, and I were going to do this together. I wrote a long letter to my mother, explaining my unhappiness at home and my strong desire to leave and be done with my life as a daughter. My mother, at her wit's end, called my grandmother and asked her to come and talk to me. After this talk, the tension was relieved and I did not run away. It's a straightforward story of a temper tantrum and a parent unsure how to deal with teenage angst.

Unfortunately, I have no recollection of this event ever happening. None. I asked Lucy if she remembers it and she could not either. For Lucy and me it was a passing storm, over and forgotten.

As it turns out though, it's one of those moments in my mother's life infused with meaning that I do not wholly understand.

-to be continued-

The reality of being pro-choice

Great editorial in the Atlantic by Ta-Nahesi Coates on the decisions you have to make to be pro-choice.
 Here's a taste:

Every day women choose to do the hard labor of a difficult pregnancy. Its courageous work, which inspires in me a degree of admiration exceeded only by my horror at the notion of the state turning that courage, that hard labor, into a mandate. Women die performing that labor in smaller numbers as we advance, but they die all the same. Men do not. That is a privilege.

Read the whole thing.

The melting pot

This week we saw a white, Catholic, Republican federal judge murdered on his way to greet a Democratic woman member of Congress who was his friend and is Jewish. Her life was saved initially by a 20-year-old Mexican-American college student, who saved her, and eventually by a Korean-American combat surgeon. Then it was all eulogized and explained by our African-American president.
-- historian Allen Ginsberg, as recounted by syndicated columnist Mark Shields on PBS Newshour

What came over me?

So I thought it might be fun to plan on a monthly gathering of neighbors for a little Happy Hour....just a few people for drinks and talk. I invited about 17 couples expecting more than half not being able to make it. Yet it appears most are going to come. Yikes! I've got to start scouring the internets for some good pupu recipes!