Heart of a Mother
Good parents become the yardstick by which you measure love and all it entails. Caring, nurturing, safety, sharing your joys, solace from sadness. They are your home long after you leave their house, the place you fit, not just for now, but where you’ll fit for life.
Growing up, my world was a quiet house on a quiet street in a quiet suburb in New York. We did not lock the door to our house at night, and did not have to look both ways before crossing the street. I played atop head-high mounds of snow piled, claiming my title of King of the Mountain, before tumbling down to land softly, but wetly, on the dirtied slush at the bottom.
The biggest danger plaguing my young world was the towering spruce tree in the corner of my parents’ front yard. Standing over 18 feet tall, it dwarfed everything: our house, the electric wires, and me, and it was just begging to be climbed, especially when the girl across the street, Jennifer, dared me to climb it. Jennifer was everything I was not: tall, athletic, daring, vivacious, pretty! When she said “climb!”, I asked, “how high?” I climbed as high as I could, moving from the thick, sturdy limbs down low, to the sparser, thinner ones higher up. I wanted to be King of the Mountain! But Newton had other ideas (what comes up must come down), and I, as my mother later put it, “fell and went boom!” This would not be the last time I went out on a limb to impress a girl, and it would not be the last time I fell fast and hard as a result.
Luckily I was only banged up. My mother put a Band-Aid on each cut, said “Kiss and make better!,” and it magically did feel better. It seemed there was nothing that a Band-Aid and those magic words could not heal.
Of course, we learn too soon, parent and child alike, that there are some wounds that magic words and Band-Aids cannot heal.
By the time I was three years old, I’d had been hospitalized numerous times, for everything from multiple eye surgeries and a near-fatal allergy to anesthesia, to Reye’s Syndrome. It cost my mother untold hours, weeks and years of worry, and ultimately cost her job. She was Head of Copyright at a large record company, but was forced out. There was no family leave law then, only “come in to work, or stay with the sick kid, your choice”. I tried to make up for it by being good. Mom tried to make up for it by trying to save me from the world.
So, by the time kindergarten rolled around, my mother was not about to let me go in alone. To ensure I would not enter the Brave New World unprotected, my mother devised a way to ensure that I’d not have to face the first day myself: music. She marched me into class that first day, and, rather than seeing me off with a kiss goodbye, walked in, her 12-string Martin guitar in hand, and announced to the class that she would lead us in sing-alongs. She sang the classics — The Wheels on the Bus; John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt; Frere Jacques, and she added my personal favorite, Shell Silverstein’s “I’m Being Eaten by a Boa Constrictor.”: I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor, a boa constrictor, a boa constrictor, I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor, And I don’t like it one little bit.
Mom came in to school monthly to sing for us, and often brought homemade chocolates or cookies. “One for each hand!,” she’d exclaim as she passed out two chocolates to each child, as she always did for me at home.
I did not realize then how much my mother was sacrificing, just as she had her career years earlier.
My mother, like any parent, was someone’s child herself, someone in need of a parent’s nurturing, guidance, and care. But her mother, my grandmother, who had successfully battled a brain tumor when my mother was in her late teens, was now battling multiple myeloma. My mother’s days were spent running to and from Long Island Jewish Hospital. Looking back, I rarely saw Mom eat, and she was so thin and tired, so sick herself, that her doctor gave her a portable heart monitor. It was a black rectangle, no bigger than a Walkman, with a metal node on the back she’d hold up to her chest, and it would record her heart rhythm. She’d have to call a phone number at the end of the day, and hold the monitor up the phone. It would emit a long, shrill beep, laying out the beats and inner workings of my mother’s heart to a computer listening on the other end of the line.
I recalled that each time I was sick, or the times, later, when I was bullied at school, it would break that heart. I decided fairly early that the best protection I could give my mother’s heart was to shield her from injury to mine. So, I decided not tell my parents when things were rough. I’d not tell them if I’d been bullied, I’d not tell them of my first broken heart (though mothers always know) or any of the broken hearts that would follow.
I knew what the doctors did not. I knew what was wrong with my mother’s heart — an excess of empathy. If someone she cared for is upset, she feel it viscerally, a physical sensation that something is off. How much pain can you watch your child go through before your heart breaks? What can a parent do, what is a parent, when a kiss can’t make it better?
Home is not what you’d run into a fire to protect. It’s whom you’d run into a fire to protect.
Thomas Wolfe was wrong. You can go home again. Maybe you never really leave it in the first place. Whether we move minutes, or miles or even oceans away, those connections, those things that make the heart swell or ache, are there. Even when we grow apart, they are always our parents, and we, always their children. As long as we draw breath, they remain home, regardless of where we live.
