Huliau - The Return Voyage

For the past two weeks I’ve been blaming the heat.   And yes, it’s been a record-setting  100 degrees  in inner-city Baltimore, with an unconscionable level of humidity.  But yesterday I realized that is not  it–not my problem at all.

Allow me to digress.

My oldest brother is a professional man.  He was the apple of my father’s eye.  My next brother, the self-proclaimed “middle child”, tried harder.  He took over the family business and cared for our aging father every day of his life.

I am the third child–the only daughter.  My father  cherished me without reserve throughout my  childhood–and worried about me every day thereafter.  He fretted over my every deviation from his feminine ideal and expectation.

When our father died after a brief illness, fourteen years ago, my brothers’ loss seemed inestimable.  I grieved then,  and I continue to cherish the memory of that honest and generous man.

But what I’ve been living in these past  weeks, during this hottest of Baltimore summers, is something else entirely. My feelings now are far more complex.

My mother.  Inch by gradual inch I am losing my  98 year old mother.   No, it has not been the heat that has drained me.  It has been the enervating emotion watching my  familiar mother become much less familiar.

I am a woman.  This is my mother.  I stand in front of  any mirror and I see her–in my hair, behind my smile.   Sometimes  it’s a  struggle to see where she ends and where I begin.

I have an iconic teenage memory.  We are locked in a Department Store dressing room staging warfare over some obscure matter of taste.  We  enlist the hired help (a saleswoman who foolishly dares to offer an opinion) to help defeat the other in a staged battle over hemline length, ruffles, glitz, color or neckline.  We define our relationship for many years by the clothes we refuse to wear–and those we do.

I have an iconic adult memory.  I had been  a vegetarian for nine years years.  My mother makes a thick chicken soup  for me when I arrive alone for dinner.  She insists, “But poultry is not meat.”  This is not an ignorant woman.

I remember, of course, my mother’s vehement objection to both men I married:  The first, because “He is not Jewish.”  The second because: “You hardly know him.”    I remember her caveat to my life as an author.  “The only women writers who succeed  have rich husbands who support them.”

I could go on.  I believe that almost every  women can–and does.  The songs we sing  with our mothers are seldom two-part harmony.

Regardless of the stories, the complaints,  the engaging and the disengaging–regardless of the complexities of being the strong daughter of a strong mother–this is the parent who knew me then, who knows me now.  This is the person who loved every bit of me (however much she objected).  This is the woman who ultimately accepted (and found reason for pride) in my every choice–no matter how far I wandered, or how incomprehensible those choices were to her narrower life experience.

Today–I enter her apartment at the senior community (where she moved two years ago, when we agreed that 96 might be a good age to stop driving)–and her eyes laugh and dance.  She tells me:  “You have no idea how much I love having you here!  You have no idea how much I love you.”  Her whole body speaks that truth.

I am losing her.  Not like my father after a three month critical illness.   My mother lives and breaths and walks (every day more slowly and with increasing fatigue).  She remember selectively, and surprisingly.   She forgets what she had for dinner, or whether she even had it.  She no longer has a ‘yesterday’ or even a ‘this morning.’   Time has disappeared. My mother teaches me  still. She instructs me in the absolute value of  this breathe, this moment–gone!

This is a woman who has  lived life with enthusiasm and zest  from the moment she took it on.   ‘Mollie with the million dollar smile’ accepts life.  She has systematically accepted difficult women among her many friends.  She explained them like this.  ‘That’s just how she is.’

She accepts too the losses.    What has been acutely painful for me to witness–has been far less terrible for my mother to live.

Return Voyage alights here for  three hot summer weeks.   ‘Iokepa and I house-sit our son’s cats and plants, in a downtown Baltimore neighborhood.  Our son and his wife vacation in Cape Town, South Africa, at the World Cup.   We’re here for my mother.

Mollie Speert Miller may live to be 105–only God has that answer.  Her health is perfect.  But her body, her 98 year old body–skin, bones, and brain–is simply wearing thin.   I watch my mother and I am helpless with grief.  What she accepts, I  continue to deny.

Mothers and daughters–there isn’t a more fraught and complicated  relationship.    I cannot imagine a life without it.