Always Home

First I want to establish that she was my go to protection against Frankenstein. Now I want you to know that while I was ten I wasn't stupid, I didn't say Mom was my first choice, it was just that Dad didn't want to hear from Frankenstein, which left me shit out of luck  after me and my overactive imagination binge watched five days of Creature Feature on TV 38.(Binge watching could take years of careful preparation back in the day unless you were lucky enough to stumble upon Movie 38's Frankenstein week) Dad was a hard case, no matter how many times Frankenstein was in my closet, that noise couldn't have been the pipes, he had no intention of indulging my childish fears. Mom on the other hand always assured me that Frankenstein was fake, but that didn't stop her from sitting in the rocking chair until I fell asleep.

...because of coarse she could kick Frankenstein's ass.

Now in retrospect it seems obvious that a 5'3" 115 lb. woman couldn't have protected me from Frankenstein if he really was in the closet, but it is also obvious that I'm still here to write this. So either Mom gave some serious monster beat downs after I fell asleep or Frankenstein was a serious pussy. Hard to say because Mom was hard to figure out.

She definitely seemed tough. First anybody in her family to graduate collage, she then flitted off to Hudson Bay to help  Mcgill University map what were uncharted territories in 1952. With her cartography project done it was then off to the University of Nebraska for a masters degree in geography. I know, standard lady stuff in 1953, that degree would almost be a cliche if she had got it. Dad happened instead. By 1954 they were both teaching High School in New Jersey. Then I came along. By 1958 Dad was working on a Masters in education at Temple University and Mom was a housewife.

She was not a standard issue housewife though. She was still both tough and ,well, odd. One time when the neighborhood kids I was playing with hoisted my 4 year old brother into a tree by tying a rope around his ankle she vaulted a standard backyard chainlink fence, caught the ringleader by the ear, and never let go until he lowered my brother to the ground. She then dragged him home to be lambasted  in front of his mom and dad. after which she lambasted the mom and dad for good measure. Did I mention that she was pregnant at the time.

She did other bad ass stuff too. Did you know she used to pull her own teeth?

Had to hurt right?

I was a kid at the time so stuff like that just made me think, "My Mom is a badass". Kids never think of other possibilities. Possibilities like maybe she was so afraid of Dentists that she would have to take extreme measures when the pain of a rotten tooth would get to be too much. Years later as her health began to fail and her hospital freak outs became more acute it was obvious that kids know nothing.

Still even afraid, angry or sad she was no standard issue mom. When I was about 5 our dog Pepper, actually it was Mom's dog so I can't account for its' where-abouts while she was traipsing across the country side for collage, got sick. Mom took him to the Veterinarian. Well he was 17 years old and it was the 60's. Time to say goodbye right? Let the Vet do his job. A little cyanide, a disposal fee, then pick out a new man's best friend at the pound. That didn't play with a woman that had a set in stone moral code and an unhealthy love of Walt Disney movies.

Mom loaded Pepper, a shovel, and her .410 shotgun into our 1957 Pontiac station wagon and drove out to the Pine Barrens. She only brought home the shovel and the gun.

He's my responsibility.

 Moms bid to be a Nietzhian obermensch freed from her slave morality to truly make her own ethical decisions based on empathy and her own sense of right and wrong ended as those things often do, in tears and self doubt. Even if it is the right thing your brain doesn't always let you off the hook.  I on the other hand learned a valuable story telling lesson. If you want to make people cry kill the dog. Thanks Uncle Walt, it is a small world after all.

On the plus side Mom always insisted that life was awesome. All through my childhood she shlepped me and the rest of the brood to the library, the beach, the woods, the ball field, the frog pond, where-ever there was an adventure to experience. "I have travelled extensively in Concord Massachusetts". She loved to quote Thoreau, but she also made fun of him for taking home his laundry to his mom. So while I don't remember her quoting Walden ironically or wistfully  I was a kid so what did I know.

Me and my sibs brought the pee to peaceful every time we visited Walden.

I don't think Mom could do irony though. This was a woman that taught us how to catch snakes, frogs, turtles, toads. She was always setting up fish tanks, pens, and cages. Once a box turtle tried to trek across the yard and the dogs, pepper was only the first of a steady supply of dogs, messed him up. After 2 days trapped in his own shell off to the Vet we went where she would't leave until the Doc, who even a 9year old could tell thought she was nuts, at least tried something. 2 Months after that Mr turtle was back in the wild far from angry dogs. She never wanted us to own nature, but she wanted us to understand nature so every spring we would raid the pond with our nets till we had a bucket load of tadpoles. By early summer we were back at the pond with a bucket load of frogs.

Back to the wild?But them's good eating.

When she wasn't teaching us how to live in the moment, how to embrace the magic of the back yard, or how to climb a tree, she was always trying to step further afield herself. She did Bible study, book groups, PTA... not a joiner though, she always quit for something else. She'd always come home with tails about boneheaded people of privilege. She was a person of privilege that didn't like or respect persons of privilege. She was also hopelessly aware that somehow her proximity to life's finish line was somehow not an advantage for her.

I guess that was pretty much a life theme for Mom. Chained to societies rules, and her personal rules, even while the times were shattering them both. She worked as a substitute teacher for years but couldn't get hired full time even though my father was a principal.(I won't help, that would be unfair nepotism, chains) she tried to get involved with the civil rights movement by bring an at risk kid to the house for the summer and working with METCO.(we don't need help from the clueless privileged, chains) she immersed herself in Friedan, Steinhem, and Bouvior(she couldn't make the leap that wealthy middle-class people were also oppressed, chains). She was an outlier and her comfortable life was a gut punch, maybe because she was afraid or because she thought too much or she took the easy path or she had too many rules or maybe it was all on these things and none of them. A gut punch is a gut punch.

She could have taken Barker and Sandler both.

I don't mean to be maudlin. It's just that my Mom's story is so different from my Fathers. He got the standard issue American success story. She got a pretty good life, it just the one forced(?) on her not the one she though she deserved. And of coarse the new age of feminism was extra kind to those that got left behind. (Sarcasm)

I get it. The 60 minutes guy asking the questions with all his male privilege pissed you off. Having to do the interview at all probably pissed you off. Not an unreasonable response, but the contempt you showed for the cookie bakers with your tone pretty much defined my mothers self image going forward. Nice job. 15 years younger and completely immersed in the barriers you crossed while casually  oblivious to the trials of those that went before.

The new information age proved to be too much for Mom. She was a Catholic born and raised with a Catholic's rules drilled into her, but when liberation theology came to Central America she watched nightly on TV as the church turned its' back while CIA trained death squads murdered priests and nuns. She was front and center as the Boston Globe spotlight team reveled the abuse scandal. She watched in person as that self same church plopped her mother into an old people warehouse after taking all her money then working her for 25 years as a nun.(that's a whole other story).

So there she was, yolked to her churches rules but unable, or unwilling, to believe in her church. She fancied herself a liberal at a time that liberals where being vilified by the right and looked down upon as clueless boobs by the left. She was outside of labor. Feminism passed her by then forgot her. She was an outstanding Mom but even her own kids had issues with her fear and her Disneyfied beliefs. And how do you have Disneyfied beliefs when the nightly news shatters those images every night?

She got more and more insuler as the years went by. More and more she was living the magic of the back yard. If the world doesn't want me I don't want the world. Then Dad died. When your world stops at the end of the driveway it gets pretty lonely when you are the only person in it.

It took 5 more years. It was probably the longest suicide ever. Last weekend I watched as she slowly, painfully died. Afraid, then beyond afraid, in pain only slightly dulled by morphine, her cognitive functions reduced to a primal cry for things to end, and I couldn't even offer her the dignity she offered to a 17 year old black lab. She passed on a Sunday morning while I was in the TV room watching the FOX talking heads basically say it was time for Pope Francis to shut-up, liberation theology was dead, and nobody cared about it anyway.

Goodbye Mom.