Portrait of my Mother

My Mother was a highly intelligent woman; she skipped two grades in elementary school and graduated from high school when she was just 16 years old. She had majored in science and took two years of Latin, she dreamed of going into medicine but unfortunately it was 1936, the height of the “Great Depression” there was no question, she was not going to college. Her father deserted the family when she was still quite young; her mother was on the public dole, supplementing the family income with a part-time job cleaning a movie theatre. There was no work for a 16 year old girl, with or without a high school diploma so Mom sat all day and strung wooden beads, busy work invented by the WPA. Finally when she was 18 she found work as a waitress at a bus station lunch counter. When she was 21, she married her best friend’s older brother, my Dad. My Mother was beautiful, caustically funny, athletic, hard working, organized to a fault and baked the best pies in the world. She was absurdly thrifty and could stretch a dollar until the Eagle screamed. When she died, I cleaned out drawers and cupboards full of recycled twist ties; reused so many times they were but bare wires. Also empty margarine tubs and cool whip containers, dozens and dozens of them. There was little of a personal nature; she hated nick knacks, called them “dust catchers”, never wore jewelry and didn’t save mementos. Her penmanship was beautiful but she wrote only grocery and “to do” lists and threw those away as soon as each item was neatly crossed off. She left nothing behind that could give even a clue to what was in her heart. My mother was depressed a great deal of the time, prone to rages that caused her to scream at us, eyes bulging, face purple. For many years, while we were growing up she kept a huge bottle of vodka under the kitchen sink. When we were grown and out of the house, she didn’t seem to need it any more. She was also honest, sometimes too much so. When I was a young woman she told me that there was something missing in her, that she was unable to love children as other mother’s loved. She did not mean to be unkind; but all I could hear was “I didn’t love you”. No that is not exactly what she said, but that is what I heard. I would have rather heard a lie. I never thought I’d be like my Mother; I worked studiously towards being another person. I would be like Aunt Shirley or I would be like Annette on the Mickey Mouse Club, I would be a new invention, a person created in a vacuum, like no one else. In many ways, I succeeded, I am not like her. I do not have her organizational skills, I was never athletic, I can not do the New Times Sunday crossword puzzle in ink. My pie crust looks like a child’s paper Mache art project not perfectly formed like my mother’s. My house tends toward the chaotic, not a “place for everything and everything in its place” like my mother’s. My handwriting looks like chicken scratch; it is not perfectly formed like my mother’s. I am like my mother in many ways despite my childhood resolve. I am prone to depression, I force myself to “hug” and to touch, and it doesn’t come easily. I have a sharp and sometimes hurtful tongue. I became so much of her that I did not like and in my struggle I forgot to embrace that which I most admired.