Mother's Day
Sunday, May 11th, 2003 08:55 pmIt's been a long time since I celebrated Mother's Day. Mom died when I was fourteen years old; she was only forty-nine. She's buried in a veterans cemetery I don't remember the name of. I don't believe in sending cards and chocolates to the dead unless they ask.
I was the one blood relative available who skipped the open casket version of the funeral. I didn't want to remember her as a corpse, with far more makeup than she ever wore in life. For more than a year after she died, I could only remember what she was like in pain, raging at the illnesses that caused her such misery and the people around her alike, crying, sometimes calm and seeming resigned to her fate, sometimes hallucinating because of the drugs she was on. Even before she got lung cancer--well before, in fact, longer than I'd been alive--she was in pain much of the time, back pains and leg pains and assorted other problems I believe would be diagnosed as fibromyalgia were she alive now. She had numerous surgeries, smoked two packs of cigarettes per day, and at one point drank twenty cups of coffee each day to try to make herself feel better.
After a few years passed, I remembered more of her. I agonized for a while over the fact that I could never remember talking to her alone--there was always somebody else around, she was always playing to some kind of an audience. I tried hard to remember my real Mom, then finally realized what an idiot I was being. She was far from being an introvert like I am; of course there were always others around. If I'm half wolf and half hummingbird, she was the wolf, the pack animal; if she wasn't the alpha female, then she was the alpha female's confidante. She never quite knew what to make of me. After having two boys and raising them to adolescence, she finally had the girl she'd always wanted and the girl turned out to be the kind who dreamed of being a tomboy but was too slow and clumsy to succeed. Where she was outgoing, I was often an outcast. When I was in elementary school, the other girls preferred talking with my mother to hanging out with me.
Her father died of a heart attack when she was eight years old; for years afterward, she expected to have a heart attack too. At the age of nine, she was flirting with marines who thought she was much older. After she got married, she half fell in love with Elvis. She watched all the movie and music awards shows on TV even when she didn't go to the theaters and thought most modern rock music was evil. She made jokes I didn't understand; I'd remember them years later with a sudden shock of realization that she'd been referring to the male anatomy. She was always doing something with her hands--oil painting, watercolor, macrame, needlepoint, Hook-a-Rug, liquid embroidery, sewing machine embroidery, crochet. Thunderstorms excited her--the wilder the weather, she happier she was. She was dogmatic in her opinions and tolerant of those who disagreed with her. She was one of the small group of white people in the '60s to integrate the local black college. In one way or another, she was a teacher her whole life. I miss her.
I was the one blood relative available who skipped the open casket version of the funeral. I didn't want to remember her as a corpse, with far more makeup than she ever wore in life. For more than a year after she died, I could only remember what she was like in pain, raging at the illnesses that caused her such misery and the people around her alike, crying, sometimes calm and seeming resigned to her fate, sometimes hallucinating because of the drugs she was on. Even before she got lung cancer--well before, in fact, longer than I'd been alive--she was in pain much of the time, back pains and leg pains and assorted other problems I believe would be diagnosed as fibromyalgia were she alive now. She had numerous surgeries, smoked two packs of cigarettes per day, and at one point drank twenty cups of coffee each day to try to make herself feel better.
After a few years passed, I remembered more of her. I agonized for a while over the fact that I could never remember talking to her alone--there was always somebody else around, she was always playing to some kind of an audience. I tried hard to remember my real Mom, then finally realized what an idiot I was being. She was far from being an introvert like I am; of course there were always others around. If I'm half wolf and half hummingbird, she was the wolf, the pack animal; if she wasn't the alpha female, then she was the alpha female's confidante. She never quite knew what to make of me. After having two boys and raising them to adolescence, she finally had the girl she'd always wanted and the girl turned out to be the kind who dreamed of being a tomboy but was too slow and clumsy to succeed. Where she was outgoing, I was often an outcast. When I was in elementary school, the other girls preferred talking with my mother to hanging out with me.
Her father died of a heart attack when she was eight years old; for years afterward, she expected to have a heart attack too. At the age of nine, she was flirting with marines who thought she was much older. After she got married, she half fell in love with Elvis. She watched all the movie and music awards shows on TV even when she didn't go to the theaters and thought most modern rock music was evil. She made jokes I didn't understand; I'd remember them years later with a sudden shock of realization that she'd been referring to the male anatomy. She was always doing something with her hands--oil painting, watercolor, macrame, needlepoint, Hook-a-Rug, liquid embroidery, sewing machine embroidery, crochet. Thunderstorms excited her--the wilder the weather, she happier she was. She was dogmatic in her opinions and tolerant of those who disagreed with her. She was one of the small group of white people in the '60s to integrate the local black college. In one way or another, she was a teacher her whole life. I miss her.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}