Mom Didn’t Choose Me
She didn’t even like kids
I got the call from Mom’s neighbor exactly seven years ago today. He breathlessly recounted what happened.
Checking in on her, as he periodically did, he first rapped on the front door of the ranch house I grew up in, where she lived quite capably alone. Nothing. He rang the doorbell repeatedly. He tapped on windows. He called the landline in her kitchen.
Finally, he put his ladder in the Wisconsin snow and leaned it against the house to peer into an elevated window in the bathroom providing a view of a narrow hallway.
Mom lay there, motionless. When paramedics arrived they said she probably died a few hours earlier.
I find it rather amazing that Mom died just a few feet from the spot where Dad passed away 16 years earlier. Not only did they die at home in the same part of the house, but they both died instantly and, unfortunately, alone.
Dad had a blood clot, Mom a burst aneurysm.
Smoking since she was a teenager, she knew she was a ticking time bomb. The aorta, the great artery carrying blood from the heart, had a weak spot similar to a worn tire. When the tire blew that was it.
On the seventh anniversary of Mom’s death, I feel a little sad that she died alone.
I would have liked to be at her side, holding her hand, ushering her to a place filled with light, laughter, flowers, vegetables and no weeds or need for stinky fertilizer (she preferred manure from our uncle’s farm).
As a certified master gardener, Mom would have found such gardens inspiring and maybe a little disappointing because she loved the hard work that got soil under her fingernails.
I don’t know if heaven is like an Arboretum. But for her sake, I hope it is.
If I could have been there when she died, pointing her from darkness to eternal light, it would have been poetic symmetry, bookends on our life together. Mom pushed me out of the darkness of the womb into a quirky, dysfunctional, loving and committed Catholic family.
I wasn’t chosen.
I just arrived, like a surprise Amazon delivery you can’t return in 30 days.
If you were a faithful Roman Catholic in the 1960s, as my parents were, there was no such thing as “family planning.” That was considered a sin. The Bible said be fruitful and multiply and the pope said no birth control, and that was that.
Mom and Dad got married on Halloween. I arrived 10 months later, just after Labor Day.
One time she told me a secret about her past I found surprising and unnerving. As a young art teacher in a public school, she didn’t like children and didn’t want any of her own — until I was born.
I was her game-changer and life-changer.
The moment she first saw me something surged through her. When she took me to her breast her heart expanded several sizes as if she were the Grinch who Stole Christmas.
When my brother came a year later her heart expanded even more. He wasn’t a choice either.
I cherish a photograph of Mom and me from October 1960, just a month after I was born, because it illustrates my point about the bond between a mother and her new baby.
Mom looks like a beautiful model in a dark, long dress. A few inches of brown, perfectly curled hair emerge under the brim of a hat so stylish you can imagine it on Jackie Kennedy, then the wife of the Democratic candidate running for president.
I’m swaddled in a fancy, lacy white blanket or gown, suggesting this may have been the day of my infant baptism.
She holds me tenderly in her arms, her lovely, young face just 10 inches from mine, giving me confidence and reassurance I can almost feel, even now.
As she looks deeply into my baby blue eyes, she doesn’t smile. She beams.
Is there anything more beautiful, more nurturing, more heart-strengthening than the eyes of a mother locked on the face of her newborn?
If you look closely at the photograph you can see my eyes open wide and riveted on hers, a Mama’s boy soaking up all that love like a sponge.
Cloth diapers are neatly stacked on a table right next to a large ashtray, a pack of Salem cigarettes and a book of matches, which would lead to her future death even as she welcomed new life.
For some reason, and I just noticed this, a cross is engraved or painted on the headboard of my crib. No wonder I’m so spiritual. I began my life staring at the cross every time I fell asleep.
That photo was taken more than half a century ago. I’m now a grown man with kids of my own and greying hair emerging under the brim of my not-so-stylish baseball hats.
Still, as I look at that picture, I can almost feel the comfort a baby experiences deep in his soul when his mother holds him adoringly as if the two of them were the only two people in the world.
I’m now a leadership coach, helping men 50 and older gain more clarity, purpose, happiness, wealth and health. My slogan is, “Take charge of your future.”
One reason I can take charge of my future is that my mother overcame her dislike of children to take charge of my past when I couldn’t take care of myself.
I wasn’t chosen. But I was held. I was fed. I was burped. I was changed. I was nurtured.
Mom wasn’t pro-choice. She volunteered as a counselor for the pro-life organization Birthright.
Mom learned to see her unplanned special delivery, me, not as a burden but a blessing, a gift of life to her and a gift of love to me.
