On one trip, I found her journal, and I sat with the deteriorating pages, closing my eyes after reading her descriptions of sunsets, early morning hill climbs, cowboys wrangling broncos, aspen trees in fall, how she rode each hill with a friend in mind. And I became her journey. I was the celebrity girl cyclist in her words. I held that journal tightly in my hands and decided then that I needed to go. I would ride my bike across the country.
But no one wanted to go. Friends, coworkers, cousins shook their heads at me, called me loony. “Take a car!” “You’ll be run off the road!” “Why do you want to waste time doing that?” they said. It took me three years to find someone to go with me. I met Brian at my brother’s house, this man with curly hair and green eyes who played a guitar and had a dream to ride across the country on a bicycle. When I found out he knew bike maintenance, we had to get married. We started our life together making plans not for children but for bike routes, bike gears, tires and high-performance Lycra. It was all so very romantic.
In 1996, Brian and I started off on our trip, packed for fifty-five days of riding on 24-speed Schwinns. We’d trained for months up mountains in Utah, up and down elevations that would leave us spent and excited at the same time. We didn’t know if we’d have our jobs when we got back from the trip, we had nothing saved in the bank, we had mortgage and college loans to pay for, but it didn’t matter. We had credit cards. We were ready to go.
Mom was there for the first day of our trip. Of course she had comments.
“Why are you wearing all that rubber stuff?” Mom asked. “I didn’t wear that when I went. ”We were standing in Rockefeller Plaza after our appearance on the Today Show with Bryant Gumbel, for our send-off. People walked past us in suits and heels, staring at us in bike shorts and helmets. Mom was coiffed like I’d never seen her before, her usual green eyeshadow and red lipstick replaced by sculpted pink cheeks and lined eyes, hair blown up and over her forehead.
“I told you before Mom. It wicks the sweat away. It’s Lycra.”
“So wear your bathing suit. I did.”
“I don’t want to wear a bathing suit.”
“You’re going to fall off your bike with those shoes.”
“They click on and off. I’ve practiced.”
“They frighten me.”
“Lots of things frighten you.”
“Like now. This,” she waved her hand around at the bustling city of New York. “The world has changed from when I went.”
“We’ll be careful,” I said. “We’re staying in motels every night.”
“I camped. Why aren’t you camping? Just ask a nice policeman to guard you in a city park.”
We stared at each other, her lined face to my expectant one, and then we laughed with her holding the handlebars. The day was like us, brilliant blue and then blown clouds, and I see how love can be between mother and daughter—this confusing place between rain and sun that often goes unnoticed until it’s there in your face.
“I love you,” I said, hoping she didn’t think that I was canceling out her comments.
“I love you more.”
“I’ll call you.”
“Every night.” Her eyes were hard, and I knew then as I know now that she sits by the phone sometimes waiting for me to call.
“Absolutely.”
And we were off, in a blaze of tears and blessings and thrown rice from a passerby as if it were a honeymoon we were going on instead of a cross-country ride.
As we rode, there were times when I wanted to give up: in the humidity of the East, my eyes covered in sweat; when the wind in Nebraska blew me straight across the road; through food poisoning and 130-mile days; a blizzard in Colorado and men throwing empty beer bottles against our bike frames. But I didn’t. I’d see her face, fragility balanced out with spunk and spice, and keep pedaling on. I couldn’t give up or give in because I was her girl; I’d heard the bike trip stories so many times that they were inside my veins, running in and out of my heart, these stories a heartbeat that pounded me over the Poconos, across the fields and plains, up the Rockies, the Sierra Nevadas to the Pacific Ocean. These stories were whispered urgings, prayers uttered in my mother’s name to finish, keep at it. I could do it, and would do it.
San Francisco Bay was beautiful on our last leg of the trip, sailboats careening past the bridges, the city in the haze of an indigo sky. The fact that my mother was singing “She’ll be comin’ round the mountain” at the top of her lungs did not deter us as we dipped tires into the Pacific Ocean. As Brian went up to the boardwalk to drink celebratory wine, Mom and I stared out past the breakers to the sun dipping toward the sea.
“It’s all just beginning, isn’t it?” she asked. And I didn’t know if she was talking about my life or our lives together, this new shared story of time. I didn’t want to ask because to me, it didn’t matter.
“We did it,” I said.
“We sure did.” And I knew she was talking about us, mother and daughter. I realized that life is not about accomplishing or finishing but experiencing moments like these and holding them close—my mother’s hand in mine, her long gaze over my face as if wanting to memorize me, and the waves rolling over us and up the beach, leaving our feet covered in sand.
I hope my six-year-old daughter finds a road. It might not be along her grandmother’s route of 1956. It could take her away from the back roads Brian and I took in 1996, and in fact, maybe she will want her own path apart from ours. But the important thing is the journey, the adventure, a favorite story you want to repeat aloud at night over and over again until it threads itself, a colorful quilt of love, around her heart.
Peggy Newland
The Piano
Three summers ago, I flew to my parents’ home in New Jersey to help them prepare to move to a new house. My mother had suffered a series of small strokes, and although the physical damage was slight, she was having trouble going up and down the stairs. So my parents bought a comfortable ranch house in a nearby suburb.
My parents had lived in the old house for forty years. This was the house I had grown up in, the only home I could remember. My mother had redecorated more than once since I’d left. There were new drapes and carpeting in the living room, different furniture in the den. But the basic pieces, the big, solid ones, were still there.
That first night at dinner, we sat at the same dining-room table that we had gathered around for countless family meals and celebrations. And later, when we had finished eating, I played Bach on the grand piano that no one ever played, but which had taken up nearly half of the living room for as long as I could remember. My mother sat on the sofa and smiled as she listened to me play the familiar melody, the one she had heard me practice endlessly, and that she always asked me to play whenever I was there. She’d always been completely tone-deaf—as a child in school music classes, she was told that she should be the “listener”—but she always hummed along when I played this piece.
I woke up early the next morning and got right to work. I decided to start in the attic, since my mother couldn’t get up the steps any more. Besides I was already feeling nostalgic about this old house, the house that held our family history in its dusty cupboards and dark closets. The attic, I knew, would have been the least disturbed over the years. If I were to find any of the old, familiar things from my childhood, that’s where they would be.
All day long, I sorted through piles of crumbling papers and filled numerous trash bags with stuff that could only be described as “junk”—pieces of broken toys, old magazines that had become decayed and moldy, remnants of mildewed carpeting. But I also found some treasures— several boxes of family photographs.
I carried the boxes downstairs and piled them on the dining room table. After dinner, my parents and I began to sort through the pictures. Many of them were familiar, but others were of people and places that I didn’t recognize. I asked my parents about them, but my mother had trouble remembering. The strokes had damaged her memory and her ability to call up the words s
he needed to express herself, so she was often silent. Every so often, when I came across a particularly intriguing photograph, my mother would start to speak, but before she had gotten very far into the sentence, she would stop with a sigh. It was as if she could only grasp the memory for a few moments, and by the time she was able to find the words to describe it, it had already begun to slip away. Sometimes her eyes filled with tears, and she turned away. I thought that she must have been frustrated, lonely, sad, grieving for the person she had once been. I know I was.
The movers came the next morning. My brothers and I helped my father load some of the more fragile items into the cars, and then they followed the moving truck in a small, slow caravan to the new house. I stayed behind to take one last look around. I hadn’t even seen the new house yet, and I wanted to make sure I fixed the old one in my memory while I still had the chance. But the house was empty now. All of the things that had made it a home had been taken to the new place. All I could do now was follow them.
By late afternoon, when the movers were almost finished, I walked around the new house, exploring its spaces, its as yet unfilled closets and empty cupboards. Gradually, as the things from the old house were settled in their new places, the house began to take on a character of its own, one that reminded me of the old one, but with its own personality. The final piece to be brought in was the piano. After the movers left, I sat down and began to play Bach. As I started to play, I realized that because of the bumping and jostling during the move to the new house, the piano would need tuning. But there would be time for that.
We gathered around the dining-room table for dinner that night, my brothers and my parents and I, just the way we used to when we were growing up in the old house. Everyone talked at once, just the way we always had, except for my mother. Now she just listened to the voices of her family. At first it was awkward and odd, the rest of us having to carefully negotiate the gaps my mother had always filled in. But gradually we had found a rhythm, a new way of including my mother in the conversation without her having to speak.
It didn’t take long for my parents to settle in to the new house. By the time I visited them again at Thanksgiving, the closets were organized, the books were arranged neatly on the shelves, the pictures had been hung on the walls. There were still a number of cartons in the basement that hadn’t yet been emptied, but my parents didn’t seem to be in a hurry to finish unpacking these last boxes.
They hadn’t had the piano tuned, either. When I sat down to play, I had to try to ignore the notes that were slightly off-key, and concentrate on the melody, the way I remembered it. It sounded a little different, but still, the music was beautiful.
It’s been three years since my parents moved. My mother seems less anxious, less sad these days. When her words fail her, her eyes no longer fill with tears. Instead, she shrugs her shoulders. “Oh, well,” she says smiling wryly. And I’ve learned not to be so anxious about her speaking. Sometimes, when I call her on the phone, I just talk about my children or my job. Sometimes, when I am there visiting, we just sit on the couch without saying anything, and she holds my hands. And sometimes she just sits on the bench next to me while I play the piano. It still hasn’t been tuned, but my mother hums along anyway. I don’t know if she remembers that she is tone-deaf, or if she even realizes that she is humming off-key. But even played on this slightly flawed piano, the rhythms are familiar, the melody still soothing.
Maybe my parents will have the piano tuned one day. Or maybe they won’t get around to it. It doesn’t really matter. We’ve all become accustomed to this new way. The music sounds slightly different, but it’s still perfectly beautiful.
Phyllis Nutkis
Don’t Cry Out Loud
All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
Leo Tolstoy
Why do you let him talk to you like that? I felt like saying.
My teenage brother had just mouthed off again and peeled out of the driveway in his Mustang.
“He’s going to get himself fired with that attitude,” my mom would begin explaining to Dad when he got home.
“I’m so worried. . . .”
My exhausted father showed no support.
“Would you just stop worrying? Good Lord, do you have to be upset about everything?”
My mother and I were exact opposites. I took after my father: strong, fearless and happy to take charge of any situation, while my mother was a pleaser and a server whose motto in life was “Don’t rock the boat!” She never spoke up for herself and would never dare send back a steak in a restaurant. She would rather eat around the raw parts than have to confront a waiter. In fact, her favorite phrase was, “It’s fine. Let’s not make a scene.”
My mother was a domestic goddess, and as she proudly called herself, “an efficiency expert.”
“Look!” she said grinning proudly one day when I arrived home from school. “I made a swimming suit!”
“How do you make a swimming suit, Mom?”
“Stretch &Sew class,” she announced. “I can sew anything!”
I could never even find a swimming suit that fit, let alone sew one from scratch!
My father once dropped her off at the door of a crowded restaurant to put their name on the list while he went and parked. He walked up and found her pulling weeds in the planting area.
“Shirley, what in the world are you doing!”
“Well, I was just standing here waiting, and I looked down and saw all those ugly weeds next to those pretty flowers, so I just decided to pull them myself!”
“Shirl, come out of there!” he said, pulling her out of the bushes.
When I grew up and got married Mom loved to come over and pick me up for a day of shopping.
“I’ll be down in a minute!” I would call while frantically tripping over the pile of laundry strewn about the floor of my bedroom. I would gallop down the stairs, and there she would be in my kitchen mopping the entire floor.
“Mom, you don’t have to do that!”
“Oh, it’s nothing, honey. I had a few minutes while you were getting ready.”
Actually, it was delightful having her there to help me when the laundry pile got too much, or it was time to wallpaper, scrape old paint, or do anything involved with housework. Mom ironed her sheets and folded them like tissue paper before placing them in their assigned positions in her linen closet. I remember the first time I walked into a bed and bath store. This reminds me of something, I said to myself. All these perfectly folded linens, lined up according to color. Oh yes—Mom’s closet!
Mom saved small boxes to organize her drawers (“This is the perfect size to stack gloves in!”) and never had one empty hanger in any of her closets. (“Each outfit has a hanger. You shouldn’t need extra ones if you’ve organized your closet correctly!”) My drawers looked like a bomb went off in them. I still had my wrinkled college T-shirt shoved in the bottom under the hot pink spandex pants that went out in the late ’80s.
Mom was my greatest helper, but when I wanted to have deep, transparent discussions, she was afraid to talk about her feelings. Girls of her era were trained to smile, be charming and never, under any circumstances, let anyone see them cry. As a result, my overbearing father would get upset with her, and she would drive off to the mall crying, but always in secret . . . behind her sunglasses.
Mom never learned how to speak up for herself, but somehow she knew how to speak up for me. Maybe that is the real bond between mothers and daughters. She didn’t give herself permission to follow her own dreams, but she certainly gave it to her daughter.
“Did you read Carla’s latest story?” my sister-in-law asked her during a visit. My mother responded the way she always responded to any of my work: “Isn’t she marvelous? Isn’t she talented? She could write any kind of book she wanted to! She could accomplish anything!”
The last time I moved, my mother came over to do what she had done for me all her life: clean, organize and get
the task done. For some reason, while we packed and swept that afternoon, Mom started to open up.
“Your sons have been given a gift,” she said. “You are the greatest mother they could have had.”
I scoffed. “Oh, Mom, I don’t even know how to cook. I still stare at the butcher counter and ask the guy what in the world you do with meat! I’ve never even made a roast before!”
“That doesn’t matter, dear. They can eat out. Housekeepers can be hired, dishwashers can do dishes, and turkey dinners can be bought at Boston Market. But what you have given those boys is something I never knew how to give.”
“What do you mean, Mom?”
“You show them your emotions. You teach them how to feel. You share the deep things in life with them. I wasn’t much good at that, I guess. You touch them emotionally, and that is the most important thing of all.”
Seven days later Mom died of a sudden, unexplained heart attack. Like the efficiency expert she was, even though perfectly healthy, her funeral had already been arranged, paid for, and a separate checking account set up with instructions typed out in her bottom drawer. There was one more thing though, that she couldn’t have planned for: her last laundry pile. I was afraid to touch it. I was in shock, denial, stumbling around her empty condo grief-stricken and overcome with sadness. Who was going to do it? Not my brother. I had no sister, no daughter. The one who always said, “Here honey, I’ll do it,” was gone. It was my job now. I loaded the washer and poured in her Fresh Scent Tide and then fell to the ground, weeping in front of her washing machine. I sat there on that spotless laundry-room floor grieving the woman who had defined her life by tasks, but who actually had been the greatest emotional support of my life. Every time she did a load of my laundry she was saying, “I love you.” And every time she listened to my poem, story, or song and told me I could do it, she was teaching me to feel my feelings and express them without fear. The woman who couldn’t show her emotions had touched mine deeper than anyone.
Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul Page 18
