“We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.”—Orson Welles
Sometimes this quote is shortened to “we come into this world alone, and we die alone,” or some-such gloomy nonsense. Most of us are lucky enough to be born with at least one other living soul with us, our mother. And while after we grow into adults, we may feel like we souls alone in a body—looking out through the windows of our skull—at birth, we barely know where we end and the world begins. We have spent months swimming inside our mother like a little orca, and come into the world screaming. If fortune smiles on us, a mother is there to hold us until our crying subsides.
Everyone has their own unique relationship with their mother, and mine, like many, was the longest I’ve known another person. Much of our communication was unspoken, spent in quiet proximity. Orca males stay with their mothers for most of their lives, following her, learning, being fed. I learned this from “The Good Whale” podcast, which I recommend.1 When a human does this, we look down upon them. In Italy, these men are called “mammoni,” and the relationship has been excoriated by archbishops who claim it hurts the culture and the economy.
A woman who stays with her mother this long will also be considered odd, even if her mother cooks meals for her boyfriends and she otherwise seems to have a healthy life. Our culture prefers to focus on stories of crushing control, helicoptering, stage mothers, bad mothers, mothers who abandon, women who don’t want to be mothers. They want a Goldilocks perfect mother, who bakes apple pies and sacrifices herself like The Giving Tree and lets her perfect children have all the freedom, and they never do anything wrong for which she can be blamed. For those of us who prefer to live in reality—not the bullshit show business circus we are force-fed—mothers are simply human, and thus imperfect and doing the best they can, like the rest of us.
Mine was one of the real ones. Despite this, nearly every friend of mine who met her felt compelled to exclaim what a great mom she was. My mom had a good role model, her own imperfect mother, who quit school at twelve to work as a housekeeper so she could escape a terrifying Cronus of a father and help her younger brothers follow; she raised her children lovingly and allowed them to be themselves, even when they made bad choices. My mother followed her footsteps and quit school young, against her mother’s wishes, to work as a hairdresser and marry a bad boy from the rich side of town who’d rebelled against his parents and the well-laid plans they had for him.
He was a narcissist and a cheat who had caught his domineering mother cuckolding his father with his own cousin, and drank to quell the shame and disgust, yet he remained in her thrall until the end of his life. When my mother tired of his mental abuse and betrayals, she fled with us, and he gave her nothing. He allowed the house to foreclose, worked off the books for his uncle so he didn’t have to pay child support, and did things like shoot firearms at targets in the cellar while we watched, to antagonize her. Thankfully, my maternal grandparents took us all in, while my grandfather was dying of cancer.2 My uncle Paul stood in for a father, and we had an otherwise fairy tale childhood with Ataris and bicycles and a trip to Disney World, while Mom worked late hours as a cocktail waitress.
She never quit and she never stopped trying for better; she managed a cafeteria for a defense contractor, learned to use computers with some of my help but mostly on her own—I owe my own career in I.T. thanks to her, as I learned how to be patient and direct people over the phone, as I helped her learn computing—and she eventually worked in offices as an administrator, and finally at a high school library. Throughout all this she maintained a sense of humor that I can best describe as corny, ridiculous, and often inappropriate.
My grandmother loved to tell a story how she and my great-aunt both were in tears, kneeling before a friend’s open coffin in a funeral home, because Aunt Mary whispered, “Why is she wearing glasses?” My mother always had a joke, often fatalistic, because that’s what survivors do. My mother was still warm, and I was making dark asides with my sister and stepfather beside her hospital bed, because that is how my family survives.
I wish she’d had more time in her retirement before she got sick. Cancer hit her eight years ago, and she was never really the same, but she had a lot of fun traveling with my stepfather, visiting friends, and feeding the Northern Cardinals who visited her yard. They ate peanuts while she smoked, a few inches away. The last thing I remember us doing together, I took her to see a comedian. Vic Dibitetto, best known as the “Gotta get the bread and milk” guy. We had a great time. She also loved George Carlin, Dom Irrera, Richard Pryor, Sebastian Maniscalco, Richard Klein… absurdity and raunchiness were always appreciated.
She was declared cancer-free a few years after treatment, but she was never the same after. Many of her friends and family had died, and she became physically frail. She was in and out of the hospital a lot, and we texted often, sending jokes. She was an orca mom. She let me be who I am, and was always happy to toss me a salmon when I visited and swam in her slipstream. She’ll always be with me. She and my uncles had to joke and find joy to survive, and that was how she raised us. They in turn learned this from my grandmother and great-uncles. And me and my sister are teaching her children.
Maggie was an original. Do I think she was a saint? Hell, no. But she stood up for her children, to a violent, privileged man from a pampered rich family, and made a great life for us. She looked like a librarian, but her soul wears a leather jacket and always has a joke to make you smile. Today is her funeral, and I will meet many people she touched.
I love you, mom.
I have turned off commenting. The next time we talk, share your condolences if you wish. Please direct your kindness to the next person you meet who is in need. I will be fine. (My mother made sure of that.) Like we’re on a plane. Put your own mask on first, then attend to those nearby who may need your assistance.
I may have also learned it from a book by Carlos Safina or Barry Lopez. Good reading.
He liked to call my mother names to my face, so I hit the gym in college and challenged him to an arm wrestling match, in which I tore his biceps. He didn’t make it out of my life’s Act One. Now he’s merely a footnote.