I never called her
mom. I always called her Kay. She didn’t like it but I didn’t care. Kay was a decent woman, something I did not
accept until after I had left the projects where we lived. She had worked every day of her life from the
age of 15, when she was forced to quit high school to help out the family, a
decision she regretted most of her life, the reason she pushed her kids to stay
in school. She worked second shift in a
candy factory for over twenty-two years.
We only saw her on the weekends.
As a kid, I resented, at times hated, her. She was never around. Even when she was she wasn’t very
nurturing. She spent most of her time
bitching about bills and the lack of money, making me lie to bill collectors when
they would call. Worse, she was
emotionally unstable and a pain in the ass.
I can’t recall how many times I cleaned up the mess she would make
during dinner when something would piss her off and she would throw her plate
against the wall. She chased more than
one of us around with a knife threatening to kill us. She smoked Pall Malls like a chimney and she
got fat, really fat, so much so that when she would be pregnant, which seemed
like every year, you couldn’t tell it.
My resentment boiled over during the last of her pregnancies when I said
to her face, “I hope your baby dies.” I
was only 10. Luckily I lived to see 11
(and my sister is now almost 50). As a
teenager, I never brought girlfriends around to meet her because she
embarrassed me.
My resentment subsided
somewhat on my 18th birthday.
I was about to leave for the Air Force and she felt it was time for me
to learn the family secrets, while I drank a beer and she a whiskey
sour. “You always asked me why I never
went to church with you even though I made you go. Well, it’s because I am not welcome
there. You see, your father was married
before to a woman named Marilyn. He
divorced her for good reason but that didn’t matter to the priest. They would not let us get married in the
church without an annulment. He was a
real jerk. Who the hell has that kind
of money? Why should I even have to pay
it? Your father could take the
sacraments but not me. I was the one who
married a divorced man.” “What a screwed up system!” I said as I took another sip of my beer. “Why didn’t you just walk away from the
church—tell them to go to hell?” “Because I am a good Catholic!” she
replied. “I had a responsibility to make
sure that all of my kids made their Confirmation. Once that happened, then I had done my duty
and you were on your own.” When I left, I began to
see her in a different light.
Eventually Kay’s poor
health habits caught up with her. She
developed high blood pressure, double hernias, and adult-onset diabetes which
forced her to take disability leave. Her
weight had ballooned up to over two hundred and fifty pounds. She hadn’t slept lying down for several years
due to high blood pressure. She didn’t
like taking insulin every day. Yet she
realized that if she was ever going to see all of her children grow up, she
needed to take care of her health. My
oldest sister Kathy, a nurse, had told me she was doing better. She started eating right, took her insulin regularly,
and her weight had dropped some. She
still smoked unfiltered cigarettes, but not as many.
All that changed in 1976
when my brother, Bobby, committed suicide two days before Christmas. In the death of her son—her most worrisome
and troubled child—a big part of her had died.
I still hear the words Kay cried when she heard about the police prying
my brother’s hands off the steering wheel after he shot himself in the
face: “It isn’t supposed to be this way.
Kids should always outlive their parents.”
In my phone calls home after returning to school, I sensed that she was slowly
losing hope and her will to live, even though she still had two children at
home. She smoked more, took her insulin
sporadically, and stopped caring about her weight. Eleven months later, at the age of fifty-four
and a weight of three hundred and eleven pounds, she suffered a heart
attack. In the ambulance taking her to
the hospital, her heart stopped. It took
well over four minutes to revive her, and her brain suffered irreversible and
extensive damage. After ten days in a
coma, her huge bulk heaving to the rhythm of the respirator that kept her
alive, my family chose to remove her from all life support. She died shortly thereafter.
At her funeral, I
wept. The sentiment expressed in that
old spiritual song now made sense to me:
“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.” Kay, like it is for many people who leave
home, was my connection to my family, to my sense of place, to the world from
which I came. Her death threatened those
connections. Even more, I wept because her
death cut short any hope I had of developing a deeper, more mature adult
relationship with her, the kind of relationship I see so many sons have with
their mothers, my son has with his. But
most of all, her death meant that I would never have the opportunity to see her
reaction when upon visiting her on Mother’s Day, I would look into her eyes and tell her, “I love you, Mom.” After all, I
never called her mom. I chose to call
her Kay, a choice I regret every second Sunday of May.
