Mom & Me Four Archive

...my intention to quote the two "interesting things" in the thank-you note my mother wrote to MFS for the birthday flowers (mentioned here and here) from my mental trash bin today while reviewing my old errand lists and ripping them out of my constant-companion-purse-sized-notebook. I'd copied the two items onto the bottom of an errand list. In the order in which these items appear in the note:

1. "[Mom's dead older brother] is still in Chicago as far as we know and he's still not found the right girl."
2. "It feels good just to sit and not do much of anything."

    Mom's brother, of course, long ago found "the right girl". The interesting thing about his marriage, though, is that no one in the family ever developed a smidgen of fondness for his "right girl", except for my mother, whose attempts at fondness were severely tested by Right Girl. Mom persevered, though, right up to the end of Right Girl's life, in line with her Jesus sensibility regarding always assuming the best about people, even when they can't seem to prove anything but the worst about themselves. After I read the note, once Mom had decided it was ready to send, without referring to the questionable correctness (I consider it questionable because, of course, to her, the note was correct, since her reality, at the time the note was written, was that her brother was still enjoying his bachelor days), I asked my mother about her family's feelings about her brother's choice of a wife and how the family initially reacted to her. Did they, for instance, give her the benefit of the doubt and like her, at first, until she had proven herself unlikeable?
    "[Dead brother's wife] told me, once, that when she met the family, I was the only one who kissed her. I hadn't remembered that."
    "Is it possible," I asked, "that the family actually didn't want [dead brother] to get married or were miffed that he did so without prior family approval of his Right Girl, and this might have colored the family's reactions to Right Girl?"
    "Oh," she said, "I don't think so. We were all beginning to wonder if he ever would get married. I think we were relieved that he did."
    "Well," I continued, "considering that a life-long bachelor tradition exists in your family (for generations, among both men and women), why was everyone worried that [dead brother] might be a life-long bachelor?"
    "I think we felt he needed to be taken care of."
    "Then, why so little rejoicing when he finally married?"
    "I guess we thought Right Girl wouldn't be able to take care of him."
    They were probably right. She was an unusually needy person, all her life. However, I'm thinking, now, it's possible that, consciously or subconsciously, [dead brother] may have been attracted to her extreme neediness in order to prove that he was not as needy as his family perceived and was damn well capable of taking care of not only himself but someone else, as well.

    Regarding the second interesting item: My mother has been trying hard to communicate this to me, over and over, for some years, now. Although there have been times, some years ago before her chronic health problems began to be addressed, that I believed her problem wasn't a desire to "sit and not do much of anything" but was related to depression, boredom and/or the catch-22 of increased lethargy, I'm now convinced that none of these is true. I now believe that when she's "not [doing] much of anything" she is, in fact, doing quite a bit, all of which is mostly invisible to me. Still, not being in or even close to the part of life through which she is traveling, being a mere observer, and a continually mystified one, at best, I tend to automatically resist her desire for "sitting" and outwardly appearing to "not do much of anything." She is mostly magnanimous with me when I try to prod her from her bed or her rocker when she's not interested in leaving either. Occasionally she'll get a little perturbed with me but I think she is as aware as am I that regardless of how beneficial my presence in her life is to her and regardless of how close we've become in the last twelve and a half years, I have only a faulty perception of her inner and outer life and her desires for how she wishes to continue that life. She is, in essence, as tolerant of me and gives me as much of the benefit of the doubt as she was of her brother's Right Girl. She likes me much better, true, and her love for me is much more personal than her like and love for Right Girl. But, bottom line, she knows I have as much difficulty fighting my way past myself to seeing who and where she truly is as Right Girl did.
    Bless my mother's magnanimity of spirit, which persists even in her phasing. It is responsible for making our lived-together-life much, much easier than it would be, otherwise.
    I love you, Mom.
    Time to get up.
    Later.