Moms

Moms

   A quick note of apology if there is a gap in these posts appearing.  The moms visiting is making time short, or at least, time for writing the blog short.  But when you find time spent with your mother coming only at intervals (or perhaps when your mother is always around), you enter a period of slow glances as you age...a tick of the face here, the upturn on the lip, the mannerism you never noticed.  Is that something you learned (likely) and yet, there's also that genetic thing...the bent toe, the crooked tooth, the arthritis and beyond.  It is now, at a later age, that you worry about health problems, mental problems, and even her attitude...sounds silly in some ways but you realize your mom is now a  preview of what you might be facing some years from now.  Was she gray at 40 (gulp!), good life, tough life (we seem to rarely pay attention to our moms when we're younger), abused, afraid of dogs (chased as a child, you find out)...random discoveries one had best find out now since once gone, those questions will remain unanswered.

   We often think that we know a person's life, especially the life of our own mother.  But again, that life is one highly prejudiced, viewed from our eyes and likely one carefully hidden from view from us as a child.  As a teenager, we noticed almost nothing, too wrapped up in our own world and besides, like us, our parents would be here forever, we felt, and there'd be plenty of time to find out things later.  But later seems to rarely, if ever come...there's always later; and sometimes when we find ourselves sitting at the side of the hospital bed, hearing their breathing become more and more labored, we are flooded with questions, questions we wished we would have asked earlier.  But now is not the time...why didn't we ask earlier?  She was our mother, for heaven's sake.

   Thus it surprised me when my wife asked my mother if now, looking back at her life (she's 89) she'd had any regrets.  It was a question that fascinated me, but one I'm not sure I'd had have the courage to ask.  And perhaps that is good...our spouses or a stranger surprisingly able to be more blunt that we, her children, could ever be.  Sometimes that familiarity makes you feel that you know the answers already (turns out, I didn't, at least not to the one asked by my wife).  But thinking back, it's sometimes all in the timing...the right question, the right time, the right frame of mind.  If someone asked that of me what would I answer?  And would I feel comfortable giving that answer?

   We all have a private side of our lives, a side we let few people enter, however open we may appear to the outside world.  And if one thinks back to all the war vets who took (and continue to take) untold stories and horrors to the grave, silent to the end.  For others, it might be a treasured secret, a heart of loneliness, a world of depression, a secret lover, a jaded past...gone like a dream, lost forever, maybe because it wasn't meant to be shared, maybe because someone never asked...never cared.

   So forgive me again if this blog skips and stutters for a few more days.  After all, asking all these questions takes time, the right time, and time is short...at least for this blog.  Hey, is that my mom calling?

P.S. The day after this post appeared, this came from National Geographic: George Orwell once wrote that the loss of a person equals the loss of an entire perspective: “One mind less, one world less.” Gemma Green-Hope echoes Orwell’s sentiments when talking about her poetic stop-motion piece and explaining why she made a film tribute for her grandmother Gan-Gan. “Everyone has such interesting lives and stories, and it seems sad that all that history often disappears with them. It’s impossible to sum up someone’s whole life in two minutes, but I wanted to capture a little piece of her marvelous character and share it with others so she wouldn’t be forgotten.”
The quick video not only offers you a glimpse of this person's life, but might make you think about how you would sum up your mother's life (or how your life would be summed up in a few minutes).