Tag: my mom

Mom: you were WAY too hard on yourself

“Hey, none of us are in jail. We didn’t end up as mass murderers, or anything. So there’s that!”

Around 1981, my mother took a cooperative extension course near her home in Charlotte, NC; I don’t even know what the topic was. What my sisters and I DO recall, though, is that it had a profound, and, from our point of view, negative impact on her.

The message she received from the class was that she was a bad mother. She worked outside the home most of the time when we were growing up. She left her children with HER mother for the bulk of the day. She wasn’t much of a cook – because her mother, who was pretty good, didn’t bother to teach her – so couldn’t share this with skill with her children.

The first time she mentioned this to me when I visited the family early in 1982, I thought she was kidding. But she brought this up time and again. In 1984, I remember spending a whole train ride from Providence, RI, where a cousin had graduated from college to New York City, where we rendezvoused with the rest of the family, trying, and failing, to convince her of her positive qualities.

After a while, my sisters and I developed some pat, and perhaps snarky responses to her ridiculous narrative:
“Mom, we all turned out fine, so you must have done SOMETHING right!”
“You were not around all the time, so we appreciated you when you WERE there.”
“Hey, none of us are in jail. We didn’t end up as mass murderers, or anything. So there’s that!”

This litany of hers went on, off and on, for perhaps a decade and a half; I specifically remember addressing this topic as late as 1996, because I probably said something such, “You have to stop beating yourself up over this! We’re not unhappy with you, but we’re sad that you’re so unhappy.” This wasn’t the first time my sisters and I had said that, but I don’t recall her launching into this particular diatribe, at least with me, again.

Still, I’m pained that she could be so susceptible, for so long, to someone else’s script. I knew that she could be emotionally squeezed by her mother and her husband at times. Still, this (bogus) message from a stranger really stifled her self-confidence at times.

As I remember my mom, two years after she died, I wish she could have listened more to her own voice.
***
Mark Evanier, his mother, her ophthalmologist, and a certain cartoon character, which is a fun story.

 

Presents for Mom

She was a tactful woman, but it was quite evident that she did not particularly enjoy my selection.

When my sisters and I were growing up, buying presents for my mother was not exactly easy. But for either her birthday or Christmas and occasionally both, she would receive some product from Jean Naté. It was “her” product line. I didn’t even know it was still being made until I looked it up; it’s now owned by Revlon.

When she, my father, and baby sister moved down to Charlotte, she started collecting decorative bells. There are LOTS of bells out there, so this made purchasing easy.

Still, I wanted to go off-script, and in 1981, I decided to buy her an LP, Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive, based on my understanding that she liked some of the original Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway songs. She was a tactful woman, but it was quite evident that she did not particularly enjoy my selection. I went back to the bells.

Then around 2000, she decided the bells were just dust collectors and got rid of all but a handful of them, indicating that she didn’t want any more. Suddenly, I didn’t have a gift for which to be on the lookout. I would ask my mother outright, and she’d always say something useless, such as “You don’t need to get me anything.” Yeah, Mom, but I WANT to. Ultimately, I’d just ask my baby sister, who lived with her.

For either her birthday or Christmas 2010, I found this just perfect sweater – warm, the right color purple. Plus I got her those word puzzles that she liked to do to keep her mind sharp.

Today would have been Mom’s 85th birthday. I wish I still had to struggle with what to buy her.

The baby sister as caretaker

On Marcia’s birthday, I just wanted to thank her publicly for all she did for our mom.

Back in the mid-1980s, my “baby” sister Marcia, who was in her mid-20s, was living at home with our parents in Charlotte, NC. I said to her at the time, “You’d better get out of there. You’re going to get stuck taking care of our aging parents,” who were approaching 60 (in other words, about my current age – yeesh.)

After my father died in 2000, my mother, my sister, and her daughter lived together. I would help out and visit when I could, but I had a family in Albany, NY. My sister Leslie also had her life in San Diego, CA.

As the one left at home, Marcia, with her daughter, became the one to take care of our mother, when, in the last few months of her life, she became more erratic and forgetful. Much of what was going on I was totally not aware of until well after the fact.

So on Marcia’s birthday, I just wanted to thank her publicly for all she did for our mom. When one has the caretaker role, sometimes it’s difficult when the role ends, I realize. And now she’s the head of the household. I wish her love and good fortune moving forward.

The teller of secrets

I muse how my life would have been if, instead of being the eldest child, I had had an older brother.

 

Today would have been my parents’ 62nd anniversary. But my dad died a few months after their 50th, in 2000. I always remember the date, though, because my mom always referred to me as an early anniversary present. I was born five days shy of their third wedding anniversary. Coincidentally, my eldest niece was born five days short of HER parents’ anniversary. Also, since my parents were married in 1950, it was always easy to calculate how long they had been hitched.

The odd thing about my parents. My father revealed almost nothing about his past. My mother, though, starting when I was nine or ten, would drop tidbits about her past, my parents’ joint history, and, more peculiarly, events from my father’s past at which she was not present, to my sisters and to me. So she told us stuff about him that he never told us about himself. Some were so spotty that it engendered more questions than answers. A few things fell into the category of “We REALLY did not need to know that.” Other bits were useful; WHY my father didn’t particularly like Christmas made a certain amount of sense.

One item she mentioned was that she had experienced a miscarriage in April 1951, in the second trimester of the pregnancy; it was a male. She was rather matter-of-fact about it in the telling, but she noted that my father was rather devastated by the situation. So when my mother got pregnant again, in 1952, she reported that he was a bit at arm’s length emotionally about it. It wasn’t until the baby arrived safely that he could even think about coming up with names.

This explains the frantic calculation of names he did on scraps of paper at his cousin Ruth’s house before he came up with Roger Owen Green, with the initials ROG. From time to time, I muse how my life would have been if, instead of being the eldest child, I had had an older brother.

40 Years Ago: March 5, 1972 – did not see that coming

It was a surprise birthday party for me!

In the Scudder Hall dorm, at the State University College of New Paltz, my room was B-2. I had a roommate named Ron, who was a graduate student; an odd pairing, a freshman and someone doing post-graduate work. But he was a pretty easy-going guy, and I guess I didn’t drive him too crazy.

It was surprising, though, that one day, Ron decided that we really needed to thoroughly clean the room. I didn’t think it looked that bad, but surely I would not have been the gold standard for that kind of thing.

A couple of days later, which was a Sunday, my friend Uthaclena was over at one of the dining halls playing billiards. I must admit here that 1) I love playing pool, but in spite of that, 2) I’ve never gotten very good at it.

After a time, he and I went back to my dorm room. If you have had glasses, you know how it was when it’s a bit cool out, then you walk into a room that’s a bit warmer? Right – the glasses steam up. So I walk into my room, and there are my girlfriend, the Okie (I think – I’m having trouble seeing), and our friend Alice, Ron of course, but wait? Is that my father, mother, and sisters? And who is THAT guy? (It turned out to be the quasi-boyfriend of one of my sisters.) And possibly others, though it was a small room.

It was a surprise birthday party for me! My birthday wasn’t for a couple of days, and so it caught me unawares. But it was great. I was feeling a bit melancholy, my first birthday away from home. And, more than that, they brought a lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken ((back when they called it that), and there was enough left over for me to have for a couple more meals.

The event had a profound impact on me. I have subsequently helped pull off a number of surprise birthday parties over the years. Of course, I can still be surprised myself; the very next year, my parents, coordinating with the Okie, puled off another event; I think we went out to dinner. And much more recently, Uthaclena and his wife plotted with my wife to surprise me.

One last thing about the plan two score ago: my father called our dorm room one morning at 7 a.m. Ron answered the phone, and my father revealed the plan. But even as I lay on my bed half-awake, Ron never let on who he was talking to. But it DID lead to a clean dorm room.

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