My Mother

Today is her birthday. Or was.  Usually I was filled with dread over the expectation that I call her. So that didn't happen today.

It's been about two months since she died.  I'm still processing it.  We didn't get along and her death impacted me more than I would ever have guessed.  I'm bothered that when I was put on the spot at her funeral, I couldn't think of a single generous thing to say about her.  I've been thinking ever since about what I should have said--and I still haven't come up with anything.

Maybe I should have just faked it and said all the stuff people expect you to say about your dead mother.  But I've never been the faking type.  I say what I think and I always have. Although I have learned to be silent when necessary, I'm incapable of saying something I don't really mean.

So I still haven't come up with any stories or examples of why my mother was a good mother.  Maybe they will come later. Her mother became bitter and unpleasant during the last years of her life, and it was some years after her death before I began to remember the stories of how much fun my grandmother was when we were young.  Maybe the same think will happen with my mother.

But since I can't think of anything generous, I will at least tell her story.  For prosperity, or my children, or just so that I've said something about her.

I don't think my mother had a happy life.

Her dad was a bit of a charlatan (maybe more than a bit, he actually went to federal prison), and they moved around a lot as kids, disappearing from little towns once the rent payment couldn't be put off any longer.  Her dad finally disappeared when she was a teenager, only to show back up with a love child in hand on the eve of my mother's wedding. The child's mother had committed suicide.

I will never understand what attracted my parents to one another--that fit just never made sense. She came from a big noisy family and was talkative and outgoing.  He came from a small family of introverts and is more than a little anti-social. Even physically, my mother never seemed like my dad's type. She was taller than him.  Of medium build--neither particularly slender or particularly overweight.  All of his subsequent wives have been tiny, petite women.

My parents divorced when I was 9, after he cheated on her. She went out of town on business and he dragged my bother and me to multiple women's houses. Not too long after that my parents and I were an event in separate cars.  I begged to ride home with my dad, and he finally relented.  But then he dropped me off in front of the house and told me to tell my mom that he went to buy a loaf of bread.  Yes, really.  And he never came home that night.  And she grilled us about what went out when she was out of town.  And we drove 'round and 'round the neighborhood while she demanded that we point out the houses we visited.  Of course we couldn't remember.

So he moved in with his girlfriend and my mother became depressed and pretty much ignored us. She had always worked, mostly as a retail store manager.  She worked late several nights a week, and we hated those nights, being stuck at a babysitter's house until 10 p.m.  She was never particularly discriminating about our child care providers, and there were some terrible ones.

In the mornings, I was charged with getting my brother and myself up and out the door for school.  If she didn't have to be at work early, she slept in. We would pour our cereal, happy if we had real milk and didn't have to sub in powdered milk, and walked the block-and-a-half to school.

Eventually she started dating, and she dated a lot. She dated men with money who could have given her a better life, and men who weren't well off but were at least decent people.  She settled on the worst possible choice.  A construction worker who always had some reason not to work.  And he was an asshole.  An asshole she would learn soon enough was physically abusive.  We told her that we didn't like him and she brushed it off, saying we wouldn't like anyone she married. No, we just didn't like him because he was an asshole.

I remember walking into the bathroom of his apartment before they married and seeing a cup shaped like a breast with a bright pink areola.  That was enough to convince me he was an asshole. That and the stacks of porno magazines everywhere.

So she married him against our protests.  And he proved to be the asshole that we warned against.  He beat her regularly.  He held her hand against the open flame of our gas stove.  One time she ended up in the hospital while we were at school--she said she just passed out and hit her head on the counter.  Yeah right.  One night he was strangling her in the living room.  My brother and I came out of our rooms as he was screaming that he was going to kill her.  She told us to run to the neighbors, and we fled out the back door and over the fence in our pajamas, banging on the neighbor's door and waiting for the police.

He would use switches on my brother's bare ass, and she never stopped him.  He hit me once, and open-handed slap that slammed my face into the refrigerator.  I told her it was him or me.  She chose him and I moved in with my father.  That was pretty much the end of our relationship.  Her refusal to stand up for herself or her children.  Her choice of this horrible asshole over us.

She finally divorced him when I was in high school, still living with my father. Shortly thereafter, she broke her hip.  She was in her early 40s and had had rheumatoid arthritis for nearly 10 years. She also had osteoarthritis--and the steroids for the RA contribute to low bone density.

I moved back in to help take care of her any my brother. She healed, and lost a ton of weight.  For the first time ever, we could wear the same size clothes.  She started dating again, and this time made a good choice. Someone who was both kind and could take care of her.  She broke her hip in December and was married by July.

The next few years were probably the happiest of her life.  She was financially secure.  She traveled often with her new husband and he showered her with jewelery. I had gone off to college.  My brother lived with them and was pretty much ignored.  He was drinking and doing drugs and skipping school.  He got a girl pregnant, and I held my niece at his high school graduation. Once I was gone, there was no one to pay any attention to anything he did.

Her health continued to decline over the next several years.  She had many more joint replacements--every major joint was replaced twice--and she was frequently wheelchair bound.  Before I had kids, in my early twenties, was when we got along the best.  I could do grown up things like drink and go shopping and didn't have any baggage, like kids.

Once I had my kids, we were too much to deal with.  She didn't want us to visit and made no effort to see us.  Three kids is just too much.  DH would complain that when we did get together, she would want to take off somewhere with just me, leaving him and my stepfather with the kids.

Eventually her health became critical.  She came to my Big City for major surgery.  She was here for nearly a year, and I was solely responsible for her while she bounced from hospital to rehab facility and back again.  I visited her every single day because there was no one else who was going to.  I rearranged my schedule to attend her doctor's appointments and surgeries.

And I never got a single word of thanks.  Christmas came in the middle of all this and she told me of all the online shopping she was doing for everybody.  And how she had found the perfect gift for this person and that person.  And I got nothing.  It sounds and feels selfish to write that.  I'm not a stuff person--I really don't care too much about things.  But it was so hurtful that she didn't think I was important enough to do anything for when I was busting my ass with a busy job and three kids and taking care of her.

I was so relieved when she was finally able to go home.  I pleaded with her to move into a senior apartment where there would be more help.  And she complained to every one she knew that I was trying to throw her into a home.

We resumed our habit of barely speaking to one another.  And then came my brother's wedding, and it was the last straw.  She just didn't show up.  He had a place set up for her right in front and had ensured a wheelchair-accessible venue.  And she just didn't show up.

We didn't speak for another year and a half.

And then last year, right after Christmas, we were in Hometown for  DH's grandfather's funeral.  I was having lunch with my brother when my aunt called and said they were recommending hospice care for my mother.  My brother and I decided to go see her together.  She was glad to see us.  She looked small--much smaller than I had ever seen her.  But our visit seemed to perk her up, and within a few days hospice was no longer being talked about.

But she never left the hospital, and by April she had declined again.  My Aunt told me they were moving us to hospice, and within just a couple of days she had declined rapidly.  I was told to come immediately.  And when I arrived, I really did think she would die within a day.

It was not my first hospice experience.  We had already been down that path with MIL.  I knew nothing was predictable, but I also knew all of the phases a person goes through before death--I had seen it first hand.  And when I arrived in Hometown, I believed my mother would be dead within 24 hours.  So did everyone else, including her doctor and the hospice chaplain.

I stayed the night with her.  Despite our difficulties, I didn't want her to die alone.  And I woke up again and again during the night, staring at her to see if she was still alive.  Sometimes going and standing over her because I couldn't tell if she was breathing.

Within a day she had perked up.  She was wakeful and would talk to us.  But much of what she said was nonsensical and became more and more bizarre as the week wore on.  One day we spent hours talking about her horse named Nettles.  Her siblings said she had never had a horse and they didn't know anything about Nettles.

I continued to spend the night and continued to wake and check on her repeatedly.  And her body continued to show improvement, while her mind continued to declined.

Against my wishes and, in my opinion, good judgment, my stepfather moved her out of hospice and back home after a week.  I went back home. I had stress dreams every night and couldn't remember if I was at home or at hospice.  I would dream of my mother and that I needed to check on her breathing.

Three weeks later, she passed away at home.  I did not go back until her funeral.

She died on a Sunday, and I though I could just go into work on Monday and be fine, but I wasn't.  I cried a lot. I drove in for the funeral and headed straight for the funeral home so that we could set up a slideshow for the rosary that night.  She was already laid out, and I was glad that I got to see her alone.  I hate open caskets, and even more I hate the spectacle of funerals and everyone else witnessing your grief.  I immediately went and got my brother, so that he, too, could see privately.

I don't know how I feel anymore.  My greatest fear is still that my children will have the ambivalence toward me that I have about my mother.

Pavlov's Dog

Bob the dog is furry living proof of Pavlov's theory.

Whenever I close my laptop or turn off the tv, he knows I'm moving my lazy butt off the couch and he runs to the back door.

Bob sleeps with TT every night.  TT has a Tardis noise as her alarm.  When the alarm goes off, TT gets out of bed and lets Bob outside.

Now every time the girls watch Doctor Who and the "whomp whomp whomp" noise starts, Bob runs to the back door to be let out.  He's going to be so confused the next time they have a marathon.

***

In a somewhat related story, the girls went to work with me a few weeks ago to do some manual labor around the office.  I was on a call while they were being supervised by the file clerk.  While on my call I started hearing the weirdest noise, and I could not tell where it was coming from.

I finally got off the call and found SS's phone in her backpack in the corner of my office.  Her alarm was going off, "whomp whomp whomp."

The One Where LC is Hit by a Drunk Driver

We are all ok.  The damage to the car is very minor.  But we were literally one second from catastrophe.

I drove PS and soon-to-be freshman TT to an off-season robotics competition in Cool City, about 3 hours away, Friday night.  We arrived about 8 p.m. with no plans that evening, so we decided to wander a university campus that is a prospect for PS in the fall.  It was hot, but many of the buildings were open--and blessedly air conditioned--and it was a worthwhile visit of a very nice campus.

We decided to end our evening by grabbing renowned and delicious ice cream before heading to our hotel, about 4 miles away. I briefly considered letting PS make the short drive to the hotel, because we are trying to get her used to driving in new places before she goes to college, but all of the crazy bike paths in Cool City were confusing to me, so I continued at the wheel.  My best decision of the evening.

So we were heading east toward our hotel.  There was a split in the road we were taking and I was trying to read the signs to make sure I was in the right lane for the highway that we needed.  I haven't driven much in Cool City and did not know my way around at all.  Oncoming traffic was coming from the hill that we were about to drive over.

As I was focusing on the signs over the hill, I saw headlights coming straight toward me.  Like they were aiming for me.  I jerked the wheel right as hard as I could, heard a thump, and saw the minivan that hit us continue to swerve down the wrong-side of the road behind us.  We came to rest in the middle of the V where our road had split.  Thank god for that V, which kept me out of the next lane of traffic and gave us somewhere to go.

I put on my hazards and a big truck pulled up behind me--which ended up being a firetruck.  The nicest firemen in the whole world got out to check on us  We looked at the car--I wasn't even sure I had been hit.  We had heard a thump but hadn't really felt an impact.  But the car showed two minor scrapes.  The firemen had seen everything and were nearly hit as well.  They got my contact information and then took off after the lady who had hit us.

I figured it was a lost cause and tried to drive back to the hotel, but I was so flustered I couldn't pay attention to my GPS or figure out which road to take and ended up just driving in circles. 

Within 5 minutes, the awesome fireman called me and told me that they had found the lady, the police were there, and to come back to the street I was on.  Several people had already called in about her and the police were already looking for her.

In hindsight, I would love to know how they stopped her.  Can you be pulled over by a firetruck?

Since I had only managed to drive in a circle, I was about two minutes from our starting point, and by the time I got there the fire truck, two police cars, and an ambulance were already on the scene. We were there for 1.5 hours while the police investigated.  My girls got a nice criminal procedure lesson, and the police and firemen both talked to them about drunk driving. I hope this is a life lesson that will stick with them.

We watched them do the walk test and the one leg test.  Finally they gave her a breathalyzer and two-second after that they cuffed her. We saw them search her vehicle. She was a minivan driving mom--a couple of years older than me.  Someone who should definitely know better. She was not one of the college students from the campus that we were blocks away from.

If I had reacted even one second later, the result would have been catastrophic.  She was probably driving 50 mph.  I was going 35--the speed limit. If I had been distracted by anything I wouldn't have been able to react in time. I couldn't have seen her any sooner because of the hill.  If I had let PS drive, she likely wouldn't have reacted in time or appropriately.  There's something to be said for 20 years' driving experience.

It all could have been so, so bad. And I just keep seeing those headlights heading straight for us.