April 17, 2011

• My Mother’s Centennial

  My mother, Dorris, was born in northeastern Kansas one hundred years ago today.  Happy birthday wishes would not be in order: she survived only three quarters of that century.  Even during her life, birthdays were not happy events for her.  She didn’t like growing older, and often cried on my birthdays because she hated to see me grow up.  Time, apparently, was never her friend.

  This isn’t a sentimental occasion for me.  Mama had enough sentimentality for both of us, and even if I wasn’t generally unsentimental I don’t think I’d get misty or maudlin over anything involving her.  The mere fact of my still being around to take notice of the hundredth anniversary of her birth is astounding.  Nobody, least of all my mother, expected me to live this long.

  

  Jim, the young man beside her in the photo above, from 1926 or ’27, was her first love.  As the story goes, my grandfather, “ran him off” because the two teens were, “getting too serious.”  Was that a euphemism for sexual activity?  Who knows?.  Given the personalities involved and the tenor of the times, my mother might have had an illegitimate child and nobody ever would have told me.

  They parted, and the Great Depression and Dustbowl era took Mama out of Kansas, to Pueblo, Colorado, where she met the “man of her dreams.” She had,

  dreamed of my father before they met, recognized his face the first time she saw him.  A fortune-teller had also foretold the circumstances of their meeting, seeing “plates with a big red ‘M’”, which turned out to be the “W” for Woolworth’s, the lunch counter where my mother was working.  Daddy worked in a salvage yard, and lived there in a trailer he fabricated himself from old car bodies.  I recall his telling of having one fork and one spoon which he licked clean after each meal, and one plate, which he would wipe clean with bread and turn upside down over the “clean” fork and spoon, until the next meal.  He was working for a dollar a day, plus a commission on the parts he removed from junk cars for customers. (memoir segment, “Parents and Early Memories“)

  

  After he died, and particularly whenever she was comparing him to her then-current or recently former boyfriend or husband, she said she had been very happy with my father.  I recall seeing her in tears many times during those early years of my life.  I recall hearing her complain about a lot of things.  I remember sharing jokes and laughter with my father on various occasions, but my mother didn’t joke around or laugh much.  After my father died,

  my mother got an exciting phone call late one evening.  Jim Henry had been her first boyfriend when she was about sixteen.  My grandfather had run him off.  My great Uncle Walter, Mother’s father’s brother, and his wife Lilly had been traveling through Arkansas when they had a flat tire.  They ended up in a tire shop in Pine Bluff near Little Rock, where they saw a familiar face:  Jim Henry.  When he found out that his old time sweetheart was newly widowed, he got her number and called her. (memoir segment “San Jose, 1952“)

  Around that time, she sent him her copy of the photo of the two of them at the top of this entry, writing on the back of it, “How about this–ain’t we a handsome couple?  I’ll bet we were about the happiest couple in the country.  I know we were certainly in love.  Please don’t let this get away.  It’s the only one I have.  Maybe you have one.  This was taken about 1926 or 1927.  I was about 15 or 16.”

  She married Jim twice.  It’s a long story.  This link also contains a lot of info about my relationship with her.  We had a complex relationship.  I depended on her for food and shelter.  She depended on me for emotional support, personal validation, menial services such as foot rubs and hair brushing, and mechanical or mathematical tasks that were outside her capability.  The most important things she gave me include some basic cooking skills and the motivation to perfect them.  Another revealing post about Mama and her relationship with me was done on the day before Mother’s Day eight years ago, in response to readers’ questions.  It is here.  It brought up more questions, which are answered here.  Eventually, after all that, I felt I needed to set the record straight,

  I love my mama.  It isn’t the respectful and/or dependent filial love of a daughter looking up to the superior maturity and wisdom of a parent.  My mama turned me into her caretaker when my father died.  Any remaining shreds of filial awe were dispelled when I was 25, homeless, just out of jail and soon to be on my way to prison, and she was 58 (my age when I wrote this) and confided in me about her man troubles and asked for my romantic advice.

  My love is not a euphemism for guilt or obligation or gratitude.  I don’t think I owe her a thing.  I consider our mutual karma balanced, null and void.  She wanted a baby, to fulfill her need to be a mother.  She stated that in so many words.  She tried before and bore another girl who lived a few hours.  I was her last chance at motherhood.  She could have adopted one or two of my cousins, but wasn’t interested in that, neither before nor after I was born, though my cousin Buddy and I were closer than many brothers and sisters.  Buddy and I both wanted him to stay with us, but just as she did with a long succession of dogs, cats and various love objects of mine, Mama wouldn’t have it.  It had to be her own baby, and only her own, and the baby was not allowed to have other love interests.

  Mama and I didn’t bond properly when I was a neonate.  Both of us had separate surgeons working on us as soon as the obstetrician got my foot pushed back up so my butt could come out, and I managed to back into this life.  I don’t know how soon it happened, but Mama became the odd one out, unable to fit in the tight, companionable rapport between me and Daddy.  It didn’t help that she lacked the native intelligence of his family.  She was a little bit slow.  We both thought, talked and ran rings around her, laughing at her the whole time.  I think that after he died she decided to make me pay for some of that.

  My love for mama is composed of empathy and compassion.  I know how hard she suffered for her errors and I know intimately the cultural and family history that led her into error.  I love her as I love all the rest of the people I know intimately.  It’s really just the same love I have for the entire Universe, only intensified by the intimate contact and knowledge.  The better I know someone, the better I love them.  And I know my mama very well.  I was her confidant, the one whose shoulder she cried on, whom she blamed when the latest man moved on, and who was sternly admonished when the next one started coming around that, “children are to be seen and not heard.”

  I have made my peace with mama, though she never made peace with me.  I was a gross disappointment to her ’til the day she died, though she always spoke of how proud she was of me.  As paradoxical as that sounds, she did have both pride and shame in me, simply because she tried to own me, control my life and live through me.  To the extent to which she got her way with me, she was proud.  I was smart and pretty, brave and capable.  To the extent that I did not conform to her ideal, she was ashamed.  I was independent, irreverent, headstrong, and promiscuous, as precocious at sex as at the intellectual stuff.  She was mortified.

  It drove me nuts and drove me out of her reach.  I don’t have to pretend that she was anything she wasn’t in order to love her because I love her unconditionally.  She was just exactly the mother I needed.  She showed me the error of hypocrisy, dishonesty and denial, gave me something worthy of rebelling against and made me who I am today.  

  A hundred years… is a long time.
  

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