I'm having trouble coming up with a name for this new blog. Today's my mom's birthday. She called me Jo at times, on a rare occasion, Josie. Maybe that was because I loved Jo in
Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) or maybe because she did. I know that reference probably seems very long ago and far away. It does to me too, but still holds true. She, Jo, was a writer. Her loves, her responsibilities, even the color of her hair in the frontispiece, were the "me" I wanted to be both then, and, now and then, since. So, while I was wondering about whether or not to start this more personal blog after many years of writing as part of my profession, it finally came down to this question, if she were here, would Jo? Yes, Jo would.
And the rest of this is about Mom. It's her day really.
The folds of her robe lapped one another in front, layer upon soft, pink layer, making her into a good place to run for a hug. But she was also belted and surprising firm in the center. They call that your “core” today and whole articles are written to explain how to work it, to strengthen it, to exercise it. They didn’t have to tell her back then. It was her survival mechanism and advantage to have such a hidden resource. She could wring things out even if they were heavy or drippy. I had seen her do it to pieces of laundry with her bare hands! I knew what she was capable of.
For her aprons and her pies baked on summer Saturday mornings, for her children's Sunday School materials piled on the dining room table ready to go to church with us on Sunday, for her puffy arthritic fingers that bulged around my Dad’s wedding ring to which she had resorted when her own had to be cut off, for her love of vivid color, for her reticence to confront or argue, for her sparkly brooches, for the way she said my father’s name that could halt that momentous train of thought he engineered, for the way she stroked worn wooden surfaces with the grain as she dusted or refinished, for her tears when someone accidentally sat on her favorite Andrews Sisters 78 rpm record one time and broke it, for her grace with someone who experimented with perfume and rouge too soon, for her hopefulness as she waited for many half-hours in the parking lot of the Honolulu Conservatory of Music to try to make a piano player out of me, for the way she tugged at my hair when rolling it on curlers or wrapping it with smelly permanent papers, and, I swear, for inventing mental math and quoting whole rhyming poems and Latin phrases forty years after she graduated, for such a woman, there is no card on the rack.
There were low points. One time she was reading the paper while I was telling her something. Oh, she tilted her head as if she were listening to me, but when I looked up, I caught her eyes finishing the printed sentence I’d interrupted. Continually the center of my own universe, I had been presuming that I also was the center of hers, presuming that she was on call, “Mooom!” The newspaper, of all things. It was the world that was crowding me out of sight, out of mind. I felt hurt and a little lost. I felt rebuked that I’d over-talked, (probably, if I were honest with myself, once again!) At the same time, I felt like a light-weight in comparison to the world unless someone were to press down my side of the scale to balance it out. Her finger had always been the counter weight I needed. Of course, now I was growing up and gaining weighty matters of my own. The world needed her attention. So eventually I shared, like I shared her with my sister. But I was tempted to warn them in advance, if they’d listen, “People don’t stay because they are needed.”
She didn’t.
She was a good mom.
