Today is my mother’s birthday, she is turning 70, and she is not taking it well. That is, while she looks like a woman in her late 50’s she actually is 70, and no matter how you cut it; 70 is old and mamma don’t like old.***
My mother is a complex person. She is tough in that Philly-girl kind of way; but she’s also deeply compassionate. She says she is a Catholic, but only goes to church for weddings and funerals. She is very vain and very concerned with outward appearances (hers and everyone else’s), she always has been; and yet, when I was a child, she was the one who always told me, “Never judge a book by its cover”.
Mom has very gaudy tastes. She likes things that are bright and shiny and colorful – but I understand this because she came from nothing. Her mother abandoned her and her sister when they were both very young, her father meant well but he drank and gambled, subsequently she was raised from the age of 8 to 18 in a Catholic orphanage. “I spent ten years in the dark with a bunch of miserable nuns”, is how she often refers to this point in her life. When most girls where growing up and going to dances and seeing boys, my mom was learning the Stations of the Cross and how to say the Rosary in Latin (something she still remembers – word for word).
***
Coming out into the real word in the 1950’s, she was ill prepared for life in general – and yet, she found work and got an apartment and lived the life of a single gal in Philly way before such a lifestyle was in vogue.
My parents met at wedding. A friend of my mom’s from work was getting married and my mother was at the reception. Apparently a couple of guys busted in to the party because there was free food and drink. One of them started sweet talking her, and (according to both parties) he was pretty damn good at it. The sweet nothings ended soon enough when the father of the bride had the uninvited guests escorted back out to the South Philadelphia side walk.
Mom says she went outside to have smoked a cigarette and he was still there. “He was a bum”, she said of the first meeting with my dad, “But he really had a way about him!”
A few months later they met again at a New Year’s Eve party at a church hall, “He lit my cigarette while I was sitting at the table with my date for the night.” She ditched her date and left the party with the sweet talking South Philly thug.
They began dating in earnest and the one thing my father could offer her that sparkled more than any diamond could was his family. My father was from a huge Italian family, and my mother craved this more than anything. More than anything she wanted to belong.
They got engaged a few months later.
That summer my mother told my father that she was going to Wildwood with a few of her friends. My dad, apparently, was less than enthused over this and told her that “No future wife of mine is going down the shore with out me!” Mom thought about it for a minute and then gave him his ring back and said, “We are not married yet!”
She went to Wildwood and did not see my dad again for almost five months.
He called her around Halloween that year and they got back together and gave her the ring back. That following September they were wed.
***
I came along in 1958 followed by sister #1 in 1960 and sister #2 in 1966.
Mom was not the greatest parent in the world, she made a lot errors and said and did a lot of things that caused her children umbrage and pain over the years. However, when the chips were down, she always came though. Her love was powerful and overwhelming sort of like a grizzly bear’s for her cubs. She’d kill anyone who messed with her children. While my sister’s and I still carry around a psychic wound or three courtesy of this tiny woman; we have survived and are better people; and we know the power of true, unstable, unhinged, unconditional love.
Dad has not been spared either. Just as recently as three years ago, they separated for a time. They were fighting like cats and dogs. My dad and I went out to dinner one night during this period and he told me something that I never forgot. He said that he finally understood why my sisters and I seemed so resentful of mom when we were younger, “You have to understand, I was working, I did not see everything that was going on … but trust me, I understand it now all to well.”
***
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame my mother for anything. In fact I love her deeply and respect her. Her early life was raw and nasty (trust me, I have only outlined things here) and she survived some real horrors. Later on, when it was her turn to parent, she did the best with what she had.
She did her best by her children. Not everyone gets a June Cleaver.
These days, in her own way, even she acknowledges her mistakes. Every time she calls me and leaves a message it always starts like this, “Hi honey, its Mommy Dearest calling…” we laugh over that.
Sometimes you have to laugh.
0 Yorumlar