Marie at 1 Write Way

On this day, October 25, my mother would have turned 100. She died on September 22, peacefully by all accounts, but, sadly, not in her home as she would have preferred. Up until September 3, she had been living alone in a double-wide mobile home, coveting her independence which was only possible because of my brother and our cousins who brought her food, cooked for her, cleaned up after her, and gave her company when she was in the mood for it.

My mother didn’t mind being alone. She had her phone if she wanted to talk to someone. She had the birds outside her kitchen window to entertain her. She had a front porch where she would sit on warm days and watch her neighbors come and go. She had her TV shows, and she dozed … a lot.

One could argue about how independent she truly was. The thing is, while others worried about her being alone at night, she didn’t.

Then she fell one night and wasn’t found until the next morning. From there, it’s textbook statistics. Hospital, surgery, rehab, COVID, comfort care, death. Just as with her life, her dying seemed to go on much longer than we thought possible. But, as far as anyone could tell, she was sleeping those last few days. At peace.

She missed “her girls” terribly.

First, Shirley died in July 2022, then Charlotte in November 2022. My mom might have been happy to live to 100 if my older sisters had still been alive. They had been her constants, more so than my brother or myself.

My mother married in 1942, I think. Pathetic that I don’t remember her wedding date.

Charlotte came around in October 1944, Shirley in August 1946. For the next eight years, it was just the four of them: Dad, Mom, Charlotte and Shirley.

My brother didn’t show up until August 1954, then me in June 1957. I once made the mistake of asking my mom if she had planned our births so that Shirley and Charlotte would be old enough to babysit me and my brother. She admitted that she hadn’t expected my brother and me. She hadn’t planned our births and, she added, something like abortion wouldn’t have occurred to her because “it just wasn’t done back then.”

My mother was sometimes too honest.

I remember my mother as always working, inside the house and out. If she wasn’t working at a grocery store like Philbrooks’ Market or a discount store like the Big N, she was busy working inside the home. Cleaning, cooking, fixing. Even when she finally settled down for the night to watch a TV show with us, she had mending to do. I used to watch as she slipped a glass jar inside the leg of her pantyhose and stitched up the runs. I wonder if she is why I always feel like I’m wasting time when I just sit and watch TV, my hands idle.

I remember our relationship when I was growing up as mercurial. One minute we’d be laughing at some joke together, the next we’d be throwing daggers at each other with our eyes. Of course, it was worse when I was a teenager. I was the youngest, but, by no means, did she spoil me.

She once said she didn’t want to make the “same mistakes” with me that she had made with my brother. Whatever that meant. My brother was in trouble no more or less than any other kid his age. But my mom took every mistake we made as a slight on herself, as an accusation of bad mothering.

My mother wanted to let me go but without me ever leaving home. She wanted me to learn but without the benefit of experience. She wanted something other than an early marriage and babies for me, but she was afraid of what that would be. For all of her independence, she didn’t want to teach me to be independent. So we fought and eventually I left.

We fought even while I lived in California, sending angry letters back and forth. I remember reading one of her angry letters while I was soaking in the bathtub. I remember tearing it up, but I no longer remember what she wrote.

When I was growing up, I rarely felt that her love for me was unconditional. I often thought that I bored her or exasperated her. Sometimes she even scared me, her anger unexpected, her silent treatment dropping the temperature in our house to freezing. And yet when she hugged me, she hugged so tight I thought my ribs would crack.

As I developed physical and emotional distance from my mother, I started to understand. She was one of 12, born somewhere in the middle to a middling farmer and his wife who died too young. My mother did what all her six sisters did, which was to marry and have babies. I don’t know how long she and my father enjoyed their marriage. I was about 10 when I witnessed for the first time my father having a nervous breakdown and listened to the soft brushing of her palm on his back while she tried to comfort him.

But it wasn’t his first breakdown, and it wouldn’t be his last. And here was my mother who was somehow expected to keep us all afloat while my father went in and out of the state hospital, then to a halfway house, then through a divorce and finally into the care of my sister Shirley.

As I began to imagine the weight of responsibility she must have felt, I also began to be fascinated by her. I became less concerned with her as my mother and more interested in her as a woman who was once young like me, who used to watch sunsets with her sisters and wished she had clothes in those colors.

(She did eventually. At one time, after she remarried, she had a pair of polyester pants in every bright color that you might find in a box of 64 Crayola crayons. She was also quite proud of the fact that the pants only cost about $2 each. My mother was frugal from the day she was born until the day she died.)

In writing this post, trying to celebrate what would have been my mom’s 100th birthday, but, frankly, feeling tired of writing posts like this, I find myself struggling to avoid the obvious.

How could I have been a better daugther?

Let me count the ways.

[Insert list that never ends.]

My only comfort is I really believe she knew how much I loved her. That, despite all the struggles, the frequent shadow-boxing of our personalities, she made me fall in love with her by finally becoming herself, becoming something other than a wife and mother.

She became Florence, a woman who loved to watch birds, to pick berries, to play the slot machines, to eat two hot dogs with chili sauce, to gossip, to talk on the phone, to know whose birthday is when (and how old they are), to live in the moment because the past is past and the future might never be.

I’ll end this post with the verse I picked out for her prayer card:

Fill not your hearts with pain and sorrow,
but remember me in every tomorrow.
Remember the joy, the laughter, the smiles,
I’ve only gone to rest a little while.
Although my leaving causes pain and grief,
my going has eased my hurt and given me relief.
So dry your eyes and remember me,
not as I am now, but as I used to be.
Because I will remember you all and 
look on with a smile.
Understand, in your hearts,
I’ve only gone to rest a little while.
As long as I have the love of each of you,
I can live my life in the hearts of all of you.