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I: Memoir-essay (reprinted from the San Francisco Chronicle, November 17, 1996)

In the fragile body of an 84-year-old woman, his mother still seems a powerful warrior he must do battle with, until he finds the strength to offer up a few words of kindness.

 

 

 

We might as well be the Protestants and Catholics wearing each other down in Ireland. Her monologues fill the house like poison gas; wounding words escape from my lips and hers. Here I am, a grown man in my 50s, still at war with my mother. The fact that she’s a frail 84-year-old who can hardly see or walk doesn’t seem to make much difference. I still see her as a giant pulling the strings of my life.

Rachel, my mother, is a diabetic who’s allergic to doctors, a leftist who thinks paying a cleaning woman $8 an hour is extravagant. No one lasts long in my mother’s employment, so most of the responsibility of caring for her falls on me or my sister, who lives near her in Santa Cruz. I live in Oakland and visit once a month.

Recently, after another frustrating visit, I grope for an alternative to bickering with her. She won’t be around much longer, and I don’t want to be left with an empty ache after she’s gone. I recall seeing a book titled Making Peace with Your Parents. I search for it in the bookstore where I work, pleased to discover a copy. It turns out to be a wonderful book that talks about letting go of old resentments toward your parents and having compassion for them.

I’m tired of blaming her for the difficulties I have in navigating my life. I know that underneath all the nagging and controlling, she does love me. She was robbed of her childhood, growing up in a cold-water flat in East Harlem and having to serve as ambassador to the outside world for her overwhelmed Russian-Jewish immigrant mother. My mother has experienced much emotional pain, which frequently causes her to lash out at others.

And now there’s the physical pain as well, stomach problems and near-blindness, the diabetes she refuses to deal with. She loves fruit and eats a lot of it, although her blood sugar is already much too high. Also, my mother senses that her mind is slipping. She puts things down and a moment later forgets where they are. Sometimes she accuses my sister and me of plotting to put her in a nursing home so we won’t have to be bothered with her.

Soon after reading the book, I visit my mother’s house. I’m greeted by the usual clutter on the coffee table in the living room, books, papers, yellowing articles cut out of newspapers. Using a cane, my mother moves like a wounded crab, folded in upon herself, feet scraping the floor. It’s still a shock seeing her in this condition because up until about a year ago, she got around fairly well. Her pale face looks as if it’s forgotten how to smile. But her hair is clean and shiny, and her green pants and yellow wool shirt look fresh. My sister mentions that my other has a new woman working for her, a spiritual person who gives her massages and cooks her big pots of vegetable soup.

“I hope she sticks around for a while,” my sister whispers to me.

I smile, thinking that if a near stranger can love my mother like this, so can I.

That evening I say to my mother, “I appreciate your bringing me into the world, and I appreciate all that you’ve done for me.” It feels stilted, like a foreign language I’m learning, but this is my only hope of reaching her. She stares at me, then looks away. Her eyes are dark buttons gazing into space. She launches into a monologue about her brother-in-law, my 84-year-old uncle Jerry, who has bladder and lung cancer.

I’m really concerned about Jerry,” she says, sighing. “I’m glad he’s finally stopped drinking. He has to have his booze. And his girlfriends, of course. He was busy jetsetting to the Bahamas and this place and that with those young girlfriends of his.”
Her face is a mask, giving no indication she’s registered what I said. I’ve heard this story numerous times before, like an old 78 whose grooves have worn thin. A wave of sadness washes over me. How naïve of me to expect miracles, that a few words could cross an ocean built up over more than 30 years.

 

It all started when I was 23, a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University. I wanted to drop out, to have adventures and write books drenched in life, like my idols Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson. I wanted to shed my sheltered existence like a noxious skin. Having put herself through college and teachers’ school during the Great Depression, my mother thought dropping out was criminally self-indulgent. She urged me not to abandon my master’s thesis on the political activity of New York metropolitan lawyers, which I had grown to loathe. She pleaded with me not to throw my life away. As a last resort, she persuaded me to see her friend, Dr. Bridger, a Pavlovian therapist. A shy man with a pasty complexion, he puffed on his pipe and constructed careful chains of logic to persuade me that I needed to pursue a career rather than a mirage in the desert. Dutifully I went back to my thesis; it felt like eating stale bread. I dropped out of graduate school. I was left, though, with a bitter aftertaste, with the lingering anxiety that perhaps I’d chosen the path of failure. My long childhood was over.

And so I made the belated discovery that my mother had flaws. I saw the manipulativeness, the hysteria, the political dogmatism, the inclination to find fault with others. My mother made disparaging remarks about my ex-wife as well as the other women I’ve been involved with. A fervent vegetarian, my mother disapproved of my diet, of my not being more political, of my love of cats. Her critical tendencies have grown worse over the past few years with the narrowing of her life.

Now, three decades after leaving graduate school, I see that she just wanted me to become someone she could feel proud of, someone who’d traveled further than my parents, the real estate title searcher and the elementary school teacher. I’ve disappointed her, but not completely. Ironically, writing is probably the main link between us. There is something almost heroic about her persistence in sending her awkwardly written novels and stories year after year to publishers in America, Europe and Asia. Year after year, her manuscripts returned, rejected.

Her pet project was a novel about political journalist Agnes Smedley; it took more than ten years to write, enduring countless revisions, like a patient who never quite gets well. Like me, my mother is a dreamer, harboring the perpetual hope that the next revision or project will be the one to unlock the gates of literary recognition. I recall her taking my book of stories around to libraries and bookstores in Southern California during the mid-‘80s persuading numerous librarians and booksellers to take some copies. In turn, I’ve edited some of her writing.

In the morning after breakfast, I repeat what I said the day before and ask if she recalls my words. To my surprise, she says quietly, “Yes, I did. Thank you.” A warm glow fills my body. I feel a little embarrassed, almost as if I’m playing a part in a movie.

And then, over the next couple of days, my overture unleashes her own latent talent for gratitude. She thanks me for working in the garden, hacking away at the jungle of weeds; and for cleaning the bathroom, tossing out all the wadded-up tissues, ancient tubes of toothpaste, and loops of spider webs. She is absurdly grateful when I cook her oat bran pancakes, chomping them down and requesting seconds. “You’re a very talented pancake cook. Thank you so much for making me pancakes,’ she says. She repeats this several times during my visit.

When I give her a hug, her body feels light, like the wind, in my arms. We manage not to quarrel at all for the whole three days. I’m assertive but keep my voice calm. I feel like a new person, as if I’ve traded in my short pants and T-shirt for the more substantial costume of an adult.

She wants to reminisce about her youth, saying we could make it into a book, so I take down her words in a notebook. She describes the actor John Garfield in his belted yellow overcoat and fedora tilted over his eye coming back to his old school in East Harlem where she has her first teaching job. She speaks of how excited all the kids are to see Garfield. Her eyes are shiny as she climbs back into the past.

While she talks, I become nostalgic too. I think of photos of her when she was young, of the light burning in her eyes. As a teenager, she spoke on street corners in Harlem, urging the residents to oppose their wretched living conditions. And I recall the warmth of her voice and the smile that made her face sing when I was a child. I also think of photos of my parents when they first got married, looking radiant in each other’s presence. And later, when I was a teenager, how they seemed like two warriors who’d made a truce.

I think of my own troubled life, a broken marriage and much anger and confusion. Only in the past few years have I begun to approach a semblance of inner peace. To heal the broken places inside me, to feel more connection to the world and myself, I have tried a men’s group, therapy, meditation and tai chi. Right now, I am content to be sitting with my mother at her dining room table, talking into the night about John Garfield.

The next morning her body leans into mine as I hug her goodbye. “Thank you so much for visiting me. Thank you, my son,” she says.

I step into the glistening Santa Cruz morning, feeling light.

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Copyright © 1996 by Ralph Dranow. All rights reserved.

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II. Poetry (reprinted from Minotaur, and also Watershed, the literary magazine of the University of California, Chico)