The Undiscovered Country, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

February 21, 2009 Martha Thomases 1 Comment

Sometime over the last few weeks, I became older than my mother.  She died three months before her 56^th birthday, and my 56^th birthday is about two months away.

It’s spooky being older than one’s parent.  I relied on my mother to set the example as to how a woman should act.  My mom was outspoken, passionate, active, obsessed about her weight, and opinionated.  She loved to laugh.  If she read about an album in the New York Times (a rare object in Youngstown, Ohio), she would go out and buy it.  I learned about the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Mothers of Invention from my mom.

Therefore, it followed that when I had my child, I would do a lot of the same things.  My kid listened to the Ramones as soon as he got out of the hospital.  He watched us argue with the television with such intensity that he would grin with glee whenever NBC anchor John Palmer appeared on the screen.  I put him in the Snugli and took him to see Geraldine Ferraro give a speech when he was four months old.  He slept through the whole thing, but he was there.

As he grew older, I gave him some of the books I’d loved as a child, including those my mother gave to me.  He shared my affection for E. Nesbitt and Madeleine l’Engel.  I took him with me to the comic book store to buy comics once a week, just as my parents took me to the train station with them when they got the Sunday Times (and I got my weekly comic).

These activities made me feel like a mother.  I was doing what mothers do.

Nothing made me feel closer to her than when I sang the song she’d sing at bedtime.  I have no idea where it comes from, but here it is:

I see the moon

And the moon sees me.

The moon sees somebody I want to see.

God bless the moon

And God bless me

And God bless the somebody I want to see.

Those may be among the most inane lyrics I’ve ever heard (and, as you can see from the above, I love the Ramones), and yet, they comfort me.  They comforted me enough to sing it out loud to my kid, even though I have a voice that makes the cats flee.

Not everything I did was the same as my mom would do.  My son was not me (go figure), and he had different needs and challenges. Still, there were many parallels.  My son’s athletic career was more accomplished than my own, but my mother’s words of consolation came in handy when he lost.  My son was popular in school, having lots of friends, but I knew what to do when he felt lonely.

Mom’s are useful that way.

I was just about my son’s age when I moved to New York, and my mom was already sick.  She fought her disease like a trooper, but she knew the odds.  She wanted to be sure that she left her family in a good place, so she tried really hard to make sure her daughters’ lives were good to go.  She wanted to see me married, and so I was.  She even picked out a second wife for my father (although he ultimately chose his own candidate).

And now, I don’t know what my mom would do. My son left home to lead his own life, just as I did when I was his age.  He’s having those first few on-your-own crises that come with doing your own cooking, washing your own laundry and paying your own bills. He’s learning how to handle responsibility.  He’s learning what it means to be an adult and a friend.

I remember those crises.  I remember that I didn’t know how to handle things, and I didn’t even know how to ask.  Instead, I stumbled around until I figured it out, sometimes more than a decade later.

None of this stops me from wanting to fix everything for my boy.  After all, I might die before things get all better. It’s what my mom did, and therefore that’s what moms my age are supposed to do.

My mom isn’t here for me to ask.  The only time I see her is when I’m dreaming, and then she’s telling me I’m too fat.

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Media Goddess Martha Thomases is thinking about setting out for the territories.