Up, Up and Away
    Last night I was able, without consciously trying, to lure my mother to stay awake longer than she intended. I think my success began with a meal designed to delight. Her appetite, as is common in the old, is unreliable and she must often be tempted to eat. Old favorites don't necessarily work, anymore, because she has forgotten, mostly, what her long time favorites are (except for pancakes...I don't think she'll ever forget that favorite). This is a boon to me. She's never been one to experiment with food, except accidentally, but, now that she's forgotten many of her food habits, I'm free to place concoctions before her that she would have eschewed in years past. Sometimes she even 'remembers' a new dish and raves about the ingenuity of an old one.
    Spurred by the irresistible scent of some peak of the season cherry tomatoes from my niece's garden, I put together a savory bruschetta with fresh arugula and basil, spring onions, garlic, red wine vinegar, lemon juice, green olives, a pinch of kosher salt and freshly grated Parmesan. Her appetite, which had been lagging all day, along with her energy, perked up as the ingredients sizzled in olive oil. Still, at 1920, early even by her standards and before the end of Jeopardy!, one of her favorite television programs, she announced that she thought she'd be turning in soon.
    "Already?" I asked, a little anxious. Yesterday was one of her two "Hair Days". On these days, when she has her hair washed and set at the salon, she is usually more energetic than she was today. "Why don't we read?" I suggested.
    No, she didn't think she was alert enough to concentrate.
    A round of rummy, maybe? A rented movie? Maybe she'd like her fingernails painted? Nothing seemed to be more tantalizing to her than her bed.
    She headed for the bathroom and I assembled the items used in her nightly before-sleep ritual. When she returned to her rocking chair, I began her nightly foot and leg massage. This is always a time of relaxed, free ranging conversation for us, one of my favorite activities with her. As I work on her feet and legs I think about her life, contemplate the gaps in my knowledge of her and wonder out loud about her experiences that have been hidden from me. Last night, I'm not sure why, I suddenly decided to ask her something I'd been curious about for a long time but hadn't asked for a variety of reasons, some having to do with respect for her innate sense of emotional modesty.
    A few nights previous I had observed that my father, her husband, had always seemed to be fascinated with her, throughout his entire time of knowing her. "You know, Mom," I said, remembering both their stories that, from the moment he'd met her as his gunnery instructor in the Navy prior to his being deployed to fight in WWII, he'd been so taken with her that he ordered the rest of his squadron against dating her, "I've always had the impression that Dad fell head over heels in love with you and never, ever fell out. Is that the impression you had?"
    She laughed, delightedly. "Yes," she had said, "I think you're right."
    My mother is a more oblique emotional read than my father was. Last night, while I was working on the soles of her feet, I decided I wanted to know the rest of the story. "How about you, Mom," I ventured, "I think you were the love of Dad's life. Was he the love of yours? You don't have to answer if you don't want to."
    She stared at the ceiling. I knew she was working this one out.
    "Or," I continued, "did you even think of love and life in those terms? When you were really young, before you met Dad, did you think that you would have a 'love of your life'?" My mother was an adventurer, I mused, so she may not have perceived love and life intersecting like this.
    She looked startled. "Oh yes, I did," she began. "I think I was more practical about it than Dad, though." Now, I was startled.
    Knowing that vague questions tend to throw her off track, now, I sharpened my next question. "Was Dad the love of your life?" and quickly added, "It's okay if he wasn't, Mom. It won't shock me to find that out."
    "Hmmm, well, no," she said, from far away, then, upon further thought, said, "well, yes, he was."
    I was intrigued. What, I wondered, caused her to first refute, then confirm my curiosity? I know, from her sister, my aunt, that previous to leaving home, she had at least one suitor who asked her to marry him. She turned him down because, one evening while walking together, he pointed out a porch they were passing with several pairs of children's shoes lined up in descending order of size and made the unintended mistake of musing, affectionately, that one day soon they would be living in home with such a display on the porch. Although she always assumed she'd have children, she had other plans for her immediate future, including college, a career, travel...and shortly after Donald Stoneking's overt sentimentality he became a part of my mother's history. I wondered if, initially, my father had been just as sentimental then realized that the way to capture this woman's heart wasn't through promises of security and coziness.
    She went on to tell me that, initially, although it was clear to her that my father was smitten with her, and she definitely found him attractive, she had no interest in settling down. She found his interest amusing, but she wasn't about to swear her allegiance to someone who might be tempted to "keep her down on the farm". These were her words, and definitely appropriate, considering that, as a daughter, she had spent a fair amount of time on a farm, had even gone to college in the midst of a farming community. When it became apparent to her that he was not interested in leading a physically settled family life and wasn't at all adverse to her working, she recognized him as the love of her life. As it turned out, their marriage was anything but physically settled. Aside from moving every couple of years or so throughout their marriage, whether from area to area or house to house within the same area, they raised their children outside of the U.S. by choice.
    I know that, after their mutual retirement at 55, although they continued to move from place to place at my father's pleasure and to my mother's ambivalent delight (sometimes she was not quite ready to move from an area when my father was), they did not travel nearly as much as my mother would have liked and, apparently, as my father had promised. My mother was philosophical about this and when my father died as a result of deciding, at retirement, that he was going to drink himself to death (which he actually announced, and proceeded to do, although more slowly than he expected), she took advantage of her daughters' far flung lives and picked up her travels where she'd left off before they retired.
    Truthfully, I was surprised that she considered my father the love of her life. Not that their love for each other wasn't obvious, but she has always been the more emotionally practical and grounded of the two. I remember her once telling me that if it had been socially acceptable for women to bear and raise children alone, "...like women do, nowadays..." when she'd had kids she would have had a dozen and done it all herself. I never took this as a slap at my father's presence in her or our lives, but, rather, as an indication that my mother had more of an explorer's spirit than my father and felt hindered by the institution of marriage that she inherited from her era. I imagined that my mother, while not feeling cheated by her choice of husbands, would have preferred another kind of love.
    I'm still not sure I'm wrong, but I don't think she settled. I think life threw her some curious curves, courtesy of my father, especially after their retirement, and, being the stalwart spirit she is, she began to realize that discovering the love of one's life is quite a different experience than imagining that person before meeting them.
    This conversation, and a felicitous appearance of an Inside the Actors Studio segment that we'd both enjoyed the first time around on television, kept her up a few more hours, last night, and enriched me immeasurably. Sometimes I think that the primary perk of taking care of my mother in her elder years is the opportunity I am granted to ask the difficult questions that many children avoid and hear how one's answers to those questions evolve as one considers one's life from the heights of great age.
- posted by gail rae @ 07:12   email...this post