Remembering My Mother

My mother was a woman of the century. Literally. Her birthday was January 1^st, 1900. The date itself is auspicious and a bit suspicious. I’ve heard that many immigrants choose that date as a way of disowning their past and claiming an American heritage. Of course, that would have been an erasure on the part of my grandparents.

The reason I even question her date of birth is because she played loose with her age along the way. In the 1930 census she claimed to be twenty-seven. Be that as it may she lived in the lower eastside of Manhattan with six brothers and got her education in the university of the mean streets. Life was combat among the pushcarts and tenements. As the decades went by no one had told her there was no war. Truce had been declared but not for my mother. Her life’s journey of eighty-eight years was a chronicle of an awkward assimilation while, at the same time, proclaiming a disidentification with the Old World. 

She lived as if haggling was for life itself.  My mother was ever on the lookout for a thumb on the scale or a rotten apple slipped into her bag. To get to her butcher she passed three others because she believed Murray the chicken plucker saved the best cuts just for her. I remember his blood-stained apron, that sawdust floor and the hanging flypaper.

While she was in the trenches in this extended skirmish with shopkeepers and the superintendent of our four-story walk-up, my father was the voice of tranquility. Through her blurts of aggravation I came away with a vocabulary of Yiddish curse words. She cursed the grocer, the landlord, the fascists and she cursed God for God knows what.

Though my dad worked long hours and was often absent in my tableau of childhood, he pacified the household. It was his temperament that was to be my inheritance. His soft voice prevailed over her loud complaints.

Beneath her pugnacity was the vulnerable little girl, teased by six brothers, who grew into a fearful woman. Those wounds were scarred over and her skin grew tough. She did mellow in her twilight years even as her trepidations became more evident.

Look. at those magnolias I called out on our last drive through  the prettiest street with the prettiest homes. Just keep your eyes on the road, she replied from the back seat where she did all her driving. My mother had a particular terror of trucks which she seemed to regard as assassins.

Her unease in this world denied her so much of the gardens and good life during her near century. I never saw her laugh. This Mother’s Day I want to celebrate her for her love which I somehow never doubted and recognize all the joy and awe she may have  missed in her daily struggles. 

I'd like to believe she had her own inner life I wasn't privy to. Maybe she even heard the mermaids sing.