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In a notebook she wrote, I’m reading Tom Robbins’s book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The passage about marriage ties in with women’s struggle for accomplishment. I’m writing this down for future THINKING … She followed with a Robbins quote: “For most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage
is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV … offspring and creature comforts all under one roof…. But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight … and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to ‘take care’ of her…. Women live longer than men because they really haven’t been living.” Mom liked to THINK about life, especially the experience of being a woman. She liked to write about it too.
But I was impressed with Mom’s tenacity. How could she keep writing without an audience, not even her own family? She just did.
Why did he leave his favorite daughter, his look-alike; why? How could he have driven away knowing he would forever break some part of her heart?
I want to know why Mother continually forgot to remember how wonderful she was.
I wonder if her lack of self-esteem was an early symptom of forgetting. Was it really Alzheimer’s that stole her memory, or was it a crippling sense of insecurity?
It’s been a challenge to witness the betrayal of such a cruel disease while learning to give love with the promise of stability. If my mother was the most important person to me, if I am who and how I am largely due to who and how she was, what then does that say about my impact on Duke and Dexter?
The exhausting effort to control time by altering the effects of age doesn’t bring happiness. There’s a word for you: happiness. Why is happiness something I thought I was entitled to? What is happiness anyway? Insensitivity. That’s what Tennessee Williams said.
“Leave me and my body alone, for God’s sake. Don’t touch me. This is my life. This is my ending.” It wasn’t that the activities were administered without affection and care; that wasn’t the issue. The issue was independence.
Mom continues to be the most important, influential person in my life.
a story of what’s lost in success contrasted with what’s gained in accepting an ordinary life. I was an ordinary girl who became an ordinary woman, with one exception: Mother gave me extraordinary will. It didn’t come free. But, then, life wasn’t a free ride for Mother either.
So why did I write a memoir? Because Mom lingers; because she tried to save our family’s history through her words; because it took decades before I recognized that her most alluring trait was her complexity; because I don’t want her to disappear even though she has.
The profound love and gratitude I feel now that she’s left has compelled me to try to “unravel” the mystery of her journey. In so doing I hoped to find the meaning of our relationship and understand why realized dreams are such a strange burden.
tone was forgiving, sweet, and sometimes elegiac.
One time I told her about how frustrating Dad was. According to him, I never did anything right. He was always saying, “Don’t sit too close to the TV or you’ll go blind,” or “Finish the food on your plate; there’s starving people in China,” and, my least favorite, “Don’t chew with your mouth open unless you want to catch flies.” Was there something about being a civil engineer that made him that way? Was that the reason he never thought I did things right? Mom was different. She didn’t judge me or try to tell me what to think. She let me think.
It has taken all my 60 years to straighten out my thinking on all this, and believe me I am finally unburdened. I am free of the fear instilled in me, free from the angry God, the straight and narrow path to Heaven, and the fiery anguish of living in Hell. I am grateful to whatever force in the universe there is that has removed me of all the ugliness imposed on me by false ideas about what life should be. And when I’m through with my time in the scheme of it all, I’m not afraid of what comes after. Amen.
Compliments were Dad’s way to whitewash his guilt about Mom’s submissive role.
It wasn’t the subject or the content of our deliberations; it was the shared experience that meant so much.
Why was Mother so engrossed with the process of validating my life?
I still longed for a mother’s guidance
When we got home Dorrie called to say she wasn’t coming down. I tried to read, but couldn’t get Dorrie out of my thoughts. Why doesn’t she come see ME? I tried to rub the thoughts out. I started to think of actions I wanted to take, but rationalized I shouldn’t. I kept thinking if I’m so miserably maladjusted to this life, my absence would only be felt for a short time. And anyway, my responsibilities with the family are over. They no longer look to me for guidance. It’s more like I’m the one they’re stuck being responsible for. My company isn’t sought after. Whatever I have allowed to happen
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I’ve created this solitude. I’m drowning in the worst depression I can remember. I’ve always tried to hide my feelings. Things, even little things, seem to dislodge my frail grip on the handle of positivity. I completely succumb to the dark side. At one time I fought with all I knew to prevent these unwelcome attacks. I did a great deal of pretending. I would say to myself, “I’m not depressed, I’m not—I’m not.” I kept covering up, pushing back, denying, in an effort to appear “normal.” When the kids were alone with me, I would be attentive, involved, interested, and warm.
Rules don’t apply to genius.
Mother didn’t finish her memoir, Memories. Memories. Lost memories. Memories unfinished. A book called Memories. It was almost as if God’s will had taken over Mother’s future. I didn’t notice. I was too busy to register the significance of taking on the task of writing a memoir or to be encouraging enough to help. I don’t know if I actually read Mother’s letter. I have no recollection. I was content to assume Mom was free from the drama of raising us kids and now she had all the time she needed to devote to her artistic pursuits. Of course, I made sure I didn’t know what was going on. I had
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She supported choices that created experiences that expanded my life. As a girl, Mom, like me, had vague grandiose aspirations, but, unlike me, no one helped her expand on them; no one could.
It was as if we’d always be happy. Of course it wasn’t true, but what lasts longer—the truth, or the memory of a perception of happiness? I opened my fortune cookie. “Value what you have now, so as not to miss it when it’s gone.”
During Dad’s five short months living with brain cancer, I learned that love, all love, is a job, a great job, the best job. I learned that love is much more than a fantasy of romance.
What is perfection, anyway? It’s the death of creativity, that’s what I think, while change, on the other hand, is the cornerstone of new ideas.
believe people evolve into who they want to be. In a way you create who you are.
I just wish we could go back a couple of years. I’d love to get your take on him.
It was hard to watch Mother struggle with the constant agitation she couldn’t comprehend.
No matter how much I tried to placate her, she got more unnerved, so much so that she started to point her finger at me and scream as if I’d betrayed her.
I couldn’t believe the woman who’d spent her entire adult life helping people battle the insistent demons playing havoc with their minds had been struck down by Alzheimer’s.
“Memories are simply moments that refuse to be ordinary.”
I find peace in these words, probably because death is a mystery and at times a torturous burden to live with. It’s so hard to understand the complexities of our human existence. Why were we created with emotions of love only to be left with such emptiness when those we have felt love for are taken out of our lives? I will never know the answer until I die and join those who have gone before me:
As my bulletin board became thick with a kind of textured patina, it began to trigger memories.
“You can’t make the past come alive, Diane. You can know it better, you can feel it better, but you can’t make it come alive. It’s the memoirist’s regret.”
Now will soon be Then. Then can never become Now. We can’t save the past or solve the riddle of love. But to me, it’s worth trying.
