Based on my age and the absence of my brother, who was
birthed in the base hospital in 1955, the photo must have been of our arrival
on the island where my dad was stationed.
If there was joy in their reunion, if my mother was happy to be there,
the photographic evidence is lacking.
Her teenage face stares beautiful toward the future, but vacant all joy.
I don’t want to be unfair to be dramatic. My mother had many happy times and
smiles. Yet the face staring out from
that photo, the curious combination of beauty and disappointment, is the look I
associate with her most. I saw it many
times.
My mother is a mystery to me. In fact, all of motherhood is a mystery. If females are eternally mysterious to males,
then full understanding of what it means to be a mother and a woman will be forever
beyond the grasp of sons and men.
I do believe, however, that in every loving mother, there
must be trace elements of regret and sadness with the way things play out.
The life my mother lived would be unimaginable for most
young women today. Puerto Rico and a
small house on an unpaved Isabela street was an early stop on a journey of
many. She followed my dad to an upstairs
apartment in the shadow of the Willis plant in Toledo, Ohio, to a rental house
by a graveyard in Sylvania, a duplex farmhouse in Lake County, a trailer in
Tennessee, another rental by another graveyard in Chattanooga, and about half a
dozen homes more.
One of the disappointments of my mother’s life was that she
never had a house of her own. Every home
was a rental, borrowed from a relative, or some other temporary arrangement. There was even a year where we all four lived
with her mother and father in the two-bedroom, one-bath home where mom grew
up.
She is not here for me to ask, but I speculate Puerto Rico
might have been one of her happiest times.
That is because it was the only period of her life when she did not work
a job. For that few years she was a stay
at home mom, and I believe that must have been sweet to her, even though the house
was hot, filled with bugs, and surrounded by neighbors whose language she could
not understand.
I wish I could remember her during those few years when she
was my constant companion in an exotic land.
But I was a little boy, and I have no recollection beyond a few gray
photos.
Working moms today are the norm, but in the era of June
Cleaver and Margaret Anderson, they were an anomaly. For every childhood friend I ever had, their
mothers were always there, a presence in the background, a voice calling at
lunch and dinner times.
What nagging sadness it must have been for mom to leave my
brother and me every morning to fix our own cereal, walk ourselves to school,
and come home to an empty house? What
fearsome ideas invaded her thoughts during her desk-bound day? How often, walking through the door at the
end of the day, did she swallow a bitter mixture of regret and relief to find
us in our bedrooms reading, playing, waiting, safe.
That was our life.
That was her life. She worked
because we needed the money.
Mom tried hard to be the mother the culture expected. Once she agreed to become a den mother for my
cub scout troop. I remember us in our
blue uniforms, yellow kerchiefs around our necks. That was a sweet time, but as I recall it did
not last long. We moved on.
One of the most vivid memories of my mother is from a winter
day when I was 17. I was driving and she
was in the passenger seat. My dad and
brother were a car ahead, leading us to see yet another rental house in another
town. We were making small talk when she
slowly erupted into sobs and told me that if this move did not make my father
happy, she would leave him.
I did not have to witness the end. I went away to college. About year later she moved into a different
rental house . . . alone.
During the last years of her life my mom remarried and lived
in a home that was almost hers. Her name
was never on the deed, but she experienced some welcome permanence there with
Robert. She planted flower gardens so
big she could never keep them weeded.
She pursued projects so numerous she could never finish. But such things
made her happy. And the imperfection of
them? Well, that’s just the way life goes.
She worked at her crafts. She worked at Wal-Mart, at Belk,
at a photo processing plant. Her life
seemed happy enough.
I believed mom married Robert thinking she would care for
him as his health failed, but she died first.
One night her heart slipped into a fluttering arrhythmia, and she never
woke up. Her last words were, “I think
I’m dying.” I can’t believe it was the
first time that thought crossed her mind.
She was three days in a motionless coma, her face obscured
by mask, tape and breathing tube. When
the nurse finally removed all the apparatus, I could then look into her face
for one last, long time.
It was still pretty.
It was still sad.
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