Mother
If Only You Would Read Proust
RACHEL CLINE
Word Count 2202
We had been sitting for an hour or so, the visiting hospice nurse and I, while my mother breathed. I had the better chair, which gave me a view of the woodcut above her bed, in which Mom sat cross-legged on the beach, dressed in red, drawing on a pad. It was titled “At Work,” and she’d made it twenty years earlier, not long after she’d first started to draw.
Outside the sliding door, I could see a sliver of bright bougainvillea draped over the recycling and garbage bins in the alley. Three days earlier, I had been summoned by a phone call from a different hospice nurse, and I’d flown from New York to Los Angeles. The message had been chipper sounding, and—as always—the stranger referred to my mother as “Mom,” as though she and all the rest of them were my recently discovered siblings.
Ashes to Ashes
ANNA SULLIVAN REISER
Word Count 1351
In October 2015 my family buried half of our mother’s ashes at our home in Woodstock, Vermont, only to exhume them seven years later.
As she was dying from a rare type of bone cancer that rapidly metastasized and left her body paralyzed, Mom decided to be buried in two places— Curtis Hollow Farm and her family plot in Boston. In some ways, her decision made sense. After all, she’d always split her time between Woodstock and Boston. But, nobody else in our family was buried at Curtis Hollow. Plus, we were most likely going to have to sell the property after she died.
“I want all of us to be buried at Curtis Hollow someday,” Mom said one afternoon during hospice. My two sisters and I were all huddled around her hospital bed, set up in the downstairs bedroom of my parents’ Boston apartment. A long moment of silence followed her request.
Falling
NINA LICHTENSTEIN
Word Count 798
The blood stains didn’t go away in the wash the way I’d hoped, and traces of my mom are stubbornly embedded in the weaved cotton fabric lying in my kitchen sink, reminding me she will always be connected to me, even when she is not there. Perhaps especially then. I’m feeling guilty as I stuff the red rag into the trash like I’m deleting her presence here in my old Maine house, where she spent the summer with me. The week before her planned return to Norway, where I grew up and she still lives, I heard a sound I’m still trying hard to un-hear. Bam-bam-bam-bam (sixteen BAMS it must have been since there are sixteen steps) and then the worst sound: THUMP. Her landing at the bottom of the steep stairs from 1865.
Silent Rules
DEBORAH MELTVEDT
Word Count 1501
In 1961, after my younger sister was born at St. Agnes Hospital in Fresno, California, my mother wanted a Tubal Ligation. Now she said. She had paid her dues, six unplanned pregnancies, and five births. Her request was denied since it was a Catholic hospital and there were rules about the sanctity of reproduction. So my mother played the insanity card. Wouldn’t hold her newborn daughter until she got the surgery. I like to think screaming was involved. It worked. Four days later she left the hospital with Mary Kay on her lap and stitches crisscrossing her abdomen like wings.
Forty- five years later my mother returned to that same hospital acting psychotic one night. She swore she saw somebody murder Tiger Woods in the parking lot below. I was not surprised by this delusion. Pain meds were dialed high, golf, not Catholicism, was her religion, and I think she was a little bit in love with Tiger. And it had been five months since she had a cigarette.
The Unlikely Mother
EVE MARX
Word Count 1191
I never imagined mothering a human, only dogs, which might explain why my son, at a very young age, announced his name was Sam The Dog and requested his cereal bowl be placed on the floor next to his fur siblings while they ate their morning kibble. I was alarmed at the suggestion but not surprised. My mothering style was to treat the child much the same way I did the dogs, setting boundaries, keeping to a schedule, doling out treats and rewards. My expectations for my very young child were not so different from expectations I had for my pets; i.e. don’t wreck the furniture and provide me with love and entertainment.
Goodbye, Columbus
N. WEST MOSS
Word Count 403
Today is my mother’s 89th birthday. All she wants is a boiled Nathan’s hotdog with relish, a side of the expensive coleslaw, and a root beer float.
My mother is dying. Last week the palliative care nurse practitioner came to the house in Westchester and walked us through things. I asked her how long she felt Mom had, and she rightly turned to my mother and said, “Would you like me to answer that?”
“God damned right,” my mother said.
“Anything could happen but I would say a few months.” It was pouring and the nurse practitioner was wearing very cute espadrilles, and all I could think was that I didn’t want her to slip on the slate path on her way back to the car.
Mother’s Red Maple
ANN PATTY
Word Count 1162
The first Mother Memorial Red Maple, a twenty-five-foot “Red Sunset” was planted at my father’s behest on the 9th fairway of the Sequoia Country Club in Oakland, California. The kitchen window of my parent’s house overlooked that fairway, an inviting greensward bordered by eucalyptus, sequoias, and live oak. My mother would sit for hours at her kitchen table; playing solitaire, watching the golfers tee off and make their way down the fairway. She herself had golfed that fairway hundreds of times. Golf had become my parents’ main activity in their later years, and my mother had been captain of the women’s golf league two years in a row. That was against the rules, but I believe the other women knew that her role at the club was one of the few remaining tethers holding her against the alcoholic tide that was more and more eroding her. Her serious drinking had begun when, fifteen years before, the Zerbes moved in across the street – next to the fence that marked the border of the golf course. The Zerbes, a childless couple who’d formerly owned a bar in LA and boasted a passing acquaintance with Ronald Reagan, began drinking in the afternoons, and soon my mother joined them.
A Box of Worms
CORINNE O’SHAUGHNESSY
Word Count 1187
“Eww, what’s that?”
Kids at my middle school cafeteria table never yelled, Yum! or Wanna trade? as I unpacked my lunch. Rather their eyes, simultaneously attracted and repulsed by whatever I had unwrapped from the waxed paper, would tense to a slivered squint. Sometimes the cause was a tofu sandwich with home grown alfalfa sprouts. Other times it was cream cheese and jelly with watercress my mother and I picked next to streams in the woods behind our New Jersey development. Occasionally, she sent an old mayonnaise jar filled with homemade yogurt mixed with chopped dates and raw honey. Even the peanut butter and jelly sandwich stood out for its ground peanuts and syrupy homemade jam. The bread was always differently dark, too, not spanking white like everyone else’s. How I yearned for tuna on Wonder Bread with a package of chips like everyone else.
Leaving Sutton Place
MARA KURTZ
Word Count 779
I always thought of my mother as an imposing figure who towered over me. Now she looked like a delicate bird. The only color in her face was pink powder I’d brushed on her cheeks and Revlon’s “Paint the Town Red” lipstick, her favorite.
She smiled at me trustingly as we held hands in the back of our Volvo station wagon as my husband drove. I could see chipped silver polish on her brittle, childlike nails. The red and gold Hermes scarf she bought in Paris in 1965 resting across her shoulders. How ironic that after so many years in a combative, dysfunctional relationship, I felt such love for her.
Though a bit nervous, she clearly trusted me. I smiled and talked non-stop about the charming “adult hotel” to which she was moving. (I wondered if she envisioned the Waldorf). But it felt like a terrible betrayal. As if this trip to the SkyView Nursing Home in upstate New York was like delivering her to Auschwitz. It seemed remarkable that God did not strike me down on the spot
Red Bra
MARIANNE LONSDALE
Word Count 944
My mom called with a request: “Can you babysit your brothers so Dad and I can go out for our 30th wedding anniversary?”
“Sure,” I answered, wondering why my five brothers, who ranged in age from 10 to 21, needed their older sister to babysit. They lived in South San Francisco and I had a one-bedroom apartment about fifteen minutes away.
“We don’t have enough money right now for a weekend getaway,” she said. Raising a family on a firefighter’s wages meant money was always tight. “So, ummm, we wondered if we could try out your waterbed?”
Jacks
ABIGAIL THOMAS
Word Count 50
The only game
my mother played
was jacks
and this,
once
in a blue moon
These Boots Were Made for Walking
LAURA CARRARO
Word Count 1763
My mother and I walk up from Riverside Drive toward Broadway. It’s her eightieth birthday, and I’m taking her to lunch at a nice café where, rumor has it, Jennifer Garner once worked as a hostess. She won’t be impressed.
After lunch, my plan is to buy her a special present. No paperback this year, or heart-shaped trinket for her collection. No orchid or CD. It’s mid-September. The sun is shining as we walk up the gentle slope that is beginning to feel like a hill. The air is warm, but a breeze reminds us to relish this day more than one in June because the cold season is just ahead.
The soles of her ladylike Mary Janes clack clack clack on the sidewalk. She has always been a fast walker, and her age hasn’t slowed her down. I am quieter than her in my rubber-soled shoes. I would not be described as a masculine woman, but I always feel that way around my mother. “Are you sure you can walk in those things?” I ask her. My mother took a fall on 125th Street recently, having tangled her foot in a discarded plastic bag.
Bettie Rae And The UPS Driver
VERLEEN TUCKER
Word Count 938
Bettie Rae lives on an isolated ranch out on CR 132A. The wavy (no kidding) roof of the long, low-slung original barn, shaped by a century of snowfall on a mountain where winter is the longest season, is the time barometer for the ranch. In a natural clearing of a conifer and aspen forest stands a two-story house, white with red trim, and red outbuildings. Not a farm implement, cast-off tire, or loose piece of barbed wire is anywhere in sight. Everything is neatly tucked away into the barn, a large shop, and several sheds that have been built here and there over the decades. Without ever going inside, I know that, after use, tools are returned to the same hook or placed in the same drawer where they’ve been stored for two generations. Maybe three.
The Baker
SALLY KOSLOW
Word Count 990
In the Fargo, North Dakota, of my childhood, if you wanted a fancy dessert, you had three choices: drive 221 miles north to Winnipeg, 235 miles southeast to Minneapolis, or grease a pan and pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees. My mother regularly turned out pies, angel food cakes, sheet cakes crowned with broiled coconut, Passover sponge cakes that required nine eggs and potato starch, brownies, blueberry muffins, and sustaining our family through the 1970’s, her signature Bundt cake featuring instant pudding, vodka and Galliano liqueur. When I went off to college, Mom shipped me butterscotch oatmeal cookies in coffee cans. I suspect my boyfriend stuck around as much for the cookies as me.
Gone
BEVERLEY STEVENS
Word Count 880
‘I miss New York‘ reads the billboard on the drive home from the office. ‘I miss my Mum’, I found myself thinking, her recent demise not far from my mind.
But in reality, I don't.
I didn’t miss her when I went away to university. I didn’t miss her when I was overseas for eight years, though she rewrote all the letters I wrote home to send on to my grandmother. And, I didn’t miss her when she died.
‘What’s there to miss?’ said my sister.
A Hole in the Head
ANN KATHRYN KELLY
Word Count 1350
We’d arrived at the ER just after midnight, January 5, 2016—ironically, Mom’s eighty-first birthday. It was a terrible hour to be awake, in an ER, wondering what would come of this snowy night. I was with my brother, Sean, and we’d just been told our mother might get holes drilled through her skull.
Burr holes, they called them.
*
While others walked through life, Mom strode. She was climbing stepladders to paint walls and refinishing antique doors into her seventies. She could roam for hours in flea markets. She maintained six precisely manicured garden beds. But in 2015, Mom—then eighty—threw her first blood clot; a pulmonary embolism. It nearly killed her.
It hit me and my siblings that our vibrant mother, a woman we perpetually saw as the forty-something four-star family general who raised us with boundless energy, had somehow become twice that age. A doctor told us clots can sometimes be an early indicator of cancer. Two months later, she received a breast cancer diagnosis. Although she wasn’t keen on surgery at her age, Mom agreed to a mastectomy. Chemo though, she said, was non-negotiable.
Conjuring Mom
VICKI ADDESSO
Word Count 960
In my twenties, I moved out of my parents’ house, but once or twice a week, I would stop by to see my mother. after work, before I met my friends at a bar or a restaurant.
My father would be at work — he was a firefighter and sometimes worked night shifts — or upstairs in the bedroom, reading. From the foyer, I’d walk into the kitchen, through the dining room, and stand in the doorway to the living room. I’d see my mother before she knew I was there. She’d be sitting cross-legged on the sofa, slippers on the floor, crocheting a blanket that rested on her lap. Beside her on the table was the ashtray where her Winston cigarette burned, and a green glass beer mug. I’d see her in profile as she stared at the TV, her hands moving as if they had minds of their own. She’d pause, left hand reaching for the beer mug. She'd take a sip, put it back down on the table, pick up the cigarette and take a drag, put it back, and then her hands would resume crocheting, her eyes always on the television.
The Gravity Of Love
BARBARA SELMO
Word Count 1410
An hour after arriving, I was spun out of her orbit. I took the elevator to the ground level, to the exit. Only the night kitchen staff were around, gently pushing carts down long, gleaming white corridors. I sat on a bench in the basement hallway, hungry, crying. Nothing here was familiar. I was not, for a moment, familiar to myself.
My brother’s unexpected death had unraveled my mother. How quickly she changed from someone who could make her own meals into someone who put yellow dishwashing liquid in the frying pan instead of cooking oil. Less than two months after my brother’s funeral, her story became the story people my age always tell about their parents—she fell, was hospitalized, then moved to a nursing home.
The Book Shuk
SARAH GUNDLE
Word Count 1659I never felt like I belonged to my mother.
She taught me many things--to love books and black licorice; to bake a perfect lingonberry tart, and to care about Israel. She is perceptive, thoughtful, and smart. But all my life it was as if she was waiting for someone to give her permission to lay claim to motherhood, a license that never arrived. I hungered for her direction, but she didn’t feel it was “her place.” It created a taught wariness between us.
Looking back, it was when we left Israel when I was a young child that she let go of the fragile rope that bound us. Ever since then I felt adrift, like an unclaimed suitcase winding its way around a baggage claim carousel without an owner. I felt unmoored. If I didn’t belong to her, how could I belong anywhere?
Visiting William
ANN KLOTZ
Word Count 1350
We cannot know how quickly mothering will pass. Many years past parenting young children, moments swim back, distinct in the blur of decades. Preparing chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese, filling out nursery school applications, arranging playdates and birthday parties, managing a big job as a mom, I did not reflect much on how ephemeral those years of early motherhood were. Taking a breath felt as impossible as visiting the bathroom alone. I was sure I would remember everything. But children grow quickly and parents age. I am closer now to being a grandmother than to the age I was when I first became a mother.