mother

Mother is a complicated word. It’s a noun and a verb.

It’s a proper noun when it replaces a name and therefore it’s capitalized. It’s a verb when someone is taking on the role of nurturing another. And we all know that if you add an “s” at the beginning of mother...it takes on a different nurturing action. And that if after mother, you add a word that starts with f and rhymes with sucker…

Mama is often the first word a baby speaks. And as I recently read in an article by a death doula, it’s a common experience for many people to call out for their mother when they are taking their last breaths. It’s a fascinating and illuminating phenomenon.

I have friends who lost their mothers early in life and other friends who are in my scenario where their mom is likely going to live to be 100. Both scenarios have their challenges. The last ten years or so of my mom’s life (and she’s still with us at almost 98 years old) have brought plenty of opportunity for reflection on our relationship and on motherhood – having a mom, being a daughter, and having a daughter (and son).

A dear friend recently shared an article with me that was a daughter’s reflection on her eulogy for her mom at her funeral. Her mother died too young for the two sisters to have time to process their relationship with their mom. The author considered what she was feeling (and what she wrote) in the throes of her grief and then later, after years had passed and she’d had time to reflect on her relationship with her mother… how her feelings had evolved. I think I’m grateful that my mom’s long and quiet “departure” is giving me time to grieve and reflect while she is still here with us.

As with all mother-daughter relationships, ours was fraught with emotion and complications.

When I was a teenager, she told me a story about my oldest sister, Karen. Karen was the oldest daughter of three. She had all of the classic qualities that we read about of the first-born – especially of the first-born daughter. My mom told me that I was only a few weeks old when Karen threw the one and only temper tantrum of her life. She hurled herself onto the carpet (at the age of 8) and screamed that Mom would not “let her take care of me”. Mom said that at that moment, she “gave” me to Karen to mother. As Mom told me this in my teen years, it made a lot of sense. During the same teenage time period, Mom also shared that when I came along, she was “done being a mother”. Now it’s not as awful as it sounds. She was and will always be my mom, but I was also very close to Karen, who in many ways, did figure as a mother in my childhood and even as I became an adult and a mother myself.

As my mom has declined and fallen further into dementia, I’ve found that I have become softer toward her. For years, when I made my quick visits, I’d find myself being short with her, lacking patience. And then as I drove home, I’d remonstrate myself and promise to be “better” next time. Time passes. Time heals. And all of those long drives to and from LA from the Bay Area have given me lots of time to reflect.

I think that partly due to my own aging, I’m better able to understand Mom’s choices, frustrations, and behaviors. And I am more philosophic about our history – almost a bit detached from our relationship woes. I’ve also come to realize that dementia has a way of distilling a person to their core being – to their essence. As Mom is slowly fading, I can see more clearly who she is…

In the last year or so when I visit Mom, she doesn’t know who I am. She often thinks I’m her best friend from childhood (also named Betty), growing up on Raymond in Glendale. We laugh together as we share stories of “our” youth.

Betty and Betty circa 1970

Sometimes she thinks I’m “Anita”. I have no idea who Anita is, but Mom assures me she was a very “nice lady”. Last month when I visited, she pulled me close with her wagging finger (how I hated that finger when I was a kid!) and told me that she had three daughters, Karen, Chris and Joyce. I smiled brightly, hopefully, thinking she was going to use my name for me! I even went and got the last photo of the three of us daughters together for her to use as reference and “insurance” for me that she would get it right!

Mom, pulling me closer, continued to tell me conspiratorially that one of her daughters hadn’t visited her in years. I assumed that as Karen had passed away some 8 years ago, she was thinking of her. I was expecting to hear, “Karen”.

Nope. Mom looked me in the eyes and said she hadn’t seen “Joyce” in years. A bit deflated, I nodded, gave her a hug and my sympathy for missing her long-lost (and neglectful?) daughter. I won’t say it didn’t hurt a bit, but in the moment, I was glad to be there so she had someone with whom she could confide her sadness and I was glad that I was able to just “be” there with her…slightly detached…perhaps as a way of softening my own hurt.

Julia Luis Dreyfuss has a fantastic podcast called “Wiser than Me”. She interviews women who are older than her and asks all sorts of questions about womanhood, aging, joy, sadness, lessons learned, etc. Last year, she interviewed Rhea Perlman who talked about the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk. The two women shared their thoughts and experiences with grief and endings and loss. Rhea described Thich Nhat Hanh’s philosophy that it’s not so much that lives end, it’s just that they shift. Your relationship with a person shifts throughout life and even through death. Even after the person is gone, the relationship…just shifts. I think this is true for Mom and me. I think that even now, 65 years into our relationship, it is still shifting.

Because to the end and beyond…mother is a complicated noun and verb…

Three generations of mothers and daughters