Upon Reflection

My mother and me 1980s...

I went to visit my 90-year-old aunt recently. She is my uncle’s wife and was my mother’s best friend. It has been a while since I made it over there, now that I live hours away. When she saw me, her breath caught. 

As I approached, she whispered, “I thought you were your mother.”

I teared up having had that same experience walking past a mirror. Especially lately. Sometimes several times a day.  A few weeks ago would have marked Mom’s 88th birthday, almost 8 years since she died, 15 since Alzheimer’s stole her from us. 

I have come to love the genetic reminders of her, to find comfort and company from the similar laugh lines around my same colored eyes. I look at pictures of Mom when she was young and see my own reflection. But of course, I didn’t know her then. She lurks middle aged in my memory—a tall, slender, handsome woman with thick glasses hiding shining eyes.

It is one of my great sadnesses that so many of the people I love now never had a chance to experience my mother. Some of them, she would have enjoyed, too.

Despite her acid self defense, the most accessible part of her is in my smile and across our hands, puckering at the knuckles with stubby fingers but a firm, loving grip. Our complaints ring similar, though my heart’s not as in it. Was hers more habitual as well? A way to mix small talk with a better-than-you she never felt? Or was it all defense? Tell them how they suck before they have a chance to show you. I would cross a thousand far away seas to ask her, just to have her bitch at me again.

Dad was funny. The life of the party. The genius playwright. Some say I take after him. I do have his same gravely voice—half full of smoke, half looking for a good time, though mine comes off far less creepy. At least I hope. 

My sentences, even the honesty are his, though his was couched in dialogue written for someone else and never spoken to those of us who needed to hear it. A gem like this, said by his lead character in his most famous work, Other People’s Money, after being asked if he could speak frankly. 

No. Lie to me! Tell me how thrilled you are to know me. I always speak frankly. I hate people who say "Can we speak frankly?" It means they're bullshittin' me the rest of the time.

I followed his scenes closely because his plays were the only explanation I ever got of his conscious disregard. A more revealing monologue than anything he’d ever said out loud. For a musical he was collaborating on, he wrote the lyrics for a song in a scene he called, He’ll never say thank you. Then he stayed true to his word.

Perhaps part of the reason I write in this brutalist way, is to leave the same trail of verb crumbs for my children. Oh, who am I kidding? My parents’ parenting was rarely about me. And my raising babies was mostly in response to them.

They were different people taking disparate angles in their quest for life’s answers and love. 

My mother was honest. Like my father’s widow maker of a heart attack at 62. Or chopped liver repeating on you a few hours later. Things as they are. Do the dishes. And homework. Marry once. Hope for the best. Expect horror. Just wait until your father gets home—a beseechment that had nothing to do with my behavior.

I had friends whose fathers beat them with a belt, or a switch, or a fist, for sport or a slight I couldn’t see because I wasn’t born into. Mine used his sarcasm and facility with a sentence against me. It left fewer visible scars.

My self proclaimed “Disco Daddy” oozed finesse. What he lacked in looks, he made up for in genuine curiosity, intellect and humor. He was the storytelling kind of a liar, feeling the need to prove himself, which made him dangerous. In every case, he was judge, jury and executioner—difficult to differentiate; impossible to please.

My mother held fast to her moral rectitude while my father had a good time. He hung out with his friends. He went to the theater in the east village for nearly every night of the two year run of Other People’s Money. Show after show his was the loudest laugh, filling the theater with what sounded like full throated, first time, pleasure. And sometimes when I write something particularly sharp, insightful and incredibly funny, my laugh reverberates around my little office as sure as his ever did in the darkened balcony of the theater.

My mother resented being alone, thinking of all the things she imagined she wanted but never even asked for. Everyone was better off, and everything she loved was out doing nothing for her. I wish I could ask her if her imagined experience of disappointment actually prepared her when life’s blows kept coming? 

Don’t get me wrong, her laugh was loud too, but she didn’t feel the need to show it off. She was irreverent, adventurous and loyal, even generous in her mostly stingy way. Her worst sin in a long, storied life, was refusing to take in the sweet along with the bitter. That’s one of her flaws I refuse to hold onto.

Back to the mirror, where the echo of my mother’s reflection stares at me—uninvited but truly welcome. If only I’d been able to uncover the wisdom I have in the last 15 years, sooner. I might have been able to offer her true forgiveness. Not that she would have taken it. 

She would have dismissed my faith as bunk. She would have told me to earn more money. She would have said to stop smoking. And also to moisturize everyday.

As prickly and open to catching resentments as she was, her concern was absolutely unconditional. No matter the characters or the plot, if you had a story to tell her, she would hear it, and retain it and ask appropriate questions until it was resolved either by you or an act of God. And then she wouldn’t ask again. As if she listened! Because as indignant as she appeared, she loved hard and was a great audience. Both are gifts I do my best to pay forward.

It is a true blessing to see her scowl as I make my way to the bathroom each morning, forgiveness filling our eyes staring back at me while I moisturize. I gotta say, she wasn’t wrong.