Always In My Corner
Today is Mom’s birthday. She would have been 93 today. She, amazingly, made it to 88. She had such a powerful grip on life, if she could have possibly made it any further than that, she would have. She was always looking for ways to improve her quality of life, physically, mentally and spiritually. She never stopped growing, right up to the day she drew her final breath. That was one of the many things I loved about her.
In my younger days, when I struggled to find the meaning of life, why I was here, what I would do, Mom was always right there with me, providing encouragement, to just get out there and do something. “Your purpose will find you. You need to go out and meet it halfway.”
When I was 15 and didn’t have any spending money because I’d quit the newspaper route the year before, she said, “Why don’t you go get yourself a job after school?” I didn’t think anyone would hire someone like me, with no experience at anything. “Oh, Malarkey”, she’d say, “You delivered papers for nine years, ran your own route for six years, worked in a bakery when you were ten. You’ve got much more experience than most boys your age.”
With her encouragement and a new resolve, I went out on Brookline Boulevard, and just started going store to store, from Chuck’s Pharmacy to Joe’s Tavern to Foodland to Newsies, all the way down to “the cannon”, and when none of those yielded a job, I went down to West Liberty Avenue and applied at the A & P, then Locante’s Fine Italian Restaurant. That’s where I got my first real job. I never would have gotten it if Mom hadn’t pushed me, and made me realize I had a lot more than I thought I had.
That’s how it went with Mom. She would never accept the words “can’t”, and always knew that my life had a purpose. It was my job to go find out what that was. Turned out, she was right. Of course she was. She was Mom. She knew about these things.
I never had a greater cheerleader than her. She believed in me when I had a lot of doubts, myself. I never realized how much she had overcome in her own life until I ran into great difficulties in my own. Then I would hear about what she had overcome. It was never delivered with a, “Look what I did”, it was always delivered with compassion and empathy — but never sympathy. If you were looking for sympathy, you’d have to look elsewhere.
She was all about living life, and if you weren’t , she pushed until you got back into the ring. The hardest time for her, with me, had to be when I quit drinking. I didn’t understand anything about the concept of surrender, or how the 12 Steps of AA worked — that was all to be a few years away, for me. I just thought you quit, then went on with your life.
It wouldn’t turn out to be that easy, or simple, for me. When I quit drinking, it was like I quit life. Up to that point, for me, drinking was life. Mom made a deal with me, as long as I wasn’t drinking or doing drugs, I was welcome in their house. Whatever you do, just don’t drink. I didn’t.
I took her up on it, and sheltered there while I transitioned from my life in the Navy, and heavy drinking and drug use, to life as a sober civilian. To me, it didn’t feel like a transition. If felt like death. I just wanted to die for the first four or five months.
Mom honored her word, and let me stay, and did whatever she could for me. She found a couple of rehabs that I would go to, then leave in a couple days, just unable to deal with people. She’d always say, “No problem, we’ll try something else.”
When something else didn’t work out, that was okay, too. As long as I wasn’t drinking or drugging, I was welcome to stay with them. I finally found something that clicked for me, that got me back on my feet, back into life, and out of the house. When that all blew up a couple years later, she was right there, encouraging me to keep going. I found something else. When that blew up four years later, she suggested I come back home, and try starting over.
That time something sustainable finally took root, and while I was living there, age 29 at that point, I found the job with the same outfit I still work for, 33 years later, met my future wife, and found sustainable recovery through AA’s 12 Steps.
When I look back, I am not so sure I would have made it through all of that journey of starts and stops, fits of false starts, without her always there, always pushing me to keep going, keep moving through whatever it was I was going through, keep moving until you find what works for you. Even though she was recovered through AA, herself, she never pushed that on me. When that was what finally worked, she was never there to say I told you so. She was just there, like she’d always been, believing in me.
I still feel like she’s in my corner, and whenever things go well in my life, whenever I experience an overwhelming sense of gratitude for having found a deep, fulfilling, sustainable meaning to my life, which I do on a regular basis, my thoughts of gratitude always begin with thinking of Mom. She gave me the fighting start I needed, and the support throughout the difficult times, the love that never gave up on me, and she was there to truly share the joys of my life, when things turned around.
When I found my voice as a writer, in her last year with us, she was there to root me on, to say what a fine writer she thought I had become. What a gift that was! She wasn’t easily impressed by such things, so when she was, you knew she meant it when she praised you for it. That was a gift that has kept on giving.
I was so lucky to have her for a Mom. Happy Birthday, Mom!
