My Mom

My mother took an obvious delight in us as young children, introducing us to nursery rhymes and songs. But if my presence was a source of delight in her life, it was also a source of dismay and frustration, such as when I'd come home from kindergarten without my umbrella or my coat yet again, for the third time this week. I think there were times she despaired of me ever becoming mature enough to function independently and responsibly.

And that was an important part of mothering for her. She wanted her children equipped to be self-reliant and competent individuals, to send us out into the world with confidence. In my case, I soon had teachers and other adults fawning over my brilliance and my verbal fluency. Mama credited that too but remained concerned about pragmatic things: having a clever tongue wasn't going to make up for being absent-minded and irresponsible; I was still in danger of needing a keeper!

The pragmatic approach was typical of my Mom. She was never much inclined to make a fancy statement or to outline her viewpoints as derived from general principles. She just did what she considered important, right, or necessary.

Wnen I was about 8, she became concerned about young poor children not receiving a good early education and therefore not getting a fair chance in life. She worked with Head Start for awhile and then became a public school teacher, teaching 1st grade. No one visiting our home or speaking with her in church ever found themselves on the receiving end of passionate lectures about racism and poverty, and she didn't hang posters on our walls or anything. She just recognized a social problem that needed cleaning up and went to work on it the same way she'd address a pile of laundry or a stack of dirty dishes in the sink.

Her own parents valued fitting in, not sticking out, and at a superficial level a person would probably have gotten that same impression about Mama. In her case, it was misleading. In the 1960s in Valdosta Georgia she had her own reasons -- practical and pragmatic ones, of course -- to have on a pantsuit on an early Sunday afternoon, and she chose to wear it to church instead of making it necessary to come home and change. Not long after that, a pair of church women were overheard to say "Well if Joyce Hunter can wear a pantsuit to services, I guess I can too".

Years later she was the first woman to work in the previously all-male ceramics and metallurgy sciences group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This integration didn't take place without some resistance. There were men there who didn't think she belonged. This was the late 1970s, a time when women's equality and their right to work in the professions of their choosing was a current hot topic of discussion. My mom's reason for being there was that her employer wanted to place here there, she had the skillset and talents needed for the job, and it sounded interesting. She showed up, did her job, won awards for the quality of her work, and outlasted her critics, and so in her own quiet way, with no trumpets blaring, she was a pioneer.

She taught me and my sister how to swim and drilled us on our strokes and technique until we qualified to be certified by the Red Cross first as Beginning swimmers, then Intermediate, and finally Advanced. When I was in Boy Scouts I decided to obtain the Mile Swim badge, and went to the most experienced long-distance swimmer I knew: my mother. A Boy Scout leader questioned this later: I wasn't in Cub Scouts, why the heck was I going to my MOMMY to get certified for my mile swim? I looked at this silly man and shook my head. Mama wasn't one of those flamboyant speed racer swimmers like Michael Phelps. When you saw her in the water swimming in her lane you didn't notice anything spectacular happening. But she was one of those people who could swim across the English Channel if she had enough time, she could go forever. She probably swam farther each month than he had in his entire life.

During my 30s I took pride in telling my friends that my middle-aged Mom had taken up scuba diving and was off exploring coral reefs in the Caribbean. She and my Dad went forth in a series of excursions and saw the world, and I enjoyed visualizing them as adventurers, peeking over new horizons and seeing new sights. Neither of them opted to spend their retirement quietly rocking back and forth in rocking chairs.

I was loved unconditionally and with joy, and launched with optimism and confidence to go out and live life to the fullest, to be a good person and to always do what I thought was right.

I don't think my gender identification stemmed from affirmatively wanting to be like her while actively trying to avoid being like my Dad or anything like that. For me, it mostly had to do with the larger world, the world that defines and describes what it is to be a girl or a boy. I'm not a Freudian; I don't think children get their sense of what the sexes mean exclusively or primarily from their parents. Parents are Other in a fundamental way: they're grownups! What is normal for them isn't normal for us and vice versa. I got the sense of what the genders meant from the neighborhood and from school. From people my own age. I made generalizations, the other kids made generalizations. And then we began treating each other differently on the basis of sex. The teachers did too. It's not the kind of thing you necessarily notice that strongly coming from your own parents, at least not unless you see them around enough children to see a pattern forming. You do see it in classrooms because you've got a box of children, about half girls and half boys, and if there's different treatment you see it. And if there's a persistent pattern you see it because over time you see several adults doing it, and you see the kids themselves doing it as well.

Home was a safe place and my mom certainly was a big part of why that was true. If she was exasperated with me it was because I didn't do my homework or forgot my umbrella at the library. Never because I wasn't out in the neighbor's yard playing football with the other boys on our street.

She didn't realize what my daily life was like, at least not while it was happening. "Just laugh and show them you're a good sport. When they see that teasing you doesn't get you riled up, the bullies will lose interest and the others will see that you're a pleasant person. Just don't let them get to you".

Later, she had a better sense of what I was up against, but she couldn't fix things for me. She couldn't defend me against them because she wouldn't always be there. She would have if she could. She told me so as we talked at length in her final days, knowing it was our last chance to have discussions. She was sorry my childhood had been so awful and that I'd been alone in dealing with the more complicated stuff as a young adult, sorting things out. I told her about how I'd been taught that I was worthy of love and given the courage to believe that no, I didn't deserve the treatment that was meted out to me. I told her that I've had a good life. It's been a life based on choices she would not have made, would have found absolutely off-limits, incomprehensible. Often did, since she knew of some of them. But that I've had good connections with people, a sense of purpose and engagement with projects, and that I've had adventures. That I have lived life to the fullest on my own terms.




"What do you think about a person who wants to end their life?", she asked. "Do you think it is immoral?" At 82 she had been an athlete still, doing her daily laps in the pool that she and my Dad built as part of their dreamhouse, when her body misbehaved and flung clots. Some lodged in the brain and messed up motor and sensory, a little bit of cognitive, all of which she'll probably bounce back from. One lodged in her right calf muscle and they had to make two parallel slices and weren't at all sure she could keep the limb, although eventually they detected enough pulse in the foot that they stopped threatening to remove it. Unfortunately the remaining clot blocked the femoral artery in the other leg and a good chunk of that leg turned into the equiv of raw pot roast, and they had to take it off at the knee.

She had never been very inclined to ruminate about philosophical questions. This was pragmatic. A practical consideration. I acknowledged that anyone in her situation would think about that. At the time, like the rest of my family, I hoped she would decide that insofar as she was still here, she might as well make the best of it or at least explore what she could do within her new limitations.

"What's that drug that people die from that's in the news so much? Heroin? And the legal version that they give you in hospitals, that's...morphine?" Yeah, pragmatic and practical.

She negotiated a discharge from the hospital and then from the rehab center they sent her to. It wasn't easy and there were setbacks but she succeeded in situating herself back in her own home, in a hospital bed set up for that purpose.

She ate well and seemed to be in good spirits and interacted with people. I spoke with her on the phone briefly.

Next day, apparently, she began to withdraw. Didn't want to eat, and ... the way my Dad put it was that talking to her was like calling an office and getting the answering machine. She'd answer questions put to her but wasn't really tuning in. Then when they were turning her to change the sheets she just...quit. No breath, no heartbeat.


Mama

1935-2018




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