The Victorians constructed what we would consider a meme these days, casting wives and mothers as "the angels of the hearth." It was meant to conjure the image of a sweet, impossibly patient, ever-loving being, closer to an omnipotent if indulgent deity than to a real parent or spouse--I think of it as the Meme of the Eternal Living Sacrifice. The Angel of the Hearth isn't a person in her own right; she's the dispenser of all love and comfort, the font of all wisdom, and never demonstrates an original thought or action.
My mother was not an angel, thank God.
My mother was a lioness.
Mom was the disciplinarian of the family. It was well-known to our friends and neighbors that when we kids did something, the Old Man's first words were not, "Get inside." They were, "Wait until your mother gets home."
They had an arrangement. Both had to work to keep the household going; Mom would get a job working morning or second shift, and Dad would get a job working second or graveyard shift, just so someone would be at home with the boys. By the time I came around, the marriage was dead, so there was no need for that arrangement anymore.
So my brothers got the joy of hearing the dreaded words, "Wait until your mother gets home." Oh, boy, did they. And Mom had heard all the excuses, and used most of them herself in her life. Her bullshit detector was more finely tuned than any instrument devised for NASA. She was the original lie detector, and unlike lie detectors, she actually was accurate.
Damn.
But Mom was also our defender. My second brother once came home with his shirt-tail cut off. The vice principal had a policy; whenever he saw a boy walking around the school with his shirt-tail hanging out, he'd snip it off. Shirts weren't inexpensive, either. Mom promptly headed to the school and told the vice principal that if he destroyed one of my brother's shirts again, she'd make him sew it back on or buy a new one.
When my third-grade teacher told her to forget sending me to high school, and just enter me into vocational training, Mom informed him that I was not only going to high school, but I would get a college degree. When my fifth-grade teacher called her to complain that I was reading in class, Mom's response was, "You should be grateful you've got a pupil that can read." That teacher didn't call her again.
We were poor. Mom did her best to keep us from realizing that fact, and succeeded with me because I didn't have any friends that weren't in the same boat. But it was a great year when she didn't have to work two jobs just to keep the bills paid, food on the table, and clothes on our backs. She never complained--she just asked me to keep the dishes washed each day, and the house tidy. I expanded it to cleaning the whole house each week. It made her so happy that she'd take me for a walk to the closest mall, where we'd get a hot dog from Miracle Mile Deli. They cost $1; that and a small lemonade were all she could afford for us, and because of that I knew how much she appreciated what I did. It made me feel as if I was really a help to her.
When my second brother needed a place to stay after his alcohol and drug abuse got him evicted, Mom laid down the ground rules: no drugs. No alcohol. Do either, and you're gone. When she found the black tar heroin in his room, she packed his things and ordered him out. She didn't share living space with him again for six years, and by then, my brother had wised up and kicked the heroin and cocaine habits he'd picked up. Alcohol took him longer to kick--but he still wouldn't have made it that far if not for the fact that, even though she wouldn't live with him, Mom still called him. All she wanted was to say hello, find out how he was doing, if he needed help, if he needed food, to know that she loved him, to stop using, to get help. And that she loved him--that most of all.
When my oldest brother's marriage imploded, Mom spent every night for a week on the phone with him, even though she suspected there was more he wasn't telling her. She didn't ask probing questions; she just let him talk. I think he was grateful for that. When my second brother got married in Vegas for the second time, she congratulated him, gave him best wishes, and only told me that she felt he was making a bad mistake. When he, too, came home needing to talk, wanting advice, Mom gave it to him. When he told her that, even though he'd found his wife in bed with their neighbor, "I didn't get married just to get divorced," she hugged him and told him, "You will figure out what's best for you, and do it. You're smart, and you're strong enough to face anything."
He ended up getting the divorce, and Mom was right--he got through it.
And when I told her I had no intentions of marrying, she did say she thought I was missing out by not having kids--but that, as far as marriage, she felt I was making a wise decision. "Marriage," she told me, "isn't for everybody, and you have to be careful these days. It's not like it was when I was your age. You practically had to get married. These days, you can even have the kids and forget the husband."
(Which, I have to admit, was Mom's great goal in life. She wanted 12 of us. I was No. 6, and came part-and-parcel with a complete hysterectomy.)
She told me the stork story up until I was five, when one of my many "adopted" cousins got pregnant. Then she started giving me the basic facts. My "cousins" helped. I knew all about the birds and the bees by the time I was 9, and Mom answered any question I had. Her friends were horrified; I had, they said, no business knowing about sex at such an early age! Wasn't she afraid I'd go out and get pregnant? Mom told these women how she had been kept so ignorant of sex that, on her wedding night, she thought her new husband was deformed. "At least," she told them, "this kid will know how to take care of herself."
Mom had a flash-fire temper allied to a protectiveness directed at anyone she deemed worthy of it--her children, or someone else's. I remember one winter day in 2005, in a Target in La Habra, CA. A little girl and her mother passed us, with the little girl in tears as her mother berated her for getting the date wrong for some event and not telling her. "But I did, Mommy," we heard the little girl say. "I did tell you!" "Oh, you're a lying little bitch!" the woman snapped.
Mom whirled on her and snarled, "I guess that makes you an unfeeling cunt, doesn't it?"
Mom was 74, white-haired, and tiny at that point, and yet I had to hold on to her arm to keep her from going after the woman who, I should add, looked like the last thing she'd expected was to be called out so pungently by a little old grandma.
She even tried becoming a social worker. She wanted to work with abused children because she'd grown up an abused child. She lasted one month, and I heard the horror stories when she came home, shaking and emotionally exhausted.
But Mom tried, not only professionally, but with her friends' kids as well, to mother the world. So many of my so-called "adopted" siblings became so because they knew that, when their parents threw them out, Mom would take them in. Patricia, who was raped by her stepfather and thrown to the mercy of the juvenile court by her mother, stayed with us, off and on, until I was 17. Regina, whom Mom convinced to give up prostitution, was one of my regular babysitters--and she's a retired surgical nurse today. Connie and Alicia, two of my friends, took refuge with Mom whenever their own mother went on a rampage. Ralph and Fred, two friends of my brothers, called her during the last year of her life, telling her how much they missed and loved her.
Today Ralph called to tell me he was thinking of Mom, and missed her. I've gotten notes from friends who knew Mom and want to wish me a Happy Mother's Day in her memory. And my brother and I are going hiking later, so we can cheer her memory and let her know we're still here. The lioness's cubs have made it through another year, and we'll make it through this one too.
Happy Mother's Day, Mommy.