Mother's Day Musings

My mother thought that Mother's Day was a fraud perpetrated by greeting card companies.  When I  looked up the history of the holiday I found that it started in the US in the nineteenth century and combined sentimentality with mild feminist sentiment.  It honored women whose children had died in wars.  Anna Jarvis, the main promoter of the holiday repudiated it on grounds of gross commercialism nine years after Woodrow Wilson gave it national recognition.  

When I was little our family celebrated it to please my father.  Things often worked that way at our house.

My mother was not terribly feminine in the conventional sense.  She never understood fashion and never got the hang of pretending that men were more capable than she.  She wasn't an outspoken feminist or political crusader.  She just never understood the role she was supposed to play and didn't try very hard to learn it.   She practiced her own variety of passive resistance.  I was in my early teens before I realized that my friends' mothers weren't like her.    Even worse, it took me quite a bit of adjustment to realize that girls my age weren't like her either. 

My mother loved her children.  I think the most important thing I learned from her I learned by example.  She always treated us like real people.  She never talked down to us.  She was genuinely interested in what we thought.  She wasn't free with advice.  She reserved it for times we asked for it or times she thought we needed to get out of the path of the oncoming car immediately. 

She loved words.  Her education ended with nurse's training.  She had a lexicographer level vocabulary and could spell every word of it correctly.  She subscribed to the "Saturday Review" mainly for the acrostic although she read the book reviews too.  She liked to clip things from newspapers and magazines that had dangling participles, misplaced modifiers, or grotesque word choices.  She tacked them up on the wall behind the washing machine.   Her favorite author was Mark Twain. 

Something I didn't notice until I was in my thirties was the way my mother looked at people and animals.  I grew up when the idea of humans being unique because of our tool use and symbolic communication.  Conventional scholarly opinion then was that there was a qualitative difference between animal and human intelligence.  One day I thought about the dog my family got when I was nine.   My brother and sister were pre-school age.  When I came home from school my mother and I and I would talk about her day and she'd talk about the things my brother, sister, and the dog did.  I finally hit me that she spoke about my brother and sister in the same way she spoke about the dog.  I thought about it and realized that she spoke about my father in the same way too.  The main difference was that the dog wasn't quite as smart, didn't have opposable thumbs, and didn't have the right anatomy for human speech. 

She had a wicked sense of humor.  She saw the irony and pretense of life and commented on it freely.  She was gentle about it.  She believed that people weren't any better than they could be.   It tied in nicely with the dog.   Perhaps because she had worked as a nurse for many years she had a knack for insulting people without their knowing it.  In the family dime store I often heard her say nasty things to people and not get the slightest reaction.  She combined ambiguity with a sweet, friendly tone of voice.  Even the most difficult customers loved her.

My mother was highly mechanically inclined.  Her greatest childhood resentment was that when she was in high school she wasn't allowed to take shop.  She did all of the ordinary household repairs.  My father thought that the wheel, lever, and inclined plane were magic.  More complicated mechanical things were totally beyond his comprehension.  One of my favorite childhood memories was the time my mother tried to explain to my father how a faucet valve worked.  I think she prolonged it on purpose.  

My mother had one of the best singing voices I've heard.  She loved music.  She always had music playing when she was at home.  She sang everything, hymns she learned as a girl, pop tunes, and show tunes.  She could do a dead on impersonation of Mary Martin.  Her favorite was Ella Fitzgerald.  She admired Fitzgerald's pure timbre and perfect pitch control.  Her second favorite was Pearl Bailey. 

My mother died nearly ten years ago.  She had a heart attack and was dead within a week.  She was in the early stages of Altzheimer's.  Death is never the preferable alternative but given that she was faced with the loss of the mental faculties that had given her so much pleasure, a relatively quick and painless death didn't seem so bad.  She was nearly seventy nine. 

I have two mementos of her, her circular saw and her complete set of Mark Twain.