Giving Thanks for Mom

We all die from something.  Some of us receive advanced notice, and others die in an unexpected instant.  My mother was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme (an aggressive cancerous brain tumor) in February of 2015.  Along with the business of living, she and I have been quietly pondering the business of dying, albeit each in our own way.  Mom has been positive and absolutely normal in the midst of radiation and chemotherapy.  True to her nursing profession, she has been unsentimental and compartmentalized in dealing with the cancer.  True to my musician and writer nature, I have been reflective, emotional and utterly non-compartmentalized.  Together we inch along the path, not knowing what tomorrow holds.

The mortality of a parent is a crisis for most adults.  The inevitable passing of time pushes each of us to the top of the family tree and we consider what we bring with us from the past and what we will pass to the younger generations.  If we’re smart, it also forces a degree of reconciliation with our own personal history.

Mom and I were each the first born of our generation, the oldest daughter of the oldest daughter, as was my mother’s mother.  All three of us are headstrong and feisty, quick to laugh and quick with the legendary Decker temper.  We each projected an aura of toughness while protecting a very tender underbelly that was sensitive to criticism and eager to be loved.  My grandmother likes to remind me that her generation paved the way for the many advantages my generation enjoys, and for that I am grateful.  She didn’t attend college.  My mother obtained a 4-year nursing degree.  I majored in international politics and Russian studies.  With each generation came new choices.

Part of the liberation of my mother’s generation was a growing economic independence and a greater proclivity for divorce, although my mother didn’t choose that reality.  It was thrust upon her when my father left.  I was 13 when my parents divorced, and my relational temperament was much more suited to my father’s.  I preferred intimate conversations and words of reassurance.  My mother loved through providing and meeting needs.  This did not warm my teenage soul.  I was furious at my father for leaving, but as in most marriages, both of my parents played a role in the broken marriage.  With amplified teenage gusto, I punished my poor mother with all the rage and pain I felt for being left behind with her as my primary caregiver.

Mom set about securing higher paying work, and she got the certification necessary to become a NICU nurse at Rapid City Regional Hospital.  Thank God for her brilliant mind.  She made more money than my father ever did as a newspaperman, and my mother became the chief payer of piano lessons, cheerleading uniforms, band instruments, athletic fees, teenage clothing, and all related teenage entertainment, at least until my brother and I started earning our own money. She did all this while trying to rebuild her shattered self-esteem.  As much as I hated her way of dealing with emotions, I resented her growing distance even more.  My mother was working, and she was dating, and my brother and I, while being the recipients of the fruit of her labor, were no longer the center of her universe.  She was pulled in multiple directions as she kept us housed, clothed and fed.  She dearly loved us, and it was clearly evidenced in her actions.  I just wasn’t able to see it at the time.

Part of the business of dying is taking stock in who we have been and the way we have treated our loved ones.  As the parent of teenagers, I look back now on my teenage fury toward my mother, and I feel real pain for all the heartache I surely caused her.  Because she didn’t love with words, she never sat me down and explained that she had not chosen to be a single parent, but that she loved me with her whole heart and was showing it by providing a stable home.  Well, she hollered at me a few times in response to some smart ass comment I made about me not choosing to live with her and how she never liked me that much anyway, so why did I have to be forced to live under her roof.  You know….really charming words like that.

I know for a fact that I inflicted true damage on her already wounded heart.  She would sometimes cry as she made dinner or paid bills or sat in her bedroom alone.  True to my arrogant and self-centered teenage nature, I felt justified in my rage, and although she certainly made mistakes as a mother, she didn’t deserve all the rage I directed at her.  My heart was troubled by many more things, including my missing father and my ability to choose mean boyfriends.  I also placed incredible stress on myself to be perfect.  There were Decker temper and teenage hormones thrown in the mix.  It was pretty much a perfect storm.  My mom said that if she hadn’t sent me to my room so often, I would surely have been dead by my 16^th birthday—dead by her hand.

But there was also love.  She attended almost every game in which I was a cheerleader, every play, every awards ceremony, every concert, and every piano recital.  She paid for the ridiculous amount of activities in which I participated, and she always made sure I had a brand new dress each Christmas and Easter.  My mom took us on the annual Christmas tree excursion, drove us to see the autumn leaves, and took us to the symphony and plays in town.  Of course, being a person of words and emotion, those acts of love were not fully appreciated by me.

Looking back through the eyes of an adult losing her mother, I realize that my mother very much loved me even though I could be an annoying teen only a mother could love.  In recent months she has told me that she was always proud of me.  This came as a shock, because as most daughters will relate, our mothers can be our most pointed critic as well as our most enthusiastic supporter.  I was so weighted toward her criticism that I was missing the many ways she supported and loved me wholeheartedly.  Not in my way, but in her way.

The embarrassment and sorrow I feel looking back at childhood photographs is that I missed out on many years of feeling adored because I was so frustrated at the ways my mom was never going to communicate love to me.  In return, I hope my mother knows how very much I love and appreciate her.  If she were to focus on the ways I tortured her as a teen, she might leave this earth feeling that I never fully loved her.  That would be a tragic mistake.

I am so sorry, Mom.  Time doesn’t allow us to go back and redo the years we have already lived.  I wish I had been more appreciative and less self-centered.  I wish I could have learned these lessons without cancer interrupting our life together.  Still, here we are, and we face the future certain of only one thing: we love each other and I am a better person having had you as my mother.