Happy Birthday, Mom

Growing up, I resented my mother’s anxiety. I could feel it weighing on me, but I thought Aunt Tess’s story was funny. Aunt Tess – preparing to marry Uncle Nat, Mom’s adored, older brother – wanted Mom to feel she was gaining a sister. She invited Mom to lunch at Schrafft’s in Manhattan. That was a big deal, but Mom cancelled because it was raining. Mom didn’t like the rain. Aunt Tess thought it was hysterical and told the story many times. I’m still working on walking in the rain.

I don’t know if Mom was afraid of fire. She certainly worried about me burning myself. Lighting a match was a challenge for me until my freshman year of college when I started smoking. I finally had to get past my fear of matches.

Mom tried to teach me to swim one summer in Provincetown. All I learned was the dead man’s float. Mom swam, but she realized something that I didn’t see. She sent me to sleep away camp, although the cost was a stretch, and I learned to swim. She knew I needed to get away from her to grow. She made sure I went away to college.

Only recently, I’ve been coming to appreciate how honestly Mom came by her anxiety. She didn’t tell many stories about her childhood, but they were all funny stories. At least that was the way I heard them. Mom grew up in Hell’s Kitchen where her parents, immigrants from Rumania owned a haberdashery. Her father, fearful of being robbed on the way to the bank, sent my mom with day’s receipts in a brown paper bag. “No one will figure a little girl for a bag full of money.” It was a funny story. Only now have I begun to imagine myself walking with that bag. Only now has it become a scary story.

Mom remembered the horse-drawn trolleys in Manhattan. I marveled. When a horse fell on the ice, they shot the horse: broken leg. Mom witnessed that. Why wasn’t I frightened by that story? I liked horses. All I remember was awe of olden times: horse-drawn trolleys.

When Mom did something at the dinner table to annoy her father, he once broke his full dinner plate over her head. Telling that story, Mom didn’t sound upset. I thought that was funny too, picturing my mom as a little girl. How could I think that was funny? Was it the way she told it?

Mom didn’t let her fears stop her. She moved out of her parents’ house before getting married, in the days when that just wasn’t done. She went to teacher training school, loved teaching, but emerged from the witch hunts of the fifties with a private tutoring practice. It was Mom who supported our family. She outlived my father by thirty years and went off on her own on a trip to Outer Mongolia just after he died, slept in a yurt. With all her fears, she was fearless.

All these years, I’ve been aware of the anxiety which I’d inherited, but I’ve never fully appreciated that courage that came along in the package. Until now. Happy birthday, Mom.