TOUGH MOTHERS

My mother has been dead for almost twenty years.  She made this life possible by willing me enough money to buy the house.  “House” equals mother in one of those core life-metaphors we build language around.

My mother didn’t like housework.  She was an outdoor farm girl.  On Saturday she took the dust mop to the farthest bedroom, pushed out everything that was on the floor, did the same in the other bedroom and the bathroom, until there was a heap in the hallway, then pushed it all down the stairs and across the front room to the fireplace where she used a big kitchen match to burn it all, mostly under-bed mice of fuzz and paper.  She mopped the kitchen floor.  No dusting anywhere — bookshelves on every wall — but not much need since it was a wet climate where dust fell to the floor.

I’m into order but no particular cleanliness.  That is, I want things in their places so I can find them, but I don’t care about handprints on the door handles.  All my bookshelves are in the front room.  I really like my bathroom sink, an anomalous Victorian porcelain pedestal that cost $350 when I still had money,  to be both clean and in a certain order.  The soap, the toothbrush, the hand brush, are color-co-ordinated.  

My mother’s bathroom was tucked under the eaves, a strange shape without much space, and she never got it quite pleasing.  When she was dying, she couldn’t manage the stairs and we asked for a bedside “chair.”  The doctor was cautious:  “Why can’t she use the downstairs bathroom?”  He didn’t know there were houses with only one bathroom.  But he signed for the chair and soon it was irrelevant.

The bathroom window was small, but it was my mother’s conning tower.  She watched us through it to make sure we were still in the backyard.  When we got big enough to range farther, she kept a whistle to call us to come home to eat and go to bed.  In old age she said she thought her duty was to feed us, keep us clean, make us sleep, give us cough syrup, and know where we were.  Not to talk to us.  She was always puzzled that the social workers who used the glassed-in conference room for kid conferences talked to them so much.  (This was a low income school next to the Columbia River — some kids lived on boats and didn’t stay in one place.)  “What do they talk about?” she asked.

Maybe this is why I respond to the Lynda LaPlante series about the tough little cop who is shrewd about criminals but neglected his own son so much that the boy tortured and murdered swans until he finally got adult attention.  The cop partner, always a beautiful and ambitious woman, never really got any attention, could not form a bond with anyone.  There is never a successful character.  What would the story be about?

I made sure not to have children.  I struggled with my bowels, sometimes getting up at 3AM to sit on the pot.  I sat, chilled and wracked in the silent dark, and felt desperate and watched the red neon Fred Meyer sign at Walnut Park, blocks away, a shopping node, our first daring walk away from our block.

All three sibs were bound up like this, me the worst, lifelong.  They say it’s about managing water, that food is meant to be a slurry and then solidify by the water seeming through the intestinal walls, which is a matter of relaxation and confidence.  When we traveled in the Forties, we kids were required to poop in the unpopulated places among the sagebrush or tall grass.  I don’t know what my parents did.  I vividly recall things brushing my bare preschool bottom.  I was barely able to balance while squatting.

When I complained about the pain, my mother said briskly, “Wait until you have a baby!  That’s a whole lot worse!”  She assured me the docs would give me a gas anesthetic that smelled like piney woods.  She said that about my tonsillectomy, too, but I had ether and it was terrible, like dying.

On my father’s side the women were dainty and fragile and protected.  On my mother’s side there were no men — they were always gone.  My grandfather was a contractor and traveled to the building projects.  My mother stayed at the prune orchard where there was neither enough water or light to make a profit.  There were four daughters, but one died in a car accident with her sister driving, so then they pulled in their cousin who lived nearby and there were four girls again.  They were resourceful co-conspirators in pinafores, but they all had bib overalls to wear for chores.

Remember that Aussie woman whose baby was stolen out of its bed, leaving no trace, and the law decided that she herself did the heinous act because she didn’t fall apart, hysterically crying?  That’s the way my mother and I are — tough, presenting stoic endurance.  Cops are like that.  We are like cops — our job is keeping order.

Now I have to check on the cats.  The grandmother grew up under a stack of windfall out in the back until she decided to come in the house.  She gave birth to the mother against my side while I slept.  The mother is the only surviving kitten from that set.  She had her four kittens the same way but I drowned two of them.  I think a kitten should always have a sib for sleep and play.  At night the two big cats and the two little kittens all sleep on top of me.  Just now they came rushing hot-footed across this keyboard and piled into the sunshine on the bed I made in front of the window next to me.  

Thimble has a stubborn respiratory infection so his mother is washing his eyes and nose so he can breathe and see.  Thread had crusty eyes but I cured them with mail-order fish antibiotics.  I can’t afford the vet.  Diurnally, in the twilights of the day-cycle, the mother begins to call her kittens — throop, throop, throop — in order to feed them.  They’re still nursing, since they’re half-grown and half-programmed.  She brings them a cat toy, a metallic bug with feelers.  They bat around the flannel mice, but they don’t try to eat them.  This poor bug takes many wounds, but it's armored.