I was raised by a single mother and I am not a prostitute

I know it isn't Mother's Day yet. Close enough.

Recently, a story appeared in the New York Times about Terran Lyons, a third shift worker at McDonald's  who is trying to raise two children on minimum wage. Each night, Ms. Lyons shuttles her children to evening caregivers and each day she balances the tasks of parenting on little or no sleep. She works the less preferred night shift because that's where the opportunity lies to work up to a supervisory level. She is twenty-four.

Twenty-four.

I commented on the article: "This brave, focused woman...is paying some huge dues now. But among the rewards I believe are in store for Terran, is seeing those kids grow up loved, strong, and driven to make a success of themselves. They don't have much, but they have a lot of the right things." 

Here was one response to my comment:  "This is something of a fairy tale response. If Ms. Lyons lives in a low income area, once the kids are old enough, the neighborhood will come calling and if mom is at work a lot, the kids will face peer pressure like they have never known. It's just life. You'd understand if you grew up without."

It wasn't just the "growing up without" comment that gave me pause. It was her assumption that the family is fighting a losing battle.

My parents divorced when I was in grade school and my brother and I were raised by my mother. She worked all day, and we spent a lot of time after school in respective activities which, for me at least, did not include a heavy amount of homework. 

Often, following a parent-teacher meeting, my mother would come home and report that I was performing at an "average" level. I started to dislike the word.

"Don't tell me anymore that I'm working hard and doing average work," I used to say. "There's nothing special about average."

"Well. Maybe you should be sure you really are working hard," she suggested, with her nice mother smile. 

I reacted to this by stomping upstairs and slamming the door, and she reacted to this by starting dinner.

But after that, I worked harder. And she didn't call me average again.

Despite my mother and father's agreeable relationship, and my regular contact with him, this was at a time when single-parent homes were considered "broken" and children living in them were considered juvenile delinquents in the making. Nervous women in the neighborhood kept a closer eye on their husbands when we moved in.   

Many outcomes of our situation were possible. If I'd believed my classmate in the third grade, who leaned forward, shook the back of my chair and whispered "I know what you're going to be when you grow up. A prostitute. My mother told me last night,"  I might have feared I was destined to prowl dark alleys like a feral cat. But I reported the comment to my mother who, with impressive restraint, only iterated her own expectations of me, and made me understand that ignorant and cruel people didn't become that way because of me. She modeled work ethic, independence and class. Moreover, she modeled the ability to turn a deaf ear to people like my classmate's mother every day.  

However hard Terran Lyons works to create an example, she will be dogged by the assumptions people hold about other people living with risk: poor, single-parent households will produce unsupervised children who will meet their need to be loved by becoming pregnant or seeking out the closest gang.

Does that happen? Yes. And those outcomes break lives in half. But when we talk about the underserved in our society it strikes me that it isn't just poverty or the privilege of others that keeps children of disadvantage behind the ropes. Very often, it's the expectation that their circumstances will fail them more than their own resilience will free them.  

The assumptions behind the New York Times comment bring home the reality that people still view hardworking, challenged people like Terran Lyons  and her children  in pass/fail terms. It might have been the way people thought of my brother and me.

But in our house, there was no "probably won't" about it. My mother expected nothing less of us than complete success and to nobody's surprise, we went on to build productive, happy lives, and raise strong, loved children.

My fairy tale experience is that children are resilient, strong creatures. They know more intuitively at young ages than they ever may again. If you tell them something, they will believe it, maybe forever. But when it is modeled for a child that a better life is within one's own control, it is more than hopeful. It is the key to that child's castle.

Nobody Wants to Spill a Drink

Foreword:  While I pull the final chapters of The Book together, I'll re-post once again. This one drew more hits than any I've written to date. It still makes me think about how we view a child's missteps. See you soon.

I was talking with my oldest son about someone I know who spills a lot.

“Spills a lot?” He asked.

“Some people trip. She spills.”

It was meant to be a throwaway, a relatable comment to which most people would respond: 
"I lose stuff,” or, “I drop things,” etc. But my son was thoughtful. “When I’m a parent, I’m going to make sure the one thing I do when my kid spills a drink is say, ‘no big deal.’”

When teenagers tell you they’ll let their kids hang around with anyone they want, or stay out until they feel like coming home, you shrug. When an adult child starts a sentence with, “When I’m a parent…” you brace.   

Then you personalize.

I rummaged through my mental archives, trying to recall the incident(s) which led to my son's pledge to his future child.

I said, “How often were we that upset over a spilled drink?”
“You weren’t,” he said, “But parents do it all the time. Scold kids for doing things they didn’t want to do in the first place. Nobody wants to spill a drink. It isn’t in anyone’s nature to want to spill anything. When it happens to my kid, I’m not going to punish him or her. I’ll be sympathetic.”

First, I smiled in my heart at the thought of my son being that kind of parent. Then I rummaged through my shoebox again until the subject changed.

It was timely insight, because the following night, as he hurried to get to a baseball function, my younger son backed into my car. I saw the whole thing. Saw him leap from the car and run up the stairs to the house, where I waited. He was holding his head, his eyes were like quarters. 

“I hit your car,” he said, “I am so sorry.”

“Let me take a look,” I said.

My car looked like it had coughed up its insides through the headlight. 
"Holy (bad word here). You certainly did,” I said.

“I’ll pay for it,” said my financially dependent child.

“No, but thank you,” I said. “Go do your dinner thing. We’ll talk about it later.”

“I’ll give you my car,” he said.

I hugged him and said, “I wish I didn’t know how you feel right now, but I do.”

Nobody wants to spill a drink.

I made him leave, grateful that he wasn’t hurt, grateful that this had occurred in our driveway and not in a busy parking lot, and, of course, grateful that I wasn't standing in front of the fender when he backed up.

Someday my son will probably have a child who drives into something. He won’t remember the lecture or punishment I might have come up with when it happened to him. But he will remember how he felt when his mistake created a loss for someone else. And maybe when his child is standing there holding his head, with eyes like quarters, waiting for the reaction that still won’t be as bad as the way he already feels, my son will offer a hug instead of something less useful.

It was the day before my birthday, a day my children find tedious because I already have everything I can use. And yet, smashed fender and all, didn’t both Sam and I wind up with something we can both use, thanks to a little gift of insight from Drew:

Nobody wants to spill a drink.

Erma Bombeck, blog-sitter

The following piece was written by Erma Bombeck, a queen among everyday people who knew more about living and parenting through humor than anyone I've read since she left us in the late nineties.

I think every mother I know has come across this timeless gem, "I Loved You Enough."  But I read it as a teenager and never forgot it.  And, if every near-adult child had a parent who was this much of a nuisance in their life, well...they'd be grateful someday.

Since I write now and then about parent relationships with grown children, it seemed a good placeholder while I finish taking care of non-bloggy business for the next couple of days. 

I Loved You Enough

Someday, when my children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates a mother, I'll tell them:

          

I loved you enough to bug you about where you were going, with whom, and what time you would get home.

         

I loved you enough to be silent and let you discover your hand-picked friend was a creep.

I loved you enough to make you return a Milky Way with a bite out of it to a drugstore and confess,  "I stole this."

I loved you enough to stand over you for two hours while you cleaned your bedroom, a job that would have taken me 15 minutes.

         

I loved you enough to not make excuses for your lack of respect or your bad manners.

I loved you enough to ignore  "what every other mother"  did.

I loved you enough to figure you would lie about the party being chaperoned but forgive you for it....after discovering I was right.

I loved you enough to let you stumble, fall and fail so that you could learn to stand alone.

I loved you enough to accept you for who you are, not what I wanted you to be.

But most of all, I loved you enough to say no when you hated me for it.   That was the hardest part of all. 
 

                                                   ~ Erma Bombeck

At times, one, more than the rest.

Our seats on Mummy Mountain

Occasionally, like we did last Tuesday night, my mother and I gather at the summit of Mummy Mountain for a glass of wine and a discussion about all things life, work, happiness, and grown children.

“How are you, Mummy?” I asked when we were settled.

“I’m fine, thank you,” she said. “And how are you?”

“My children are abandoning me,” I said.

She sipped her wine and made a cracker, and encouraged me to go on in that mummy-therapist way we mothers of grown children acquire.

 

Lovely Courtney
as seen from the
summit of Mummy
Mountain

Last week I went to Cleveland to visit the lovely Courtney. Like always, I spent the first half hour of our visit staring at her and thinking about how lucky I am to have this smart, beautiful, competent, wise, funny girl for a daughter. If she were a cat, this would be when I’d give her a little scratch behind the ears and say, “Yesh. Who’sha a good girl? Who’sha a good, good girl.” But she’s a grown woman with bills and a landlord so I just stare at her and let her update me on all things life, work, happiness, and John.

“John will be here at Christmas because he has a singing commitment," she said twenty minutes from the airport. "He basically always will on Christmas. And we know we really want to be together on Christmas, so I probably won’t be home. But then I would definitely be home for Thanksgiving.”

It gave me pause, as any declaration does if it means I will be forced to spend time with moody Transition and its sad-sack cohort, Coping.  But we had only two days, with things to talk about, and places to go back to and new places to visit, and so I said to Transition, “Get lost, I’m busy,” and I said to Courtney, “You should do what you want to.” Because there are times, when one person needs one other, more than the rest, to understand them.

We had dinner at an outside bistro where a young couple sat with their seven or eight-month-old baby. Next to them was an animated, boorish man, 25 or so, who wore oversized dark glasses, and who, with his entire body, carried on  a shrill, melodramatic cell phone conversation with someone I only hoped would have to hang up soon. The infant watched him, hunched and still with fascination. When the call ended, the man turned, and seeing how he’d captivated her, lifted his giant black glasses quickly and gasped in a peek-a-boo fashion. The baby reared back in surprise, and wailed. The man laughed. Frightened, arms outstretched, the baby reached for her mother who smiled a reassuring “It’s okay,” at the man and lifted her sobbing daughter to her, cooing little things until she settled. The father, though aware, hadn’t stopped eating. The baby never looked at him. There are times, when one person needs one other, more than the rest, to make them feel safe.

We had been talking about what I want to be called when I’m a grandmother. After the scared-baby moment we talked about what I might have done had my future grandinfant been scared by a man like that. I said that not only would I not have smiled reassuringly at him, I might, in fact, have told him he and his giant glasses were both (bad word
here)s.

Later when I was alone, I thought about the “when I grow up,” conversations we have with small children in which they imagine what they might do with their lives. You know their minds will change a thousand times but still, you help them. You talk very seriously about where they might locate their mansions when they become famous performing artists, what kind of clothes they’ll wear, what kind of dog they’ll keep in their purse. There are times, when one person needs one other, more than the rest, to make them feel the best things are possible.

Hello Transition, where do you want me?

Like always, the visit ended too soon and before I knew it, I was dropping my shoes and purse in the bins at security, distracted and blue, so that when the woman snapped at me for walking through the security arch too quickly, I wanted to sit down on the little feet imprints to weep.

At my gate, I saw, sitting by herself with a Kindle and a Vitamin Water, someone who looked exactly like my own mother who I promptly texted.

“Wine,” I said.

She penciled me in for Tuesday.

“First, it’s Christmas,” I said looking out over the land of grown children which, on a clear day, is visible from the summit of Mummy Mountain. “One doesn’t come home,” I said, “and the next thing you know, nobody comes home. It’s just like when someone leaves the party and then everybody does.”

“That’s not going to happen," said my mother.

“Yes it will and then they’ll be too busy to call at Christmas time and I'll be by myself staring out the window and listening to the Rat Pack and there will be nobody to call because all my friends will be with their grown children who still come home and Tom and Christine will be family-ing somewhere with Ross and Collin and so it will just be me and the tree which I will have started talking to (Yesh! Who'sha good tree? Who'sha good, good tree?) and on the floor there will be a box of ornaments that nobody came to hang which will still be there on January 3 because I will have become too depressed to move it and it will stay there for eleven more months along with the tree which I will be too depressed to disassemble and put back in the basement. So that's it. It’s ending,” I said.

I didn't believe it of course, this Eeyore version of "When I grow up." But one should not let worry skitter away like an ant. If worry is to be addressed, it must be increased by several zoom levels first, so that all flaws may be examined before resizing is attempted. This applies to just about everything in life.  You're welcome.

“This is not ending,” she said. “This is changing. This is how it begins. They change first, and you change with them. If they have to stop coming to you, because they have jobs, or small children, or unforgiving in-laws or whatever it is they have, you’ll pack your bag and go to them. That’s what we do. I did it. You'll do it.” 

I knew that, of course. I’ve always known it. But there are times, when I need my own mother, more than the rest, to remind me that the worst things aren't probable, and that what I hope is true, probably is.

And so, Courtney, if you're reading this, you know by now that you'll need many people and things and experiences in life to remain independent and strong and beautiful and competent and wise and funny. Two of those things are seats on Mummy Mountain.

Welcome to America. Would you like trains for dinner?

It occurred to me the other day that Sam is possibly, God willing, going to make it through high school without asking if we can host an exchange student. It’s not that I don’t love the idea. I love the idea very much if other people have it.

Courtney asked if we could host an exchange student somewhere in the first half of her high school career. She framed her argument well, and had I been a person who cared what everybody else did, or craved a vicarious cultural experience, I would have been sold right away. But it was her suggestion that it would really help her early French skills to be communicating with our student non-stop for two weeks that made me say “Okay, let’s do it."

Like anyone, I like to believe that if I care enough, am determined enough, put my whole heart into something – aerobics, preparing fish, what have you – I will succeed. I’ve been proven wrong twice: I look like I am running from bees in an aerobics class. When I have finished preparing fish, it looks exactly like it did under the sickly lights at Hannaford. Much as I tried to retain more in college, my foreign language skills end with “Where is the library” in Italian and Spanish, and “How did you sleep last night?” in German. I worried about the language barrier but shrugged it off, and we wound up with Audrey, whose English was not nearly as good as my French.

We got the room ready. We got Audrey’s profile information. I bought a French-English dictionary. I contacted the circle of parents who did this all the time and asked for advice. We picked up Audrey and I gave her a big welcome-to-America hug.

On the way home, I apologized to Audrey for the very bumpy condition of the road.
“Ehhh?” she said.
“Tell her what I said, Courtney.”
“About what?”
“About the bumpy road.”
She said a few things I didn't understand, and gestured.
Audrey shook her head and said several things in Fren-glish.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“I’m not really sure,” Courtney said. She smiled encouragingly at Audrey who smiled back and probably wondered if it was too late to go back to France.

Later that night, Courtney was asked to work extra shifts at the GAP for the next several days. "Go," I said, "We'll do this." 

It's not like it was Aerobics.

I took Audrey food shopping the next day. French-English dictionary in hand I brought her to the meat department where I asked if she would like some of “these potatoes?” She pointed to the correct word in the dictionary and I said, with much gesturing, page turning, and many hopeful facial expressions, "Take whatever you want and put it in the cart,"  which she did.

Thankfully, exchange students have an agenda which I learned to understand, and Audrey was soon among other exchange students, touring the sights, eating the food, learning the language, and gossiping about the host-parents which is probably when Audrey said in French, “Yeah, but I’ll bet your host mother knows the word for steak.”

But this was not aerobics or fish-grilling. Dictionary at the ready, I asked and learned about Audrey’s family, her boyfriend, her upbringing, her hometown and what she wanted to do when she graduated. Courtney was eventually released from the GAP in time to have a conversation with Audrey before she went back to France. When she did leave, she was not relieved but sad. And, okay, we were too. A little.

I have new appreciation for people who bring in exchange students over and over again, and make it a worthwhile experience for the entire family each time. If I were asked, I’d probably allow myself to be talked into it the way I’ll probably give halibut-wrapped-in-foil another shot on the grill. But the senior year is already here and I haven’t heard a peep from Sam. I’m hoping it stays that way, as much as I hope Audrey finally became a veterinarian or vegetarian or valedictorian the way she wanted to.

Mummying

In 1986, when I became a new mother and had few “skills” but ideals and assumptions that numbered in the hundreds, I took an approach to raising children that I take today when a gigantic project awaits: think of an outcome, and work backwards. More than anything I wanted to raise children who would trust themselves in the future as much as they trusted me in the beginning. To that end, I told them often, and usually in the wake of a particularly bad parenting moment, “I’m no better at this than you are.”

These years later, I love my children for countless reasons, but here is a big one: They took me at my word when I told them they were better experts on themselves than I was. They are still that way, experts all.

It isn’t that my parenting has been hands-off – I’ve had my face-offs against the bad teacher here, the bad coach there, the bad parent of a bad kid elsewhere, but only when my protective instincts have taken over and sent my judgement out for an ice cream. For the most part, my young adult children have developed and followed their own user manuals, with only editing suggestions from me and my husband.

Now, as three of the four draft budgets and prepare to pay rent and car insurance and cell phone bills on their own, and the fourth closes in on his last SAT exam, I am in full awe of how naturally it comes to them to be honest, courageous, kind, industrious people, and, as I knew all along, how little help they needed from anyone else to be those things.

Thank you Courtney, Drew, Jacqueline and Sam, for making it as easy as breathing to adore you.

I love you all. And oh, not just for this.

Awed

Here is class.
Here is determination.
Here is confidence in the making.

A few months ago, Jacqueline quietly signed up to run in the Cape Cod Marathon and without fanfare, went about the business of “training.” Periodically, there were updates about her running schedule (twenty miles before dinner two weeks ago), diet regimens and other things she was doing to meet her goal. Most of it she kept to herself, as though the sudden need to bow out might present itself and would be easier to handle without having raised anyone’s hopes, including her own.

On Saturday, en route to our hotel in Falmouth she said, “I don’t want to say ‘after the marathon,’ anymore. I shouldn’t say that as if I already did it.”

Sunday morning, at 6:15, she checked in and received her bib. At 8:31, a cannon sounded and she was off, her black and orange hair ribbons visible for only seconds before she was engulfed in a crowd of 1100 runners that rolled from the start line like a wave.  Her onlygoal she said at the beginning was to finish, to reach the end of the 26 mile route. She could have focused on the higher goal of placing, but she opted to bring it down a peg, zeroed in, and went for it.

I was at the finish line a good hour and a half before she appeared. Many runners sprinted to the finish, others limped purposefully across, some collapsed. One had to be carried. At around five hours and twenty minutes, Jacqueline rounded the corner several blocks away. Her pace was steady. She passed me, looked at me with a huge smile of “I did it,” then crossed the line, arms raised. She was wrapped in a blanket and awarded a medallion. I was too awed to cry. At first. 

This is the Jacqueline Bonifant route to confidence: Consider what you can probably do with very hard work. Then shut up and do more. Be constantly surprised by your own strength. Be motivated for the next challenge that comes along. Repeat above steps.

Sometimes, in spite of all our good thoughts, high hopes, solemn prayers, heartfelt beliefs and lofty expectations, our children don’t accomplish what we think/hope/pray/believe/expect they will, but more.

Jacqueline on Sunday, one month and four days after her twenty-first birthday, was Jacqueline squared.

Congratulations, my girl. I am beyond proud of you.

Clothespin doll

In three weeks, I have had three discussions with three mothers who are all at some precipice or another with regard to their growing children. One whose young child is entering the “K-3”years, one whose child will enter high school this fall, another whose last child will leave for college in a week. These discussions have the same question at the core:

What now?

I don't want this to be the blog of get-to-the-point, (see preceding post) but I think the parenting career (I refuse to call it a journey. Everybody calls everything a journey) is as fascinating as the period that follows childbirth itself when, without even paying extra, we get to marinate in the new knowledge that we are super-powerful after all, capable of all things in the entire world, because just look at what we produced, even as we were coming apart like a clothespin doll. And men, if they aren’t the obstetricians, reinforce this. I don’t care how many times they wince at Mel Gibson being stretched to death on a rack, crowning wins. Witnessing the birth of our four children changed the way my husband looked at me forever.

That’s how we feel on day one of our parenting career. Blessed, and cursed with the knowledge that we can do anything for our children if we have to, want to, need to, if that’s what they need, even if it hurts.

But I don’t want this to be the blog of I-already-know-that so I’ll move on.

More than once in my twenty-four year parenting career I’ve woken at 3 a.m. with two thoughts: I don’t know what she’s doing. And, what if she needs me? Then the what-ifs start. What if she didn’t lock her door? What if he walked home from a party and got mugged? What if she’s too sick to call and tell me she’s sick? What if he needs me, but he’s too proud to tell me he needs help? What if he needs me? What if she needs me? And so on.

Nobody imagines the worst like a mother can. Mothers imagine things so horrible they won’t even share them with other mothers (even though they should). It’s irrational, but it keeps us on our toes anticipating all that disaster and ways to prevent it. But the question isn’t really about the child’s welfare, because at 3:20 while we’re trying to control our breathing and slow our minds, our child is actually updating her status on Facebook and listening to something on Grooveshark. No, the question is really about a mother’s reach and correlationally, how well the child can possibly be doing if we aren’t involved with it somehow. It’s more than good parenting to wonder, it’s who we are and what we’ve done since our entry-level parenting years when our involvement did determine how well our children did. We told them what to do, what to eat, when, where, how and all the rest, and at that point in their little child careers, they thrived with all that supervision.

And so did we because after all, we didn’t almost split in half for nothing.

But it flips without warning. At some point, it’s time for them to drive, and time for us to shut up when they bump the curb because if we don’t, we’re not advancing them in their child careers, we’re telling them they’re not ready and they will believe us. It flips when they don’t share what they think, when they struggle but won’t ask for help, when they grow quiet and dark and stay in their rooms for too-long stretches while we wait on the other side, preparing a good ice-breaker which, God willing, will lead to a meaningful conversation like we used to have. And then, just as we’re considering the worst (drugs, of course) and talking it over with all our friends, and reading “life with your teenager” articles, it flips anew when from out of nowhere our child asks us to go for lunch, or shows us what they bought at the mall, or tells us something that has the potential to make us unhappy because, somewhere, somehow, holed up in there with only their own minds for company, they found the legs that go with their opinions.

It should feel good when they weather these storm systems in their child careers and emerge stronger and smarter, even if we lose weight and can’t focus on a television commercial while it’s happening, because it means we’re all being promoted. But I can go on forever about “should” now that my daughters and I cry at the same movies and have conversations that start with “So, listen to this.” When it was happening, what it felt like was, “what now?”

Eventually, if we stop telling and start asking, our children tell us “what.” Then they become CEO of their child careers, and we become trusted consultants. This is when we coach, more than we supervise (right, Kris?). This is when they call us not for advice, but support. Not for directions, but guidance. Not to hear the words of worry in our hearts, but the love in our voices.

So if you feel lost in the haze of “what now?” it might help to picture this: you’re ten or twenty years from now, sitting in a restaurant with your son or daughter who has, by now, become Chairchild of the Board. You say this: What was the thing you needed most from me when you were (their age now). They will tell you. If you’re watching and listening, you actually know the answer right now. Be that clothespin doll again, even if it hurts.

And now, I will think of a reason to go boss my fifteen-year-old around, because very soon, he’ll have his license and he will be driving. And I will be a passenger, looking for opportunities to shut up.

Dollface

Twenty four years ago tomorrow, at around four in the afternoon, Courtney dollface was born and I learned the difference between happy and complete.

I had the first of my three or four thousand heart to hearts with Courtney less than twelve hours later when I propped her up against my knees, looked her over as though she was a creature who'd been dropped from the moon, and thanked her. I promised to do my best, and asked God to give us both patience. I wondered if she'd be a little like me. I wondered if, in a couple of decades, we would have anything in common.
For the next twenty-four years, I watched my beautiful girl grow up before my eyes, move away, and become her own woman - smart, wise, funny and kind, with a heart that wraps around those lucky enough to have earned her love. She grew up with my guidance, and sometimes in spite of it. We're not the same people it turns out, but we've both been enriched by the differences between us. We'd run into traffic for each other.

I am stunned by the moments I catch myself seeing my dollface the way the world probably does. Or when I realize the decisive, independent person she is -even as the sight and sound of my daily influence has fallen away with time and geographical separations.

God came through with the patience we needed to go through almost two decades together and still plan lunches together at the Cheesecake Factory like long-lost college roomates. As her next chapter begins - love, career, marriage, children - I will stick my bossy mommy hat in a place where she'll find it if she ever needs to borrow it. I will be enjoying my softer hat which I borrowed from my own mother. It says across the front, in letters only we can see, "mentor."

Now there is a different word to describe the feeling of having any part in launching such a wonderful spirit into the world - and it is joy.

Happy birthday dollface, it is the easiest thing in the world to love you.

Mommy

Mummy and the gas station attendant

When I was younger, I called my mother “Ma.” When I got older and felt it made us sound like hillbillies, I switched to “Mummy.” For some reason, the very word “Mom,” sounds tired to me and makes me think of people rolling their eyes as they say it. Nobody rolls their eyes when they talk to my mother.

Among hundreds of other good things, my Mummy is the queen of unconditional love. When we were very young, there was someone in our neighborhood who had just gotten out of jail for killing a gas station attendant. My mother marveled at his mother’s willingness to take him in and give him a room without blinking because she was “his ma.” Some liken their fierce, boundless love for their children to the mother-bear thing, the grizzly-mama thing. My mother likens unconditional love to that woman who took her son back even though he once killed a gas station attendant.

But on Tuesday night, at age 73, she was admitted to the hospital with excruciating abdominal pain. They were after the gall bladder, given the symptoms, but when the cat scan showed “an obstruction with an unknown cause,” which "could be anything," they came back dressed in scrubs. Before I had a chance to notify my siblings, she was being wheeled to surgical suite #2 and I, holding my cell phone which now rang with frantic return calls, was being asked to say goodbye.

“Goodbye?”
“You have to do it now.”
I hugged her around the tubes.
“Goodbye, Mummy. I love you. Thank you.”
“And I love you, Darling.”

Is there a bigger word than Goodbye?

I wandered around for a while until I felt the breakdown coming and then I called my friend Maureen. Fifteen minutes later, the elevator doors opened and there she was. I said, “I’m not ready.”

For two hours, I alternated between overreacting and knowing I wasn’t overreacting. For two hours I thought about the daughter I’ve been, the mother she’s been, and the very poor job I’ve done with my side of that equation. I wondered what I gave her. It was hard to see around the glare of all she’d given me, and hard to think straight, wondering who would love me still, even if I killed a gas station attendant.

My husband, friends, and the siblings who could make it were there. But as the night wore on, I moved away until I was around the corner and it was there, on the phone to my out-of-town brother and trusted confidante Tom (raised with me by my mother after the divorce), that I realized I gave my mother more than stuff. I gave her back to my own children.

I believe with my entire heart, that each of my children knows they can call me at any age, at any hour of the morning, drunk or sick or laughing or crying and I’ll sit on the floor in my bathrobe and talk to them until they can go back to bed. I think each knows I will hop a plane, I will drop a plan, I will get into the nearest vehicle and will be at their side before they’ve had time to reconsider, if they say the words, “Can you come here?”

I’ve given my mother gifts of time and love. I’ve complimented her perms and shoes and invited her out for glasses of wine and Broadway shows. But more than that, I’ve been her in my own children’s lives. When they’re sick, when they’re sad, or worried, or happy, or quiet, or when they’re any of these things and alone, I believe my children know someone in the world will know everything they’ve said or done, and will still give them a room. There is no better report card when you’re a parent. My mother is high honors in this regard, and I’ve tested her more than once.

She came out of the surgery like a champ and will have a happier, healthier life as a result. And I have been given a chance to shore up my side of the equation.

But her reach is far and long. Her great-grandchildren will know her, even if they never meet, if I do this right. This week, I learned a lot about doing it right, in two of the longest hours we’ve both lived through.

I love you, Mummy.

Happy Birthday Dollface

My dollface is 23 today. She's in Rochester, but also in my heart, in that special room that says "First Baby" on the door with her name underneath.

I'm keeping an eye on the clock the way I do on her birthday, thinking back: what was going on now? How about now? At around four o'clock, I remember thinking it might not be so bad to have only one child. By five-thirty, I was asking the nurse to bring me a gin and tonic with a cracker and cheese plate. Not really! Ha. Can you imagine?

I asked her father to bring it.

Anyway, my lovely daughter has had a place at the top of my list of greatest blessings (and it's an impressive one) for a long, long, long time. She's brought laughter and love and luck into my life in ways I never expected. Her music passion has literally changed my life, and not just because I learned what a viola actually is, but because it's everywhere. I miss my girl? I listen to a symphony.

Also, there's nobody else who enjoys character shopping as much as I do; sitting in a bus or train terminal and "guessing the stories," or analyzing the mood of people stuck in traffic based on their bumper stickers. She does killer Fargo impressions and once reminded my husband and me that it was our anniversary and not to forget. She truly is - awfer cute.

Two words for my daughter that are not Happy Birthday: Thank you.