My Mother Is Right
My mom is 93 years old. She is 4’10” tall and is one of the smallest humans you will meet. Whenever people meet me and say, “I imagined you as much larger in person,” I take out a photo of me standing next to my mother and try to explain that I always thought I was tall. All through my childhood, my mother told me how big I was. I am five inches taller than she is. By the time I was in high school, it perplexed me when people told me I was actually short. I still don’t believe it in my head, I think.
Did I mention she is 93? My father died 3 years ago and although she loved him, she has been living her best life since his death. She bought herself a giant Teddy Bear that she named Marshmallow (pictured above) for Valentine’s Day, though he always gave her chocolate and flowers. Who knew that my mother would want a giant Teddy Bear? I never had a Teddy Bear of any size while growing up.
Since my father’s death, she has been on an Alaskan cruise (with my brother), a trip to Snow Valley, and is scheduled to visit Prince Edward Island (yes, of course of Anne of Green Gables fame—it is her favorite book). She is having a grand time and while she will gladly tell you how old she is, she will not let you treat her like an old person. I took my mom to the local Tulip Festival this weekend. When I suggested that we could use a golf cart to take her through the miles of the Tulip Festival, or even a motorized wheelchair, she scoffed and said she would take her walker and would be just fine. Indeed, she was just fine. She walked a little more slowly than I would, but on several occasions when I asked her if she would like to rest, she insisted she was fine and was ready to see the next garden.
We had lunch afterward (she ordered a half BLT, but would only eat half of the half) and she insisted on paying for all of it. She very much enjoys paying for everything herself these days, now that she is entirely in charge of all of her money herself and doesn’t have to account to my father for a single cent. She likes to inform us all how much money she has and that she is fine and we don’t need to worry about her and can she give us some of her money for a gift because she wants to make sure we’re OK.
When I talked to my mom about how she raised eleven intelligent children, she insisted, “that’s all from your father. He was the smart one. I was never very smart.”
When my sister and I objected to this and reminded her that she had a Masters Degree from an era when women rarely got a B.A., let alone a graduate degree, she pivoted and insisted that “[Older sister] was really the smart one. She never had to study a second, but I had to work really hard.” As if her having a strong study habit was a BAD thing.
Let me tell you, because my mom won’t listen to me when I remind her of this, if anyone gets credit for the academic success of her children, it is my mother. She is the one who drove us (all eleven of us) to the library every f***ing week (I’ll try not to swear because she doesn’t like it). She let us each check out ten books (except for my older brother, who I only learned last month, got a special pass to check out as many as he wanted). She was the one who had to keep track of all those books and get them back to the library.
And even after hundreds of dollars of late fees and replacement fees, she still kept taking us back. Every. F***ing. Week. For thirty odd years. And then she read to us for an hour every night, sometimes until she was hoarse, always falling asleep over and over again, until we nudged her awake to finish the story. She seemed as excited as we were to read it. She must have read those picture book favorites of hers (Prince Bertram the Bad, for instance, and Blueberries for Sal a thousand times—and this is not an exaggeration).
She also kept school files for all of us, placing any notable work we’d finished, along with our grades and test scores and awards we won. It is thanks to my mother that I have a record of nearly every story I wrote in elementary school. She is the only person who seemed to believe in me when I continued to tell everyone who asked what I was going to do when I grew up, “I’m gong to be a writer.” My father tried to insist this was impossible, “sweetie, it’s a hobby.” My mother never contradicted him. She just kept all my awards and papers, all the nice things teachers said to me, as proof. And she purchased every f***ing book I published and read them out loud to my father, whose highest praise for me was, “I guess it’s all right if it’s fiction because it tells a good story.”
When I thought about how annoying it was to worry about my mom falling over, or that she would be exhausted and in pain tomorrow because of the Tulip Festival today, simply because she was too proud and independent to accept help, I knew also that my children do and will say this about me. I have no idea if this is genetic or learned, but as much as I worry about her, I also remember my oldest brother calls her “the Energizer Bunny.” She wakes up every morning to go on a walk and she also sweeps the sidewalks at her living facility, something the staff really REALLY wishes she would not do before they have a chance to get to it themselves.
If I annoy people half as well as my mother does when I am her age (if I get to be her age), I will be very pleased with my life. My husband didn’t die, but decided he didn’t want to be married to me anymore, so I also live alone. But maybe I can take a note from my mother and figure out how to live my best life now that I get to make all my decisions on my own. And I can also, as she does, correct everyone who imagines that they remember anything about the past because I certainly have the memory that she passed on to me. And I also have the journals and other records as she taught me to keep them, to prove that I AM RIGHT.