A few words in honor of Mother's Day

Terry was funny, glamorous, creative and volatile. She was born in January 1930, just a few months after the stock market crash of 1929 signaled the beginning of The Great Depression. She was my grandparents' first, and, as hard as it is to admit, initially a great disappointment to my grandfather, who desperately wanted a boy. I can only imagine how terrifying it must have been to have a newborn during those uncertain years.

She grew up in Michigan, and later on the Upper West Side of New York, an area immortalized by Woody Allen and now nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the country, dominated as it is by Starbucks, Gap, Victoria's Secret and families pushing $800 strollers. Back then it was a middle-class, mostly Jewish neighborhood, where she led a fairly sheltered life. The family lived right across the street from the Riverside Memorial Chapel, a funeral home, and when guests dropped by the apartment unexpectedly, my grandmother would open the door with a resigned "Who died?"

My mom married early, and, when that marriage ended in divorce (a "shanda," or terrible shame in Yiddish), she met and married my father, handsome, funny and fresh from his own divorce. They were both approaching advanced old age for newlyweds: he was 30, she was 29. She was thrilled and terrified when I was born. My father tells me that, just a few days after they brought me home from the hospital, she called him in tears, demanding that he come home immediately to help her bathe me, or he would be father to "the dirtiest child in all of New York."

My mom was a brilliant pianist. She could hear a song once and play it perfectly, and when we had musicians in the house (a fairly common occurrence in my childhood), I could always tell the tone of her playing from anyone else's. She loved Cole Porter and Harold Arlen, but her heart belonged to Gershwin. In her late 30s she began composing songs, and even had some successes. (One song, in a completely bizarre twist of fate, was sampled by Diddy on his 1997 song "It's All About the Benjamins").

My parents separated when I was 16, and painfully divorced over the next several years. It was a dark time, and her sharp sense of humor gave way to depression. She would often get together with her other women friends, and they would drink, and talk, and smoke, and listen to music, and complain about men, long into the night. Over the next few years she managed to put her life back together: she sold our family home, bought a condo and started a new career--her first since college. She began dating, and though Sundays were always melancholy for her--family days--things were looking up.

And then she got sick, and when I was 29, after a long and painful battle, we lost her.

My mother was not a Hallmark card mother. She didn't really play with us, preferring to send my sister and me to fend for ourselves. Her sense of boundaries and discipline was haphazard. She was more inclined to treat us like adults than kids, which was confusing when we were small and lots of fun as we got older. Though she was a great cook when she felt like it, she tended to exhaust herself on the occasional elaborate meal and then shout "find something in the freezer" from the bathtub for the rest of the week. When I was a teenager and my friends came over, she'd sit cross-legged on the floor with us and talk for hours--mortifying to me, but earning her the reputation in the neighborhood as the coolest mom ever. She had style, and wit, and talent, and she loved us fiercely.

My mom never met Jesse, never saw me married, never saw Isaac. I don't know if she had ever even heard of autism, and I have no idea what she'd think of my life today. But, now that I'm a mother, I find myself appreciating more and more the multiple, fragile elements that make up my memories of her: generous, mercurial, sometime bitter, always loyal to her family, always looking for love.

Happy Mother's Day, mom.

Comments

[Beata]

You made me cry....this one is so beautiful.My mom never met my husband either, she probably never thought I will be living thousand miles from my country.I find myself missing her so often and understand her more and more every day...

[Beata]

Happy Mother`s Day , Susan

[kristen]

Happy Mother's Day, Susan. Enjoy your day!