Happy Birthday Mom

I spent the last five days with my sisters, Ann and Cheryl and with my mother and her sister, Wavell. Wavell is some nine years younger than my mother, and resistant to being golden girled.  Precious metals, then. Still we had a good time assigning the characters. And whoever else we could not agree on, Wavell is definitely in the Blanche category. My mother is neither brusque Dorothy nor clueless Rose though she is practically wise  like the former and a bit innocent like the latter. “Really? What you telling me there?”

My mother’s birthday was yesterday. She comes from a gene pool of long livers.

Perhaps not too unusually, she married someone who it turned out was not interested in either the convention or spirit of marriage and who  did not have the constitution for home making. As an aside, just today I was reading that Margaret Mead thought that marriage was a matter of practice- “fake it, to make it”. The idea being that it is in the habit of home making that marriages gel. Sounds so dry and prosaic.

Alone as active parent, my mother was, typically for her generation, relaxed with the supervision. This in sharp contrast to the helicoptering parenting in which we  now engage, all that hovering. My mother was more in the free range styling as by nature she is a non-interventionist. So we came and went except, except for when she got that bad feeling. And then there were no words of logic to move her from the lockdown position.

She was open with her life and like her father, she is a storyteller. And so we knew of her emotional struggles and the whys of the decisions that she made along life’s way. What I did not fully appreciate until recently was the nature of self-denial that went into her parenting. Not a dramatic sacrifice but that kind of daily give up needed to keep some semblance of stability, shepherding children towards adulthood despite the tensions endured. Yet, she is not one for regret.  This has been her life and that’s that. Like many Caribbean women, she would no doubt say, “I  have my children”, that being the touchstone of satisfaction, notwithstanding.

Now Valli is care-free, literally. She greets routine life absurdities with deeply felt laughs. She is well-loved by her grandchildren. And that surely must be the karmic return for living well.

 

 

 

 

 

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