Today is Thursday. I've been on the Cape for four days, attending to my Mom and spending time with many of my siblings, most of whom live down here.
The picture I've posted here is of my Mom at age 5, in the middle between her sister Barbara and her brother Robert. Yesterday, Mom's connections to this world were visibly faded. She is shutting her children out, a process we respect because we know we keep her in this world and she can't stay any longer.
Last night, my sister and two of my brothers sat with my sister's husband—a wonderful addition to our family—and the newest member of our lot, my one-year-old nephew Christian, in the lobby of the nursing home where Mom now lives. As we gently conversed and played with the baby, I realized how much we comfort one another by our presence, how much my siblings matter to me, and how our relationships came to be.
Mom has always been the hub of our wheel. She was what we now call a stay-at-home Mom at a time when Mom and home were synonymous. Her brood—me, four brothers, my sister and then two more brothers—were a very active lot. With so many, we could and did have enough to make two teams to play whiffle ball, kick ball, dodge ball (I'm sure you'll notice the ubiquitous presense of round objects in our play) not to mention tag, hide and seek, and anything else we could think up.
When I was ten, we moved to a house with a small hill in the backyard, enough to sled on in winter. We also explored and figured out a back way through the woods to the football field in back of the high school that featured an even bigger hill. Dad got us a six-person toboggan, the biggest he could find, and we dragged that along.
At the top of the big hill, we'd pile on, joined by other kids in the neighborhood, and whip down that hill, screaming and spilling off the side along the way.
And, of course, we never went back inside until our mittens were soaked and stiff with the cold.
Now ranging in age from my 60 to my youngest brother's nearly 47, we all have different interests, different work, and sometimes very different opinions about the world. But we act and think amazingly alike when it comes to how we treat Mom, how we care for my newest nephew (who just turned one), and the great value we give to kindness.
We still tease and kid one another in ways that are now like muscle reflexes, gently laughing over jokes that share a common source.
And now that I am older—and hopefully somewhat wiser—I realize that much of this was Mom's doing. Not really an active, in-your-face doing but the ordinary, everyday doing that comes from loving your kids when you wake up in the morning and loving them when you go to bed at night.
I don't mean to make our childhood sound idyllic. It was far from that. I'm simply acknowledging the way that Mom knitted together a family that's still cohesive sixty years later.
We may shake our heads over some of the life choices our siblings have made from time to time but even over distance, time, and differences, we still care deeply for one another, and accept the differences because that's what Mom taught us to do just by being Mom.
That is Mom magic of the most powerful kind.
No comments:
Post a Comment