From Womb to Tomb: the evolution of my relationship with my mother

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.