My Mom, A Class Act

My mother was a class act. I’m not 100% sure all that goes in to that. I just know that she was.  

As soon as I thought it, I told her so. “Mom,  you are a class act.” She looked at me quizzically, as if to say, “What brought that on” and “Who, me?” all in the same thought.  I would tell her that again and again, whenever the overwhelming feeling welled up inside me. I told my sister and my daughter that I thought this way, too.

It wasn’t that my mom was perfect. She could be very stubborn. She was kind of a perfectionist. She could be a bit of a martyr.  Just a bit. She didn’t have a great sense of humor and she hated socializing.  She was not an intellectual and she was a teensy bit on the prudish side.   

My mother should have hated my father. She had every reason to do so.  My father was charming and talented, smart and hugely fun-loving. He was also seriously narcissistic, arrogant,  impulsive, and reckless. He was unfaithful to her again and again throughout their just-about thirty year-old marriage. The cheating started before I was born – of course I did not know this until I was an adult. The woman lived in the trailer park my parents owned – she cut my sister’s and my hair. He cheated again when I was in my teens. This time it was a woman from the Eastern Star – a Masonic lodge my parents were long active in. And he cheated when I was in my early twenties, newly married – this time with a woman who worked for him at his regional newspaper.  He would leave my mother for that woman, with whom he lived until she passed away from lung cancer. There could have been others – there probably were others. Those are the ones I know about.

My father wrecked my mother’s life financially. Never one to be fiscally responsible, he was less so without my mother to keep the checkbook balanced. A series of missteps combined with some bad luck and terrible timing after he left her resulted in my father losing his property which included the house I grew up in – the house in which my mother and brother still lived.  The house was to be sold by the bank. My mother was facing homelessness. My aunt and uncle kindly stepped in and bought the house. She would have to pay them back. She was already 60 years old. My mother squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, and spent fifteen years letting college kids live in her upstairs in order to pay her debt back.  My mother. Class act.

My father, meanwhile, had no money of his own. Never one to let reality interfere with his plans, however, he moved in to an old decrepit mansion in our town. Why? He’d always wanted to live there and now he didn’t have my mother’s boring practicality to hold him back. It didn’t look run-down on the outside – but on the inside – holy cow. Plaster falling down, pipes exposed, holes in the floor, erratic electrical outlets, bare lights dangling from the ceiling.  But hey – he was living in a mansion – with his girlfriend and two of her four children, who were 12 and 14.    

My mother worried about those kids.  It was Christmas. It was western NY cold. She knew they didn’t have much heat and that there also wasn’t much food.  She went to the grocery store and bought bags full of groceries. “They can rot in hell,” said my mother, about the two supposed adults.  But she sent me with those bags full of groceries to that mansion so those kids wouldn’t suffer any more than she imagined they already had. “Don’t tell him I bought them,” she said. Like hell I won’t, I thought to myself.  My mother. Class act.

Many years later, the girlfriend passed away. By then, my father had pulled himself together. He was no longer living in the falling-apart mansion. He’d dusted off his engineering skills and went back to work. He was no longer living hand to mouth.  But now he was alone and very sad.  Christmas was coming.  “Tell your father he’s welcome to come for Christmas if he wants to,” my mother said to me.  I looked at her incredulously. “Really?” “I imagine he’s feeling lonely – and it’s Christmas,” she said. And just like that, my father was invited back in to her home – which was not yet fully paid for – given a seat at the table, and in front of the fire, and made to feel comfortable and welcomed. My mother. Class act.

More years passed. My father was dying of esophageal cancer. Now he was living with another woman – this one had insisted, however, that my father actually divorce my mother. So she was his wife. He was in hospice care at home and though his wife had promised the hospice administrators that someone would always be there when the nurses or aides were not, she disregarded that direction regularly and left my father alone in bed for hours. It did not matter that he was getting weaker by the day or that no one would be there to get him some food or help him to the bathroom.  My mother fretted. “He should NOT be alone,” she’d tell me.

My mother also had cancer at the time and was in the middle of her own four-year battle for life. She endured one round of chemo after another which brought on horrible mouth sores, incredible exhaustion, and some serious kidney problems. One gray and cold morning in January a few weeks before he died, my father called my mother.  It was just 7:30. “Are you doing anything?” he asked her. “Do you think you could come over?”  The last thing my mother wanted to do was dress, summon the energy to scrape her car of snow and ice, and drive the few miles to my father, who was lying alone on the couch in his house. But she did. She sat with him for hours until the hospice nurse came while he alternately dozed and roused. Later she would tell me that she thought he had been afraid he was going to die that morning and he was afraid to be alone. My mother. Class act.

During the last weeks of my father’s life, he asked for parsnips. My angel mother scoured the grocery stores in town for some to make him. He reminisced about the macaroni and tomato juice soup he used to love. She made that too.   I helped her with the oyster stew he asked for.   She wasn’t feeling well but she directed its making from her couch in the living room. I delivered it to him and watched him slurp it down, grateful to my mother for being who she was. Class act.

After he died, my sister and I arranged for the funeral that his wife said she could not afford. We could not let him leave without a proper send off. My mother offered to host a buffet lunch afterwards.  Of course his wife was welcome.  His wife, I might add, is not a class act. Most people aren’t.

I think it all comes down to this. My mother was a class act because she was full of humanity. She acted consistently from a position of kindness and compassion even if she had plenty to be angry about. My mother simply did the right thing. Always.

I miss you, mom, every day. But the things that you did, the example that you set, guide me every day.  Happy mother’s day to my mom, the class act.