Mom’s 90th Birthday Remembrance

My mom would have been 90 years old today. When my dad turned 90, we threw a big party. But my mom died in 2007, so instead, I’ll honor her my own way, with photos and words. 

I find it hard to imagine my mom at 90, both because she was so frail her last few years and because so much has changed in the last 15 years. New great-grandchildren have come along, her own kids have mostly moved out of California, into new jobs and some into retirement, and the world itself is different. Selfishly, I would have wanted her to see my little trailer and read about my adventures from the comfort of her worn blue recliner, safe in her bedroom. I know she’d be supporting the choices I made to get here, as she always did when she was alive. 

She made her choices too, some out of fear, some out of love, and built the best life she could from those choices. After a year at UCLA, she dropped out in 1950 to get married, stay home, and have kids, a common enough choice at that time. 

I don’t think she could imagine herself going against that standard, being a career woman, a single woman out there in the world. She’d rented a room that year from an unmarried librarian with cats (such the stereotype) and so she had seen that life up close and somehow couldn’t imagine herself following that path. So the wedding, the honeymoon, and then the kids, all in short order. By the time she was 25, she had four of us. (I’m grateful for one of her choices, to convert to Catholicism after the birth of her first child because it meant they wouldn’t stop at two kids, and I was number three in the final lineup.)

My mom wasn’t perfect, or even close to the ideal mother when I was growing up. She was a functional alcoholic from as early as I can remember until a few years after I left home for my third year of college, the bottle of vodka hidden away in one cupboard or another in the kitchen, where I guess she thought we wouldn’t see it. But we did. I did. I knew, but we didn’t talk about it, ever.

When she was 48, she chose sobriety, for reasons I still don’t know, perhaps too personal for her to ever reveal to anyone other than her AA sponsor. She held on to that sobriety for 27 years, until the day she died, and she was justifiably proud of that accomplishment. At some point in her later years, when we were talking about me being her healthcare power of attorney, she asked me to put “Friend of Bill W” in her obituary when she died (which I did). 

I learned a lot from my mom: what I wanted, what I didn’t want, and how to change my choices if I wanted to. She went back to school after we were mostly grown, earning three degrees (AA, BA, and MLS) to become the librarian she’d wanted to be since she was a child. 

She and my dad raised two grandchildren, long after they’d thought they’d be out of the child-rearing game and heading towards a relaxing retirement. Instead, they chose two boys, 7 and 9 years old, signing themselves up for all the angst of middle school dances, high school rebellions, and family dramas. But, eventually, as the original four did, those two kids grew up into pretty cool adults. 

In thinking about her life since she died, I’ve come to understand more about my mom, from her fears and flaws to her determination and courage. She asked me to pull the plug on her if it ever came to that (which I did); she knew what that would cost me because she had done it for a close friend many years before.

Despite some rocky years in their marriage, my parents lasted 57 years, her whole adult life. She wouldn’t let us throw them a 50th anniversary party until about 3 months before the date, and then relented, admitting it was indeed pretty damn amazing to hold a relationship together for that long. 

I look at photos of her now, Brownie troop leader, proud mom in the living room family portraits where dad wasn’t in the photo because he was holding the camera, her showing off her shiny new MLS degree, the two of them celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary not long after my dad’s life-changing stroke. All I see now is love, from day one till the end.

Happy birthday, Mom, and thanks, for everything. 

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That’s how you know you love someone, I guess when you can’t experience anything without wishing the other person were there to see it, too.

Kaui Hart Hemmings (The Descendants)