Mom

May 13, 2008

If you had an assignment to write 5 of the first memories that come to your mind about how you remember mom, what would you write?

Here are my five, we’ll see in what order they pop up.

1. I am having a birthday and I am not yet in school, so it must be my 5th birthday. I am home with my mom. My two older sisters and older brother are in school, because it is January, so I know that is where they must be. I don’t know where my two younger siblings are (my youngest brother is not born yet), but in my memory it feels like mom and I are home alone and I am basking in the individual attention she is giving me. I am dressed in a special dress and I remember saying things about having certain privileges for that day because, I say, “After all, it IS my birthday”. She is standing by the stove in the kitchen, getting ready to bake my birthday cake, and she seems amused by my words, so I say it several more times during the course of the day to please her and make her smile more. She is making a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, even though there is probably cake leftover from last week. Mine is the last of four January birthdays. First my youngest brother, whose birthday is exactly seven days plus two days before my younger sister's, whose birthday is exactly seven days before my mom’s, whose birthday is exactly seven days before mine. It always was and continues to be a source of pride for me to be included with my mom in the January Birthdays.

2. I am perhaps 3 years old. I have been to the grocery store with my mom and she has bought for me a play wristwatch with a red elastic band that has numbers on the dial that glow in the dark after it has been exposed to light. I remember being impatient enough to want to see that phenomenon right away so I go into a closet in a bedroom at the old house on Corkhill Drive in Maple Hts., Ohio. While I am in there somebody has acidentally pushed a dresser in front of the door, just enough so that when I push to come out, I can’t open the door. I am afraid I will get in trouble for being in there because after a while I hear everybody calling my name in loud voices, inside and outside, over and over. I don’t know how long I was in there or if maybe I fell asleep on that pile of shoes in the back of the closet, but eventually somebody checks in the closet. I remember a squeezing hug, and the feeling of immense relief, "Didn't you hear us calling you?", and I didn't have a clue why. Not until years later, when my own son disappeared in Sears for half an hour only to be found brrrm-brrm-ing on the riding lawn mowers did I realize how frantic mom must have been.

3. I am in 3rd grade, and I remember waking up, sitting on the bedside table next to my mom’s side of the bed in the middle of the night, asking her to buy refill leads and erasers for my beloved turquoise Scripto mechanical pencil. I have been sleep walking/talking and my mom is telling me gently, go back to bed Lizzy, we’ll talk about it in the morning.

4. When I was 13 years old, Mom took 6 of the 7 of us kids across country, camping in a trailer pulled behind a white Ford CountrySquire station wagon. She took us to see canyons and mesas and forests and Las Vegas and the Pacific ocean, Badlands, corn lands, mountains, hills, deserts and prairies, and Mount Rushmore. She made the plans with my dad's help , but I know it was her idea. She executed this trip pretty much alone for the most part until car trouble around Flagstaff, Arizona (where the only camground to be found was on an Indian Reservation in Tuba City over the 4th of July) which prompted my dad to fly out and join us a little earlier than planned. That summer was an experience I never appreciated until last May when I made a similar trip with a friend and realized the enormity of what my mom had done, the gumption that it took to undertake it, with 6 in tow, kids aged 4 to 16, across the country pulling a trailer, to discover this great country with her children.

5. This last one is the last conversation I ever had with my mom. I am grown and have 3 kids of my own, I am 42. She has been having trouble catching her breath and it has been found that she has heart trouble, a torn aorta or something, I don’t recall the specifics anymore. Mom must go into the hospital for heart surgery. I speak to her the night before she goes in, our usual Sunday night talk, and she is expressing concern about the surgery, so I said, Mom, don’t worry, everything will be fine. She said back, I’m not worried Lizzy, I’m scared.

I saw her in her last days when she was on the ventilator and I wondered if she could hear me, if she knew I was there to say goodbye. I was never worried or scared for her because I never believed my mom wouldn't be there some day.

She’s been gone for 9 years today.

I miss my mom.