Mom & Me Three Archive

    Although I've alluded to the following in previous reports here, last night I finally understood it, due to a conversation we had prior to Mom retiring: Whether I am her daughter to her remains a mystery but I realized that I am a contemporary. It is possible to be both a child of and a contemporary to an Ancient One.
    The conversation was so insignificant I can't remember the detail. It centered around discussing some aspect of life, mentioned in the news, that has changed drastically since she was raised in Mechanicsville. At one point she asked me to clarify something of which I had no knowledge.
    "If you've forgotten, Mom, then your guess is as good as mine, since I wasn't there."
    She gave me a direct "what's you're problem" look. "It happened in Mechanicsville," she prompted.
    "That's why I have no memory of it, Mom. I wasn't there. You hadn't even imagined having me, probably."
    "Well, then, where were you?!?" She clearly thought I was joshing her and she wasn't appreciative.
    "I wasn't anywhere, Mom."
    "You've said that before. Why do I remember you there?" She still had that "this is your problem, not mine" tone.
    I paused for thought. "Well," I posited, "if reincarnation is true, maybe my essence was there as someone else, someone you knew who was to die shortly and be reborn several decades later as your daughter. Then again, maybe I'm wrong about not yet being a gleam in your eye. Maybe you imagined all your children long before you had them and I was there. All I know, and I'm willing to accede that what I know could be superficial and insignificant, is that I was born to you in 1951 and, after my birth, you didn't visit Mechanicsville again until, hmmm, I think it was in 1995 when you went to Cedar Rapids for that stockholder's meeting."
    She listened carefully. Made no comment.
    "Are you confused?" I prompted.
    She fixed me with a determined look. "No, I just can't figure out how it is that it seems as though I've known you all my life."
    I laughed. "Well, that's easy! Maybe I'm right! Maybe you have known the idea of me all your life and when I was born I became the idea manifest!"
    She laughed, too. "I think you may have something there..."
    Which is the best confirmation anyone can get from my mother.

    This reminds me of the conversation I had with Mom about a week ago about why she asked me to be her companion rather than making arrangements to combine her life with that of one of my married-with-children sisters. I can't remember why it occurred to me to ask her, although it's a subject over which I've mulled many times. I've also thought I knew the answers:

1. I was the single one which, from the point of view of my mother's generation, means that I was not suffering Caregiver Burnout from being a wife and mother and would probably be amenable to taking care of her, when care would be what was needed;
2. My life up to that point had been pretty adventurous with no obvious hitches that indicated I wouldn't want to be her companion;
3. She and I had accidentally (probably due to my single status and her desire to not interfere in the married-with-children lives of her other daughters, although she was always available to help, of which only one daughter took advantage), throughout the years, forged and nurtured a close, person-to-person relationship beyond our mother-daughter status and had included one another in our intellectual and physical adventures;
4. I had lived in her chosen home, the Phoenix Metroplex, on and off throughout the years and she knew I would have few and easily adjusted qualms about returning, despite my love for my found home of Seattle; thus, the detail of her life wouldn't need to change or would change, as necessary, slowly and easily instead of drastically and with personal upset.

    When I asked my question I also asked her to take some time to think back and try to remember what she was thinking that fateful day when she called me and said, "What would you think about moving back here to live with me? I think I've had just about enough of living alone."
    She took some moments. I waited patiently at her feet, her faithful dog, my eyes trained, as always, on her upturned, searching-the-ceiling-of-her-mind face.
    Finally, changing her view to straight ahead, letting me know that she was satisfied with what she found, she pronounced slowly and definitively, "Freedom of thought."
    A left field fast ball. I reeled. I knew there had to be more behind this response that the surface revealed. I've always considered every member of my born-into family as permanently sloshing about with abandon in The Fields of the Lord of Infinitely Ranging Thought. Except for one friend whom I've had since 1983, I've considered every member of my family my only strongholds for companionship during Discussions of Unfettered Thought. I attribute many rituals of my own unfettering directly to each member of my family. My unfetterings continue through them, as well. I've always felt that each member of my family and I are joined at the hip, working hard and constantly to understand what each is thinking, consider it with and against our own thoughts and absorb and love, with astonishingly respectful equanimity, the details of our inner and outer lives. I learned to do this within my family and count on my family to continually nourish these abilities. I know that my mother feels much the same about our family and The Realms of Thought. Thus, I knew that I couldn't assume anything from my mother's short, pithy response.
    Instead of pointing out that we are a family of free and mutable thinkers, thus couldn't this apply to her living with any of her daughters, I asked, "What do you mean?"
    Again, she took awhile to answer.
    "I knew," she said, "with you I wouldn't be just another member of the family who would be listened to but would be...hmmm...let me think...."
    "Can I help you?"
    "Sure, if you're wrong, though, I'll tell you."
    "Good. ...whose thoughts and feelings wouldn't be hijacked by what would seem to be the more urgent thoughts and feelings of spouses and children."
    "There, you've got it!" She seemed relieved. "Families are so busy, nowadays, you know." An interesting observation, considering that she was born into an extremely busy family and probably passed this trait on to us.
    "And I didn't make a second family."
    "Right."
    "Wow. I never would have guessed that. I thought..." and I felt it would be safe to tell her why I previously thought, of all her daughters, she asked me to be with her, so I did.
    "No, no, no," she said. "When you asked me to consider living with you in Seattle and we realized I couldn't stand Seattle, I expected that you'd decide not to come live with me."
    "Really! Well, you should know, then, once I made up my mind, trying you out in Seattle was just an attempt at an adjustment. I had no intention of not being your companion if you hated Seattle. I just thought, you know, I just thought I'd try. Also, for your information, I haven't regretted leaving Seattle. I miss the weather but it'll always be there."
    "Well, good."
    So. That's the story. I can't help but fill in a little. I'm positive my mother wasn't impugning any of my sisters' characteristics of thought. Immediate families, though, always take precedence over past and future families. When one remains single, as I did, one's immediate family is one's past and future family if they are a part of a family they continue to love and enjoy throughout their lives. Thus, one is free to continue a level of in depth involvement with one's parents and sisters that one would necessarily shave in the face of immediate husbands and children. When relationships with siblings and parents are kept up it is usually through the efforts of the single sibling, if one exists. Otherwise, relationships are stored for use in one's later years. My mother knows how this works. This is what happened between her and her sisters and parents. In her case, the glue of a single sibling didn't exist and, as it turned out, her later attempts to rebind with her siblings were tragically truncated by her brother's and sister's health problems.
    How had I kept up the relationship with my mother while I plied my singular life?

• During the periods of time I lived and worked within the Phoenix Metroplex I would make it a point to have dinner with my parents, then my parent, at least a few times a week.
• Holidays were always spent with my parent/s.
• Occasionally, when in the process of moving to and from other places, I lived with them for short periods of time.
• During one particularly cogent period in my late 20s and 30s when I lived close to my parents, my mother and I would meet a few evenings a week to read aloud and discuss books in which we had a mutual interest.
• When I lived in Seattle and my mother lived alone in Mesa she would call me every Saturday at 1700 Seattle time for an extended week review. When I brought this to her attention, with much amusement, on the occasion of her not calling me one Saturday and me looking, by phone, all over the Phoenix area for her, wondering if she was all right, she denied, with barely hidden embarrassment, that she habitually called me. When I laid out my concern when she hadn't as proof that she did, she expressed relief that someone knew her habits well enough to worry about whether she was okay. As it happened, she was. She'd been out on the town with her sister.
• I've always been in the habit of "saving" snippets of information for her that I knew would pique her interest and provoke discussion. She has done the same for me.
• We've had shared adventures, too, some of them illegal, when she's visited me in far flung locations or we've traveled together since I came to live with her.

    Most of all, though I believe the amount of attention I pay to her in her Ancient Years, the willingness (with reservations, including the reservation of my desire for solitude during the holidays and my desire not to negotiate us into episodes that have already proved disastrous) with which I allow her preferences and my inability to consider that her life is impinging on mine are the bedrocks of what she was expressing. It is unusual in the life of a dependent Ancient One to be able to live out one's life precisely as one wishes without feeling that one's life is hampering, is a distraction or is incidental to the lives of others.
    I am struggling, here, not to make comparisons while I enumerate the advantages, to her and me, of the life we lead journeying together in her Ancient Years. I have often, in despair, considered that my mother would be better off surrounded by a family of more-than-one (me), including the young and the middle aged. I have wished that an arm of our family was closer and more able to host my mother when my need for my beloved solitude becomes so overwhelming that my behavior becomes uncontrollably wretched. As well, my continued, fundamental belief is that Ancient Ones both deserve and benefit from frequent exposure to relations of all ages. I still, though, consider myself lucky and blessed to be doing what I'm doing with my mother. I'm sure my mother feels equally lucky and blessed to have her single, family oriented daughter walking with her through her final years.
    Families beget families beget families. In our culture, at least in the WASPish arena, families are, at this time, primarily nuclear. Even though, especially within the last more-than-a-few decades, this nuclearity is stretching to accommodate "blended" families, single parent families and families extended with older and/or abandoned relatives, at this time lucky is the family who somehow manages to produce a single sibling who remains family oriented. Had circumstances been different, had my mother successfully petitioned to spend her last years in the bosom of one of the families that came out of the family she created, I know that she would have been fine and happy. MFASRF, many years ago, upon meeting my mother (she was in her mid 60s at the time) pronounced her "resigned, in the best sense of the word." She is. She takes it as it comes and if I hadn't come to be with her she would have taken it well. Although I have rarely dared to imagine that this life my mother and I lead is my mother's preference and was from the beginning, I have often hoped, against hope, that it is. I'm glad I found the presence of mind and the courage to "ask...
    ...and it shall be given unto you."
    Time to nudge The Mom into her morning.
    Later.