Not the Easiest Thing to Write

For me, this year has been a bunch of firsts that have been quite difficult to process, and there's a big one coming up. Sunday is Mother's Day, and it will be the first time recognizing this day since my mother passed away. Anyone who follows this site will know that she spent her last several years with severe dementia, virtually unable to interact with the world around her. Every time I visited her, I would leave thinking, "Is there anything of her left in there?" but there was no conclusive answer. The best I could come up with is, "Maybe, but probably not." Incredibly uncertain but enough to leave open possibility that maybe she knew I was there. This year, however, I will ask that question and the answer will be, "No." For here and evermore, that's it.

Now that I have killed the mood sufficiently, let me explain why I went here. I always attribute the creative side of me to my father and that side of the family's weirdly elaborate brains. When it comes to words, however, both in creating things with them and discovering the world created by them, that's all the property of my mother and her side of the family. And the merger of those two concepts - the creative mind and the power of the word - are a perfect description of me. So, let me point out a few amazing things about how my mother showed my the world of words.

It would be fair to say that books were always a part of my life - our house had plenty of them. However, most of them were antiques, or a showpiece encyclopedia set from 1920 (I am not exaggerating), or something that was meant to be seen and not touched. As far as the "real" books went, that was my mother's real estate. I know my father read on occasion, but I do not actually remember the act of him reading a book. Mom, however, had a book around her somewhere, be it one of the more recent important pieces - The Women's Room by Marilyn French, and I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can by Barbara Gordon are etched in my brain even at a young age - or some book about politics, politicians, or life in general. The way I delineated it, my father had books; my mother knew books. 

And, of course, my mother was the writer in the family. My father was creative, but writing was not his specialty. Mom wrote for a living, and likely wrote more than I will ever truly know. I can't say if she ever tried her hand at narrative, essay, or poetry - journalism was her jam for the most part - but I know that it imprinted upon me how words had their own leverage. When they say, "A lever moves objects, leverage moves people," this demonstrates just how words can bring causes to life and move people to act. When my mother wrote her news stories, like about the teacher's strike in the early 1970s, people responded to that. More to the point, when I went to high school in the early 1980s, a few teachers recognized my last name and brought me aside to tell me they remembered being interviewed by my mother all those years ago. This was all the purpose, the creation, of the journey that is words.

Sadly, I have very few actual written pieces of my mother's work. She was not a packrat like my father was, so her first drafts and clip stories are mostly relegated to history. However, I do have the legacy of words to remember her by, and the knowledge that living in that world of words can be a very special feeling. Whenever I read my older writings (and after I go through a wave of self-criticism), I remind myself that this all goes back to the debt I owe my mother.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!