When I was maybe ten years old I celebrated a Mother’s day the only way I could: by running away. It was a pretty harmless escape; I walked a little over a mile down the road towards a convenience store I loved to go to. I wanted some candy. I was gone for maybe two hours.
I had other motivations as well. On this Mother’s day, my mother asked for her children to do a long list of chores for her. This is enough to upset a preteen. Is it enough to make them run away? Probably not. I was behaving dramatically. At the time, I remember being upset with her for numerous reasons. Nearly every weekend, we would do a list of chores inside and outside of our house anyway. There was nothing unique about this Mother’s day gift.
These chores would end up occupying most of our weekends. The lists were long. This particular weekend, for Mother’s day, the list was impossibly long. Between “ten and fifteen tasks” long. We were expected to weed the driveway, weed the patio, wash the windows, dust the furniture, rake the yard, mow the yard, pick up the trash near the road, vacuum, clean up the garage. There were more tasks too: Wash the walls, clean the bathroom, clean up the dog shit on the patio.
I remember reading one task that sent me over the edge. If you were facing our house from the road, to the left was Laurie Lane. Going the length of our property along Laurie Lane was a series of shrubs that were between seven and ten feet high and the selfsame width. Some days I would go crawl underneath the canopy of shrubs, in the dirt, and hide away from the world. The expectation was that we were to go underneath these shrubs and weed out every plant that was not a shrub.
The image of my mother looking out the dining room window as her children labored in the yard for her Mother’s day present seemed like an abysmal and cruel joke. This was always her move. At the time, it struck me as having this Authoritarian vibe to it; like Mussolini watching the trains arrive on time. I would lock eyes with her and yell from the yard, “Stop watching us!” and suddenly she would cackle like a movie villain before disappearing behind the lace curtains. Several minutes later, she would appear once more to survey.
I remember thinking about Mother’s day in a much more sentimental way that day. I wanted to get my mother something. I wanted to do something that I thought would show my appreciation for her. I didn’t want her to dictate how I would show my love for her. This is why I went on strike. This is why I ran away. I ran away because I loved her.
Twenty years later, I find myself running back to these memories because they are all I have left. Becoming an adult and learning more about my mother, I have come to understand her eccentricities and lack of traditional affection. Losing her own mother at the age of six, she had to grow up very quickly. Her and her brothers were raised by her Irish immigrant grandparents until they, too, passed away.
These details were always incredibly painful for her to recount. She never wanted to speak about her past. When I was a teenager, I grew despondent and distanced myself. What I noticed about my mother during those years was that she was always unhappy. She would herself grow despondent for long periods of time. She would then explode in a rage, yelling about how much she “hated this house.” It was never the people inside of the house but “the house,” which I found to have poetic significance because of her obsession with how well the house and our family presented itself to the rest of the world.
I denied her notions of what mattered and her philosophy without even coming close to knowing why she may behave in the ways she did. Because the chasm between mother and son was so vast, to approach her character flaws as if she were another person was an impossibility. She was understood by me to be the authoritarian figure she presented herself as and I was the rebel insurgence.
This, in turn, meant that my mother grew to think that I hated her. She had a lot of evidence to prove this, including that one time I ran away on Mother’s day. I also showed resentment constantly. I was sullen in my responses to her. I kept to my room. And in our many screaming matches, I would yell “I hate you!” But I didn’t hate her. I hated that she never offered me a chance to get to know who she really was.
Several years into my twenties, our fights took on a different timbre. She would be the one yelling “I hate you!” at me for my insistence that she seek help. Whether I would implore her to call Gambler’s Anonymous or to see a therapist, my abrasive and inquisitive twenties were marred with hostile fights where she would sit on her couch with tears streaming down her face yelling “Why? Oh God, why?”
I wouldn’t leave her side though. Each little crack in her armor revealed more of her humanity. If it wasn’t for my persistence and the pain that I would make her relive, there would be so much still unknown about her. My mother, dating back to her earliest memories, lived with an immense burden of loss and trauma that never left her and rarely ever found an outlet. I would hold her accountable for her gambling addiction when she’d yell “I have a sickness!” I’d respond, “well, do something about it.” Yet, even in those moments I grew to understand that it came from some misguided need to provide what she was never given: stability.
At the end of my Master’s degree in 2016, my mother, who was now unable to leave home without oxygen due to COPD and a partially collapsed lung, wanted to attend the English Department’s award ceremony. Having never received a Bachelor’s degree, she was elated to see her son go on to receive a Master’s degree. So elated, in fact, that she went against what I once believed to be her defining characteristic: her vanity.
As I waited for the event to begin, I received a phone call from my brother who was asking me where he should park the car. Our campus was large so that it meant the two of them would have a long way to travel in order to get to where the event was taking place. The thought never occurred to us how she was going to make it that far so I started asking around the English Department for information on where to track down a wheelchair. After consulting with several offices on campus, I had no such luck. So, I improvised.
I brought an office chair with wheels down to the parking lot and put my mother on it. As we wheeled her around campus, going up two elevators and down hallways that connected the campus buildings, my mother could do nothing but laugh and smile as she kicked her legs out in front of her. She was as happy as I had ever seen her. I watched as she effortlessly cast aside how ridiculous she looked as she prepared to celebrate her son’s accomplishments.
Two years later I would say goodbye to her at the Carney Hospital in Dorchester, a hospital she worked at for 25 years. Much like this Mother’s day in 2019, the day she passed away had an Irish kind of rain, like Irish tears that regret all the secrets that she had left unshared.
For those of you that have followed my posts over the years, a connecting thread to my personal blogs could be discerned as dignity; dignity in the later years for those who become discarded by the utilitarian urges of society. Last month, I held an estate sale with my father who, since my mother’s death has had to deal with a looming eviction from the home he spent 13 years in. I speak of dignity in simple terms. How do you wish to be treated as you near your life’s finish line? According to Hearth, there are “1,200 homeless adults over the age of 50.” My father was nearly one of them and his fight is still not over. According to HUD Homelessness Data Exchange, nationally there will be a “33%” increase in “elder homelessness […] between 2010 and 2020. It is estimated that it will more than double by 2050.”
I want to write more on this topic as it connects to Boston housing for my next blog post but I hope in the meantime you consider making a small donation to Hearth, an organization working to assist some of Boston’s most vulnerable citizens: http://www.hearth-home.org/donate
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