Working on a formal obituary/tribute for Mom, and Im struck by the fact that as a son it is nigh impossible to give a full accounting of this woman. Too much of my perspective is tied up in failings and successes both real and imagined on both sides. As every parent knows (and every child eventually must accept) we are a sum of our parents own vices and virtues, and untangling whose sprung from whom is a tricky knot. I am both Sisyphus and his boulder, struggling against my own failings of memory with arms too tired to navigate such treacherous terrain. My Mom was nearly 30 when she had me, and Im struck by the inescapable fact that the timing is such that nearly half of her life will remain a complete mystery to me for the remainder of my days; a book missing so many pages as to make it nearly incomprehensible. Digging through photos I see a young woman who resembles my mother, filled with stories Ill never hear. There are anecdotes; heaven knows she touched enough lives to build one of her so beloved quilts around her meanderings and experiences, but they arent real to me; I have no guide to her inner life in those years and what may be found from those who knew her then would read to me like a collection of short stories vaguely based upon a character I knew from other mediums; a portmanteau narrative from the perspective of very different authors each wildly different from the last. So it is alone that I revisit these roads that all sprung from a single point. As a young child Mom is a close a concept our struggling minds have for God, and and while I envy (indeed covet) those who can recall such days with clarity and sureness, for me those memories are both ephemeral and ethereal; an Impressionist painting done in chalk on a rainy day that can only be retrieved in incomplete swatches. What little vision remains of those days is too narrow in scope to count. The middle childhood years are a bramble I simply have found not the strength to navigate. Too much there remains unresolved even to this day for me to separate out the empirical fact from the emotional truth. And of course the recollections from my teens are invalid for the simple fact that the hormonal brain of a teen male is the epitome of an untrustworthy narrator; too much tied up in my own (then) developing (and now fully bloomed) neurosis and quirks to be examined or mined. With the birth of my own daughters I finally acknowledged that secret fear that lives within every childs heart: Our parents are no different than we; ad-libbing and improving each moment of our childrens lives, lurching from crisis to triumph with equal parts terror and pride. My mother was no different, and its only with the reflection afforded those who find their own little Dorian Grays in the eyes of their children that I understand myself more completely in the context of my mother. From whence my unrelenting sense of humor came, the foundation upon which my obsessive need to play the Devils Advocate rests, my penchant for procrastination (and last-minute inspiration), and my (utterly infuriating to many, I know) need to speak with complete authority. But from within the deep and rich well of my mother I also find my tendency towards self-imposed isolation, my deep-rooted hatred of being complimented no matter how proud I may be, and a fearfulness constantly at odds with the sheer wonder of existence. She gave me gifts and millstones that Ill spend the rest of my life discovering, and I wish I could thank her for letting me utterly, utterly ruin her love of the Beatles by putting up my ham-fisted efforts to teach myself guitar via the Complete Beatles Songbook. I wish I could have thanked her again for letting me pound the keys of her Selectric II into mush with what can only be kindly described as the epitome of shitty pre/teen poetry. I wish I could have thanked her for exposing me to such a wonderfully vast vista of music that Id otherwise be wholly ignorant of (though Im not exactly sure how thankful I should be that I can sing entire Dan Fogelberg albums from start to finish). I wish I could have thanked her enough for not just enduring, but encouraging (if grudgingly and with matronly concern) my throwing away the life of a network admin to run around the country with bands (and start a few of my own) for the better part of a decade. I wish I could thank her again for letting me commandeer our first PC to learn HTML and explore the birth of the web (without which I would be living a very, very different life) both on her time and (dial-up days, my friends) on her dime. And I wish I could thank her again for how graciously she opened up our home to my friends; treating, worrying, and caring for them all as welcome (if noisy) additions as if they were simply puzzle pieces wed not yet found. With the influx of well-wishes and sympathies from so many who knew Martha, I hear again and again of how proud she was of me; how much she loved my wife Kaitlin as the daughter she never had (and in fact I was supposed to be. Im not sure she ever forgave me for that twist of genetic fate), and of course our terror twins. And I appreciate and embrace those sentiments, but a full accounting is due and at this time above all others I must accept the fact that I was equally a good and bad son responsible for heartache and pain undeserved that (in my mind) doesnt quite balance out the scales. But ultimately I was and will always remain her son. And for that I am eternally grateful. You were not perfect, but you were the best I could have ever hoped for. Gnight, Mom. I love you, and I can never, never thank you enough.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 05:07:30 +0000
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