Last week, my mom died. I have a lot of thoughts about that, and I’ll be honest with you I’m not going to share 100% of those because first of all it’s a public forum and secondly I’m not sure all my thoughts are fully formed because I’m still going through a lot of grief.
She died last week but I haven’t said much to most of my friends because I feel this kind of pressure to feel a certain way about it. Like, I told my work about it and they told me about their bereavement policy and how I could take up to 20 days and I realized, in that moment, that they, and a lot of people, would expect me to just be really overcome with grief. And I do feel grief. But maybe not exactly in the way that a lot of other people might feel about their moms. My relationship with my mom was, and is, a really complicated thing.
I guess the first thing to understand is that this has been a long time coming. My mom has been sick for the better part of 8 years. She had Alzheimer’s. I went to visit her right before she died, and she was already gone, unable to talk or recognize anyone. So it wasn’t a surprise when it happened. And I had a lot of time to get ready for it, not that you can ever be truly ready.
My mom was, in her own way, the most powerful influence in my entire life, for good and for bad. She was a really strong woman. She was pretty, and she was smart, and she lived a life that was mostly pretty easy. Until the end, she was hardly ever sick. She was good at her job, becoming one of the first female computer programmers back when she worked at RCA. She was a chef on TV, on All in Good Taste. She had lots of friends. She loved to teach, and did it well. People always liked her at the grocery store.
She was raised by a woman - my grandmother - who I think of as a very kindly and friendly soul but who I have since learned was a pretty hard mother and pretty hard on my mom and had high expectations. So I guess it’s not a surprise that my mom had high expectations of me. I was the oldest son, and from my earliest days the thing I remember most about my childhood is the expectations. Back when I was born and raised, the US still seemed like this place that operated according a set of rules, what I will call the White Picket Fence rules. Good people did X, bad people did Y. Good people got married, bad people smoked cigarettes. Good people studied hard, bad people took a year off before college. Good people got a good grade on the SAT, bad people didn’t even take the SAT. Most of my mom’s expectations centered around academics. I remember being told that I should be on a sports team because it would look good on my college resume. I picked swimming. I was really bad at it, but I still love to swim.
I don’t have a lot of fond memories of my mom. I don’t have a lot of what you would call “motherly” memories. I don’t remember being held by her, or comforted by her. I can remember giving her a hug as an adult, but never really as a kid. What I do remember are the moments of shame. I remember feeling awful when I left a pen in my pants and ruined a whole load of clothes and she was so upset. I remember crying when I was 14 and I still had to come home by 10 pm and I felt lost and alone and like I had no friends. I remember sitting with her and learning how to balance a checkbook. I remember fighting about doing the dishes.
I remember sitting with a copy of US News and World Report with her and going through all the top 20 schools and applying to as many of them as I could. The one time I remember spending time alone with her, really, is when she took me on all my college visits. She paid for me to take the SAT 4 times so I could get a perfect score. I remember after that perfect score they came and took my picture and put it in the paper, and I remember when they did that they told me I couldn’t carry my duffel bag, so they borrowed some other kid’s backpack. She was very proud of me and showed the picture to everyone, but every time I see that picture I think about that isn’t my backpack, and how people - and mostly my mom - always wanted me to put on a show. I remember not really feeling like I was ever a kid.
I had a lot of anger about my mom, for many years. I probably still do. I realize now, in my middle age, how imperfect we all are, as people. I realize that I feel abandonment, and I feel that lack of love. I realize that I look to other people to try to fill that gap from my mom, and of course they can never do it, because they’re not her. I would love to go back in time and just have her look at me, one time, and know that she was just proud of me for being exactly who I was. I would love to have been a kid.
But that time is done, and now she is dead, and the person she was is now just a person, in the past. She’s not really my mom anymore, I guess, and now that I see her as a person, I see that she really was just doing her best with what she knew. I see now how hard she worked; the long hours in the snow in Buffalo while she had 2 kids. I see the fact that they bought my computer equipment and let me play games. I see the loving extended family I had when I was little, and how much everyone loved me and my brother. I see the beautiful houses I grew up in, the delicious food she cooked, the fact that I went to the best schools and my mom and dad paid for me to go to college, and even bought me a car. I see how much pain she was in all the time, always having these expectations of people that they could never meet. I see now that I think she wanted to love me, but honestly didn’t know how.
I hope she is finally at peace. I forgive her. I hope in heaven they find her a table at a restaurant where the air isn’t blowing on her.
And I’m sorry, mom. I’m sorry I wasn’t perfect, but I did my best.