October 31, 2020

Success

I am thinking about my mother this morning. As a result of Covid and the resulting restrictions, Mom faded away, disappeared. We had no opportunity to guide her on the way. We didn’t get the chance to visit her in the care facility and sit by her bedside to help her count the remaining heartbeats. Her death didn’t make the news. No heads of state sent good wishes. We (and the unpaid credit card company) are the only ones who know she is gone. The rich and famous, the powerul, the important, were quite busy that day. None of them had time to notice because they were all doing the right thing, improving themselves and the world, making a difference.

I have held a horror my entire adult life of ending up like Mom. I wanted more from life than dying in a state-run facility with no family around. I have done what I could to avoid that. I tried to keep a good job, I paid my bills, I voted, I made a somewhat futile attempt to grow up and be mature. In my attempts to be a better person, I berated myself often and thoroughly for my human weakness and limits. I tried twice at achieving a close family without high quality results. Regardless my effort, I was not totally successful at changing into a different person. Not all the way. There are still times I see Mom and my inglorious past in my bad habits, my unhealthy living and I worry.

The thing I often forget is, y’see…she wasn’t evil, she was just ordinary. She made mistakes. She made big, important mistakes. She made errors that caused her unnecessary suffering. She made mistakes that affected her life in big ways and our lives, as her children. Those mistakes bled out into the community. The phone bills unpaid, the unkempt household all had an effect. She was an outsider and not well respected around our little town. Once, one of our neighbours called her ‘a wacky woman’ in the most dismissive of tones. She said that to my brother, without regard. People weren’t very kind. All of the flung mud and cast aspersion, eclipsed Mom’s other side.

She had good qualities and many of them but she was a woman who spent most of her life profoundly depressed (not suicidal – there is a huge difference). She was, at times, a shade schizophrenic. She sometimes saw the world in a different way than the world truly was. Sadly, she missed an awful lot of the common joys. She made incorrect assumptions, assessments of others and that led her to keep to herself, with few friends. In part, that reticence did turn opinions. The world outside her window was against her a little. It was, indeed, often a bad place. She was treated inhumanely at times but the forces of evil were not as much against her as she thought. As it goes for most of us, the world outside actually didn’t notice her that much. Yes, she could have been and done much much more. She could have had a more pleasant everything. She could have been more than she was. Coulda, woulda, shoulda… but living was not a complete waste.

My mother suffered greatly and lived gently. She didn’t gobble the world and puff away down the street in a giant SUV with plastic bags full of consumer goods blowing out the back windows. She never howled at a Trump rally and never, ever would have done. She didn’t demand anything. She was fair. She held a deep respect for art and literature, music. She held not one ounce of prejudice or intolerance for others. She didn’t hate, not even the folks who were sometimes so very bad to her. She read widely, eagerly and constantly. She encouraged her children to do the same and we all do, we all did. She did things for herself and did the best she could with what she had.

I have my own ideas about how my Mom came to be who she was. From her tales of the grand past, I learned that the grandmother my mom adored as a young girl was a pivotal figure for her. The two of them had a wonderful bond. They went walking in the woods together, they chatted, they avoided the mess of the 1930’s by stepping outside it onto and into the wonderful world of my great-uncles’s farm. My great grandmother treated my mom as a special person when none other did so. Great Grandmother, almost single-handedly, noticed Mom. My mother’s parents and siblings did not. There was not enough space in the worries of their days to pay the right kind of attention to her when she was growing. They weren’t able to do so. The result was, Mom didn’t get enough of this or that, the whatever it is a person needs to come up straight and strong. She was a bent little tree from the very beginning.

No one in my mother’s history is to blame for any willful crime. It was a different social time. They did what they thought was best. They followed the dictates of the time they were in without particular malice. We have since learned that a ‘seen and not heard’ distant childrearing is not a good thing. I think it’s possible we have since learned how to better meet the needs of growing children. I think the majority of folk here in the lonesome crowded west have learned to talk to and notice their children. Maybe there are some who have let children run amok but I am not convinced it is a majority, are you?

In my mother’s time, no one had enough energy left over from the concerns of the great depression and the great wars to give a thought for her. No one did except her beloved grandmother. Then, at the nadir of the Great Depression, in the middle of all the hoo-ra, my great grandmother died. It was catastrophic for Mom. That word is easy to say, people say things like that all the time. Folks say things like that in an off-hand and unconsidered manner about mundane, minor problems. A number of folks do not understand what a catastrophy is. I say that about my Mom’s loss of her best friend and it was completely true, no hyperbole.

Adding to the misery and loss Mom felt at losing a dear friend, confidante and co-conspirator was the awful way the death got handled. In those days, whether it was a fact of not enough money or just a social custom, persons were not universally disposed of by a funeral home. My great grandmother lay in the parlor for several days of starting to stink before she was buried. That image burned into my mother and stayed. You might imagine that a young child would have all sorts of confusion and hurt faced with such a situation. No one noticed Mom’s suffering. She was seen and not heard, she was as invisible as the rug folks walked across every day. No one sat down with her to explain and comfort her and that was her end. I have to believe that she ended right there at her beginning.

By the time I came around, Mother was limping pretty badly through life. She had no direction and knew little about how to care for or love herself. She was in her second shot-gun marriage and had a couple of very young children that she had no idea how to care for. Aware that any future, any private plan for her life was canceled, she was done. She was toast. Then, not long after, when we were five noisy kids and playing at teen-age, my Dad divorced her. She became a forty-ish and still good-looking, vital human being with five children and a mortgage and no life skills, no prospects. What was she to do?

She was to surprise everyone. At a very crucial, make it or simply break time, at that point of push becoming shove, she dug into secretarial school at the Jackson Business College and grabbed a reliable trade. Can you imagine what that took for her to do? How huge the meagre success really was? She was able to draw aside the curtain of her pain and survive, if only for a minimum wage moment. In spite of everything, every negative bit of self-doubt…she survived.

Survive is a good, accurate word but survive isn’t often regarded as the success it can truly be. The general opinion of our social world draws a marked line between ‘survive’ and ‘success’. Maybe because survive doesn’t include happy or fulfilled or wealthy or influential, it isn’t regarded as enough. Survive is one thing, to earn respect another. Survive doesn’t even include gaining your self-respect for some folks. For some folks like Mom. She wasn’t able to celebrate her accomplishment because it was not outwardly astounding. Her major life achievement paled before the expectations of others. Those are the same expectations of herself that she had internalized. Many, many of us do. When I am at my most Mom-like, that is what I do.

For women like her, in the time I was growing up, choices were pretty limited. Having a serious lack of a sense of self-worth added heavier weight to the fact that women were generally not respected or equal in society. My Mom was trying to live, trying to go along down the way, hobbled and with nearly every road blocked. Her personal history was a further setback. Born out of her growing up, the choices she made in her life weren’t the best. Those choices left her in a sort of underworld. Being a woman made her further second class. All of that beat her down pretty well and she suffered a long while.

Her ultimate success came because she did stand up when the standing was necessary. At the last lingering long second — she came through. She held a job steadily, eked out a living without any help. She retired with a miniscule pension but she survived. Her retirement years were spent careening from one financial disaster to another with something like aplomb. She was used to it, knew how to deal and saved her concerns for the latest Bookmobile Perry Mason novel or the knit-one, pearl two and handwork creativity that were an equal background to her life. Most folk would cluck their tongues, sadly thinking what a waste of potential. I know I did. I did for a long while. Not so much any more. I look back now at the tremendous success of her life.

Today, as I struggle with the fact that I have reached my 70’s and have not come to some grand place in life, that I am turning out like Mom, I have to see my Mom’s time on earth clearly. She suffered from her own hand and from circumstance, certainly, but she succeeded by her own hand as well. Her success was real. Because of her abiding love for hand work, knitting, sewing, crochet…because of her abiding love for and enjoyment of literature… because she accepted her life and drew from it what she could, she never spent a bored moment of retirement. She was sometimes unhappy, she gained an awful lot of weight, she never really conquered mental illness but she worked around it. She was a grand success after all. There was at least one time when she stood up at the last, long, lingering moment and did what she had to do. She saved herself and found a full, rich life.

So, It’s okay kids. You don’t have to agonize when you find yourself unable to be who you thought you should be or do what you thought you should. It is okay to sing badly, drink too much, write stupid poems, wolf down the ice cream sometimes. We slip. Shit happens. Sure, try to do better. Aim where you will. It is always worthwhile to try. Best not to agonize over the faults and failures, though. I don’t say so as a means of excusing our personal culpability. Everyone has a history. It’s just that (life) will be what it will be. The faults and failures cannot be avoided. Keep in mind, no matter what, at the last, long, lingering second….you will be successful, by someone’s measure. It might as well be you who does the correct measuring.

No matter how rightly we live, how much effort and skill we put into it, we aren’t guaranteed anything remotely like love, romance, fulfillment, happiness, wealth, position… it doesn’t go our way, it goes as it goes. We each have our own hurdles and we trip up. That it should mean our lives aren’t worthwhile or successful is goofy thinking. We can keep a-goin’ with things as they are and work around it. We will. We don’t need to told how or be shown by ourselves or others. We can’t use guilt, recrimination as punishment. We all have an excuse. We have the biggest and best excuse. We are human. Yes, in spite of the Dr. Phil’s and the Jordan Petersen’s of the world, We should get a medal for showing up. That means something. We don’t have to think about doing the right thing at the right time, it’s kind of automatic. Things are ok. It’s all good. Chillax, the province is low on anti-depressants and booze is expensive. Ice cream, however…remains cheap.