Motherhood, The Second OldestProfession (14 page)

What kind of a mother would...

sentence her eighty-two-year-old mother to Chez Riche, a $2,000-a-month nursing home?

Ethel

Ethel refused to believe her mother was approaching senility.

She rationalized a lot of eighty-two-year-old women ran away from home every week, sat in parked cars talking to themselves, and threatened to name Gary Grant in a paternity suit.

She would not listen to anyone who advised her against keeping her mother at home with her. Not her doctor, her minister, her husband, nor her Aunt Helen who insisted, “Face it, Ethel, Jenny has one oar out of the water. She's my sister and I love her too, but I'm telling you normal people don't give out cans of tomato paste for Trick or Treat.”

Ethel was defensive. “It's my fault. The kitchen was dark and she grabbed the first can she saw.”

The burden of her mother's future was awesome to Ethel. When did the responsibility revert to her? Was it at her father's funeral three years ago when she put her arm around her mother and promised to take care of her? No, no, it was long before that that the mother became the child and the child became the mother.

She had started hearing echoes from her childhood soon after she was married.

“Mother! Aren't you ready yet? The doctor won't wait, you know.” (Ethel! Don't dawdle. School will be over by the time you get there.)

“Come over Wednesday and I'll give you a permanent.” (Hold still, Ethel, and I'll pin up your hair so you'll have curls.)

“Try this dress on, Mother. It'll make you look younger.” (I don't care what you say, Missy, that dress is too old for you. Try this one.)

“Mother will have the fruit plate. She thinks she wants the veal parmesan but she'll be up all night.” (I know a little girl whose eyes are bigger than her tummy.)

Her mother resisted at first, then fell easily into the role. After a while, when the memory went, Ethel was dialing phone numbers for her mother, filling her coffee cup half full, and automatically holding out her arm whenever she brought the car to a stop.

The transfer of authority was complete.

The lapses of her mother's memory were erratic. One minute Jenny could recall bite for bite what she had to eat forty years ago at a dinner at the VFW. The next minute, she was referring to her grandson as “Whatshisname.” Ethel couldn't count the number of times her mother had thro\\ 11 out the inside of the percolator with the grounds.

In time, she turned quarrelsome, irritable, and downright hostile toward Ethel. She announced to anyone who would listen that Ethel was stealing her blind and was trying to do her in by putting something bitter in her bran. She told her sister Helen, “I'd rather die of irregularity than be poisoned.”

One night before guests, she tearfully told them she had been tortured beyond belief by her daughter, who had made her watch an All MacGraw film festival on TV.

The accusations broke Ethel's heart. Things came to a head one day, when her husband brought Jenny home from the polls where she had just voted. “Something has got to be done about Jenny,” he said.

“What's the matter?” asked Ethel.

“She just voted Democrat. She'd die if she knew that.”

Eight months later, Ethel checked her mother in at the Tranquil Trail Nursing Home. As they carried in her suitcase, Ethel observed, “It's a nice room, Mother.”

“It's bugged,” she said, “and it's dinky. Why didn't you just put me on an iceberg and let me drift out to sea. That's what Eskimos do.”

“I wouldn't do that. Mother,” she said tiredly.

“I suppose you've sold all my cut glass. You'll be old someday.”

“I'm old now, Mother.”

“That's true. Did you pack my fur coat?”

“It's July. You don't need it now. I'll bring it to you when it gets cold.”

“You've said that before. Why don't you admit it. You sold it.”

Ethel leaned back in the chair and rested her head. Was there anything left in her but frustration, hurt, and shame?

She was doing a terrible thing. She was abandoning her own mother, putting her in the hands of strangers. Her mother had sacrificed her entire life to raising her and now Ethel was turning away from her responsibilities. But she was so exhausted trying to relate to a person she didn't even know.

Her mother was living in a strange new world and had been for some time. It was a world that allowed the past to enter but not the present or the future. She had tried, but she couldn't reach her there. Nor did she want to. She wanted the old world. The way it used to be when her mother was softer and in control.

Would these strangers understand her mother's world?

An attendant came in and said, “Jenny, you got everything you need?”

“Did you steal my watch?” asked Jenny, her eyes narrowing.

“You bet. Was it valuable?”

Jenny stood toe to toe with her and searched her eyes carefully. “I got it from Gary Grant. I named him in a paternity suit and he tried to buy me off.”

“Same thing happened to me with Glint Eastwood,” said the attendant.

Together they walked out the door as Jenny whispered, “Glint Eastwood. Is he the one who squints all the time?”

Ethel watched them for a while, then wiped the tears from her eyes and put herself together. Maybe it would work. Maybe she was a constant reminder to her mother of the old world, the one that had left her suspicious and confused. Maybe that's why she lashed out at her with such anger. Oh well, she would think about it tomorrow, when she brought her mother's fur coat to her.

What kind of a mother would...

reply when asked what it was like to give birth to Erma Bombeck, “It's a rotten job, but someone had to do it”?

Erma

This book would not be complete without a chapter on my mother, who at this moment is leafing through it to see if she is mentioned.

Words that flash through my mind when the word “Mother” is mentioned include: box saver, gravy on diet bread, right words in wrong places (“Your grandfather mi-grained here from Ireland”), candidate for first tongue transplant, courage, abounding love.

My mother was raised in an orphanage, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty-five, left with two children and a fourth-grade education. According to her height and weight as listed on the insurance charts, she should be a guard for the Lakers. She has iron-starved blood, one shoulder that is lower than the other, and she bites her fingernails.

She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

I never can remember exactly how old she is, so I set it at thirty-three and forget it.

In the years I was growing up, there were good times and bad times, but when I presented her with three children, our relationship stabilized. There is no doubt that the grandchildren offered her the answer to her prayers: revenge.

No one is more supportive of the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech than I am, but the “gag rule” seems to get more attractive all the time.

When my kids are around, Grandma sings like a canary.

I never thought she'd turn on me. When I was sinking in a sea of diapers, formulas, and congenital spitting, Mother couldn't wait to pull her grandchildren onto her lap and say, “Let me tell you how rotten your Mommy was. She never took naps and she never picked up her room and she had a mouth like a drunken sailor in Shanghai. I washed her mouth out with soap so many times I finally had to starch her tongue.”

At other times, she is on my side and her presence is comforting.

Once, when I was in my twenties, I remember standing in a hospital corridor waiting for doctors to put twenty-one stitches in my son's head and I said, “Mom, when do you stop worrying?” She just smiled and said nothing.

When I was in my thirties, I sat on a little chair in a classroom and heard how one of my children talked incessantly, disrupted the entire class, and was headed for a career making license plates. I said to her, “Mom, when does it end?” She said nothing.

When I was in my forties, I spent a lifetime waiting for the phone to ring, the cars to come home, the front door to open. I called her and whined, “When does it stop?” There was no answer.

By the time 1 was fifty, I was sick and tired of being vulnerable and worrying about my children. I wished they were all married so I could stop worrying and lead my own life. But I was haunted by my mother's smile and I couldn't help remembering how she looked at me with concern and said, “You look pale; you all right? Call me the moment you get home. I worry about it.”

She had been trying to tell me what I did not want to hear: “It never stops.”

When my first book came out, she went with me to New York, where my baptism on television was to be “The Tonight Show.” I was terrified. As she was zipping me into my dress, I said, “I don't think I can do this,” and she turned me around and said, “If you're going out there and try to be something you're not, you're right. You'll fall flat on your face. All you can do is to be yourself.”

I went out that night and took her advice. I was myself. And I bombed so bad it was ten years before I ever got on the show again.

When I confronted Mother, she said, “What do I know? I just came along to shop at Bloomingdale's.”

There's a lot to admire in my mother. The wonder she sustains . . . even at the age of thirty-three. She is still impressed with people, curious about new things, and excited about Christmas. Her openness is not to be believed. One day, a reporter from a supermarket tabloid knocked at her door and wanted to know anything about her daughter that the public didn't know. Mother invited him in, gave him coffee, told him my life story—beginning with the labor pains—in great detail. By the end of three hours (she was up to toilet training), his teeth were falling asleep and as he begged to leave, Mother insisted he take a bag of homemade raisins. He never came back.

I suppose every child remembers some special virtue their mother has—some piece of wisdom that has saved them from disaster or a word that made the path infinitely easier.

I love my mother for all the times she said absolutely

nothing.

The times when I fell flat on my face, made a lousy judgment, and took a stand that I had to pay dearly for.

God knows I've made every mistake in the book, from the time I bought a car with 87,000 miles on it to the time I made a decision to tell my boss, “I don't need this job.”

Thinking back on it all, it must have been the most difficult part of mothering she ever had to do: knowing the outcome, yet feeling she had no right to keep me from charting my own path.

I thank her for all her virtues, but mostly for never once having said, “I told you so.”

Epilogue

While the Good Lord was creating mothers He was into His sixth day of “overtime” when the angel appeared and said, “You're doing a lot of fiddling around on this one.”

And the Lord said, "Have you read the spec on this

order?"

She has to be completely washable, but not plastic.

Have 180 movable parts ... all replaceable.

Run on black coffee and leftovers.

Have a lap that disappears when she stands up.

Have a kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair.

And have six pairs of hands. The angel shook her head slowly and said, “Six pairs of hands . . . not possible.”

“It's not the hands that are causing me problems,” said the Lord. “It's the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have.”

“That's on the standard model?” asked the angel.

The Lord nodded. “One pair that see through closed doors when she asks, 'What are you kids doing in there?' when she already knows. Another here in the back of her head that see what she shouldn't, but what she has to know, and of course the ones here in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and reflect, 'I understand and I love you' without so much as uttering a word.”

“Lord,” said the angel, touching His sleeve gently, “come to bed. Tomorrow ...”

“I can't,” said the Lord, “I'm so close to creating something so close to myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick . . . can feed a family of six on one pound of hamburger . . . and can get a nine-year-old to stand under a shower.”

The angel circled the model of The Mother very slowly. “It's too soft,” she sighed.

“But tough,” said the Lord excitedly. “You cannot imagine what this Mother can do or endure.”

“Can it think?”

“Not only think, but it can reason and compromise,” said the Creator.

Finally, the angel bent over and ran her fingers across the cheek. “There's a leak,” she pronounced. “I told you you were trying to put too much into this model. You can't ignore the stress factor.”

The Lord moved in for a closer look and gently lifted the drop of moisture to his finger where it glistened and sparkled in the light.

“It's not a leak,” He said. “It's a tear.”

“A tear?” asked the angel. “What's it for?”

“It's for joy, sadness, disappointment, compassion, pain, loneliness, and pride.”

“You are a genius,” said the angel.

The Lord looked somber. “I didn't put it there.”

About the Author

ERMA BOMBECK writes a humor column three times a week for 900 newspapers from her home in Paradise Valley, Arizona. She appears twice a week on ABC's Good Morning America. She has a loving husband and three children who have never published a book about her. She calls her Mom and Dad at least once a week and holds ten honorary degrees.

Her husband comes home everyday and asks, “So, what have you been doing all day?”