I stopped writing. I had to. Every time I started to write something I started crying and I don’t like crying. I began this countdown to my 50th Birthday as a joyous adventure and a challenge to myself. I wanted to prove I could sustain a “writing life” worthy of sharing with others. Now, I find myself in the middle of quite a different countdown, the one I have spent 40 years fearing more than Dorian Grey may have feared viewing the painting of his soul dripping over the canvas in all its wretchedness. I find myself counting down the days I have left on this planet with my mother. I soothe myself with silent meditations reaffirming my own emotional strength and the knowledge that she and I are of one soul so we can never really be far apart in a metaphysical sense, only in this solid earth-binding form we have found ourselves in. Mind over matter I tell myself. I can handle this.
I got more time with my mother than most people do. She is ninety. Over the last month, I have had at least 3 doctors tell me “no one lives forever”, and while they are saying it I smile at them to reassure them I have not gone over the deep end. I am a practical realistic woman. I don’t need the miracles they can’t provide. I know no one lives forever. I knew that when I was 8, and again when I was 9 and again when I was 11 and again and again and again over the last 4 decades. The epiphanies are popping up almost daily now. I find them like nuggets of gold in a California river waiting to be sifted through and saved in a pouch on my hip.
It seems impossible, but my best friend, yes, the one I met on the way to kindergarten finds her father in the same Rehabilitation/Nursing facility as my mother. We think perhaps it was divine intervention. Our dark humor comforts us and gives us respite in between our on-going analysis of the situation, our lives, our parents lives. We are like a little epiphany manufacturing plant churning out insights to help us manage the treacherous terrain we are trekking through on our way to our own meeting with mortality.
Epiphany #1: My best friend and I have parents who are part of the Generation that survived the Great Depression, World War II, the suppressed 1950’s and the outrageous 1960’s. Now, they are the first to benefit from Modern Medicines ability to keep them alive well into their 80’s and 90’s. Our parents saw their parents die in quite a different way, usually in the blink of an eye. I guess I think about Life Expectancy rates a lot more than most people. But how long each individual lives has nothing to do with that great graph charting how long most people born in the year 1919 or 1923 or 1928 are expected/going to live. After all accidents happen, my dad died before he ever hit 60 and so did my mother’s sister. Yet, so many of the Great Generation are now taking the life expectancy line higher and higher. And as they climb through the years in greater numbers they show us how difficult it is to grow old, really old. They endure so much, physical pain, the diminished capacity of their senses, the ever increasing desires to travel back in time, or the wading through the reservoir of regrets they are leaving in their wakes as they slowly inch forward in time.
I hate seeing my mother in pain. I hate hearing her lament how she never finished high school or went to college. I hate listening to the constant calling out for her long lost family and friends, “Rutka, momma miner, Ruthie, Bernice, Pa.” That is her moaning mantra while she tries in vain to connect with those dearly departed who she expects to be seeing when she leaves me. I can’t let her go just yet, and she can’t let go either. We are both clinging to that imaginary life preserver as the ocean turbulently turns and twists us trying desperately to separate us both from each other and the white circular ring tucked under our arms and chins with our heads tilting toward the sky and our mouths hanging open sucking in each breath we can find without any letting any water down our throats. The ocean is threatening to drown us. Funny, I was born two days before her 41st birthday. We shared everything including our astrological sign of Cancer, a water sign. Yet, my mother never put on a bathing suit in her entire life and never learned how to swim. I am afraid of water after a bad experience as a young child at the pool inside the JCC on Touhy Avenue. I guess it is just another one of those ironic plot twists I am suppose to remember and incorporate into one of the many books I will never write.
I have always been writing, if not on paper, or a computer, inside my own head in invisible ink along the pathways between my brain and my heart where my soul rides endlessly back and forth, back and forth. I remember writing about how angry I was at my mother because she was always just “treading” water, “keeping her head above water” was how she always phrased it. I wanted her to move, to swim across the vast ocean and get to the land, the promised land where our dreams were waiting to come true. Didn’t she know how special we were? Wasn’t life meant to be more than just surviving? Weren’t we supposed to be thriving and succeeding and beating the odds?. I never gave her credit for what she had accomplished. I remained unsatisfied and often angry about what we did not have or do. Thus the water metaphor kept popping up in my journal. My mother was someone who was “simply” treading water and not actively swimming through life. And it made me mad, at her and at myself I guess as I mimicked her existence in almost every way.
Now I can see how I got that attitude from her. She was always confused about who she was and sending out mixed messages: “Don’t you mess with me, I am no fool” and then “I am stupid idiot”. Or. “I hate myself” and then “she is no better than I am, I am just as good as the next person”. The “she” could have been any number of wealthier, better educated women. I could never figure it all out, which was it. I guess she never really knew her self. So over the years, while she was saying to herself, “why didn’t I graduate from High School?” I was saying to her, “why didn’t you go out and get a job after daddy died or learn how to drive, or lose weight and find another husband?” But we were both wrong. My mother is a monument to wisdom and strength she just never got to believe in herself. Funny, I seem to be suffering from the same affliction. If we believe in ourselves, really believe, than we are only a moment away from realizing our dreams. After all, Bob Dylan had a horrible voice, but he did not let that stop him. He believed in himself. Abraham Lincoln lost election after election, but he did not let that stop him. He believed in himself. The world is filled with examples of people beating the odds, their own limitations, their bad circumstances and still finding a way to their dream. They owned their own destinies by creating their own dreams and then pursuing them with vim and vigor.
My mother wanted to put three kids through college. That was always what she said her goal was. That was her dream, but she said she wanted to do it to prove something to my dead father and perhaps the rest of the world, finding redemption for her own insecurities by seeing each of her progeny with a Diploma. Oh good lord, my mother is the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz. But I still wonder, didn’t she have any dreams just for herself? Did it ever dawn on her to go back to school, and get a Diploma? How could she with three kids to steer. She had responsibilities to her children and she was going to live up to them even if it meant never finding her own dreams. What did my mother want for herself all those years while I was growing up? I know, a good game of cards, a night out with friends, traveling, bingo, going out to eat. No yearning for stardom or unbridled success nagged at her heart. She was a member of the Great Generation that knew it was simply all about surviving. I hope it will not be too late for me to learn that lesson. I guess that means I need to keep writing, treading water so to speak.
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