15 Lessons

There was a blue cartoon bull on a show I watched when I was little. He had a ring through his nose and would blow puffs of white smoke out of his huge nostrils every time he saw red. My mother saw red a lot. When she became angry at me or my sister or even just life in general, I would sometimes envision that blue bull’s face over hers and would then have to fight back a giggle. She’d see me pursing my lips wide-eyed as I watched the bull pacing around the room, a slim cigarette perched between long maroon nails and she’d say, “It’s fine to think whatever you want inside your head but you damn well better be careful what you say.” That was lesson number 1.

My mother Pat was an extremely intelligent woman. She was the middle child in a family of five sisters and she was her own mother’s admitted “least favorite daughter”. Years of her own maternal emotional battery combined with the sudden loss of her second infant daughter and the continued infidelity of my father (the love of her life) had created a very short-fused bomb within her. She knew it. My sister knew it. I knew it. It ticked loudly and the pain it caused was palpable to everyone. As kids, we tried our best to keep to a very choreographed routine to avoid ignition—but sometimes a blast was unavoidable.

My mother married young and her marriage to my father was wrought with tension. She made the decision to get her college degree because she wanted to ensure that she was always able to take care of herself and her children. This was not an easy task in the 70’s and meant juggled carpools for my sister and long days spent at an in-home day care for 2- year-old me. She worked an office job while going to school and managing me and my sister and the family home and although harried at times, she did everything with grace. When she completed her Bachelors, things with my father still had not improved and she decided to expand her career goals by going to law school. My father had a good job where we were, but the law program was at a university three hours away. She packed up my sister and I and rented a home in the college town. We would travel back to visit my father on the weekends or rarely he would come to see us. Money was tight then, but she was the queen of bargain shopping and always made sure we had all of what we needed and even much of what we wanted. I can remember a time when she and I were sitting on the floor of her bedroom at the rental house. She was perched cross-legged with a legal pad in her lap pouring over 6 or 7 very thick books with a highlighter in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Go get your books, Sarah” she said to me without looking up. “It’s time to study.” I was only 6 years old, but I complied with enthusiasm and returned to her room with a heaping pile of books about animals. As I sat down to mimic her, she smiled and said: “Education brings opportunity”. Lesson Number 2.

Birthdays were always a well celebrated event at my house. My mother made it a point to take us to the best bakery in town about a week before our big day to let us choose and order our own birthday cake. I can still smell that place— pure heaven. We often had birthday parties at the house with hats, balloons, and party favors but what stands out the most is the way that she started our day. On my birthday, she would wake me up singing “Happy Birthday” in a playful voice while still in her nightgown with my groggy sister and sometimes grumpy father in tow. She would have an armful of wrapped presents and I’d gleefully open them right then. She continued to call me early on my birthday to sing the birthday song well into adulthood.

Holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter were more carefully orchestrated traditional events but always very festive. She would slave over the holiday meals and set beautifully fancy tables with seasonal tablecloths, candles, flowers and the good dishes. There were dazzling Christmas trees and over-stuffed Easter baskets with jellybean trails, all organized by her, and she would smile and laugh as we ate or opened presents or hunted eggs. Those are the best days I can remember with her.

Lesson Number 3: Life is hard. Celebrate when you can.

Mom often hid in the bathroom. She was found easily enough by the wafts of cigarette smoke seeping out from under the door and when I’d ask her what she was doing since she’d been in there for so long, she’d reply “There is solace in solitude.” That was lesson number 4.

I realize now that she isolated herself in order to keep from blowing up on us but as I kid, I thought she just wanted to avoid me. I began to emulate Mom’s tactics and spent much of my time alone with books and playing with stuffed animals. She sometimes referred to me as a “sullen child” not realizing soon enough that although I had mastered the art of solitude- there was little peace in it for me. When I begged and pleaded for a kitten, she knew I needed the companionship and my dad’s opinion be damned- a Siamese kitten she named Portia appeared for me one fine Christmas morning. Portia might have been the meanest cat in the world to everyone except me. She’d attack my mom and sister regularly if they made the mistake of trying to pet her but she’d purr contentedly in my lap. When we’d take the trips back and forth from the college town, I insisted that Portia travel with us -much to my father’s disdain. Portia and my father hated each other equally and they would engage in a sort of passive aggressive dance throughout each visit. My dad would swat her off his chair and she would hiss at him. My father moved her litter box out of her preferred location and so she’d make her way to his closet and poop in his shoes. I loved her fiercely. She would sit on the side of the tub while I bathed, sleep with me, and even let me dress her up. We were best friends. After each round with Portia, my dad would regularly threaten to get rid of her and my mom would come to the rescue: “You will go before that cat does”.

Lesson number 5: Sometimes the best human companions aren’t human at all.

As an adult, I realized that Mom most probably suffered from bipolar disorder, but mental health issues were very stigmatized then. She had become an accomplished attorney and her quick temper made her quite effective in that capacity. A leaked mental diagnosis would have been career suicide and was therefore summarily avoided. She instead self-medicated with 2 packs a day and nightly Vodka Tonics. She practiced mainly domestic and civil law and was always quick to take up for the underdog. Mother would singly take on major banks, corporations, and even government entities that had entire teams of lawyers opposing her during a time when women still weren’t taken very seriously in professional roles. Much of her work was done pro bono for friends and relatives and she fought most ferociously when representing family. She joked that she was always “jousting at windmills” and took pride mainly in the chase rather than the kill. Her win/loss record was nothing remarkable, but she had a reputation for over-the-top research and briefing that created extensive work and expense for her opponent. She was an infuriating legal adversary.

Lesson numbers 6, 7, and 8: Stand up for yourself and what is right. Defend your loved ones at all costs. Know your enemies.

Sometimes Mom took the “Know your enemies” philosophy outside of the courtroom and introduced me to true crime stories at the height of the Stranger Danger education craze. She had me watch a made for TV movie in the 80’s about the abduction and decapitation murder of a young boy. I was 6. The movie was followed up with a lecture about yelling “Fire” while running away if a stranger approached me menacingly, and never approaching cars to take candy or look for puppies. I developed a full-on phobia of white panel vans and ice cream trucks, but it was effective. There wasn’t a weirdo in the world that could have desensitized my hardwired terror. On a separate note, my OCD kicked in after Mom described the dangers of electricity and water and detailed how a childhood friend of hers died when a hair dryer fell into the bathtub. I couldn’t touch an electrical cord or light switch without having to wash my hands 7 times. I’m not sure how that protected me from a sparky electrical death but in my mind it did, and it went on for years.

Lesson Number 8: Strangers can’t be trusted.

Lesson Number 9: Electricity and water don’t mix.

Lesson Number 10: Ignore your loved ones seemingly benign obsessive behavior. It’s probably just a phase.

When my sister Angie became a teenager, she and Mom had a constant power struggle over boys and curfew. My mom generally held firm on a 12 AM return time with her constant mantra being “Nothing good ever happens after midnight”. My sister was always pushing the limits and it generally ended badly for her—when she got caught. There was much yelling and crying and even a powder blue rotary phone thrown through a door after Angie racked up a $400 long distance bill talking to her college boyfriend. There was also a late- night turnpike stakeout when my mother discovered that Angie had snuck out and driven 3 hours away-without a driver’s license- to visit that same boyfriend in his college dorm. My mom woke me in the middle of the night and told me to get in the car. “We are going to bust your sister” she said with a weirdly calm smile as she threw a can of coke to me in the back seat. She told me to buckle up and blasted the music in her white Camaro until we parked along the highway and waited to catch a glimpse of Angie’s Mustang. It was the closest I had felt to my mother in years. Once it was spotted, my mom was on my sister’s tail like an eagle swooping down to catch a fish. I was thrilled with the police partnership my mother and I shared until we got home, and the bomb went off in full force. I observed every Mother/Angie interaction with a keen 10-year-old eye.

Lesson Number 11: The best defense is no offense at all… or at least no trail of one.

My parents split the day after my sister’s wedding. My Dad had the gall to invite his secretary and mistress to the big event and Mother remained seemingly calm for the guests although imploding internally. The next day she moved out which put me in the awkward position of learning about my dad’s infidelity and the unraveling of my world all in one moment. I also had to choose right then and there where I was going to live. I chose Mom because I was disgusted with Dad after learning that this was in fact the third impropriety. My mother didn’t make a scene that day or at least not one that I saw. She explained to me later.

Lesson Number 12: Fool me once, Fool me twice—Shame on you. Fool me three times—Shame on me.

Both of my parents remarried within two years of the divorce. My dad married his mistress and my mom got hitched to a man her law partner had represented in his divorce. I always found him odd, but it was strange enough to see my mom in dating mode. It was a weird new normal for me and I struggled to accept everything. I began to understand that there was some solace in solitude and retreated into myself. Depression hit hard and it concerned my mother. I believe she saw a lot of herself in me and I could tell that she feared that the mental demons that had always haunted her had attached themselves to me. She was right.

I went to college and there I learned many lessons on my own. I had my heart-broken, navigated the politics of academia successfully and then became an un-planned mother at 23. No one in my family ever thought I’d choose to have kids and it seemed to be an unspoken fear that I may not be fit. My sister who already had two kids of her own would pop in unannounced and so would my mother. My OCD was back—I would scrub my hands raw before handling my newborn daughter and insist that everyone else did as well. Beyond that, I was adapting to life as a mother just fine.

My relationship with my mother was up and down throughout my early adult years. I divorced my children’s father and married for the second time about a year later. Mom disapproved of him. She disapproved of my career choices. She disapproved of much of my parenting style and because I wanted to keep the peace, our time together over the next 10 years was limited to a handful of holidays and a few summer camping trips with my children.

When my second marriage ended, my mental health took a nose-dive. Mom resurfaced and would intermittently dote on my children, particularly my son. She loved attending his football games and would whistle and cheer loudly for him. He loved it! She brought huge bags of snacks to the games and would try to sneak him candy and soda at half times even after I would sensibly argue that it would make him throw up. They would laugh and do things behind my back which both annoyed and surprised me. My mother rarely if ever attended any of my school or extracurricular events so this new-found enthusiasm was a little puzzling.

Lesson 13: Being a grandparent must be more fun than being a parent.

My Mother was 65 when she was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer. She kept her diagnosis from me for two months fearing I was too fragile to hear the news. When she did share it, I was deeply saddened but not surprised. She had started smoking when she was 15 and my sister and I had both been after her for years to quit. 50 years of two packs a day takes a toll on even the strongest of constitutions. I started spending more time visiting with her without the kids because we both knew that time was limited. We would talk for hours, laughing and crying together. She completed rounds of chemo and radiation even though the doctors admitted that it might only buy her a few months. Her strength and appetite declined sharply. One evening, my stepfather called me frantically saying that there was a “problem with your mom”. I raced to her house to find her sitting at her computer while cursing and tossing papers around- clearly seeing red again. She was still practicing law at the time and was attempting to submit a document to the online court system but couldn’t make it work. I told her to let me have a look and what I saw shook me.

The document she had written was nonsensical gibberish, but it was formatted to the legal standard perfectly. I asked her what she was working on and asked if I could correct a few typos. “Just send the damn thing! There’s a fucking deadline!” she screamed. My mother’s entire persona was centered around her line of work. It pained me to submit something sub-par in her name. I couldn’t stand to lie to her in that moment though and so I submitted it and then she sent me away. I cried all the way home knowing that the cancer had spread to her brain and that the months the doctors had predicted had now morphed into weeks.

I took leave from work so that I could spend more time with mom. She was adamant that she didn’t want to die in hospital, and I promised her I wouldn’t let that happen. We talked about her pending death, and she forced me to a columbarium to help her select a niche for her ashes. I was appalled. She had already made all her own funeral arrangements but wanted me to pick the spot since she assumed I was the one that would probably spend the most time there. We settled on a spot in front of a thicket of oak trees where deer gathered in the evenings.

Lesson 14: “Gravestones and funerals are for the living-not the dead.”

Mom often wanted me to sit on the patio with her and smoke. I gave up on getting her to stop when she said “It’s already got me. What’s one more cigarette going to do?” We talked quite a bit and it was obvious that many of her memories were fading. She was forgetting names and the faces in pictures within just a few days. A lady from hospice came during the last week to explain the process to us and although she was trying to be nice, she spoke to my mother like a toddler, and it infuriated me. “I like your red sweater, Pat. Do you like red?” I would have given anything for her to be seeing red again in that moment rather than for her to be asked if she liked it. It was unnatural.

A hospital bed was set up in the living room of my mother’s home and a hospice nurse came three times a week. Things went quickly from there. One day mom was still trying to drink Diet Dr. Pepper and asking me to help her get to the patio to smoke and the next day she couldn’t get out of bed. She would wake periodically and mumble something and I fought hard to try to understand what she was saying to no avail. I never heard her voice again after that. She died on a quiet April evening, less than 10 months after her diagnosis, with me at her side and my stepfather asleep on the couch.

It has been five years since she passed away and I still find myself wondering what she would think about decisions I’ve made. I want to talk to her about my children and hear her laugh about something silly my son says. I want to hear her voice again-even if its yelling- and I will never have that chance. Most of who I am, both the negatives and positives were shaped by my mother. She was sharp-witted and strong. She was quick-tempered and opinionated. She wasn’t perfect but she was mine.

Lesson 15: Love your mother with your whole heart. You only get one.