I really like this woman's articles. They always seems to hit home with me.
I've been thinking a lot about my Mom lately. So many things I didn't say,
didn't ask about. I miss her so much & wish she were around again, if only
for a day.
As we age, we hear: 'How's your mom?'
Mary Schmich
October 22, 2008
Every few days lately, I run into someone—in the grocery store, in the office, on the street—and the first question one of us asks is "How's your mom?"
For people of a certain age with parents who are still alive, "How's your mom?" has become a reflexive salutation, an act of solidarity, the equivalent of "What's up?"
Sometimes when I run into these acquaintances and friends, we ask about each other's fathers, too, but less. It's the mothers, mostly, who remain.
So we say, "How's your mom?" and we trade stories. Sad stories, funny stories, tales of the absurd. We update the diagnoses, recount the latest fall, shake our heads and cringe.
She did what? All by herself? Is she OK?
We nod empathetically, and we laugh because, well, laughing feels better than what we really feel. If we can laugh, then we can feel in charge, if not entirely of mom or of the future, at least of our emotion.
A few days ago, for example, I ran into Kathie at the supermarket. We're friendly but not close.
"How's your mom?" we asked each other almost simultaneously, standing next to the shopping carts. I issued my report (a man rushing for a bus knocked Mama down and fractured her pelvis, but the nursing home is great), then Kathie issued hers.
Kathie's mother lives in Wisconsin. Kathie's been driving up there a lot lately, adjusting to the idea that her mother—the same woman who once managed four kids, a part-time job and the family finances—now needs her children's help the way her children once needed hers.
One weekend, Kathie reported, her mother lost $300. Just lost it. Her mom recognized she was fading, so she put down a deposit on an assisted-living place. Then backed out.
Kathie was annoyed at having to handle the return of the deposit—until it hit her that her mother's change of heart wasn't selfish caprice or mental failure, but an admirable desire, against the odds, to keep her independence.
But then, said Kathie, she took her mother to the doctor for an oxygen test and . . .
Suffice it to say that the rest is the kind of bittersweet story, replete with medical detail, that often follows "How's your mom?"
A lot of "How's your mom?" conversations involve stories of trips.
There are the routine trips to help mom out, to make sure she's healthy, safe, not constantly alone.
Then there are the stories of the urgent trips, undertaken when the problems accelerate.
The urgent trips are like the one Barack Obama is taking this week to Hawaii to see the grandmother he moved in with at age 10. His decision to stop stumping for two days sparked the predictable jibber-jabber about the costs to his campaign.
But that's what you do when mom, or the grandmother who was practically your mom, is gravely ill. You go.
When it comes to mom in the last phase of her life, love trumps work. It trumps ambition. It calls upon you to stop whatever you're doing, no matter how important it is.
Forget the cost. Forget the risk. Just go.
Even if you're running for president.
Sometimes the trips I hear about when I ask, "How's your mom?" are ones not yet taken. When I asked a friend last week, he talked about his plan to go to Omaha to organize a garage sale for his mother, a prelude to the hard discussion of whether she should continue to live on her own.
We talked for a while about the difficulty of solving that question. We didn't solve it, for his mother or mine. But I hung up with the perverse reassurance that life will be difficult in a whole new way when our mothers aren't around to ask about.
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I'm glad you all enjoyed it too.
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