Tag: my mom

N is for Normal

My biology/homeroom teacher told me straight out that my father was “CRAZY” for leaving his job at IBM.

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, it was NORMAL for the mom to be home with the kids. My family wasn’t normal. My mother worked outside the home for as long as I can remember until she retired a decade and a half ago.

First, she was in the bookkeeping department at McLean’s department store in downtown Binghamton. Then she moved less than a block to Columbia Gas, where she was reportedly the first black person to work as a customer service rep. When she moved to Charlotte, NC, she was a bank teller for First Union bank.

No one has ever suggested that my father was anything like “normal.” In fact, my biology/homeroom teacher told me straight out that my father was “CRAZY” for leaving his job at IBM of six years (that he hated), especially for a position with Opportunities for Broome, an OEO government job (where he thought he was making a difference). Government jobs come and go, but once you’re in the IBM family, you were set for life. (IBM decided it actually DID start having to lay off people in the 1990s.)

So, normalcy isn’t always that appealing. It’s been used as a cudgel to block all sorts of individual and collective rights.

Conversely, I AM sympathetic, as I watch the trauma over the worldwide economic crisis when I hear people ask, “When will things get back to NORMAL?” Likewise, the “crazy” weather generates a similar response. People are desperately looking for a sense of stability/sanity.

I have to wonder if “normal” is coming, or, as I suspect, we’ve come to a “new normal” of stormy weather, fiscally and meteorologically.

As Bruce Cockburn sang: The trouble with normal is it always gets worse – LISTEN.

Maybe Normal is just a town in Illinois.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

(Great Grand)Father

She saw him as this pillar of virtue, who crumbled as an icon for her.

There was a recent news story that reminded me of my family.

My dad’s maternal grandfather was a man everyone simply called Father. He wasn’t a Catholic priest, of course, but he was a deeply religious, pious man. I actually remember him; he died in the early 1960s when he was over 90. He was always decent to me, and my father adored him. But Father’s children clearly feared him. It was strange to me; he was a little old man, but my grandmother and her siblings, who were in their 50s and 60s were in terror of this diminutive fellow.

After he died, his house was cleaned out. And what do you suppose the relatives found? What they used to call “girlie magazines”. And booze. This was especially terrible for my mother, who had been married a dozen years or more to my Dad. She saw him as this pillar of virtue, who crumbled as an icon for her.

I’m not sure when I first heard this story – certainly not at the time – though I suspect I was a teenager. I DO know that my mother told of her disappointment of this man periodically for the next 40 years or more. I think this revelation really shook her sense of faith for a number of years.

Of course, the recent story that prompted this recollection was the stash of pornography found in the residence of Usama bin Laden. Or was it porn ‘stache? As more than one comic has remarked, USL’s off to meet his 72 vegans (David Letterman’s joke), or 72 Virginians, or 72 pick-your-word-starting-with-the-letter-V.

The new Mother’s Day reality

The running joke when I’d call or send a card is that I’d say or write that it was from her favorite son.


Someone sent me this picture some months ago. I thought it was rather funny. Specifically, it reminded me of the Paul Simon song Mother and Child Reunion, which is based on a chicken and egg dish that Simon had at a Chinese restaurant.

Then my mom died, and it’s my first Mother’s Day without her. The visual is still funny but in a more melancholy way. Melancholy humor.

I’ve discovered that Mother’s Day ads REALLY irritate me lately, more than Father’s Day ads did 10 years ago. Maybe it was because it was longer between when my father died until the next holiday (August to June) than it is for my mom (February to May). But probably it’s because I get more e-mail solicitations than I did a decade ago, and they are more difficult to ignore.

The picture above is of my mother with her favorite son many years ago in front of 5 Gaines Street, Binghamton, NY USA; the house and the trim, BTW, were green. The running joke when I’d call or send a card is that I’d say or write that it was from her favorite son. She was generally polite enough not to mention that I was her ONLY son.

Last Sunday, there was a Mass for Mom at the Mission San Diego Basilica de Alcala in San Diego. As my sister Leslie reported, it was “beautiful. It was the regular Noon Mass, but it was announced at the beginning that this Mass was for Trudy Green, mother of Leslie Green, who is a member of the Mission Choir.” I will be getting a copy of the event. “It was a packed house on a beautiful day.”

The bottom picture is of my daughter with her favorite mother. Carol is, among other things, a good mom.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you mothers, and all of you who have or had mothers.

 

Grief

You’d like to know following my own mother’s death, we have had a great healing.

I must say that my friends have been most helpful to me in dealing with grief. Apparently, I had said something useful to a friend when her father died, which was at some point after my father died: “Just so you know, I often think of (and quote) your message to me after my dad died, that grief is a non-linear thing. Still happens, in the most unexpected places.”

Well, THAT’S right. Besides the situations already mentioned in this blog, in the past couple of months, I’ve cried at:
* sad songs that have nothing to do with my mother, or death
* the mournful sound of train whistles
* an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy”, where a young father dies before he can take his son to the big game; I believe he had a stroke, which might be a factor for me

Of course, the other thing that’s in play is that this is my LAST parent who is gone. As another friend in the same position noted: “Now there’s no one ‘above’ you. That’s pretty weird, huh? We miss our parents as individuals, but also for the roles they played.” And since both of my parents were only children, I NEVER had aunts, uncles, first cousins. I mean, my PARENTS had aunts and uncles and cousins, but my sisters and I never did. And I’m the oldest of my generation.

A doctor of one of my sisters recommended the book Orphaned Adult: Understanding and Coping With Grief and Change After the Death of Our Parents by Alexander Levy, printed by Perseus Publishing, ISBN 0-7362-0361-0. It shows up on this list of resources to help one deal with grief. The book is at a library affiliated with the Albany Public Library, and I’ve just received it on interlibrary loan.

Another friend wrote: “You’d like to know following my own mother’s death, we have had a great healing. And it has brought our family closer with annual holiday gatherings.” Well, maybe. Certainly, the pathologies of my family were less evident this time than after my father died.

I had forgotten how many of my Albany friends had met my mother at some point when she came up to visit. They all used terms such as “delightful”, “a lovely woman”. One of my old Binghamton friends wrote: “I always liked your mom. She was very down to earth and unpretentious. I loved her smile and how it always warmed up the room.”

Assuming Facts Not In Evidence

“What has been also interesting is how we have heard from several people how common it is for people to get better before they depart.”


One of the things that have puzzled, occasionally annoyed, but ultimately mystified me was that, when my sisters and I told people that my mother had died, and knowing that she hadn’t died in an accident or the like, not a small number of them, whether they got the news in person or by e-mail, said something along these lines of “I didn’t know she was sick.” Well, that’s just the thing; she wasn’t.

I’m stealing an e-mail my sister Leslie sent to one of those people. “She was not physically ill. In fact, she was feeling great, had just taken her shower and was getting dressed in anticipation of having the bus pick her up to take her to Adult Day Care. She complained about her head hurting but did not have any of the typical stroke symptoms.

[Our sister] “Marcia decided to call 911 to be safe, again, not because she had the typical symptoms. They determined that she had had a massive stroke and moved her to a facility that has a better neuro dept.” This was referred to as a brain bleed, a rarer, and apparently more problematic, type of stroke, which measured 9 cm, when the “average” stroke is 2 to 3 cm.

“She was in ICU for 2 days before they moved her to a regular room in the neuro. dept. They monitored her closely, taking her blood pressure, temp, etc. every few hours.

“On Tuesday, her eyes were opened a bit, so we were feeling very hopeful. When Marcia cleaned out her mouth with a swab, she grimaced, and when Marcia said ‘oh, you don’t like that’ she answered ‘no’.” She also raised her eyebrow in response to another comment. “So, we got all excited, thinking that perhaps she could have pulled out of it, as we know, nothing is impossible to God.

“We met with the Dr. and he said we needed to add the feeding tube or let her go peacefully, which could have been 1 or 2 weeks to live…We agreed to give her a fighting chance and elected for the feeding tube. The MD had agreed to make it so and was going to do so later on Wed. Guess Trudy and God had different plans.

“Roger had spent [Tuesday night in her room]. The nurses had been in and out that [Wednesday] AM, and he was staying out of their way. At 8:56 they told him to call us, which he did, and we went to the hospital immediately. She was already gone…went very peacefully, and looked as if she was just sleeping.

“Interesting that Marcia and I were with Dad when he passed and Roger was with Mom…

“What has been also interesting is how we have heard from several people how common it is for people to get better before they depart.”

BTW, the article title comes from dialogue from one of the countless law shows I grew up watching, from Perry Mason and Judd for the Defense to Owen Marshall and the lawyer section of The Bold Ones.

Ramblin' with Roger
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