Easter in the '80s: Me and my moms
Then there are the more explicit, declarative memories that seem to be more easily (if erratically) conjured: autobiographical events that are summoned when your current mood or emotional state is in congruence with how you felt when the original event took place. I don't envy my hippocampus for the drudgery of sifting and sorting through the minutiae of my daily routine to decide which visions should be easily available for eventual resurrection and which ones relegated to "Memento"-level status — but someone's got to do it.
I have two such episodic memories from when I was about 11. The first memory is from a particularly lazy summer, a 2.5-month stretch my brothers and I spent, as we did most summers, riding our Big Wheels up and down the driveway, ascending trees that we couldn't descend, and running through the sprinkler, trying to simultaneously stay cool and avoid the irritated earthworms that inevitably poked their hermaphroditic heads up from the saturated earth.
And there was my mom, sprawled out on her plastic chaise longue (the economy kind that left horizontal indentations on your thighs and made a jarring clackety-clack-clack when you tried to subtly adjust its incline). When this lady chaise-longued, she chaise-LONGUED: She was Marilyn Monroe (or at the very least Olivia Newton-John, probably the most logical '80s equivalent), her magnificent vintage sunglasses practically smothering her face, the latest page-turner in hand, seeming (to us, anyway) not to have a care in the world, though I'm sure she had many.
Those were the days when you didn't demand that your parents entertain you every second of the day — they were your parents, not your playmates. My mom knew her place and we knew ours and times were good. We would sprint past her post, letting out frenzied, high-strung shrieks only accessible to children left to their own devices in the sunshine, christening her with our laughter and the remnant droplets clinging to our bodies. Sometimes she'd laugh; sometimes she'd yell at us to knock it off because we were getting her book wet.
When I'd had enough tomfoolery, I'd flop down on the grass to dry off, stealing covert glances over the top of my Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH to ogle this smart, glamorous lady who was able to endure three caterwauling children for hours on end, then arise like clockwork to whip up our elevenses, lunch, and a quite-delicious dinner that always included an entree, carbohydrate, and at least two or three sides generated from the three vegetable gardens we all took turns tending, to varying degrees of success (my youngest brother once pulled all of the zucchini plants* out instead of the weeds — that's all I'm going to say).
* * *
The second vignette that drifts in and out of occasional consciousness is when I came downstairs one night that same year, well past my bedtime, and busted my mom smoking a cigarette. I must have had the biggest "WTF?!" on my face (my mom didn't smoke, as far as I knew), but she never lost her cool. She looked right at me and snuffed out the cigarette in the amber-glass ashtray we kept for company. It looked like this (but, in this case, with a snuffed-out cigarette in it):
I don't remember saying anything. To me, she simply said, "It relaxes me," and then I went back to bed. I never saw her smoke again, FWIW.
I'm not sure what determined the mental taxonomy for these two specific memories, but neurochemical processes happened, and they've somehow ended up in the "Do Not Forget" pile. I do know they exemplify how I've always thought of my mom: beautiful and in control.
My mom will probably LOL (or at least spit out her hazelnut coffee) when she reads this. Now that I'm a mom myself, I know that, despite appearances, my mom likely didn't feel very glamorous and/or in control on any given day, at all. My mom and dad were 19 and 18, respectively, when they got married, and they had three kids (the oldest being me) by the time they were 25. While I wasn't privy to all of the details of these particular circumstances (other than co-existing during this time in that fiercely protective bubble that children form around themselves when they don't care to hear about boring grownup problems, because they have their own kid problems), I imagine times were tougher than we knew.
What I do know is my mom worked hard (so did my dad, but this is Mother's Day — June will be here soon enough). She raised three kids while my dad was working two or three jobs. When my youngest brother started school, she went back to school — first taking introductory courses at community college, where she was also a high-ranking member of the Concrete Canoe Club, then receiving her bachelor's in computer engineering from Columbia. Did I mention my mom's pretty smart?
In addition to her three children, a full courseload, and a daily four-hour roundtrip drive to the Big City, she also had regular mom stuff to do: She cleaned, did laundry, went grocery-shopping, canned vegetables from the aforementioned gardens, apparently studied/did her homework at some point (she graduated, so I assume this happened). After she left school, she took on a full-time engineering job that I know she never really liked but that she did for us. We feasted on a multicourse dinner every Sunday that seemed to take her all day to cook. She threw massive parties, including our annual September shindig and Christmas Eve.
None of this seems like it would make any sane person feel beautiful or in control or glamorous. I have just two children, I would rather order takeout than cook a meal, and I don't can a damn thing, yet I often feel like a physical and emotional wreck. I lie down a lot (one of my worst fears is that one of my kids will someday write a memoir entitled "Why Does Mommy Like Her Bed So Much?"). I do work hard — I'll give myself that.
There were occasional cracks in her unflappable Mom Shell. I know she cried after she and my dad dropped me off at my college dorm for the first time, 400 miles away from home, because my room was on the first floor, right next to the exterior door that led out to the mean streets of Buffalo. I know she used to proudly show her engineering co-workers the hack articles I penned for the trades when I first got out of college. She didn't tell me about either of these incidents, but I have my inside informants. When my brothers, my brother's girlfriend, and I flew down to Florida for one night to surprise her for her 60th birthday, her stoicism totally collapsed — we had her! She spent the entire night saying, "I can't believe you came." I knew she was happy. We looked at old pictures until way past midnight, even though we all had to fly back to our respective parts of New York early the next day.
Over the years, I suspect that my mom probably often felt (like I do, and like many moms do) like she fell short in some way — either with the kids or at work or with friends or with her husband. Something always feels like it's gotta give. In terms of our own mother-daughter relationship, the two of us definitely had our ups and downs (we shall never speak of the-time-she-hid-all-of-the-bathroom-towels-and-makeup-on-me-because-I-kept-leaving-my-wet-towels-all-over-my-bedroom-floor-after-she-told-me-a-million-times-not-to incident) — but I think that's pretty normal, and I own my part in the nonsense.
Sometimes you have to look at yourself the way your kids look at you to see the big picture. I now have similar bouts of tumult with my own daughter, who fluctuates between bringing the crazy and genuflecting before the Mom God. Often the twain shall meet: My mini-me will throw an epic tantrum, then guilt-step into my room 15 minutes later, hug me, and melt my heart with her enormous, earnest eyes and such nuggets as "I know we always love each other, no matter what" and "Please don't ever die" and (my absolute favorite): "If you weren't my mommy, I'd create you."
That last one is a weird, quasi-existential thing to say, but I know exactly what she means. I'd create my mom, too, if she didn't exist. Then I'd make her my prisoner and force her to whip up her amazing salads and Sunday dinners for me for the rest of my natural life. Kidding! (Not really!)
I now have the privilege of being a mother myself. I stumble through the day-to-day, hoping I'm making the right choices. I know sometimes I mess up. But I see how my mom did it. I know I can do it, too.
Thanks for everything, Mom. I love you. Happy Mother's Day!
* My mother has informed me they were tomatoes, not zucchini.
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