My Mother, Poor Woman, Is Still Dead

The Tiny Tornado and I set an alarm to make sure we're up in time for school. But we mostly don't need it. He tends to wake up sometime after 7, and crawls into bed with me for a cuddle. We use the alarm to tell us it's time to stop snuggling and get moving.

He's such an energetic little person. This morning, after the alarm, I said to him, "Are you ready for another day?" He said, "I sure am!"

This morning during our cuddle I found myself thinking about my parents. I told Raider that if I'd known how liberating it would feel to be disowned by my dad, I'd have worked harder to push him to the brink years ago. We wonder, though, if it would have been possible while my mom was still alive. It makes me curious about what was going on between them, marriage being the complicated thing it is. We imagine him as a dog straining to escape, and her as the one holding the leash.

This morning, I found myself thinking about how my mom died friendless. People liked her, but she always saw the worst in everyone. When I was a child, I wondered how it could be that my mom didn't actually like any of her friends. As I got older, I realized that her "friends" were generally relatives, or the wives of my dad's friends. I think she experienced liberation as her siblings and in-laws died in recent years, and when her last surviving brother was so unethical in his handling of my Uncle Charlie's estate that she felt clear to sever ties. Perhaps this is something else we had in common: that we hung onto bad family relationships too long, and were relieved when their ends were taken out of our hands.

The wives, though--lovely women who seemed to sincerely like my mom. But my mother always chose to see the worst in everyone. Given a choice, she ascribed the least flattering motivation to everyone's actions. She magnified people's flaws and failings, and overlooked their gifts. In recent years, she had simply refused to socialize with these people anymore; my dad carried on without her. And she never, that I saw, made any effort to make friends of her own, on her own terms.

When I was a senior in high school, I became friends with a group of girls who transformed my ideas of what friendship could be. They changed my life for the better, and for good. I'd previously been part of a large, fun, and loving but messed-up crew that thrived on drama and loved to gossip behind each other's backs. It was eye-opening to fall in with a group who actually liked and supported each other. A whole new model of friendship!

My mother, of course, didn't like these girls. She never liked any of my friends, but for some reason she had a particular disdain for this group. She had a derogatory nickname for each of them, for instance, which she used whenever they weren't present. And, while I was experiencing these friendships as the first truly healthy and loving relationships of my life, my mother questioned my motives. She thought these girls were beneath me--even as I, struggling to break old habits, wasn't always sure I deserved them.

One of her favorite accusations was that I had chosen these friends because they weren't as smart as me, so that I would look better by comparison. I can remember arguing with her about it many times. For one thing, these girls were smart. I have lost track of a couple of them, but the rest turned out to be:

1. A math major in college who worked for the census bureau and is now a teacher.

2. A mechanical engineer.

3. A Sociology Ph.D. who is a researcher at the University of Wisconsin.

4. A History Ph.D. who is a professor at Kalamazoo College.

If my intention was to look smarter by comparison, well, I'm going to say that was a failed strategy.

I tried to tell her, also, that to the extent that I was choosing friends in order to look smart to some imaginary audience, it would make more sense to choose smart friends. "Hmm," someone might say, "I never though Su Penn was all that bright...but she must have something going on upstairs to be able to keep up with that crew." But she could never see another point of view than her own, and she could never see the goodness in people.

I am so much like my mother that I count it as one of the great blessings of my life that I have managed to not be like her in this way (after some early false starts and failures). My mother was a lovely woman, a raconteur, hilarious to listen to. She made a vocation of keeping and passing on the family's stories. People liked her; over the years, many people have told me of their appreciation for her sense of humor or her charm or her thoughtfulness, and I have no reason to think they were being insincere. People were ready to love my mother, but, for the most part, she did not love them back.

That is my eulogy for today.

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