In Advance of Mother's Day

I spent the Sunday before Mother’s Day working in my garden—my first big spurt of gardening since the fall. I spent half the day hacking back the neighbor’s overgrown ivy from our fence and aggressively pruning our own outsized, overly exuberant bushes. The rest of the day I devoted to carefully planting iris rhizomes—not too shallow, not too deep, but at just the right level. It occurred to me—not for the first time—the dichotomy of cultivating a garden. It necessitates having both nurturing and destructive capabilities. Oftentimes they are called into play on the same day.

When I’m in full-blown (or even shallow-breathing) gardening mode, I can’t help but think of my mom. And with Mother’s Day looming, thoughts of her are more haunting than ever. Weekend after weekend, in her infamous and inglorious gardening moo-moos, she enslaved herself, and with less regularity, her daughters, (thankfully we were spared the humiliation of wearing moo-moos) to yard work. In addition to a painstakingly maintained rose garden, Mom had the best bearded iris collection around.

Bearded iris at the old house.

In what might be deemed hereditary solidarity (and with prompting from my husband who seems to feel roses are floral essentials) I made my last residence a spring/fall iris spectacle and rose grove to behold. I’ve recently taken the bulbous iris outcroppings from the old garden to propagate in our new garden. We’re starting anew with the roses since I couldn’t justify digging up the old bushes. They seem to like life in their current location. If Mom were still around to see her legacy of gardening activities, I think she’d be delighted. And when I survey my work, I acknowledge it as an homage to her.

My "old" rose garden--not yet in full bloom.

She died a little over seven years ago from complications and consequences of being morbidly obese—the state in which she spent the greater part of her adult life. I wish I could report it was a “good” death—whatever that consists of—that she was fulfilled and satisfied with her 70 years on the planet. I’d like to tell you she went easily and calmly, that she was at peace while she took her leave. Nothing could be further from the truth. Dying isn’t often easy. When you’ve spent a lifetime abusing yourself with food, inactivity and other destructive behaviors, departing can be—and was for both of us—torturous.

The only positive thing I can say about her death is that she was ready. In fact, my mom had been ready to depart this world for as long as I can remember. This manifested in some—shall we euphemistically say—self-destructive habits. There were three crises which occurred around the time I was between the ages of three and four that highlighted her injurious propensities. I vaguely remember all of them but required prompting and rehash from my sister (a year and a half older) and my father for the details. The three emergencies happened over the time span of a year or two. No one seems sure about the exact timeline anymore.

One incident involved the doctor—Mommy’s beloved Dr. Foster, a psychiatrist who became her unwitting knight in shining armor—coming to the house. She was very sick. My father explained to my sister and me that she’d taken too many pills. I don’t know if he used the word “accidentally” or not but I instinctively understood that it wasn’t an accident. My father took her to the hospital where they pumped her stomach. Apparently, this was a relatively benign aspirin O.D.

In a repeat episode (and this involved a lot of fill-in from my dad) she again took too many pills. This time things were more serious.  Apparently she’d been stockpiling the sleeping pills (tuinal) my father cautiously doled out to her, to save up for the big event. He found her in bed barely breathing. A call was made to the aforementioned Dr. Foster. This time her hospital trip involved not only a stomach pumping but an overnight stay in the psych ward. She demanded to be let out the next day and was released AMA—against medical advice. Luckily, too many pills had turned out to be not quite enough to achieve her goal.

The third misadventure is what I call the “Where’s Mommy?” night. I recall this somewhat more vividly than the other two events, which makes me think it happened later on in the timeline. She left the house in only her nightgown sometime after dark. As my dad tells it, he called the intrepid and by now nearly sainted Dr. Foster and a close friend to help him scour the sleepy streets of Los Gatos in search of his errant wife. My sister and I, also in our nightgowns, were wakened out of beds, put into the backseat of our black and white, 1957 Chevy Bel Air and told to look for Mommy.

We didn’t find her until we got back home. Decades later I found out why when Mom recounted the story to me. With weirdly perverse pleasure, she described how she’d slipped out of the front door in nothing but her nightie and hidden in the bushes next to the house. While we were out trolling the roads, looking for Mommy, she went back inside. Twenty plus years later she laughed at how she’d pulled one over on my dad. She made no mention of her two young daughters being hauled out of bed when they should have been sleeping. She offered no apology for making us worry. But man, she had a good laugh at my dad on that one. Hilarious.

Obviously, she never was successful at a full-on sayonara; otherwise she wouldn’t have lived to see her 70th birthday. But you get the idea. These goings-on set a certain tone of anxiety. Growing up, I couldn’t help but feel very worried about my mom. Apprehension and daughterly devotion were my overriding sentiments about her.

In those initial decades, the pitch didn’t change much. There was the divorce from my father. There were numerous bouts of her drinking too much. There were hysterical crying jags. There was a completely wrong-on-so-many-levels, marriage to a man who should never have been allowed to visit our home, much less move in with us.  This person mentally and occasionally physically brutalized my sister and me. I don’t call him my stepfather and have not kept in contact. Luckily, she divorced him, too. However, that spiraled her into further depression, a recurrence of drinking and much time spent abed.

Mom’s bad financial decisions stacked on top of each other like a slow-motion, chain-reaction, freeway pile-up. There was a house foreclosure—the home we grew up in—at a time when foreclosures were not only rare, but shameful. Both my sister and I, by then in college, were afraid for her during this particular time, and rightfully so. We were acutely aware that her “way out” was a default for suicide. If she didn’t like how things were going she could always just take her ball and go home. I honestly, believe that’s how she saw it. Her daughters had learned by then we weren’t supposed to feel responsible. We were just supposed to sadly wave goodbye and not give voice to the fact that we wished she’d stuck around longer.

You’re thinking: That’s not how it works.

True. But you couldn’t get her to understand that.

Empathetic and excessively concerned for the first three and a half decades of my life, my feelings about Mom gradually shifted.  Being around her became more and more a horrid chore. I still worried about her but the intensity of the worry was supplanted by resentment and exasperation. By this time I had my own child who needed and depended on me.  The obvious questions I’d kept in the depths started bubbling up like a toxic potion. Why couldn’t she be trusted her to take care of herself? Why couldn’t she be good to herself? What was wrong with her? What I once saw in soft focus as her weak and wounded spirit fell into sharper, harsher definition. A person more beset with terminal self-loathing, I’d never met.

Not surprisingly, around the age of 50, Mom was diagnosed with diabetes. Her decline was dawdling, occurring in bits and pieces, encroaching in fits and starts. Escalating ailments related to obesity closed in on her. Her once desired goal—to be dead—was taking a drawn-out, tedious and agonizing route to fruition.  I removed myself even more from her during this time. I know that sounds bad. It was. Your mom needs you as she becomes more and more ill and you pull away?  I did.  My sister did too.

Mom asked me about it—confronted me, really—and I told her the truth. “I can’t stand watching what you’re doing to yourself. You’re hurting yourself. You’re killing yourself right in front of me and there’s nothing I can do about it. You won’t do what you need to do to get better. You just do things that make it worse. You can’t expect me to enjoy spending time around you.”  

It’s extremely hard to care for a person who doesn’t care for themself.

Instead of keeping her weight down, being physically active, monitoring her blood sugar and insulin, she helped the disease and her girth along by downing bakery goods like a greedy, deprived child. She refused to believe in the circulatory problems associated with diabetes. Her mother, also a diabetic, had never lost her vision, or a limb, or her kidneys, and therefore it wouldn’t happen to her. In a vague sense, Mom was right. She didn’t live long enough to go blind, or lose body parts. She lived just to the point where she decided to take her ball and go home.

A week after she turned 70, she had enough. With a final heart attack, and protracted hospital stay, her abilities to walk and live on her own were extinguished. Rehab attempts did not amuse or arouse her. Threats of moldering away in a nursing home did not inspire or motivate her. She was ready to go. She asked me in front of my son who was ten at the time, to put her in the car and drive her to Oregon where they allow assisted suicide. “Mom. It doesn’t work that way. You have to have been a resident already. You have to be diagnosed with a terminal disease. I can’t. I’m sorry.” “Please,” she begged, “You have to help me.”

She died not so many weeks later of septicemia which began from bed sores—a direct result of her immobility and her decreased circulation. The doctors advised us to let the infection progress. Mom had a DNR (do not resuscitate) order placed on her file and the doctor was taking it more seriously than we would have on our own. Shocked and resigned, my sister and I agreed.

It took days—maybe a week. Between regular pain relief shots, she suffered loudly and indignantly. Finally, I pleaded with Kaiser to put in an IV to allow a steady supply of drugs. They were concerned. Did I know this would hasten the process? Well, no, I didn’t. But if that were the case, I wondered, why didn’t we do this immediately? Wasn’t that the point—to help her on her way as comfortably as possible?

A call came from Kaiser early one morning—around 4:30. Mom had finally passed. When would I be coming to the hospital? What should be done with her body? At her request, she was taken into the care of the Neptune Society. A month or so later, I took her ashes home with me.

There was relief. There was sadness. There was regret. There was emptiness. As I write this I understand that there was also irony. She’d been so intent at various times on taking her own life and in the end it had to be done for her with medical intervention. Yes. There was that.

I don’t miss my mom the way I presume most people miss their deceased parents. What I miss is the person I think she wanted to be. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I miss the person I wanted her to be. I’m not so sure how similar those two people are to each other. Mom certainly had good intentions—having a marriage and a family—she just wasn’t always great on follow-through. And I have to wonder if I should be missing her at all or just be happy for her. She finally got what she wanted—that one-way ticket most of us dread. At the not-so-ripe age of 70, her heart’s desire was finally fulfilled with the help of her daughters’ consent and a team of healthcare professionals.

So when I’m tilling the soil, maniacally slashing back the overgrowth, tenderly planting seedlings, ripping up weeds, nurturing blooms, pruning off dead wood, or coaxing healthy, new growth, I’m thinking of Mom.  She was, in her way, a garden. The first part of my life I spent cherishing, loving, and fretting over her. In later years, I wrongly believed she should be able to take care of herself. At the end, her diabetes and weight evolved into a kind of rampant ivy, taking over her body and pulling her down. It was not a thing over which I had control. She was not a person over whom I had control.  Finally, the best thing that could be done was to agree to speed her on her way. The decision—both lethal and compassionate—was the most benevolent conclusion we could offer our mother after a lifetime spent trying to hurl herself over the garden gate.

I wish she were here to see my new garden go in, but I think she’s happier being on the other side of the gate.



The first iris in my new garden



Remembering Mom’s Cooking—A Holiday Reverie

I'd just been sifting through the New Yorker—the Thanksgiving food issue had been adorning our kitchen counter for a while. Finished with E.L Doctrow's fiction "Assimilation", I read some of the food stories Thanksgiving morning. First, I consumed Allegra Goodman’s story about trying to reproduce her mother's “elegiac” Linzer torte. Next, I digested Jane Kramer’s homage to root vegetables. And lastly, I partook of David Bezmozgis’ sentimental how-to piece on pickled cabbage featuring his deceased grandfather. The pieces were poignant and evoked a sense of "Gosh, that’s interesting.” and "Gee, I can really relate to that." and “I may need a tissue."

Since then I’ve been thinking about my own culinary upbringing and what I would write should I ever evolve the talent to join the ranks of esteemed contributors to The New Yorker. I’m sorry to say “elegiac” is not a word that sprang to mind as I accessed the memory banks of my childhood food experiences. Aside from my sister, Beth, I doubt there are very many folks out there who can relate. And while I’m quite certain no tissues will be required unless a cold has grabbed hold, I thought I’d give it a go anyway.


Mom was all about teaching her daughters to cook. Partially, her motive was normal mothering instinct, but I’m pretty sure her prime objective was to get her two daughters cook-capable in order to pick up some of the work load. She worked full time and as a result, for our ages, we were charged with some fairly hefty responsibilities. By the time I was in 5^th grade, and my sister in 7^th, we were each cooking dinner two nights a week. Beth, a natural-born homemaker, was much more game for the idea than I. She would spend time, follow recipes, take pride, and put something together that could generally qualify as cuisine. Her chicken and rice casserole was everybody’s favorite. I, on the other hand, had no designs on mastering the domestic arts, and tended to fall back on box meals, mac and cheese and tuna casserole. I viewed cooking as just one more chore on the list. Scrub toilet—check. Vacuum carpet—done. Make dinner—well, if I must. Ho hum—the drudgery!

As a thrift measure, we’d buy half a side of beef at a time and when the huge freezer truck pulled up in front of the house, my sister, mom and I would form a sort of bucket brigade with meat so the butcher-paper parcels could be loaded quickly into the garage freezer. The white wrapped packages would sit dutifully on the shelves, like nutritive soldiers, awaiting their fate in the oven or fry pan. The steaks and more interesting cuts would always be consumed first. By the time we’d get to the last of the packages—ranks of ground beef—many months or perhaps a year later, the remaining militia would have succumbed to some fairly serious freezer burn. We’d amputate the frost-bitten appendages and put the aged recruits out of their misery in the form of spaghetti sauce, meat loaf or if I was cooking, ‘70s-innovation-run-amok, Hamburger Helper. To my childish palate, Hamburger Helper tasted just dandy, but in my adulthood, I’d never touch the stuff. In fact, as a direct result of eating so much ground beef, I've developed a lifetime aversion to hamburger. Time will tell what such meaty consumption has done to my veins and arteries.

Vegetables were tricky. Salad was a rare treat and fresh vegetables were not done for the most part. This would have involved too much reliance on timely shopping. Frozen was the vegetable method of choice. Little wonder that my sister despised vegetables for the most part. Beth had a very short list of acceptable veggies that didn’t result in tears when Mom insisted we eat everything on our plates. Born in the 1933 depression years, Mom would turn harpy if your plate wasn’t clean. For me, as long as it wasn’t Brussels sprouts or lima beans, I’d eat it. I may not have liked it but I’d do just about anything to avoid a set to.

Mom’s method to get the frozen bricks thawed and cooked as quickly as possible was to put the burner on high, dump the ice-blocked vegetables in the pan, add a little water and walk away to do something else. Usually this included refreshing her 16 ounce screwdriver with a shockingly high ratio of vodka to OJ—the seed of another story all together. A good percentage of the time this would result not only in burned vegetables, but a saucepan that required SOS soap pads, overnight soaking, and plenty of elbow grease to remove the charring. We had blackened pan scouring down to a science. If Mom was cooking, you had an 80-20 chance of being required to expunge the cremated remains of some unsuspecting food item off the cookware.

Indeed, high heat and carbonized food was a recurring theme. Steaks at our house were regularly cooked flambé. I believe this was unintentional but I could be wrong. Mom would set the oven rack so close to the broiler coil the grease would catch fire. It apparently never occurred to her that lowering the rack might avoid this issue. Steak night almost always erupted into a flaming circus act with fire licking the upper cupboard and flour flying in order smother the flames. I was never sure if it was better to be in the kitchen nervously watching the pyrotechnics or hiding in my room and waiting to hear “Hey, the meat’s on fire!” from down the hall. It’s true we never had to call the fire department, but when I was younger, I found these burnt offerings more than a little disturbing. I silently vowed never to cook steaks in my own house when I grew up—far too dangerous. It wasn’t until I got out more that I realized ours was the only family to cook their prime cuts by immolation.

For company and holidays Mom’s traditional, East Coast, Welsh/German sensibilities would momentarily prevail and we’d dispense with combustible comestibles—except by design. A roast of some sort—beef, lamb, pork or turkey—was always in the offing and, amazingly enough, was always cooked to perfection. On these special occasions, salad and fresh, unscorched vegetables would grace the table having been purchased with the fest in mind. Mashed potatoes and gravy prepared in a conventional manner were welcome additions to the main course which was served with pomp and circumstance on china, accompanied by silver and proper linens in the dining room.

Dessert for these formals affairs was usually a Mrs. Smith’s pie of some sort. You could almost pretend you made it yourself since it had to be baked in the oven. (An aside: My sister managed to master pies in her late teens, whereas I am still in awe and want of pie-making skills. I trust Whole Foods or Costco for pie unless it’s pecan. Pecan, I can manage with the aid of a store-prepped shell. Pastry seriously intimidates me.) In the event of Christmas, persimmon pudding was our traditional dessert and because old habits die hard, the brown mound was treated to a dousing of flaming brandy. The display was always impressive but nerve-wracking. I’d hold my breath and try to decide if water or napkins might be best in case I had to spring into fire-fighting mode. Looking back, it’s surprising I hadn’t become somewhat inured to the idea of blazing food. To Mom’s credit, the pudding always burned itself out without emergency intervention and the delicious, raisiny cake was devoured with hard sauce. Right-o. The alcohol was never forgotten.

Aside from formal meals, Mom’s other culinary forte was weekend breakfast. During the week cold cereal was de rigueur. But on weekends Mom would sometimes pull out the stops and make French toast or pancakes and bacon. Reliably, these would be mornings when Beth or I would have had friends sleep over. I think it was mom’s way of waking us up and getting us going on the weekend so there weren’t two or three teenage girls sprawled over the living room fold-out until 11 or noon. She’d also take the opportunity to hang out and get whatever info she could from our friends about her daughters' for the most part unexciting “private lives”.

These special mornings, much to our annoyance, Mom would start making a ruckus in the kitchen around 9. As soon as the bacon aroma teased our olfactory bulbs, we’d give up our futile attempts at sleep and stumble into the kitchen. It’s true, sometimes the pancakes were a bit darker and oil-smoked than ideal but we weren’t picky. I never told my friends this was not typical weekend treatment. I think they thought every weekend was one, long morning pancake party. Good thing they didn't stick around for steak night.

The antithesis to formal meals and morning pancakes was Mom's most creative and least delectable contribution to our nutritional history—homemade TV dinners. You remember TV dinners—right? When you’re a kid, they actually seem exotic or exciting in spite of what they actually are—an entire meal frozen in a sectioned-off aluminum tray. Mom would save the trays and when we had leftovers, we’d segregate the food—meat in the middle, veggies on the sides—wrap the tray in foil and freeze it. Weeks or months later the food would be resurrected in the oven.

Not surprisingly, these were not appetizing meals. My sister was fairly certain we’d die young because of them. The food didn’t survive the storage well and upon the great foil unveiling you’d find desiccated meat and overcooked veggies. Reconstituted freezer burn reigned supreme. To avoid the dryness we tried adding a bit of water to the sections before heating which only succeeded making a runny mess of everything that nothing could possibly help anyway—unless it was the miraculous appearance of Meals on Wheels.

Maybe it was mom’s way of assuring us these were “real” TV dinners, because more often than not we’d eat them in front of the TV when usually we ate at the kitchen table. My sister, older and wiser, had the good sense to merely pretend to eat—choking down a few bites and pushing the vitiated vittles around with her fork. Younger and hungrier, I ate the ersatz TV dinners despite their unappetizing essence. I don’t think it ever resulted in actual illness, but the thought of this desecration to leftovers does arouse a certain, vague nausea to this day.

In spite of the burnt offerings, TV dinners gone wrong, and over indulgence in beef, Beth and I grew up healthy. I have not retained many of Mom’s lessons in haute cuisine although it’s widely agreed that my mac and cheese—a noodle or two short of being elegiac—is the bomb. I’ve modified the recipe significantly since my girlhood and my half-Italian husband informs me it’s more akin to baked ziti. Beth has cleaved to her homemaker roots and continues to carry on and improve many of Mom’s food traditions. She is the only person I know who makes Yorkshire pudding for the holidays, a carryover from Mom’s Welsh side of the family.

Mom passed nearly six years ago. We never really spoke of it, but I assume she was happy in the knowledge that her oldest daughter was and is doing much improved and less flammable versions of many of her recipes. And her youngest daughter, never big on domesticity, has not set anything in the kitchen on fire for at least a decade, and has become a respectable cook herself. Even her discriminating, foodie husband agrees.

Mom, I applaud you on  job well done. I do hope at some point you gave yourself a pat on the back. It's a shame I never did. Now I wish I had. On second thought, maybe I’ll need that tissue after all.