There are times when I sit down to conjure up something for this space that I know exactly the audience I hope to target. There are other days when I write just for me – and today is one of those days – and I simply invite you along for the ride.
My mom, Geraldine, passed away 16 years ago and I want to preface what I write by saying she was a good woman, a good Christian woman. She was also a good mother, grandmother and a good and faithful wife. Prior to her death she had been in a nursing home for a couple years, suffering from dementia and perhaps early Alzheimers. She was 79 years old, two months short of her 80th birthday when her body just finally wore out. And there is no doubt in my mind that she passed out of this life to a better one.
She passed away on Valentine’s day shortly after 5 a.m on a dreary, February Monday morning. As anybody who has been through the loss of a loved one knows, the date of death become seared in your mind. It can be a Tuesday in mid-August with no relevance to anything and then suddenly that date becomes a part of you and you carry it with you forever.
That morning when my mother passed and I realized it was February 14 – Valentine’s Day — it was an odd feeling for me. On one hand a day set aside to express love and share with a significant person in your life and on the other hand it was now a day that will forever be associated with sadness and loss. Again, it was just a very odd feeling when that finally registered with me and it’s a feeling I’ve experienced every February 14 since.
And on the day set aside for Cupid, candy and flowers I also deal with the fact that my mom and I did not have a great relationship. While we were never estranged and we were always in contact through the years we were often at odds with one another. Think oil and water, gasoline and an open match or Geraldine and Jim, sometimes we just didn’t mix well.
Geraldine Muir
You see, I came along at a time when my mom thought she was through having children – I have three older siblings. Couple in the fact that she had two miscarriages during those three pregnancies means she was pregnant five times before me.
Throughout my life I heard her tell the story – a hundred times, a thousand times, maybe a million times — about the day she went to Dr. Turner, in Christopher, and he confirmed what she suspected – that she was expecting her fourth child.
“Well, Geraldine you’re pregnant again,” Dr. Turner said. “What do you want this time?”
And as the story was told, she sat in his office and cried and then replied: “At this point in time I don’t care.”
And then the exclamation point to the story that she often told is that she went home, went to bed and cried for a week. While that might seem like a tough story, I realize what she was thinking. She was 35 years old, had two daughters ages 12 and 7 and a son 3 years old. I get it, I understand what it’s like to think you have your life moving in the right direction and then find out you don’t.
And to add insult to her injury she was ‘blessed’ to have a son (that’s me) who was somewhat of a handful. I weighed 10 lbs 10 ounces when I was born and it was not an easy birth and from the time I learned to put one foot in front of the other I was rambunctious at best. I’m certain that having a child who was always into something (and most of the time it was trouble) only confirmed her original thinking that she didn’t want or need any more kids.
If I had a dollar for every time she likened me to a ‘bull in a China shop’ or used the phrase ‘mess and glomm’ — ‘that’s all you do is mess and glomm’ — I’d be independently wealthy right now. I never bothered to ask what the word ‘glomm’ meant, but I was nearly certain it was nothing good.
As the years went by I’m certain that it also didn’t set well with her that she and I were very much alike in certain ways. For instance, she was very opinionated and loved to get the last word in … and of course those who know me recognize that I’m guilty of the same character flaws. Based on that, it’s easy to see how the fire could fly occasionally between us.
Through the many ‘discussions’ we had I learned from a young age that there was always one button I could push that would get the same result. And I should note that I pushed it regularly. In the middle of a disagreement I would dispense with calling her ‘Mom’ and would begin a sentence like this; ‘Listen … Geraldine’ … and I would drag the word ‘Geraldine’ out to about four syllables. Of course I knew the second I said that she was going to grab the first thing she could find and hit me with it. She definitely was not one of those ‘wait-until-your-dad-gets-home-type of moms.’
And I certainly get my love for politics from my mom, although we often didn’t see eye-to-eye on that subject either. She is the first person I ever heard use the phrase ‘yellow-dog Democrat’ and she was referring to herself. Of course that phrase means that she would vote for a yellow dog before she’d vote for a Republican. As I got older and my views became more conservative we traded verbal jabs quite often. During the past decade I’ve often thought that I would love to talk to her and debate the current state of affairs in both Washington D.C and Springfield. That … would be interesting and entertaining. Despite our disagreements, I miss her and I think about talking to her often.
As a columnist I think one of my strong suits is that I have the God-given ability to take virtually any topic and in about 750-800 words tell a story and wrap it up at the end into a nice, neat little package. But, I can’t do that with this particular offering because there is no nice, neat way to wrap this up. After reading and re-reading what I’ve written here there is no real story to this, instead it’s just ramblings about a mother and son that often struggled and failed to like each other, but who always loved each other.
Happy Valentine’s Day … and thanks for spending some time today with a tired, old writer who feels like a little boy missing his mom.
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