My Mother

On the sixth anniversary of my mother's death, I contemplate her life and my relationship to it. Unfortunately, while she was alive, I couldn't really appreciate her situation or her history. Mine was always a rocky relationship with her. Although she would go into paroxysms of laughter at one thing or another, I always thought of her as not having a sense of humor, certainly not one akin to mine. Irony and satire did nothing for her and she actually resented it when presented with them.

Beset by 7 rambunctious children that she had a hard time controlling, she retreated into a humorless insistence on order (very much like myself). We considered her old-fashioned and unwilling to bend with the times.

Of course, in retrospect, we have all become our parents and journeyed the continuum of growth they traveled before us. The generation gap wasn't invented or discovered in the 60's. It's as old as creation.

Until she died, it was difficult to see her as a person, growing from childhood into young adulthood, maturing into comfortable peaceful middle age and finally descending to the end of life with all its anxieties and fears.

After she died, I went through boxes of photographs which depicted her in many of the stages of her life and only then did I realize there was a real person there. An orphan child afraid of dogs and hating the goat she had to milk, living just along the poverty line with her mother and adored brother and retarded sister. Then later with the man she married, happy in the new security of marriage, but once again plunged into anxieties caused this time by persecution and a world war and then the tragedy of her brother's murder and the untimely death of her mother.

I see pictures of her, at a time when she was younger than all my children are now, finally in the new world though not worry free, happily holding a little baby (me) on a Hudson river boat outing or enjoying a summer afternoon sitting on the grass with myself and my older brother, a picture of youth and expectation. Things got well for her after she arrived here. My father did well and we lacked for nothing material. A summer home, vacations in Florida and out west, and then later a home in Israel. I don't think she was ever completely comfortable socially, always in my father's shadow, except for the time she spent in Israel.

I am still surprised when, on the occasion of the anniversary of her death, people approach me and tell me stories of how they were impressed by my mother, how she helped them and was kind to them and did things for them.

It has taken me almost seventy years to finally appreciate her.