A Mother's Legacy

My mother’s birthday would have been this past week, on June 13th, to be exact. Thoughts began swirling around in my head then, but I was deep into a project with a deadline, so had to wait a while to actually write anything. Now that the project is done, here is but a tiny part of what I could say about her.
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Mother’s shape us in ways we don’t always understand or even suspect. Usually somewhere down the road, after a woman is grown and on her own – and especially if she has children – she will at some point do or say something and have this shocking revelation, “I sound (act) just like my mother!”

Don’t try telling that to a teenager. They’d never believe it.

However short or long the time we have with our mother, we are being molded. Even if someone never knew their birth mother, that too has an influence on their life. There is no denying whatever relationship we had or still have with our mother has far reaching effects, and an important cornerstone to building the person we are.

My mother was no different. I’m still sorting out the many ways our relationship impacted who I am today.

Unfortunately, many of my memories of my mother are tied up with death. One of my first vivid memories is of me sitting on a hard backed chair, legs dangling, and Mom explaining that I would be going to school a year early. I don’t remember the words, but instead a sense of compelling urgency. I needed to go to school THIS year, because my mother was sick, and she might not live to see me go to school NEXT year.

Yes, my mother was different. She was going to die. Most kids don’t think about their mother dying. It’s fortunately not part of their world to imagine such a thing happening. It was part of my world since I was 5 years old.

Once in grade school a fellow student asked our teacher what leukemia was. I knew. My mother was going to die because of it. Tears coursed down my cheeks while she explained it to the class. Later, when we went to our phys-ed class, she pulled me out of the line of kids marching around and around the gym and apologized. I told her not to worry about it, I didn’t mind.

I lied.

I minded a great deal, then and every other time I was reminded. And it shaped me. I had to be a “good girl” because what if I was bad and my mom died? How could I live with the guilt? Would her death somehow be my fault? I was always striving to live up to what I felt were her expectations for me, whether real or in my imagination. The building block of “there might not be a tomorrow” was shoved into my psyche.

Many times during my childhood I went to stay with my paternal Grandmother. She lived nearby and I could go to school while my mother was far away in some hospital and unable to care for me. I didn’t understand exactly what was going on then. Of course now I realize she was having treatments for the leukemia, most likely chemotherapy.

It became a pattern in my life. Long periods of things being normal interspersed with stays at my grandmother’s. During the normal times, my mother was in remission. She worked harder than most people I know, and never complained within my hearing. She defined the word “stoic.” You didn’t complain because you were sick.

So there was yet another building block cemented into my personality. Still today I have trouble admitting when I’m feeling bad, when I’m having pain, even to a doctor. You are NOT supposed to complain. That is seared into my brain. It means most people never have a clue that I have chronic pain and how much it affects my life.

When I was a teenager and full of my own ideas and concerns, I tucked away thoughts of my mother’s illness. It lurked in the background. It still shaped me, but I didn’t actively think of it so much. And so it went until my last year of college. I got married in December, between semesters. My mother worked hard on that wedding. She frequently mentioned she’d like to see some grandchildren. Soon.

It never dawned on me the time was drawing near when she was really going to die. I was used to the routine: my mother went to the hospital every so often, then she came home. She ALWAYS came home. Never mind I was in nurse’s training and should have seen the signs. I knew my mother was going to die, I always knew it. But not NOW, not yet.

It was a crushing shock when four months to the day after I got married, she DID die. Within a few short weeks I graduated from college on Mother’s Day. It hurt.

I canonized my mother for many years after that. It was a long time before I realized it was all right to admit she wasn’t perfect. She had many virtues, but like everyone else, she had a few faults also.

She was a remarkable woman, struggling to raise a family in spite of her illness, helping on a farm doing much of the manual labor outside while my father worked at a factory, and intensely devoted to her kids. She didn’t live long enough to see any of the grandchildren she longed for. I know she would have loved them so much, and been so proud of them, but she never got the chance to shape their lives.

But she certainly shaped mine.
And I still miss her.