With gratitude and love (often unspoken) to my parents, David and Judy
I write a lot about mother – son relationships (for obvious reasons) but I recently read a book that got me thinking about the other end of my spectrum, being an adult child to one’s parents. The book, Mitch Albom’s For One More Day (Hyperion, 2006), is based on the premise of exploring an ex-baseball player’s relationship with his mother; the unique spin is that much of the story chronicles his relationship with her after her death.
This got me thinking of me as a grown-up daughter with parents who are getting closer to the end of their lives than I usually care to think about.
Albom’s (anti)hero spends much of his life taking his mother for granted, and sometimes doesn’t see or talk to her for long stretches. Maybe longer than you think can usually happen in a good relationship, but not so long as to make you think he’s a terrible, terrible person. Those thoughts are reserved for the way he walks out of his daughter’s life. But his turnstile approach to his own mother doesn’t seem that unusual. It’s not so unlike how I take certain cultural institutions – the interstate, the grocery store, Amazon.com – for granted. Doesn’t matter if I don’t use one for days, months, or longer; if I really need the thing that only it provides, I’ll turn to it, and it will be there, because it has been there all along, regardless of what I think about it.
Later, he realizes some important things about being alive after the death of his parents, and this one stopped me short:
“But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.”
How many times my parents have provided this kind of backup. Even at times when I feel excruciatingly alone, or miserable, or stuck in an unbearably intolerable situation, I have held the knowledge that my parents will be there for me safely in my back pocket, where other people have been known to hold their Aces.
My folks might not know this, given how many times I have asked for help, but there are actually times I thought I needed their help, and didn’t ask for it – just the knowing they’d be in my corner was enough to help me make some kind of forward movement out of the difficult dilemma I’d been in.
Before my parents moved out of the family home I was raised in, the one they lived in for 43 years, I was protected from the unrealistic yet female fear of becoming homeless. I knew I could always return to my old bedroom, with my childhood single bed, blue and white stitched bedspread and even a few of my old stuffed animals still right there. But this option is now forever closed – I will never step foot again in my childhood home, and I will never watch my son sleep in my old bed, as I have when we’ve gone back to visit.
But I still am protected against being homeless, because if I needed to, I could live on my parents’ couch in their two-bedroom senior citizen apartment. I will never be homeless as long as they are alive. That’s something, in these times. A guarantee that a good professional career no longer offers, nor does marriage, raising kids who are kind to their parents, or even having really good friends to take you in. My folks are my guarantee. I will always have a home. It might make me crazy if I ever had to take the universe up on this kind of cosmic upending of everything I know to be true and the structures I have in place in my life, but crazy-because-your-parents-drive-you-crazy is one thing; homeless with no place to go and having no one in your corner is another.
There’s a second passage in the book that brought me up short. It’s taken from a scene where the main character thinks he’s encountered his mother, or her ghost, as she is no longer alive.
“Mom?” I whispered.
I hadn’t said it in so long. When death takes your mother, it steals that word forever.“Mom?”
It’s just a sound really, a hum interrupted by open lips. But there are a zillion words on this planet, and not one of them comes out of your mouth the way that one does.
“Mom?”
I can still vocalize that single “Mom” sound, can utter it at will, have probably been uttering it longer than any other word or sound. And there’s just one man who is my “Pop” – another singular sound, childish in its simplicity, an onomatopoetic word that perfectly conveys that all that is my father starts and stops with one sound.
But these sounds, these effortless primal communications, will be taken from me. One day, Albom warns, I will be orphaned, like his ex-ball-player. I will enter every situation without the backup of my real-life parents and the knowledge that they would (and have) stood by me no matter what. I will be alone in a way I have never been alone. I will have no one on the other end of a phone to whom I can say, “Mom,” with as many syllables to draw it out or shorten it, as the emotion of the call requires.
That it doesn’t really even matter how much or how little struggle a child has with a parent, it’s that the child has been wrapped in the consistency of always having been the child. There is someone who will answer to “Mom” or “Pop” and someplace to go home to, regardless of how crazy it makes you. That even though I’m now “Mom” to someone else, and I don’t need to be wrapped like a child in anything, I can hold the bravado of that position only because I still am somebody’s beloved daughter.