Mother’s Day

I’m going to try to write about my mother. Fair warning: I may suck at this.

One of the benefits of being a mother myself is I get to update all of my perceptions about my own childhood with current medical understanding. Which is to say: my mother was the neurotypical in a house full of weirdos.

She was young when she married – not yet 21, not yet graduated from college. She had pictures in her head of what married life would be like. She told me once she’d always wanted the house to smell of fresh bread and cookies, only to discover she just didn’t like cooking that much. And living with another adult – in particular my dad, who was, as I’ve established, kind of an odd one – would have been something of a shock.

When I was very small she worked as a journalist for the local paper. She had a pilot’s license; she was part of the 99s and participated in a lot of local events. She went to law school when I was 8? 9? I don’t really remember. Later she told me she’d been worried about bringing the idea to my dad, but he was thrilled at the idea of her becoming an attorney. Score one for the odd one: he was for sure a product of his time, but he never embraced the idea that a man’s wife shouldn’t have a career and a life full of her own interests. In the beginning she was home when we’d get home from school, but that fell away over time, and we’d come home to an empty house. I loved it. I loved the quiet, and the independence.

She was never blunt about her reasons, but she was very clear with me: make sure you can make your own money. Make sure you can take care of yourself and your loved ones. Don’t be left without options.

She’d make shortbread cookies at Christmas, and we’d decorate them together. She was so neat and careful. I loved icing, and spread it everywhere. I got frustrated that my work didn’t look as good as hers, but we ate them all just the same.

A few years ago, I brought a box of those cookies to my parents at Christmas. I don’t know if they tasted familiar to them; at that stage of their illness, there was no point in explaining why they might taste familiar. But they disappeared, very quickly. I should have brought more.

Before she went to law school, she would sew dresses for me. Around the second grade I refused to wear them, and I think that was a loss for her. She’d loved dolls, and tried giving me some of hers, but I wasn’t a doll kid. Long after I got out of college, she started collecting dolls again. She has some very nice ones in storage I’ll have to go through.

She taught me how to do laundry as soon as I was tall enough to reach the dials on the machine. She taught me about delicates and what shrinks in hot water, and the fabrics that shouldn’t go in at all. She taught me about pre-treating and ironing, and let me tell you, ironing sucked. I don’t buy things that require ironing anymore. Back then there wasn’t much choice. Laundry was never a great joy, but it was an undeniably practical skill.

When I started working, she taught me how to dress like a professional: how to shop for separates that I could mix and match, how to take care of my shoes, how to make practical choices. Back then, if you worked in an office environment, you wore suit separates, and if you were female, you wore skirts. Black, navy, maybe red. Be feminine, but also professional. As if there was really any way to accomplish that.

We shared books. For many years, my parents lived next door to a Waterstone’s. I’d see my mother every weekend, and we’d shop. We’d buy Faye Kellerman, Carol O’Connell, a few others. Dennis Lehane, Anne Perry. We saw both of them speak at Waterstone’s. Lehane was funny, and self-deprecating. Perry talked about outlining every chapter in detail before she wrote a word. We’d find books, and take turns buying them, sharing the expense. Mysteries, always, apart from a few bits of litfic. We both liked John Irving, until he became too self-referential; we didn’t track the litfic world closely enough to know who he was skewering. We read The Color Purple together. I don’t know if she found it as joyous a story as I did. (It feels weird just writing that, given what the book is about, but it does end with joy.) We collected books. We traded books. We hoarded books.

She got into ebooks before I did. What did it for her was finishing a book at 2 in the morning, thinking “Wow, I’d like to read the next one,” and being able to click a button and do just that. My practical mother, up all night reading Charlaine Harris.

She traveled a lot with my dad. Her French was excellent, but his was better, and it allowed her to hang back in his shadow a bit. She did that a lot. I don’t think she always liked it.

When they first became ill, my father was the sicker of the two. I fantasized about taking her out book shopping, having long lunches with her, giving her the freedom she’d never taken for herself. It was a hard lesson, realizing she didn’t want any of that. Or maybe it was just too late. She faked things better than my father did. She still does, in a way. She doesn’t talk much anymore, but she reacts and gestures and laughs at all the right moments. I don’t know how much she understands, but she knows how she’s supposed to look when she responds.

When Trump won in 2016, she was livid. She didn’t want to die with him in the White House. She was with it enough to vote in 2020, and she voted for Biden. In 2024 she couldn’t vote, and she doesn’t know who won. I am glad of that much.

For years we got together every Saturday. Didn’t matter where I was living. It was the one tradition I held on to throughout my abusive relationship. I never told her how bad that was; I was protecting him, as you do when you haven’t yet figured out you need to run for the hills. She was horrified when she started learning the details. When she met my now-spouse, she told him, in no uncertain terms, that if he was a jackass to me he would regret it. (Reader, he is not a jackass, and he kind of loved my mom for the threat.)

She was always harder to know than my father. He was loud, charming, expansive; she was quieter and more subtle. He was an extrovert; she liked people just fine, but they tired her out. She felt slights acutely, and it was hard, with my father, to do much socializing without feeling slighted. She was careful about making friends. She’d forgive a lot, but if you crossed a line, that was the end of it.

She played piano. I have, in my basement, a beat-up old spinnet that my dad got her for their first anniversary. Both my brother and I learned to play on it. I don’t know what to do with it; I haven’t played in years, decades. I’m not sure I can bring myself to let it go. She could sing, and she loved Christmas carols. She would have had Christmas music on all year if she could. Now, when I visit her, she’s not sure who I am – but we can sing together. She hums, since words have largely left her, but she still knows the tunes, and she’s still on key.

She loves cats. I don’t remember our first cat, but I remember her sobbing when that cat died. Right now, as I type this, I have her last cat in my lap. He’s old, and rickety, and sometimes loud, and he was no longer compatible with her assisted living setup. After I took him away, she didn’t notice his absence. I try to pamper the hell out of him, because he was everything to her

She was my moral compass. If I was worried about a decision, I could talk to her, and it would all become clear. Whatever mistakes I’d made, if she could forgive me, I could forgive myself. With all her harsh lines, she knew all about human foibles. She knew people made mistakes, and she knew things didn’t always look the same to outsiders as they did to the people involved.

I came across an old diary of hers a few years back. When she was heading off to college, she’d been planning to study astronomy. That didn’t work out – she got her degree in French – and I wish I could ask her why. Her father worked with NASA; she kept us steeped in the space program, good and bad, throughout the Apollo era. My brother grew up to be a physicist. I grew up to be a programmer, and then a science fiction writer. I wonder what her life would have been if she’d stuck with astronomy. I wonder if it just turned out to be not her thing.

When I see her, I talk at her, as I always have. She seems to like the company. I can hug her, if I’m careful; as with many dementia patients, she’s sometimes hypersensitive to touch. I show her pictures of cats. We sing together. She fixed so much for me when I was little, and I can’t fix anything for her anymore.

I am a different sort of mother to my kid. With her, I’m much more like my dad was with me. She and I are very alike in a lot of ways. I like to think I’m more conscious of the pitfalls of similarities than he was.

The biggest thing my mother gave me that I try to pass on is the sense of unconditional love. It’s not like she always approved of me, or never got angry or upset. But under every other emotion, she loved me. It was never even a question. We were never much the same, my mother and I, but maybe, in that one way, we can be alike.