May 15, 2023
Greetings from the prodigal,
I was looking for something else and I came across a manila envelope. Inside were sixty-four handwritten pages, pieced together over nearly five years. My mother, Barbara, wrote them out thirty years ago, for her grandchildren, a glimpse of a story that otherwise might not be known.
There are all sorts of interesting commentaries about our family’s history, about what things cost and how people dressed and who was at what event, and how they traveled. I’m trying to imagine how my children would absorb any of it. The world comes at them in such amazing ways now, I don’t know how they would see sixty-four pages of cursive about a time that is probably, to them, about as relevant as the Paleozoic era.
Which leads me to a confession of sorts. For too many of her years, I didn’t know my mother as a person so much as I knew her as her role.
It didn’t occur to me to wonder if she liked being a parent or being married or living where we lived. I don’t know when she worried about paying bills, or what she was going to feed all of the kids that simply assumed she would feed them. I don’t know if she would rather have had a career instead of devoting most of her young life to working at home.
I didn’t know she was shy. For some reason, amidst all the words on the sixty-four pages, that stood out to me. I sat on the bed of our spare bedroom and read what she wrote about getting married and having children and what her parents were like and how much she earned working at her first job. And she was shy.
Of course, she was more than that, it’s just one of the personal things that mattered. She grew up, became a wife, created a home for her family, traveled, made friends, had a lot of fun. She had her share of heartbreak, and none of it ruined her. Like other people we know, she cried and was afraid and prayed and pushed on into new things.
What I saw in all of that was my mother. I didn’t analyze that she was different from my friends or other people I got to know, even as an adult. She was just this other person who was my mother. I knew her as well as you could know someone who you lived with for nearly two decades. Well, that’s not entirely true.
Later in her life, when I could have known her better, I knew mostly her struggles. The aches of aging, the frustrations, those new worries that come with being older. Her world narrowed, and what she chose narrowed it further. And here I’ll confess that in all those years, I didn’t ask her the same questions I ask my close friends, about what they care about or what they wish for, or what the best part of their day was.
It may be the time we were raised or our own dynamic, or maybe it was just me, but with the wonderful bond between parents and children there is alongside it a barrier, a gauze of otherness.
Once in a while I would warn my children that my mother would likely tell them stories that were not entirely true. It was meant as a joke, sort of, but it was not respectful, in spite of the accuracy of it. My mother loved to tell stories, usually primed with a glass of wine, which prompted her to add color to the facts. Here was another place we could all have known her better, and perhaps in my impatience we cut it short.
She was a wonderful, charming woman, and held a learned sophistication that fit her personality. created friendships that lasted decades, raised five amazing children who all grew up to be beautiful people, including the son who wondered if he could have known her better.
She wore saddle shoes, she borrowed sugar from the neighbors, she borrowed money from the bank so she and my dad could go on a vacation, she lived in poverty, she had a huge house, she saw a lot of the world, loved Caesar salad and martinis and when she was in high school, surrounded by people she wanted to know better, she was shy.
None of this is written simply so you could know my mother better. It is sent in the hope that if it is still possible, that you might know your own mother better. Take off the mantle of daughter or son, and look at her with the eyes of a friend, and ask her to tell you what she thinks, how she feels. Ask what mattered, what was important, about regrets, about grief, about love, ask about her best friend, and maybe the person who broke her heart. Ask her what you would ask if suddenly you couldn’t ask.
Hope this finds you treasuring,
David
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