Here's to Thinking about You, Mom ...

We human-folk of whatever Quarter of Life are prone to think that what we are thinking at this very moment is the salient issue to be understood by each and every denizen of the Cosmos. Perhaps the alien is best understood as all those Others that we encounter or can imagine who may not be in on that truth.

King Kong just didn't get it ... people were busy leading their quotidian lives and he needed to climb the Empire State Building and make a big fuss. Godzilla was really no better.

Space aliens don't get it, either. While they're reigning terror from above with their Laser Ray Guns, we're trying to sit down at the table and eat leftover Kapusta from yesterday's just delightful dinner. 

And why the Hell can't the person who cut me off this morning on the Expressway, nevermind the enemy, why can't they know just how important it is for me to get to wherever I'm going, even if I'm Playing in the Last Quarter and not certain what that destination is.

Today, is Mother's Day in the United States. What a curious self propagating race those Mother's are. I know, I know. Fathers have something to do with propagation of the species ... but lemme tell ya ... Kids seem to know. Babies grow in their Mommies bellies and that story about Dad leaving a seed there has gotta be a fairy tale. 

I came out of my Mom's belly, just like everybody, maybe, but Dolly the Cloned Sheep. Baaaah! In fact Bah Humbug on the thought that the 12 pound or 12 pound 8 ounce baby (there's seems to be conflicting info on my exact weight at birth) that came out of my Mother's Belly started as a randomly chosen cell.

So, to my Mom who arrived on these shores from Hungary in 1921leaving most of her family behind to be ravaged by the World War that was brewing in Europe even in those just-post-WW-I days, I have a day to remember you and the other Mothers of my life ... including M and our Daughter and Daughters-in-Law and all those Women and those Men who have Mothered me. Mothered me? Well, yes.

This morning, waking up into a new day, I puzzled ... Mothers? What are they. I didn't have the disappointing experience that many visitors to my office make plain by referring to "Mother as but half a word" or just more plainly as "that fucking bitch." Hans Loewald who must've had a Mother, himself, said that some of our human dilemmas arise from our memories and how they house conflicting (consubstantial, was the word he used ... sharing the same body) images of our Mothers. One image comes from a very early sense that we are Mom's one and only ... inseparable from her ... maybe even part of the same system. Mom didn't mind our dirty diapers and didn't seem to object to all the stumbles and falls that finally got us on our way. My Mom found humor when I hid the hamsters in the pot drawer under the oven ... just for her to find scampering into her kitchen. Mom didn't mind in 1954 when I gave her the phone, indicating that Daddy was calling and leading her to greet my school principal as "hello, Darling." She didn't even seem to object when one night when I was 7, just as she was coming into the bedtime room, I slid down under the covers, getting her to mistakenly kiss TrampDog good-night. I don't know what Mom thought in her last years as she slipped away into mindlessness, but even then she would smile when M and I or my Brother and I would sing songs of her childhood to her in the odd residence in which she spent those final years.

But then there's the other side. We approach even the best of meals hungry and that repast is not infrequently judged harshly if the entree is not just so or if the dessert is made from frozen strawberries. Maybe the most difficult lesson in life is recognizing that Moms -- and Dads, too -- are people in their own right. My Mom wanted to be an artist and, even if she never made a living from that work, she was. I don't know if she wanted 2 kids before the war, one during and one after, but she did seem to care for her family. Would she have been happier if she listened more keenly when her older Sister took her to see Margaret Sanger talk about birth control ... maybe? Part of her was lost in the mourning for her cousins and aunts and uncles who perished in the Auschwitzes of Europe ... mostly, in Auschwitz, itself. Part of her was special for her shared ability to feel those sad feelings for her lost family and to appreciate the wistful tone of the melodies of her European childhood.

It was just a few weeks ago that in the midst of a project I was writing about healthful relationships that I wrote:

To care for another – aye, to love that person maturely – requires 

that they be allowed in one’s mind to be complex subjects in their own right … 

with their own relationships and beliefs that may be independent of ours’. In this sense, it is recognition of others’ inner different worlds that permits love.

Maybe when I was writing I was thinking of my Mother and all the generations of Mothers who figure out how to juggle their own need to be subjects with their own desires while carving out spaces for their kids to eventually do the same.

Here's to you, Mom. You did real good!