Halfway From Mom

When I woke up this morning, I felt something had shifted.  I’d been aware of this upcoming milestone of sorts- the day that marked the halfway point. Today, on this exact day, I have been without my mom in my life for as long as I was with her. Twenty-nine with, twenty-nine without. At fifty-eight years old, I am already two years older than Miriam was when she died. Losing her was such a searing loss, it’s sometimes hard to remember what it even felt like to have a mother.

Significant life-passages in the second twenty-nine years make it hard to relate to the first half as me being the same person. It often feels as though that was another person altogether, going through my childhood, my teens and into adulthood. My mom was there for that part. But she missed the delicious parts, the parts that give my life so much meaning and not having her to share that with has been heartbreaking on so many occasions.

There is a great comfort though in feeling that the further away I get from her death, the more I remember her life. And today for some reason, I am focusing on my mother’s hands.

My mom Miriam was left-handed and her hands were lovely with long, thin fingers. When she wrote or typed for long periods of time, a numbness in her fingers caused her to stop writing, shake out her hands for a minute and then continue. Her handwriting always reminded me of the perfect examples in my “How to Write Cursive” book from elementary school - flowing, easy-to-read, beautiful.

When she died, I took her brown leather purse and over the years, each time I have found something she wrote, I put it in the purse. Now I have a whole collection and each year, my sister Sue and I take the purse out for a spin.

Re-reading years of letters written to us can be so hard, causing us to cry the inconsolable tears of the motherless daughters and then suddenly, minutes later, bringing us to our knees in great gales of laughter. Like the letter about her driving clear across San Francisco to buy a six-pack of her favorite soda (Fresca…only ONE calorie!) because it was on sale for .50 less than usual and then calculating that what she saved in the cost, she paid for in gas in her piece-of-shit ‘ 76Toyota Corona station wagon. That car gave her more pain than pleasure. Mechanics hated working on it and complained bitterly when she brought it in. And she brought it in a lot. Before she died in 1983, she referred to that car in one of her purse letters, accurately predicting that, “this damn car will probably outlive me.” 

There were letters full of advice (some taken, some ignored) and many pages fervently wishing for a life partner like Robert Browning wrote about in his poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra” – “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be…” She was a romantic and instilled in her girls the notion of true, requited love as being something of an ideal for which to strive.

Reading the now-yellowed newspaper clippings, my sister and I are reminded that Dear Abby was something of a hero to her, recommending that girls simply “keep their legs together” as a way to avoid all kinds of unplanned teen maladies and that "if the boy really loved you, he would not ask you to go all the way". Having her daughters regard themselves with self-respect was extremely important to her.

In her most pensive moments, she talked about her desire to “leave a mark” or have some type of legacy that meant something to somebody.  Miriam’s legacy is my sister, me and all of her grandchildren and how we conduct our lives. None of us would be who we are without having had her for that first half, teaching, advising, writing to us. And each year on July 22^nd I am reminded how much a part of me she still is and will continue to be. I may not have her beautiful hands, but in quiet moments, I sometimes still have her voice in my head.