My Mom's Lessons

My Mom’s Lessons

Grief

At five-years-old my best friend was a cat. I named him Blackie despite his white bib and paws. He never scratched or bit, not even when I dressed him in baby clothes and paraded him around the yard in a baby carriage. We lived on the main road through town, a long, straight road many used as a speedway. Indoor cats unheard of back then, Blackie took his chances with that road and lost. We found him dead under a neighbor’s house.

We were not a hugging family. I still remember the feel of the start of surprise that ran down my mother’s rigid body as I flung my arms around her waist. Stepping back, she bundled me into the family car and took me out to dinner, just the two of us, something she had never done before. This marked my first experience of loss with solemn importance. I cried off and on, and she never told me to stop or to move on. She let me grieve at my own pace, a lesson especially remembered as my family went through my dad’s death and now hers.

Even Adults Need Play  

My mother often shooed my brother and I outside and locked the door against constant childish demands. One day she forgot the lock. I went in, I don’t remember for what. Mom, in her late twenties, her hair in a ponytail, stood in the middle of the living room, yardstick in hand, conducting to a classical record playing on our record player that looked like a suitcase. She saw me, standing in the doorway, mouth open, and the yardstick drifted down to her side. Face red, she asked what I wanted. I felt bad interrupting her pretend time but was delighted that, even though a grownup, she still found time to play. It’s one of my favorite lessons.

Determination

My mom’s biggest regret throughout my childhood was that she didn’t have a house. We rented. She decided to take the matter into her own hands. In all but the most extreme weather, my dad helping her to set up, she stood weekend after weekend under an awning, behind a rented table filled with her shelves of cats, dogs, and clowns made from yarn, which she sold at New Jersey’s Englishtown Flea Market, the largest market on the east coast.

Mom had gone back to work, after we three kids entered school, as a third-shift aide at a rest home where, while the residents slept, she finally found a few hours of peace and quiet to dream and create. She took orders and produced people’s beloved pets from photographs or matched the color of crocheted tissue covers topped by her unique animal or clown heads to their décor. My mother saved enough from this second job to send us girls to college and to buy my parents’ retirement home.

At the assisted living facility where she lived the last half year, they had a craft fair and my mother spent hour after hour making large bed cats and smaller kittens for it. No longer able to stand, she sold from her wheel chair and made a few hundred dollars, as good a day as any at the NJ flea market.

Mom lived longer than anyone believed possible with her severe heart disease and diabetes, mostly, I suspect, on sheer will power. Even the day before she died, she said, “Am I dying?” My sister said, “I don’t know, Mom, are you?”

“I don’t want to,” my mom said. She still had things to do, crafts to make. I wonder if there are craft fairs in heaven. It would make her happy.