Like the time recently when my mother was in the car, directing her nurse (hip surgery recovery assistant) on the route to take to drive me home from a colonoscopy. I was in the back seat, all too quickly recovered from the disappointingly unopiate-like drug that they had given me to knock me out. In the space of a few minutes and a couple of miles, this was the conversation. My mother: "There you've got a stop sign. Now you can go. You want the right lane and you can turn right if this car will go. COME ON DUMMY! He's from out of town, so he doesn't know he can go right on red." Ruby: "Do you think he might be going straight?" "He's not going straight, there's nothing down there, unless he's going to those empty apartments. He's not going there....You were right, Ruby, he's going straight. Get in the right lane. Oh look at this, maybe we'll make the light! Uh-oh. Can you get in the left lane? Now go!"
Okay, so she's controlling beyond all calculation, she's vain, manipulative, perfectionistic, arrogant, emotionally crippled and in her lurks a mean streak a mile wide that comes into play at times that I cannot foretell. For many years she was extremely volatile, indulging in rages that would have done Idi Amin proud.
There is another side. If you go back to the story of the car ride back from my colonoscopy, who was in the car? My mother. Who took me in, no questions asked, me at the tender age of 56, twice in 15 months? My mother. Who was prepared to support me financially? My mother. Who was and is the best nurse on the planet if you are sick? My mother. This was an unexpected but dominant aspect of her personality for my entire life, and indeed it is shocking that I did not become a hypochondriac in order to elicit those ministrations on a continuing basis.
Who taught herself gardening (flower and vegetable), antiques (English, Continental, American, furniture, porcelains), history, contemporary Chinese politics in the era of Mao, art (traditional and contemporary), haute cuisine (cooking and eating), connoisseurship of fine wines and haute couture? My mother. She read voraciously, and she read books of great depth along with the Regency romances and Barbara Cartland paperbacks. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was in our library and I am pretty sure that she had read it, or at least part of it. I remember her reading and talking about the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution in China in the 60's, and being vaguely curious but not enough to ask.
Who said to me when I was still living in Virginia and doing poorly that if I needed her to come to me that she would come "if she had to crawl up the steps to my house" (one hip and another knee were compromised and extremely painful at the time)? My mother. Who announced, microphone in hand, at a 2009 luncheon for 100 loving mothers and daughters, that she was going to shock the group by telling them that, unlike the other mothers, she had been a bad mother, that she had quashed me at every turn and persistently opposed my efforts to become my own person? My mother.
And, reluctantly, I suppose that I must address the fact that my mother was physically beautiful, a stunning, imposing woman, not petite, but with broad shoulders, long legs and thick, dark brunette hair. She was often mistaken for Rosalind Russell on our travels, and that is a fair description, at least the pictures I have seen of the actress in the 1940's. I was even with my mother once as a teenager, at a midnight dinner after a bullfight in Madrid, and a woman came up and asked for my mother's autograph, mistaking her for Ms. Russell. (My mother complied, but signed her own name.) More than physical beauty, my mother had a commanding presence, still has it at age 85.
To the extent that I have strength, it comes from her. I watched her carry my father on her back for the last two years of his life, and that was a sight to behold--I've never seen anything like it and I expect that I never will. During that time, he was somewhere along the spectrum of dementia, but more than that, he was depressed, had all but given up. Golf, the great diversion of his lifetime, was beyond his capabilities, he had been fired from his volunteer work because he wouldn't learn how to use a computer, he couldn't drive any more, couldn't see very well, couldn't hear well at all, and these things weighed heavily on him. When you asked him what he was doing, he would say "sleeping the day away, what does it look like?" And that's mostly what he did, nap and doze, nap and doze.
I would have been oh so tempted to let him drift away, but not my mother. She gave him chores, she took him out to lunch, she took him out to dinner, she pushed him hard and then she pushed him harder. When he slacked, she would roar at him, "You're not trying! Now look at me, here's how you do it!" And she would show him how to push himself up from his chair or how to bend and pick up a dog toy or put on a sock. It wasn't about being kind, there was nothing kind about it in its day to day operation, and I once heard him say to her "I wouldn't talk to a dog the way you talk to me." It was at once painful to watch and awe-inspiring--I don't think I could have done it, I think the necessary cruelty of it would have been beyond me, but I think that she stole hours out of the mouth of oblivion for him, and I think she did it for him, not for herself.
My mother also has positive qualities that I lack, that I respect, that I could learn from. As impatient as she may be in the more mundane of life's situations (e.g., road traffic as encountered with me and Ruby), she has rare patience in more serious settings. Like with me. She has been waiting me out for months now, she is absolutely constant in her approach to me, her smiles, her endearments, her pleasant requests. Her voice holds delight when she hears that it's me at the other end of the phone, and it sounds genuine. She rarely forgets herself any more, rarely doffs the mask of the kinder, gentler persona, and the word "churlish," outmoded as it is, perfectly describes how I feel as I hold on to my distrust and anger.
And while I do hold on to my resentments against her, and I do keep my distance from her, I notice that I am more amenable to the idea that it's not over yet, this Greek drama. I am starting to take a longer view of it now, and I pay more attention to the notion of patience and letting things unfold in their own time. I am studying the Tao Te Ching, so that may be part of it. And it's not like I haven't heard the concept before, all the way back to my Farraday days they were pounding into me the mantra "while this is how things are right now, it won't always be this way," trying any way they could to rewire my tendency to catastrophize all matters great and small.
Then again, maybe I'm starting to learn from my mother.
