May 2006
From “Mother” to “Mommy”
By Bill Strubbe
Mother’s Day approaches and almost a year has passed since my mother died.
When I was a child, she was always “Mom” or “Mother” — never “Mommy.” Warm-and-fuzzy was not her style. She excelled as a super-mom: efficiently juggling the needs of five children, enrolling us in all the requisite music, art, and sports classes. She was a woman who returned to college in her 40s to earn a second degree and the person who, when my father became ill, helped support the family.
My mother had an inquiring mind and keen interest in the world. She packed sushi and sashimi in our school lunch boxes decades before the proliferation of sushi bars. One Halloween, she transformed herself (with muslin sheet, flesh-colored skull cap and wire-rim glasses) into Mahatma Gandhi, but she was not the kind of soul inclined to scoop us into a hug, or to read us a story while we nestled in her lap.
Like-mother-like-son, it seems. The fortes and foibles I acquired from her tempered our adult relationship. We shared a number of common interests but, while dutiful, I remained a somewhat aloof and distant son who was anxious to leave when our periodic visits concluded. While I loved her, liking her was a different matter. Perhaps because we were too much alike.
In the last few years at the nursing home, as her body and agile mind slowly sank into the quicksand of Alzheimer‘s dementia, she underwent a transformation. As the ego disintegrated and her defenses let down, she became more able to express and receive love: she became more childlike. She cooed with delight when we rubbed her back or brushed her hair. When a toffee cashew, spoon of ice cream, or chocolate morsel met her lips, her eyes would light up and she’d exclaim that it was “The most delicious, really the most delicious, thing I’ve ever tasted!”
And rarely would five minutes pass without her saying, “I love you.” Not only to us, but “I love you” to the staff, to other residents, to her psychiatrist, and even to the visiting Santa Claus — that is, after she’d first told him to “Shut up!” when he started “Ho-Ho-ing” rather loudly near her. (”Shut up!…. I love you.”)
It came as a bit of a shock and surprise to me and my siblings, to hear ourselves using such hitherto alien endearments such as “Honey,” “Sweetiepie,” “Mommy” and one of my own, almost too silly to admit — “Ms. Pickle Wickle.”
As grueling as that final year was, once I accepted that she was never returning to our version of reality (really, is this one all that great?) and that the only passage through was by entering into her world, I imperceptibly crossed some inner threshold. No longer did I feel it a chore to visit, but I looked forward to it, often twice a day. We confabulated intriguing word rhymes, spoke in jibberish, vocalized animals noises — the loud “baaing” of sheep making her laugh hysterically then exclaim: “Stop it. They’re going to think we’re crazy in here!” When she was frightened by the hideous inner voices that sometimes assailed her, I simply held her hand her until she fell to sleep while I sang her songs.
During the months of helping to feed her, lifting her from the bed to toilet, changing her clothes, encouraging her to walk, and mostly holding her by-now-very-familiar hand, all my long-held grievances — both imagined and real — slowly dissolved, disappeared. As my mother, she had done her best: she now had become my child, and there was nothing to forgive.
Several days before she died, she mouthed her last whisper of “I love you.” That parting gift will always be carried in my heart. When her labored breathing heralded the final hours, it was I (we always knew it would be me) who was blessed to be at her bedside. Sad, frightened, yet also relieved, I sang her our songs, repeated the prayers, cried a river, reminded her of the loved ones awaiting her, and spoke of the great Light — all the while holding her precious hand that still grasped mine with surprising tenacity.
As her spirit was liberated with her last breath and her color abruptly drained to alabaster, her hand became as light as a sparrow. When I finally let it go, it was as if two twin flames — her soul and mine — flew up and away into the light. At the end of the arduous journey, all that was left was love, pure love. We’d passed through the Refiner’s Fire, burned through our shared karma, and all that was left was the flicker of pure love, our true essence.
Of course, sometimes I wish that this healing transformation — this amazing Divine gift of grace — could have happened earlier in our lives when my mother might have more appreciated it and I could have carried memories of happier shared years. But, as is the nature of mysteries, this miracle unfolded with its own unique timing, and I remind myself that, in the ever-Eternal Now, nothing is ever too late. It only matters that love finally does come around and find itself.
My mother bestowed many gifts upon my family (and to me in particular) — the love of travel and diverse cultures, a fascination with the written word, an appreciation of art and architecture, and a predilection for quirky clothes. But the most important bequest — besides that of giving me birth — was that she helped birth me again, more deeply, into the life of the Spirit. For that I am ever grateful.
For never, even a few years ago, could I have imagined that I could have loved my mother so much — that I could miss her so much — that I could think of her and unabashedly say: “I love you, Mommy.”
Bill Strubbe is an Oakland-based freelance writer, photographer, world traveler, and dreamer of peace.
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