Mother-Memories

If my mother were still living today, she’d be celebrating her birthday – her 103rd birthday.

She was born in 1906 and passed away in 1988. My memories of her last years are fuzzy, at best. That was another lifetime ago when my kids were still little and needy and my life was consumed by my own mothering role - back when my limited childhood perceptions of Mother’s chronic depression still blinded me, in large part, to the soul and spirit of the person who lived within that Alzheimer-wracked mind.

Her last months were spent in a debilitating fog, although there were little breakthroughs along the way. One day she paced the floor of the nursing home with an irregular gait while chanting “I good no am, I good no am, I good no am” - wringing her arthritic hands, bouncing off the walls, stumbling with uncharacteristic unsteadiness. Much of the time she couldn’t speak at all but sat hunched and withered in a chair, staring blankly at the floor with a pocked-with-worry forehead.

However, there were breakthroughs every now and then. One day we visited the city park for lunch and she used her teeth to gingerly pull the slick, mayonnaise-laden shaved ham from her sandwich, then very intentionally poked the floppy slices the rest of the way into her mouth with her whole hand, glibly smearing the white greasy stuff all over her face without caring in the least that she was making a royal mess. It seemed like a moment of ultimate freedom in a strangely childlike sense – a flash of time when it didn’t matter what anyone thought, when she just followed her instincts there in the great outdoors (in the context of her beloved nature environment) and savored the ability to delight in the sensory enjoyment of that dismembered sandwich. No Emily Post strings attached, no social protocol. That was also the day an intelligible sentence interrupted her usual nonsense chatter: “I could walk all the way to New York today!” (We were in Indiana, and as far as I know, she had no history of friends in New York or any particular reason to go there.)

We pulled off a birthday party for her at the nursing home that year, her last party since she died a month later. It was a grand affair that somehow created a spark deep inside, one that called her to rise, in as full-flame as possible, to the occasion. Her eyes sparkled for the first time in ages as she donned a floppy polka-dotted clown cap to join the fully outfitted, face-painted clowns (my then 6-year-old daughter Katie and myself). She smiled and cooed with verbal inflections (no intelligible words, though) reminiscent of days of old. I’d made a birthday cake, one of those doll things with the Barbie torso sticking out the top of a bundt cake shaped like a southern-belle-type hoop skirt, and all the grandkids were there to help celebrate – as well as my father, who had stopped visiting her because of his own painful inability to deal with her level of infirmity.

Candles protruded from the cake-skirt in a prancing ring-around-the-frosting-roses. When we lit them, Barbie’s synthetic hair caught on fire – OH CRUD! - and left a smoky chemical stink in the air. No doubt it was toxic, and Barbie looked more than slightly disheveled afterwards (definitely a bad hair day), but Mother didn’t notice, let alone care. It was a PARTY! That’s all that mattered.

We offered her a few small gifts, too, which the kids helped unwrap (her motor skills were bad at that point and her fingers like stiff sticks) - but I don’t remember what they were. Things like a pad of paper and pencil, I think, since she still liked to write long, fluent-looking lines (pages) of scribbles. I thought those lines and lines of “writing” might be some sort of code representing whatever might be lurking behind the confusion in her mind. I never could make sense of them for the most part, although sometimes a series of letters would repeat themselves, like “phmg.” Once a four-letter word showed up twice in the midst of other gibberish: LOVE.

That was all such a long time ago: twenty-one years.

I wish I could throw another party for her now, something elegant. Perhaps I’m just a little bit wiser, a little more able to see beyond my own smoke-screen of attitudes and assumptions. Actually, I wish I could go back in time to her 60th birthday (I just celebrated my 60th recently) and get to know her at my same age. I’d love the opportunity to talk to her one-on-one and dig a little into the depths of a psyche and heart I never knew.