June 5, 2011 ~ Day 177 Mother and Daughter

Today I went for a walk with my mother along the cliffs where I grew up, holding her hand like a small child. My mother is now in her early 70s and I've managed to stuff 35 years under my own belt.

I'm not sure how it happened that I grew taller than the woman who once seemed to tower over me like some friendly goddess.

I cannot pinpoint a single moment in which she passed her torch to me and my siblings as the vital women and men in our "prime of life" and she began to lead us into a graceful golden age by example.

The whole aging process is as weird for me as it is for her. I don't know quite how or when it happened.

Yesterday as we left her house - the home where she raised me from infancy to adulthood - to go for our walk in the gorgeous June sunshine, Mom remarked, "I don't know how I ended up this vintage, I still feel so young."

"I guess the answer is, you kept putting one foot in front of the other," I laughed.

"That's right," she giggled.

Yet walking forward, I felt a lump growing in my throat. I had to turn my head so that she wouldn't see me getting emotional.

There are no words adequate to express just how much I love my mother, yet I believe that anyone who has a parent that they adore will understand exactly what I mean. I know that not everyone is lucky enough to have a strong bond with one or both of their parents, and in all honesty, I didn't have much of a bond with my Dad (at least not one that I recognized at the time) until he was already well into his years of decline.

Mom though has been an integral part of everything that makes me who I am. Every childhood birthday and slumber party, every high school date, every college exam, every job interview, every new apartment, everything.

She was physically present in the room with me - just she and my husband - holding my hand and praying through my agonizing screams, as I pushed my children out into the world in a mess of blood and other fluid. I don't even want to know the parts of me that they have each seen; just the IDEA of them watching that intense process sort of blows my mind. Yet there they were, weeping with me and beaming and holding those precious little newborn boys. (The girl came by c-section; I was alone; my father had died 22 hours prior. More on that later this week...)

I cannot imagine a world without my mother, one in which I am an orphan and there is no longer a single person on the planet who loves me unconditionally. I am so deeply thankful for my siblings, husband and children - for my wealth of amazing friends; I live such a blessed life but nothing - NOTHING - can replace my mother.

Yesterday as we walked together I couldn't help but notice the changes that time has wrought in that beloved lady. Just as I continue to think of myself as only slightly more than seventeen years old I have crystallized my mother in my own memory somewhere around the age of 47, when I was ten.

When I think of her I picture jet black hair flowing down her back, those high defined cheekbones, a sweetheart mouth and incredibly warm embrace - coupled with ice cold hands. I remember how calming her cold hands were to me as a small child, as she would place her palm upon my forehead to check for a fever or to smooth my tousled head. (I'd never heard of poor circulation back then...)

It has been really hard for me to accept that she won't be here forever. I don't honestly know how I'll cope.

Yesterday after we walked I sat in the front from of her beautiful house where I grew up, and I realized that the day will come when I can no longer enter through its front door as I please - a day will come when neither the door nor the house belong to our family. That is the strangest thing I can imagine; given that my own parents moved into the house just months before my birth. Going on 36 years now - the entirety of my existence - it has been the veritable seat of our family tribe.

What will it be like someday when I drive down along those cliffs and pass my "old" street, without being able to stop in? Will I knock on that thick wooden door years from now to the answer of strangers, asking if I can please show my children or grandchildren the interior of the home where I grew up?

It's hard to wrap my head around.

I said something in that vein to my mother yesterday, something like - "It will be weird when we don't have this house anymore," with all of the subtle implications that accompany such a statement.

My mother nodded and then said philosophically, "Well, it's just a house."

"I know what you mean - it's the people in the house that make it special," I agreed.

The uncomfortable, unacknowledged bit in my sentence stuck jaggedly in my throat. When my mother is no longer in the house, it will no longer be our home. My mother is what makes the house special, now that my father is gone. When she passes on, it will become merely a house.

I hugged her very hard when I left for the day. "See you soon!" I promised, and my words were more like a command or a demand or an entreaty to the Universe. (Please let me see my mother again soon!)

Late last night, I awakened in pitch black to the crying of a child. Our three children share the same bedroom so I peeked my head into their doorway to see who was restless or unhappy. As it turned out, our nearly two year old daughter was fussing - standing next to the bed of her nearly four year old brother. Actually she was crying her head off and trying to wake him up. Given that it was three in the morning, I decided to whisk her out of there before she roused the entire house.

Swiftly I entered their room, picked up my little girl, and brought her into our third bedroom so that both my husband and our sons could try to sleep. Holding her in the third room, I sang to her until I felt her tense little body shudder and then relax into mine - finally accepting sleep now that she was enfolded in the comforting scent of her mother.

"It's okay, baby girl," I soothed her in the darkness. "Did you have a bad dream? You're okay." Her warm little body tucked into its footsie pajamas snuggled against me and I inhaled the scent of her baby shampoo. We began to fall back to sleep.

Just then I realized something; remembered something that my mother told me years ago. "By the time I leave this Earth," she'd said, "You will be married with a family of your own. You may even have a daughter."

Yesterday in the dark night holding my tiny daughter and feeling powerfully connected to her, it struck me for the first time that perhaps someday she and I *will* share the same kind of profound love and friendship that I share with my own mother. Perhaps she and her brothers are the gifts that Life has generously shared to assuage my grief over the loss (past and future) of my own parents.

As if reading my mind at that moment, my daughter murmured "Mama"... just before she began to snore gently.

Perhaps many years from now my daughter and I will talk and walk along the seaside cliffs, and she will reach for my hand just as I have reached for the hand of my mother throughout all of these precious years. It is a comforting thought.

April 3, 2011 ~ Day 115 Happy Birthday, Venusian Girl

Something very important happened for me on this day in 1938... my mother was born in the city of Los Angeles to hardworking parents that loved her very much.

My mother's childhood was not easy though; her father contracted a water-borne parasitic disease from swimming in a local pool and died when she was only seven years old. In the coming decade, she experienced life as a "latch-key" kid in the late 1940s and early 1950s - taking care of herself as best she could while her own high school educated mother worked full time as a secretary to put their dinner on the table and pay rent.

When her mother remarried a man who had no children and wasn't especially fond of her, my mom decided it was time to head for the hills. The Hollywood Hills, that is! She moved into a home for working actors and with a dear friend and that friend's mother, she began to take acting classes and pursue a career in "the business".

My mother was sixteen years old when she moved out on her own. Sixteen! This means she has now been taking care of herself for 57 years.

I love hearing stories from my mother's "prior life" - the one she lived before she met my own father and moved to this city. The life she lived before having me. As a child I could never understand why she would have left the glamour of acting to settle down as a housewife and mother.

Now that I am a wife and mother though, my relationship with her life story has come full circle. I cannot believe that I am now the same age that my mother was when she first met my father (35) and that in less than two years, I will be the same age that she was when she gave birth to me. This kind of freaks me out because I was always the kid with 'old' parents compared with the rest of my friends. I wonder if my children already see me as old...

Once I hit 37 I will actually have my own memories to turn to when I want to know what various times were like in my parents' lives. It blows my mind to think that my mother must only have been about 46? years old when my elder sister got married... I remember that time in life so clearly (I was nine, her wedding was like something out of a fairy tale) and I definitely did *NOT* think of our parents as being "young" back then. Wow. I can't believe how young my mother actually was... or how 'seasoned' my husband and I are becoming!

There are many stories from my mother's younger years that have apparently been too racy to share with me. I've caught glimpses here and there from looking through her old black and white photo albums, sifting through her casting head shots, reading a few love letters saved from her first marriage.

I know, for example, that at the age of seventeen she headed out to Las Vegas to work in a nightclub as a showgirl. She stayed with relatives near town and spent a few weeks rehearsing for a big show, tanning by the pool by day. I'm not sure what kinds of activities filled her nights... but I do know that she said she figured out pretty quickly that most of the girls she worked with in the chorus line had come to Vegas with big dreams but had fallen into a more sordid world, becoming "gentlemen's escorts" by night.

Mom ran in a circle there that contained Sammy Davis Jr. and other members of the Rat Pack. She once told me, "I looked a lot older than my age, so I got a lot of attention. The only reason they ultimately left me alone was that I told them I was underage and had family in town. If they'd tried to "have their way" with me they could have gone to jail".

My mother apparently decided that she'd better get back to Los Angeles before she turned eighteen and Vegas turned on its 'brightest' lights for her; so return she did, and during the years between eighteen and twenty-four her acting career thrived. "I was always up for roles that would go to either Natalie Wood or Elizabeth Taylor" she told me, "because we had the same general look". She could speak 'broken English' in a wide variety of dialects, and got a lot of acting work as an "Indian maiden", "Russian gypsy", "Mexican girl", etc.

In her most unusual role, my mother played a "Venusian Girl" in Zsa Zsa Gabor's critically panned cult classic "The Queen of Outer Space". The movie synopsis cracks me up - "Three American astronauts are on the first manned mission to Venus, and when they arrive, they find the planet to be inhabited solely by women with high heels and short dresses. Unfortunately, they are immediately imprisoned, for the queen who rules Venus hates men... Suspecting the astronauts to be spies, she now plans to destroy the Earth. So now it's up to the three men (and some friendly Venusians) to overthrow the wicked queen and save the Earth."

I have never seen this movie but I get a big kick out of thinking of my mother as a "friendly" Venusian bad-ass. In fact, I just found the trailer for the movie and I can't stop laughing. Wow mom! "Let me kill her now..." she says with a massive weapon in her hand pointed right at Zsa Zsa. You go girl.

Other tales from my mother's early years are not as amusing. A difficult first marriage filled with love (hers) and wretched alcoholism (his). Getting passed over for key roles because she wouldn't accept them 'on the casting couch'. The strain of waiting tables at night to put food on the table for her kids, while still trying to make auditions by day. In the world where beautiful actresses were a dime a dozen, my mother scraped and saved to do right by her children and prayed for the big break that would lift them from poverty into safety and comfort.

My favorite story from this time period is the story of the broken water jugs.

My mother was newly divorced, living in a small apartment with her two children and two dogs. She rarely had time for dates but had gone out for the evening with the friend of her neighbor who said he was a nice guy. A tall, gangly music professor from the Midwest, the man had two sons of his own; she'd never met them. He spoke with a twang, wore thick black glasses and combed his hair over the top of a rapidly increasing bald spot.

Despite all of this, the man was truly kind and very smart, athletic and (blessedly!) stable. Unlike her ex, he didn't drink. The man was passionate about music, something that she as an artist could relate to pretty well. He too had been through a difficult first (and second) marriage. Perhaps more importantly, he looked at her like he was a cat and she was the cream.

On one of their first dates, he brought her back to her apartment and she asked him for a favor. "Could you please lift that water jug for me onto the stand?" It wasn't a test of strength or even courtesy - she really needed the help. The five gallon jug in question was made of glass, very heavy and unwieldy.

"Certainly," he replied and strode over in his manliest way to heft the jug with ease. Except, right at the stand he fumbled. The jug dropped. It shattered into a thousand small pieces with a sea of glass and water covering the entire kitchen from wall to wall.

"I wanted to sink into the floor," he would later tell the story. "Here's this poor woman with a house full of barefooted kids and dogs and a kitchen full of glass. I didn't think she would ever want to see me again."

Instead, my mother laughed graciously and began to clean up the mess as though nothing much had happened. "No sense crying over spilled milk," she said, and began to talk of something else as she put the room back into order.

"That's when I knew," he would tell us. "That's when I knew that your mother was the one for me. Any woman who could manage such a terrible situation with such a great attitude was someone to hold onto. I asked her to marry me just as fast as I could."

Thirty-six years later I have to thank my father with all my heart for recognizing the quality in my mother that I most prize in her myself... her incredible grace under pressure and calm in any crisis. Perhaps due to a long life full of hard knocks, my mother views any situation - EVERY situation - as a potential gift from God and a miracle waiting to happen. She has so much faith and perseverance.

On this day of my mother's 73rd birthday I am so full of gratitude to have had a mother such as she. An incredible artist with amazing visual and kinesthetic abilities, she can do just about anything she puts her mind to. My mother is as graceful as I am awkward; generous to a fault, humble without allowing herself to be humbled by life.

She is so bright ~ self-taught in almost every way ~ an "A" student who never got to go to college but who dove headfirst into life and figured things out for herself, step by step. She is also a deeply spiritual person with true, profound faith that I both admire and envy. While I desperately seek evidence of God in the world, my mother *knows* God in the core of her being. Her own inner faith is so ardent, I believe that the mere strength of her belief is powerful and world-changing.

This particular birthday also marks a crucial rite of passage for my mom. Her own mother passed away at the age of 73 after a protracted and gruesome bout with ALS, Lou Gerhig's disease. My mother is now the same age that her mother was when she died, yet she is still sharp as a tack and in full possession of her physical skills. She plans to usher in the new year with an upcoming trip to Spain where she and a friend will enjoy the magnificence of Barcelona for the very first time. Not only has mom not given into the "Golden Years" ~ that exciting girl is just getting going!

My mother has always been the largest and most important influence upon me. I suspect that even when she is no longer with us, this will remain true. With every passing day she teaches me by example to grow older with grace and joy.

She inspires me to be a more positive and hopeful person, to take life's many hard knocks a little more circumspectly. I have watched her bounce back from incredible loss and suffering, turning the page on events that would topple others. To me, her life reads like one hell of a success story.

In short, my mother is my hero.

They say that to the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world. Mom, you are the world to me. Happy Birthday.