When Mom died the emotions that welled up from
deep down inside me felt old and familiar, but caught me totally off guard. For
years the most offensive thing people could say was, “You are acting like your
mother.” I did not want to be like my mother. She was difficult, demanding, and
the world’s worst nag. It seemed to me
that we were mismatched as mother and daughter.
My mom, Ann Ridge
Adams, was the steward and guardian of our family tradition with pride and
propriety as her hallmarks. Born and
raised in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, the lands that her ancestors had settled and
developed since their immigration with William Penn in the 1600’s, my mother
had a legacy to uphold. The house where she was born and raised was the house
where she and my father celebrated their wedding; where she wore the family
wedding gown and veil. Every cell of her
being spoke old world heritage and Quaker character and she was very proud and
assertive in sharing this with her progeny.
There was a sense aristocracy when she shared and taught me to honor and
respect the family values. Propriety was
underscored and behaving like a proper lady was reinforced.
Carrying on her
heritage, she named me and my siblings after ancestors. My middle name, Logan, as namesake for a long
line of Elizabeth Logan woman in our family.
This was an honor and a distinction that I enjoyed and it gave me a
sense of confidence as a child.
Mom was in her
element when she was setting out the family linen, silver and china that she
had inherited. Thanksgiving, Christmas,
Easter, and all the family birthdays, were served with formality and
elegance. Tradition was ritualized in
every aspect from making the gravy, to carving the meat, to setting the table
with each utensil lined up with precision.
Mom was very
intelligent even through her end of life dementia. She could quote literary giants, recognize
and name famous artistic works, and she admired legendary theatre, music, and
dance performers. Sharing Cinderella and
Swan Lake performed by Rudolph Nureyev is just one example of the many and
diverse ways my mother shared culture and knowledge with me. Even at the end of life as she slid into
dementia she would impress me when she could recall bits of works from obscure
authors like, Vladimir Nabokov or Marcel Proust.
Name-dropping and
flaunting her connections also made Mom proud.
She shared so frequently that she went to boarding school with people
like Stephen Sondheim that his music was performed at her memorial
service. And there was always music in
the house. Broadway musicals she and Dad
had seen, South Pacific and Porgy and Bess were her favorites. Hip music and comedians were introduced as
they were popular, folk, jazz, rock and roll, even comedians they had seen in
the 60s in San Francisco like Lenny Bruce and Dick Cavett.
She used clichés to teach us words to live by
like, “tempus fugit,” Latin for “time flies,” was her favorite phrase while she
prodded us to get ready to go somewhere. “There's a place for everything and
everything in its place,” when inspiring us to clean our rooms. “A job worth
doing is worth doing well,” when reviewing our homework. She had a phrase to
remind and reinforce everything.
My mother was a
petite Napoleon. She was vastly clever
and could actually be quite intimidating.
I never doubted that she loved me.
But I was in my twenties before I heard her say this. She dispensed her love in a very officious
manner. She
convinced me to “set a good example” for my siblings. She explained that they would follow my
example and it was my responsibility to be certain that we were all well
behaved. In retrospect, this was
actually brilliant parenting. As I was enrolled in her plans, I naturally
became her assistant and partner. When I was more grown I learned that she
depended on me for support. She would
even ask me for advice on how to handle their issues.
And yet, Mom and I didn’t have one of those
best-friend-mother-daughter relationships.
She had a way of putting people in their place that could be offensive
at worst and aggravating at best. She expected everyone to meet her extremely
high standards and expectations. When the gas station attendant didn't use proper
grammar, she’d say, “Did you hear that? He said, ‘you betcha’ rather than ‘thank
you,” her voice was uncharitable and her face screwed up in disgust. My friends
were not good enough for me. “She’s a
bad influence on you,” she would admonish as if I was not good enough to associate
with appropriate friends. Someone or something was usually out of place and Mom
would be sure to point it out without consideration for the recipient or
bystanders. Her insensitive remarks were embarrassing and often humiliating. Rather than wanting to be like Mom I found
myself working very hard to assure that I showed no signs of her influence.
As a result our relationship was an odd
juxtaposition of place and time. She was
not sensitive or emotionally available and I was a sensitive, insecure and
fearful child. Mom did not have the
compassion or the capacity to comfort and teach me about my emotions. With my parent’s lifestyle of entertaining
and traveling, I was often left with babysitters and remember feeling a sense
of abandonment.
When I was 3 or 4, a garbage truck ran over our
dog and my grandfather died all in a very short period of time and I remember
wondering about how to deal with the sadness and grief. I remember often that I did not understand my
feelings and that she did not recognize my need for support or comfort.
When my brother was born, I created my own myth
that once she had borne a son, the second most important thing a woman could do
in her time, he was automatically deemed the Golden Child. All focus was on him. I had lost another piece
of my sense of belonging.
My experience was a struggle for belonging and
understanding. For Christmas that year, she
gave me a Betsy McCall doll that I adored.
McCall’s magazine had paper dolls in every edition to entertain little
girls. I loved to play with them and was
thrilled to have the actual doll. The
imaginary world of dolls and dollhouses suited me perfectly as a form of
solitary entertainment. Another
Christmas she gave me precious pink leather slippers that made me feel like a
princess. Both were lost and destroyed
forever by my little brother, the Golden Child.
While I was devastated family life moved on as if nothing happened.
Mom couldn’t stop long enough to understand or
communicate with me about my feelings of loss and disappointment. Her life was always moving and changing
faster than I can imagine. It left little
room for my special needs for acknowledgement and gentle loving support.
When I was in the fifth grade and a new kid in
school, we went shopping for school clothes.
I was more aware than ever about belonging and the impression of my
appearance. She was convinced that
proper well fit shoes were critical to health and development and insisted on
buying me hideous, black, leather and velvet saddle shoes. She could see no reason for sympathy as I sat
crying in the shoe department at JC Penney’s while she insisted that these
would be my school shoes.
As I entered puberty, I was delayed in physical
development (maybe because of the hideous shoes) and she refused to allow me to
have a bra like the other girls in my gym class. Apparently she could not relate to the
humiliation that I experienced wearing an undershirt in the locker room.
In retrospect, it is clear that I was her first
born and she was learning as we experienced our mother-daughter relationship
together. I was kind of an experiment. Once when I was a back-talking teenager,
while my father was cooking breakfast, he actually said out loud, “I wish that
children were like waffles and you could throw the first one out.”
My father was my connection to love and
belonging. I was “the apple of my
father’s eye” as they say. My character
and personality developed in a life centered on my father’s military
career. I was a “military brat” as they
say. I was always the new kid in school;
trying to find a way to belong. We moved
often and I left home and friends behind like dirty underwear. While it was new and exciting, I was
accumulating unresolved grief and loss.
We were taught our
manners by the standards that Mom’s father and forefathers had taught at their
dinner tables. Her father actually had a
tree switch under the table to reinforce to his daughters that they must mind
their manners. “Seen but not heard,” was the unspoken expectation. We were expected to understand that it was a
privilege that we were allowed to speak.
When she spoke to us, it was to instruct us on our behavior and her
aspirations for us. “You will thank me
when…” she would say.
She instilled in me
a sense of self with pride for what we represent, and how we reflect the family
we come from. In my teenage years it all
felt very superficial to me; I had trouble believing that anyone else noticed
all of these details. But, her
insistence overruled my wayward thoughts.
Mom conducted
everything based on propriety and pride.
We gathered every night at the table to share our dinner. She simultaneously conducted the daily inquisition
while correcting our manners and our grammar.
“What did you learn in school today?” was the open-ended question that
engaged one or more of us in conversation.
Grammar and manners were paramount standards of
good behavior. We joked about “correctivitus.”
She would catch us at every fault of misplaced “me” or “I” and other
rigors of appropriate parlance. She was
consistent and persistent with manners and grammar. They were an unavoidable
lesson. “Well-mannered people never put
their elbow on the table,” she’d harp.
Or, she’d catch me hunched over my plate and remark, “ladies sit up
straight and bring their fork to their mouth, not their mouth to their plate,”
and, “it is not proper to slurp your soup.”
I was instructed to walk with my head high; practicing with a
book on my head. And I often heard,
“ladies do this” and “ladies don’t do that.”
I had this image of Mom that was rigid,
inflexible, and uncaring and I resisted, bent the rules, and eventually
rebelled. Regardless of all the amazing
things she provided and ways she cared for me, a divide developed between
us. I refused to cooperate wherever I
had control and knew from some point that I never wanted to be like my mother. Mom loved to play golf and cook. She taught all of her children except me the
love of both. Actually I refused to
allow her to teach me either. I was
compelled to rebel and avoid her control of at least some area of my life.
From somewhere in my childhood I learned that my
mother’s love was only accessible through doing things her way. We functioned well on the surface because she
was very clear and I was a quick learner.
In matters more intimate and personal, we suffered. Gaining her approval through good behavior
became ingrained in me like the habits of brushing my teeth and making my bed.
As I reflect on my mother, I realize that her most
amazing accomplishment is that she created a loving and connected family in a
very transient lifestyle. She could
pack, move, find a new home, and unpack like a professional. She moved us six times in eleven years and
birthed four children. That's kids, dog, mom and dad packed in the family car
(or cars) traveling from Virginia to Florida, Florida to Washington, Washington
to California, California to Virginia, and across the country for a third
time to finally settle in Whidbey Island, Washington. She even designed and supervised the
construction of our home on Whidbey Island.
At this point in my life, I am in awe of how she
managed all that she did. How could this
small town girl raised in a rooted small town family environment evolve to
birth four children and move six times in eleven years? It now seems to me that she was driven by her
aspiration for a different life than small town of Langhorne. Her exciting naval aviator husband was her
ticket out; her own rebellion against the imposed strictures of her family
life.
We had our share of challenges but we are some
of the most well-adjusted and accomplished people that I know. We all love and
respect each other, and mom was the glue that created that unity.
I really thought I
had said and done everything necessary and appropriate to prepare for my
mother’s death. By
this time, I had spent years in personal development courses and coaching
sessions; I even tried regressive hypnosis, doubting my sense of self. I was finally no longer dependent on Mom’s
approval. In this, I began to see my
mother for what she really was. She had
high standards, she had always done her very best for me, and she was fiercely
loved every one of our family. I had actually
learned to model that. I was just like
her all along. I have high standards for
myself and expected no less from everyone else.
Mom had her first stroke some eighteen months
prior to her death and she had been slipping into dementia for several years. Her decline gave us the opportunity to reconfigure
the family, come together to support her and Dad, and to prepare for her
transition. Wheel chairs and walkers lined our family life. All of a sudden my 84 year old mother would
no longer get out of bed, dress herself, or perform most of her daily
activities. She could no longer carry on
an entertaining or intellectual conversation.
Her behavior and her manners were totally inappropriate by her standards. As she declined into dementia she became the
child and I became the parent; I had to remind her of the standards she had set
for me. Our roles reversed and she
needed my help and wanted me to be her aide.
She was helpless in so many ways.
My memories of her loving care when I was sick or fearful as a child came
back to urge me to give her all of the support in every way that I could. And we
began a healing process.
A week before she died, she had a serious stroke
that took away virtually all of her functioning abilities. She could breathe and she could open her
eyes. But, we were gently led to
understand that she would never recover again.
The shift was palpable as, over the course of three days, the doctor
explained once, twice, and again a third time that her condition would never
improve. Every one of the family came
together to support and honor her passing.
We gathered in her hospital room. The youngest grandchildren drawing pictures
of their love for her. The older
grandchildren pulled up close to hold her hand and share their hearts. The oldest, my son, even brought his Bible
and ritual to bring her ease; with holy water anointing her, he read her the
Last Rites while the doctor explained her prognosis to the rest of us.
As Mom and Dad had always planned, we brought
her home for her last days. Our family pulled together once again. On the eve of her death Dad, siblings,
in-laws and grandchildren gathered to share love and gratitude for her life in
the way that only our family could have done.
We stood, sat, knelt and perched around her bed to hold a circle of
love. I took the lead to share with Mom
that we were all there to honor her with love and support for her passing, to apologize
for our misgivings and mistakes, and to forgive her for hers.
My life with my mother was a conundrum of passages. She relied on me and I depended on her and we
were often unable to be what the other needed.
What I’ve learned is that my perception of my mother was only my
experience; it was not who she was. The
timing of the moves and the birth of brothers and sisters along the way were
coincidental to what I saw in her and in myself. These all had me see her as difficult when
she was really doing the best she could.
Today I'm proud to say that I am like my mom.
I'm proud of her accomplishments, her beauty, her enduring love and support of
our family. What I wanted more
than anything was Mom’s love and acceptance.
It took me an entire lifetime to understand that she loved me all the
time; unconditionally.
Womb to Tomb – was
my journey with my mother. We were
partners in this life. It was sometimes rough and an uphill battle. It was not until the end that I could look out
at the congregation at her memorial service and share how much I love my mother
and all that she stood for. Our
relationship had come full circle and in it I learned the power of love and
appreciation for another human being. And
thus, I being my own evolution of purpose and being in this life.
