Today, if she were still alive, my mother would turn 80-years old.
But she is dead. She died at 56-years of age. To arrive at 80-years of age would have been quite the milestone for my mother, if she were alive. It was so for my father.
Additionally, my older daughter Julia turns 14-years old tomorrow. That is another milestone. High school. The dark drama of deepest adolescence lies straight ahead. The outlines of her adult personality will come into view. Exciting!
My mother used to say she found her children much more interesting the older they got. She did not enjoy dirty diapers, spit up, and toddler tantrums. She did enjoy complicated conversations with her older children about controversial issues, athletic achievement, and youthful heartbreak. I tend to side with my mom on this. Those early years of caring for infants were heavy lifting, although my daughters were damn cute babies. I was so in love with them after they entered my life! Or I was as in love as I was terrified at being responsible for them. Human babies and toddlers have next to no common sense when it comes to surviving danger. You have to watch them almost all the time. My wife and I did that. For years and years.
Now my daughters are almost in middle and high school. There will be pros and cons versus earlier eras of maturity, but I am glad as a parent to never have anything to do with elementary schools again. I appreciate the fact that elementary school teachers — every single one a woman in my family’s experience — can be trusted to use good sense and loving compassion when dealing with a crying 8-year old. I was not always so impressed with their teaching or in the depth of lesson plans. A good chunk of elementary school seemed to me babysitting and socialization. I reckon elementary school teachers are generalists and not specifists, and so a deep content matter knowledge is less important. But still.
Regardless, our family moves away from elementary to bigger and better things in secondary school.
My younger daughter moves to sixth grade and middle school. If elementary school is a shaky educational vessel, middle school is if anything worse. My older daughter is currently finishing eighth grade and cannot wait to get out of the misery which middle school mostly was for her, and I am nervous for my younger daughter to start. “Make good friends, hold them close, and keep your wits about you!” I advise her. It is as if she is in the army going off to war. Next to nobody is sad to leave junior high — a period of life which rarely ranks as a person’s most graceful.
Wish us luck!
When my daughters are both in high school, I will breathe a sigh of relief. I can watch out for them, and my school is a “magnet” school. Quality control is such a concern in so many public schools, and I have seen this first hand as a parent through elementary and middle school. Not all teachers are of the same quality — not by a longshot. Same for schools. But I benefit as a parent for also being a teacher and knowing the lay of the land, so to speak.
I will get my daughters through the hellscape of middle school, and then guide them through the crucial high school years. Try to prepare them for college and adult life. My wife and I have been putting money away money every month in college savings account since the girls were born. We will not be that parent who has little or no money to contribute to their child’s higher education. But will we have enough? My daughters will be ready academically. We have seen to that. It will come sooner than we think.
What would my mom think about all this? On her 80th birthday, what would my mother think about her grandchildren and their development? What sort of grandmother would she be?
She has been gone for so long I find it hard to say.
My mother always had in front of her a full array of passionate intellectual and spiritual pursuits. Nobody would ever accuse her of being a negligent mom, but she had a life apart from being only a mother or a wife; she never lost her separate adult self in her vocation as a mom and wife. I would never have seen her as the doting grandma who served almost as a second mother to her grandchildren. She would have delighted in her grandkids and enjoyed them. I think. But she would not have spent too much time taking care of them. More to the point, she would have served as a steady anchor for our family in the storms of life; my mom always was the person who could be trusted to listen actively in a crisis and to give support unconditionally. This is where my mom stood out. The troubled and lost had a way of arriving at my mother’s doorstep. Without judgement she would listen to their stories. Maybe it was because she was so calm and grounded herself that the untethered and unhappy were often drawn to her?
But my mother never got to be a grandmother. Cigarettes and lung cancer. She died back in 1996 when I was still in my twenties. Much has taken place since. My father got remarried and eventually my stepmom also died. Cancer again.
My mother died so long ago that much has faded. I search my memory this evening and strain to appreciate what kind of grandmother she would be tonight on the 80th anniversary of her birth. Can I see her holding my nephew, Patrick? My daughter, Julia? My niece, Maggie, who was named after her. I can see the picture, but it is fuzzy.
I have to admit I am not really sure how my mother would have been as a grandmother. It is highly theoretical.
I can remember my mother vividly from my childhood and college years. I remember her sickness and death clearly. I won’t ever forget, yet it grows fuzzy with the years. And what she would have made out of the 25 years of life since she died is unknown. At best, it is conjecture.
It is one of the problems of death: it freezes a relationship in time. You continue to age and grow older, but the beloved who died does not. You have memories, but that is all you have. There are no new connections. The relationship does not evolve or grow, even as you do. I think back upon the past and continue to talk with the dead in my head. In fact, I do it often. But they are not talking back. Or if my mom is talking to me, I am having trouble hearing her. It is one-way traffic, for all I can tell.
Perchance I am tone deaf? She speaks to me, but I don’t hear?
I don’t know.
Sometimes when alone in my car, I try to reach out and touch my mother. I lift my arm and my hand goes forward to touch… nothing but air. Is my mom there? Cognizant somewhere of my efforts to reach her? Eavesdropping on my thoughts about her? A sentient spirit in some other dimension unseeable by me?
I have no idea.
But I do realize my mother’s importance to me and my life, and that does not fade with time. In a very real sense I appreciate that much of what I might bring to my daughters as a steady and supportive father with good judgement is due to what my mother gave to me as a child. A therapist recently listened to me introduce myself and replied: “A loving family with mom and dad present. A happy childhood. A solid education. A secure job. Friends. You seem like a person who has it mostly together.” And I do.
Much of it is due to my mother (and father). That is why it was so hard for me to watch my previously healthy mom deteriorate into a tumor-ridden, skeletal-figure wearing a diaper. I would sit there and bawl my eyes out in front of her. She was already out of it by that point, but it was as if at a molecular level I was feeling her physical presence in all the hugs and kisses I’d received as a baby and little boy. You take your parents for granted when you’re young, not knowing anything else. But for me it all came up when I saw my mother’s mortality — when I could see her withering away in front of me. As a 29-year old man at the time I knew I could support myself and carry on without my mother. But the child in me saw my mom dying and could not stop crying. It was the end of the world.
My mother and I had our differences. Intellectually I was a more kindred spirit to my father. I never knew quite what to make of my mother’s idiosyncratic new age spirituality. But it was important to her so I mostly held my tongue. In those moments when I did not we sparked. But there is some intense opposite sex juju going on between fathers and their daughters and mothers and their sons, and I was lucky to have a healthy, attentive, loving mom. I see this more clearly now as a parent myself. Little boys whose mothers abuse them — or boys who grow up with mothers who are prostitutes or whatnot — I despair for the men they will grow up to be. They are enraged at the whole female sex for what their mothers did to them. There will be hell to pay! Wasn’t the mother of Jack the Ripper a prostitute? A somewhat similar dynamic is true with girls whose fathers abandoned them — they grow up needy, and they go looking for a father’s love in all the wrong places. They get victimized by Jack the Ripper.
I am so thankful for my mother. And for my father, too. For the solid foundation which were my earliest days. As a baby I was so totally at the mercy of my parents, especially my mother. My father was starting his career as an attorney at that time and was preoccupied with work, although he was a committed and loving father, too. But my mom stayed home with us all day everyday. She was my primary caregiver.
I know my mother was totally overwhelmed with being a new mother in 1967. I was the first, but my brother came only 15 months later and then my sister three years after that. By 1974 she was a stay at home mother with three young children under her care. It could not have been easy. Our young family lived at that time in the frigid snow of Wisconsin with its long dark winters, and my parents had no extended family around to help out or give support. It was my parents together against the world. More specifically, It was my mother at home with a new baby and two little boys, feeling isolated, overburdened, and probably more than a little bored. Feeding and nap time and diapers and tantrums day after day. My father told me she was starved for more adult contact.
Married with young children.
I only came to understand how hard a grind this can be when I became a parent myself in somewhat similar circumstances. My mother later told my father that she regretted occasionally screaming at me in frustration during those early years. She supposedly felt guilty about it. But I can’t remember her yelling at me. Not at all.
Thank you, mom. I try to pay you back in being a good father to my children, your grandchildren. They are neat kids. Katie’s kids, too. You would have enjoyed meeting them. Take a look at the below photo:
The grandchildren.
There they are, your grandchildren — maybe one day you will meet them.
Happy birthday, mom!
80-years old today. If you had lived.
But they say that nobody is quite dead as long as her name is still spoken.
If that is the case, you are far from dead.
You are loved, Margaret Mary Geib. You are remembered.
You are appreciated.
Thank you.
My mother with me shortly before her death.
