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I miss my mom
Dec. 26th, 2023 10:40 pmIt's been more than five years -- my mom died June 25th, 2018, eleven weeks after moving in with me to my new place, a condo that is beautiful but in a town that is not Oakland, and is much more boring.
I am missing her a lot right now -- and my sister just told me today that she's been missing her a lot, too. We were never a family that made videos, really, but our cousin found a short video my mom recorded on her new iPod Nano in 2009, at Christmas, when she (and my cousins and aunt and uncle) were in Chicago, in her apartment, and we were all out here. My cousin Sara aimed the nano around at everyone and in twenty or so seconds people basically just said "Hi! Merry Christmas!" ... but there is almost no footage of my mom moving and speaking, and my sister texted me to tell me it made her cry. Me, too.
I miss her as she was before she got dementia, kind of obviously -- so many parts of her personality were flattened by that, and altered into strangeness. There was one period near the end when she would just switch into bad Spanish in the middle of her sentences. She'd ALWAYS been trying to learn better Spanish -- she did a trip to Mexico and stayed with a (Mormon) Mexican family and went to classes. The main thing I think she got from that was an excellent way with chilaquiles. She took classes at adult schools. But it didn't really stick. And then, in the last year, there was this just weird outpouring of more or less Spanglish mixed in with other parts of what she was saying. Very basic. Not incorrect -- I mean, it wasn't gobbledygook or anything. But choppy and very, very odd.
My mom and I got along really, really well, like 85% of the time. Maybe even 90% of the time. We had a lot in common, in terms of things we liked to do -- sing, cook, draw, read, be political... She taught me to love folk music, especially Child ballads and 1970s singer songwriters like Bryan Bowers, Tom Paxton, Holly Near, and 40s, 50s, 60s singers like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Joan Baez...
She was always absolutely and emotionally on the side of the oppressed, and I remember walking downtown with her along Judson Avenue and her pointing at different huge Victorian houses saying "That could be a summer camp... that one would make a good communal art studio..." Her emotions informed her politics, and she would be so angry and in pain right now over Gaza. All of my friends from middle school on were envious of my mom, because she was always both tolerant and supportive. Everyone liked spending time at my house, because of her. And so many people moved in to live with us, because she was open and willing to fill up any nook and cranny. Comrades visited from around the world, and then comrades in need lived in our basement apartment, and later also in our refinished attic bedrooms. A friend of my sister's who was estranged from his family after coming out moved in with us, in high school. My college roommate moved home to those attic bedrooms with me, sophomore year.
I'm not going to say she was perfect or that our relationship was absolute bliss. There was that ten to fifteen percent of the time where we could grate on each other or have fights. And she wasn't of the same temperament as my dad and me -- we blow up and then it's over, very quickly. With her, there was a slow burn and then a sharp angry explosion, and then possibly a long slow recovery to status quo ante. She was very judgy about me and how I used money, for example, thinking I spent money wastefully. Fair enough, when I didn't have a job. But once I did, I was a little done with THAT. And she had this weird thing where she sort of made it clear that whatever successes I had, she chalked down to my luck. I got mad about that. I mean, I think I have been lucky in some things. But I also am good at some things and got jobs, and prizes, and so on as a result of being good at those things. And she was an absolutely terrible driver and very, very forgetful. She seemed to lose her wallet about once a month -- though, back in the 70s and 80s, it was more than once mailed back to her, empty.
She had a great speaking, singing, and reading voice, and always wished that she had found a project where she could get recorded reading books aloud for the blind, or something. I loved having her read aloud to my sister and me when we were little. And I LOVED her singing and playing guitar. She would sing us lullabies that were kind of questionable, especially two versions of the Child ballad about the two sisters who loved the same guy, and how the older, less favored sister murdered the younger one by letting her drown, and was suitably punished for the crime. There are so many versions of this, but the two she sang were "The Lord of the North Country" and "O Binoorie". She also sang "The Great Silkie". I wish I could have been in the audience in one of the folk clubs she played in in Madison, before I was born.
I don't know if putting a link in here will work, since putting a photo is IS WAY TOO FUCKING DIFFICULT. But I'll try, and see if it works. If it does work, I might have posted it five years ago, but whatever. It literally makes me cry every time. We don't have much video, my family, but we do tend to have a lot of photos. And my dead half-sister had these tapes of my mom practicing, which she sent me when I told her I had no recordings of my mom singing. So I digitized about five songs, and this is one from a Christy Moore album called "Unfinished Revolution", about women in revolutionary struggles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9EJDY-f0As
Hope it loads.
I am missing her a lot right now -- and my sister just told me today that she's been missing her a lot, too. We were never a family that made videos, really, but our cousin found a short video my mom recorded on her new iPod Nano in 2009, at Christmas, when she (and my cousins and aunt and uncle) were in Chicago, in her apartment, and we were all out here. My cousin Sara aimed the nano around at everyone and in twenty or so seconds people basically just said "Hi! Merry Christmas!" ... but there is almost no footage of my mom moving and speaking, and my sister texted me to tell me it made her cry. Me, too.
I miss her as she was before she got dementia, kind of obviously -- so many parts of her personality were flattened by that, and altered into strangeness. There was one period near the end when she would just switch into bad Spanish in the middle of her sentences. She'd ALWAYS been trying to learn better Spanish -- she did a trip to Mexico and stayed with a (Mormon) Mexican family and went to classes. The main thing I think she got from that was an excellent way with chilaquiles. She took classes at adult schools. But it didn't really stick. And then, in the last year, there was this just weird outpouring of more or less Spanglish mixed in with other parts of what she was saying. Very basic. Not incorrect -- I mean, it wasn't gobbledygook or anything. But choppy and very, very odd.
My mom and I got along really, really well, like 85% of the time. Maybe even 90% of the time. We had a lot in common, in terms of things we liked to do -- sing, cook, draw, read, be political... She taught me to love folk music, especially Child ballads and 1970s singer songwriters like Bryan Bowers, Tom Paxton, Holly Near, and 40s, 50s, 60s singers like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Joan Baez...
She was always absolutely and emotionally on the side of the oppressed, and I remember walking downtown with her along Judson Avenue and her pointing at different huge Victorian houses saying "That could be a summer camp... that one would make a good communal art studio..." Her emotions informed her politics, and she would be so angry and in pain right now over Gaza. All of my friends from middle school on were envious of my mom, because she was always both tolerant and supportive. Everyone liked spending time at my house, because of her. And so many people moved in to live with us, because she was open and willing to fill up any nook and cranny. Comrades visited from around the world, and then comrades in need lived in our basement apartment, and later also in our refinished attic bedrooms. A friend of my sister's who was estranged from his family after coming out moved in with us, in high school. My college roommate moved home to those attic bedrooms with me, sophomore year.
I'm not going to say she was perfect or that our relationship was absolute bliss. There was that ten to fifteen percent of the time where we could grate on each other or have fights. And she wasn't of the same temperament as my dad and me -- we blow up and then it's over, very quickly. With her, there was a slow burn and then a sharp angry explosion, and then possibly a long slow recovery to status quo ante. She was very judgy about me and how I used money, for example, thinking I spent money wastefully. Fair enough, when I didn't have a job. But once I did, I was a little done with THAT. And she had this weird thing where she sort of made it clear that whatever successes I had, she chalked down to my luck. I got mad about that. I mean, I think I have been lucky in some things. But I also am good at some things and got jobs, and prizes, and so on as a result of being good at those things. And she was an absolutely terrible driver and very, very forgetful. She seemed to lose her wallet about once a month -- though, back in the 70s and 80s, it was more than once mailed back to her, empty.
She had a great speaking, singing, and reading voice, and always wished that she had found a project where she could get recorded reading books aloud for the blind, or something. I loved having her read aloud to my sister and me when we were little. And I LOVED her singing and playing guitar. She would sing us lullabies that were kind of questionable, especially two versions of the Child ballad about the two sisters who loved the same guy, and how the older, less favored sister murdered the younger one by letting her drown, and was suitably punished for the crime. There are so many versions of this, but the two she sang were "The Lord of the North Country" and "O Binoorie". She also sang "The Great Silkie". I wish I could have been in the audience in one of the folk clubs she played in in Madison, before I was born.
I don't know if putting a link in here will work, since putting a photo is IS WAY TOO FUCKING DIFFICULT. But I'll try, and see if it works. If it does work, I might have posted it five years ago, but whatever. It literally makes me cry every time. We don't have much video, my family, but we do tend to have a lot of photos. And my dead half-sister had these tapes of my mom practicing, which she sent me when I told her I had no recordings of my mom singing. So I digitized about five songs, and this is one from a Christy Moore album called "Unfinished Revolution", about women in revolutionary struggles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9EJDY-f0As
Hope it loads.
