Joyce

That last day in May, 1986

I looked at my apple watch this morning and it gave me a calendar alert of “Mother’s Death, May 31, 1986, Tomorrow.” and I burst into tears, which surprised me.

I am feeling a little under the weather as I sit in my room in Osaka, Japan on my day off from work. I am a sixty year old woman with a husband and a daughter who have championed me in this rather crazy life choice of acting in a foreign country, in a foreign language. Sometimes it makes me shake my head in wonder and deep gratitude.

It will be the 38th anniversary of my mother’s death tomorrow. I have lived more life without her than I did with her. She was a hard shelled woman, and her hardness made four hard shelled children. Our shared traits? Stubbornness, tenacity, anxiety, depression, fierce loyalty, honesty and hard love. Our dad was stubborn too, but somehow a softer soul. Someday I’ll try to describe him. But today is about my mother.

Joyce Ann King nee Mobley. Born in July 1927. From all accounts she was a fun loving, outdoorsy kid who loved being on the farm with her two older siblings, Jean and Phillip. During WWII they moved to Sabastipol so that her father, Phillip Lyle Mobley 1 could work in the shipyards. I never heard any stories about that time.

After highschool she went to SF French Hospital to become a nurse, and met her best friend LouDell. I don’t know what happened to Joyce during that time, but something did and she became hardened. It may have just been the thing she had to do to become a nurse, but I think it was deeper, perhaps darker than that.

Years later when her mother, Clara, was in her 90’s, she talked about our family as if I were a stranger and made comments about Joyce that made my jaw drop. “I don’t know when she became so mean.” Ah. Well, yes. She was at times.

My mother’s love had to be earned. There’s no other way to put it. I was never sure that I could do enough to earn it and it made me anxious and hyper aware of her moods. My inability to earn her love brought a huge amount of shame. That shame still lives deeply rooted in me, and when I disappoint someone, or do something wrong, SHAME rises up and tries to swallow me. It usually leaves me weepy and sorry, sorry, so very sorry.

So I spent a lot of my time lost in books, music and fairy tales, singing Disney songs and pretending to be someone else, somewhere else. Low and behold, that’s what became my profession. I’ve been an actor most of my life, and still find great joy and a home in that world and with the people that inhabit it with me.

Joyce’s life was reality. We lived on a farm, where our attention to detail and routine was truly life or death, and she worked as an RN, where her life was focused on other people’s lives as well.

She always seemed torn between allowing me to dream and pretend, and in reminding me what was real life…hard facts. But I think somewhere in her there was a dreamer that she tamped down and squished out of some kind of fear.

I remember that she would put on her starched white cap and white uniform, spray back her hair with V05 hairspray, smell slightly of Jean Nate, cornstarch face powder and lipstick, and then drive to work at the hospital. Then she would come home exhausted.

On her days off she would put on her jeans and work shirt to cook, or plough or drive the tractor to pack silage in the silage pit. Plant our garden, or harvest and put up fruit and vegetables, or sew a dress for me, or for my barbie. That was her love. Hard work and dedication… I don’t think there was anything left for her to give after the day was done.

She was unwell when I was in 6th and 7th grades, and then went in for a brain tumour surgery when I was in 8th grade, in 1977. The headaches and clumsiness that the doctors tried to convince her were because she was a woman of a certain age were really because she had an egg sized tumor at the top of her head between the hemispheres of her brain.

My dad went with her to San Francisco's Stanford Hospital. On the day of my mother's surgery I was home alone and waiting for the phone call from my dad to tell me my mother was out of surgery. I was 13 years old, and frozen in the act of waiting. I remember waiting all day, unable to concentrate or do anything else but wait. Finally, I went to the office at the back of the house to sit by the tan push button phone, with my mother's address book opened in front of me. I got the call, finally, some 6 hours later, and then I picked up the phone and began making calls to let friends and family know she was out of surgery.

Her recovery was long and the depression that settled over her was deep. She hated having to learn to move her left side again. She hated being weak. She told me once she would have rather died than be stuck doing what she was doing. She was miserable. But she fought her way back, and finally went back to work at the hospital.

The tumor returned four years later, in 1981, and she was furious. Absolutely beside herself with rage at it all. I drove her to Stanford Hospital for her pre-surgery appointment and got lost on the way. It was not a pleasant trip. She was stressed and I got us lost and she was at her wit’s end with me. A second surgery, a second recovery time. While she was away in San Francisco, my dad went back and forth as often as possible, and I was sexually assaulted. Let’s just say it was not a great time for any of us.

She struggled again to regain control of her body, and was put on medication to subdue seizures, but she didn’t like the medication because it made her feel foggy and disconnected. She would tinker with the dosage to try to feel normal, then would have a seizure and have to up the dosage once again.

Joyce was suddenly a lot more emotional after the second surgery. I saw her cry from some tender thing and it surprised me. We gave each other the same gift. I gave her a card with a quote from “The Velveteen Rabbit” and she gave me the same thing in book form. We cried together. First time ever, when I was 21.

I moved away to a different college; to a performing arts school. There were so many reasons that pushed me to go away, and my parents let me go on that path and supported my choice. So they were left alone in the big farmhouse with one another, and I think they found a sort of peace with one another.

After college I moved up to Seattle, and had to have surgery. She came up to stay with me while I recovered. She met my friend Tom, and they talked. I’ll never know what that conversation was, but I am glad they met one another.

On May 31st, mother swam alone in the pool, and after a probable seizure, she drowned. We all came home for her funeral, which was so unlike my family. Funerals weren't a thing we did. But because she was a nurse, my dad thought we needed to do something to include her huge community of co-workers and former patients, and they came to the funeral and to the farm afterward. They brought casseroles and cream puffs and gestures of kindness, and stories were told of the Joyce that we didn’t know. Joyce the RN that gave smiles and love and support to all her patients and fellow nurses. Joyce that inspired her co-workers with her strong work ethic and bedside manner.

I sat in the anger of her death for a long time, because I’d never been taught how to mourn or express anger. It stayed inside and became darkness and mixed with the other darkness that I kept hidden inside me, along with shame.

Now I’m sixty, and I understand her limitations, her exhaustion, anger and rage, her depression and dampened dreams. She gave every bit of herself and left herself empty, day after day, year after year, and she didn’t know how to ask for what she needed, or wanted.

I think we might have become friends. I think I have made a friendship with the memory of her, at least. It took time and a lot of counselling and work on my part. I still have a lot to learn, and shame is still lurking in my life, but so is tenacity and fierce determination, absolute loyalty and hard love.

A lot of soft love too.