Mother's Day

I wanted to temporarily re-vivify this blog in order to write about my mother on Mother's Day, hence this post.

No one has a perfect life and it's unfortunately rare when someone is blessed with a relatively harmonious family life.  In the big picture, our parents shape our character and perhaps our karma in the sense that their impact upon our early formation is undeniably important. What you do with that as an adult determines who you really are in life.   

My father was my nemesis for much of my life.  I worked really hard at resolving that relationship as much as possible.  I say "I worked hard" because I knew my father was incapable of doing that work himself, so it was up to me to work through our issues.  Dad only learned what a family meant by virtue of having one of his own; he came from a broken home, never knew his own father, and his mother was the single most psychologically vicious and manipulative person I've ever met in my life.  So Dad did well to turn out as well as he did.  He was a decent but deeply wounded person.  By the end of his life, he was the most serene and mature that he'd ever been.  He'd learned valuable lessons about what it meant to be in a family of widely disparate human beings.

Mom came from a huge, raucous, rough and rambunctious country family.  Her own father was the oldest of sixteen children who all grew up in a rambling farmhouse simply known as "the ranch."  I could never keep track of who all my aunts and uncles and cousins were.  

My mother's given name was Joy, and it was apt.  She was happy, social, and gregarious.  Her nickname as a child was "joybell" because she loved to talk so much.  That's a love that never left her throughout her life.  She enjoyed her family.  Her father was strong and silent, a farmer, a good family man, and a devoted fisher and hunter.  Most of our Thanksgiving and Christmas meals were provided by game fowl he had hunted, whether duck or goose.  My mother's mother was a school teacher.  Mom loved learning and was the valedictorian of her graduating high school class -- all seven of them!

But Mom had a sense of adventure and ambition as well.  Of course, the momentous event of her early adulthood was the onset of WWII.  Mom had already finished nurse's training and was an RN, so was quickly accepted into the Navy.  She served at Port Hueneme Naval base in California, where the wounded from the Pacific theater of war were returned stateside.  I recall Mom saying there were something like two dozen nurses and several thousand GIs at that base.

Mom ran the operating theater.  I also remember her telling me that the nurses understood that part of their care of their patients was to simply sit by their side and let the guys talk through their war experiences.  It was a no doubt important form of decompression for all those guys who had been through the trauma of armed combat.

Mom also told me about the sense of their not knowing how long the war might last.  She served three years, I believe, and was discharged on July 4th, 1946, in San Francisco.

Although Mom was raised on a dusty wheat farm, she was always happiest in a city.  She wanted to be around people.  After the war, and under the auspices of the GI Bill -- the most intelligent thing this country has ever done for those who've served in the armed forces --Mom enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle, intending to get a BA in Nursing Administration.  Life and love intervened, however.  She met my dad, they married after a short courtship, and soon a child was on the way.  

However, Mom worked throughout my childhood and, in fact, didn't retire from nursing until her late sixties.

What I remember about Mom in my early life is that she was my one safe haven. I was an overly-sensitive, painfully shy child with a troubled relation to his own father, and two older sisters to contend with, in a family that moved every six months to two years.  That's the way life was back then.  I remember cuddling up to my mom on the couch at about the age of four, understanding that some day she would no longer be there to bolster me and be my one bastion of love and acceptance.  It was a daunting thought.

Mom was fair and I don't think any of us felt slighted nor in need of competing for her attention.  She was an instinctively happy person and loved having children.  Her intellectual life was served by the constant learning in the field of medicine.  She was not able to contend with my father's moods and temper, so we all tip-toed around that elephant that was perpetually in every room of the house.  But I understood the ground rules; I had to work things out with my dad on my own, and so I did.

Mom was always the sun around which all the planets of our family orbited.  I think there were moments of contention with each of my sisters, but that's just what happens with mothers and daughters.  As time went by, Mom moved easily into the role of family matriarch.  Two grandsons came along, upon whom she doted, and Dad and she moved toward retirement and the hope of finally travelling.  In fact, I learned late in life that one of the reasons my mother and father had been drawn together in college was that they both intended to emigrate and work in Brazil when they'd graduated!  Ah, the dreams of youth.

Dad, however, came down with leukemia and died a few weeks shy of his 67th birthday.  Mom lived another 28 years on her own.  She was bolstered for many years by her work in the Women's Club organization.  She served a term as the State president for Washington in the mid-Eighties and continued to travel to the national headquarters in Washington DC for many years, doing volunteer work there.

To Mom's chagrin, in the summer of 1965 the family left Los Angeles, which she loved, and moved back to the dusty farmhouse from which she'd always longed to escape as a child.  They did it for we kids, thinking it would be healthier than living in LA.  We were all showing signs of asthma due to the smog and my oldest sister, who was in high school, was just starting to flirt with the emerging drug culture. So Mom had to live another 29 years on that farm, including another 7 after Dad had died.

Eventually, a sister and brother-in-law in Bremerton, a former Navy town one hour west by ferry from Seattle, bought a house kitty-corner from their own and moved Mom into it.  She fit there like a hand in a glove and commenced a long and happy sojourn of church and service groups.  Her house, of course, always served as home base for either Thanksgiving or Christmas.

My own relationship with my mother became more complicated as I moved further into adulthood.  My inclination was always an introspective one and I began to work through all the left-over issues of my childhood.  This is a necessary step for anyone who wants to be an unimpeded adult but I'm always surprised at how many people go to such great lengths to avoid this.  Eventually, I drug Mom through enough conversations to have finally worked through most of my own questions and issues.  I do have some guilt at not being closer to home while Mom went through her own end of life passages.

On the whole, what strikes me most about my mother's character is how much integrity she had.  She always took the high road.  She was honest, forthright, and a shrewd judge of character.  She was happiest when at her most social.  She talked too much and about people none of us knew or had ever met.  But I finally realized, that's what people of her generation conversed about -- what everyone else was doing.  She was just making monologue -- er, conversation.  She was loving and warm.  I probably owe the best features of my own character -- if there are any -- to her influence.  I asked her once what she would change about her life if she could live it over.  She thought for a few moments and then said, "Nothing.  I would make all the same decisions and do exactly the same thing."  How many of us can say that about our lives?

So, Mom, I consider myself lucky for having been born to you, thank you for all your support, your friendship and your love. I look forward to seeing you again somewhere down the great cosmic road of life.  Amen.