May Without My Mother

When I was a little girl I remember trying to scare myself by thinking of things that would seem unimaginable - being lost in the woods, driving an out-of-control car, losing my parents. Of all, the last was the one that would stop my heart, and also the one that seem least likely. I was both terrified of being in this world without them and secure in my 10-year-old knowledge that this would not happen and if it did if was so far in the future that I did not need to worry about it.

Now, at 47, I am at that parentless point in my life. My father succumbed to Lymphoma two decades ago, so long in the past that the painful weeks leading up to and after his death seem like a distant memory. But details from my childhood are as clear as if they happened yesterday. I can close my eyes and smell the hunting clothes he would wear, a slightly oily scent that embodied his strength and determination to come home with a buck of some notable size. He was a mechanic and because of this his hands were always rough and slightly dark around the edges. In these hands I saw a steady confidence as he used them do just about any task. He only had an eighth grade education but he used determination to open his own service station and run it successfully for 40 years.

Like many men with children in the 1960s my father did not spend much time alone with me. As I got older I worked for him in his gas station, filling cars with fuel in the heat of the summer when my friends were heading to the beach. I don't remember resenting this time though, because in this role I was given my father's attention. He was truly grateful that he could rely on me to do this work competently, freeing him to fix cars and manage his business. After dinner he would close up the back of the garage and sit with me watching "Wheel of Fortune" on the gas station television while I took care of the last customers of the day. Between fill-ups I would sit with him and we would call out what letters the players should select. We would also talk - about his vegetable garden, about work that needed to be done around the station, about his hopes for my brother and I. I would listen attentively, soaking up his knowledge about life and all that he had built. Years later I realized that I could not live the life he had hoped for me and so we had a falling out. We were able to reconcile before his death but something had been lost, that feeling that my father was invincible and that I could never live without him.

During the years I worked with my father my relationship with my mother was different and mostly difficult, as it will be for teenagers and their mothers. I bristled whenever she wanted to sit with me, not wanting to hear anything she had to say. This was a complete turnaround for how I felt about her when I was a small child, when being close to her was the greatest gift I could receive. My first memory is of seeing her face and mine together, framed in the reflection from a stainless steel toaster she had just purchased. Today when I see reruns of I Love Lucy or Mary Tyler Moore in the Dick Van Dyke Show I am reminded of my mother and the carefree style in which she dressed, comfort and class with confidence thrown in.

In addition to handling all the bookkeeping for the gas station, she was errand girl for my father, driving almost everyday to pick up parts he needed to repair customers' cars. She could maneuver her station wagon on city streets and country roads, always smooth sailing, her hair held fashionably tight in a scarf fastened under her chin. When I wasn't in school I would go with her, never worrying that we would get lost but always marveling that she knew where to go. She liked to include shopping trips or lunch out in her travels and so those errands always seemed like mini-vacations.

Mom died this past August, entering me into the fraternity of women without mothers on Mother's Day. As the day approaches I wonder what it will mean for me.

I came to realize after my mother's death that everyone in the family had some different version of her. She lived long enough to have great-grandchildren and even one great-great grandchild. The younger family members never knew my father, never knew the relationship my parents had or the business that was so central to their lives. To them Mom was the doddering old lady who needed help getting in and out of a car. But they embraced faults that as her daughter I cringed from. She would bring them things from the thrift shop where she volunteered and the younger ones would see them as the treasures she had envisioned, while I only saw them as castaways from someone else's life. In her later years she did not have a sophisticated sense of style, something that I made note of in her gaudy jewelry and unpolished wardrobe. That was how the adult daughter saw her, but the little girl inside, the one that will no longer have to buy a pot of petunias for the second Sunday in May, will always miss the self-assured, strong woman with the scarf, poised enough to handle a business, a family and my father.