Musings of a Midlife Mama and Other Stories

I blame Molly’s ruptured appendix for her leaving me.

I blame that infected inconsequential sac located between the small and large intestine for Molly moving 600 miles away from home to go to Sacramento State. 

Follow me:

If Molly hadn’t had appendicitis on her field trip in second grade…if she hadn’t puked in the bushes near where the bus was parked, where her classmates could see her…if the bus driver hadn’t yelled at her to make sure she didn’t dirty his bus with her vomit…if she didn’t lay ill in my bed for four days while Bill was in Philadelphia for business…if I hadn’t taken her to Dr. Anderson’s after four days and if he hadn’t told me to get in my car and take her to Children’s Hospital…if they hadn’t admitted her after diagnosing a ruptured appendix, performed an appendectomy and told us she had to stay  in the hospital for seven days while they pumped antibiotics into her system to kill all the bacteria…if from that moment on Molly couldn’t imagine leaving my side the way I’d been in the hospital with her…maybe if Bill and I hadn’t separated and then divorced around this time…if she hadn’t gotten adhesions, scar tissue, from her appendectomy a year later…if Molly hadn’t panicked every day at school (What if I have to go to the bathroom?  What if I start throwing up and can’t stop?  What if I lose control the way I did in second grade?)… if she hadn’t sat rigid in her classrooms, stoic, focusing on the teacher (What is he saying?) and not concentrating on the fact she had to pee or go to the bathroom… if she could have asked for a hall pass…if she hadn’t had a full blown panic attack in eleventh grade while she watched a film about Hiroshima…if she hadn’t gone to a therapist and talked about the what ifs (What if  my appendix hadn’t burst?  What if my parents hadn’t divorced?) and the whys (Why me?  Because I’m a bad person.  I deserved all this.)… if Molly hadn’t gotten well, strong, made homecoming court, and won Best Personality Senior Standout,  and if she hadn’t come to me and said, “I’m not going to San Diego State.  I’m going to Sacramento State because I have to prove to myself I can do it.”

If Molly hadn’t had a ruptured appendix, would she have stayed closer to home?

Read the first chapter of HOLDING ON AND LETTING GO: A MOTHER’S STORY.

Mabel Dodge Luhan, Me & Dorothy Brett (1938)

My new best friend is someone who died the year before I was born.  Her name is Mabel Dodge Luhan.  Here’s the thing about my BFF.  In 1917, at age 38, Mabel Ganson Evans Dodge Sterne, moved to Taos, New Mexico with her third husband.  She left behind her privileged life in New York and Europe as a salon hostess, wealthy patron to the arts and spokeswoman for the East’s avante-garde. When she arrived in Taos, she said, “My life broke in two right then, and I entered into the second half, a new world that replaced all the ways I had known the others, more strange and terrible and sweet than any I had ever been able to imagine.”  

I sat down with my best friend in the lovely kitchen of her adobe home.  The sprawling house is situated on a quiet road near the town of Taos and butted up against the Taos Pueblo, the original home of her fourth (and final husband), Tony Luhan.  The kitchen is warmed by the kiva fireplace and the peachy colors of the stucco.  Southwestern tile and vegas complete the feel of the room.  The scent of pinon and sage fill the room.  Mabel and I sit at one end of the long oak kitchen table over cups of tea.

Me: Why Taos, Mabel?

Mabel: I followed Maurice, my third husband, who is a painter, to Santa Fe.  He knew I would fall in love with the landscape, with the Indians, and the simplicity of the life.   He said to me, “Do you want an object in life? Save the Indians, their art-culture–reveal it to the world!

I was curious about Taos.  I’d heard it was uncorrupted by human intervention.  And when I arrived it was like “the dawn of the world.”  When I arrived in Taos after the day long horse and buggy ride, I knew I was home.

Me: Home?  Hadn’t you lived in a lovely villa in Italy and wonderful apartments in New York?

Mabel: [Waves her hand dismissively at me.] Those places, those things, didn’t mean anything to me.  It was the utopia of the Taos desert, the spirit of the people.  After World War I, our society was spiritually bankrupt.  Everyone around me was about things, possessions, status, and I felt empty.  My reaction to New Mexico was this, ” There was no disturbance in the scene, nothing to complicate the forms, no trees or houses, or any detail to confuse one.  It was like a  simple phrase in music or a single line of poetry, essential and reduced to the barest meaning.”

Me: Didn’t you feel scared to leave the known for the unknown?  The civilized for the uncivilized according to the times?

Mabel: [Laughs] Never.  I don’t know what is with women, especially middle aged women who should know better.  What are you so frightened of to try something different?  Why can’t you carve your own paths?  Stop being followers! Why do you hold on to ideas, to possessions, to a life that doesn’t work anymore?  Death is knocking on the door.  Live.  Live life.

Me:  It’s a scary proposition to do something different from everyone else, especially when you have children.  You should act and be a certain way.

Mabel: [Pounds the kitchen table.] Who says?  I was married three times.  It wasn’t until I married Tony Luhan I knew I’d found my soulmate. 

Me: Soulmate? Maybe you didn’t try hard enough with the other three.  Just maybe you let go too soon…

Mabel: [She looks out the kitchen window out on to the Taos prairie, miles away is the big Taos Mountain.] Michelle, do you know I don’t remember a time, ever, that my mother kissed me?  I didn’t have affection, a connection, until Tony.  My life was filled with words, promises, when Tony came along there was a silence, and he only spoke words that truly mattered.  Once I asked him, “What is your religion?”  He told me, “Life.”  And that’s what we’re doing honoring our lives.  Honoring life. 

Me:  Describe what your favorite day is like.

Mabel: Tony and I ride our horses up near Blue Lake, the sacred lake.  I’m not allowed near it but we go up Taos Mountain as close as we can to the lake.  We build our teepee on the hillside under the desert willows and Rocky Mountain Junipers.  I breathe in the smell of sage, and for miles you can see the pink color of the Desert Sand Verbana and the yellow of the Blackfoot Daisy.  We build a fire of pine, and sometimes we talk and other times we lay on the desert grass and look up at the moon.  In the morning, we eat a breakfast of eggs, flatbread and canned sausages. 

Me: Sounds simple…

Mabel: Exactly.

Read “Edge of Taos Desert”  by Mabel Dodge Luhan and catch the second half of my interview with Mabel Dodge Luhan in the upcoming weeks.

What woman do you admire, alive or not, fictional or real, middle of life or not, brave or bitchy?  Why do you admire her?

Molly (age 14 mos) and Grandma Shirley

In memoriam of Shirley Zive.

“Mom passed away today,” my ex-husband said over the phone.

“What?” I sank to the closest available chair. “I was supposed to go up there this weekend. I was going to sit with her and Herb…I was supposed to–”

“Don’t worry about one day,” Bill said. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is how much you meant to her. Over the last seven months, we spoke a lot about all the good times and memories of you and our, our, time together. Molly and Kelly. She loved you.”

Lymphoma. Fuck cancer. Shirley Zive, the woman who hadn’t taken an aspirin or nap in the twenty-eight years I’d known her, had been beaten by cancer. The woman who sewed tiny American Doll clothes for her five oldest granddaughters and made a feast for a party of twenty at a moment’s notice and then cleaned up the mess as if it never had happened (unlike my days and months of finding flour on counters, grease left on stove burners, and left opened cans in the refrigerator from cooking a family dinner) had passed away after seven months of battling lymphoma. Shirl, who went to the gym four days a week, had gotten down to ninety pounds and was confined to bed during her last month of life. Fuck cancer.

Shirley was my second mom. I met Bill at eighteen at San Diego State, and followed him to L.A. when he got a job. We lived with his parents for a number of months before I found a place to live. Over the next three years, I moved in and out of Shirley and Herb’s house. What I remember most is Shirley. After working all day at  B of A, a job she disliked immensely, she would make dinner for the four of us every night with a smile. She was funny like Edith Bunker. She was Gracie Allen to Bill’s George Burns. She was the straight (wo)man but she was no dummy. She was as smart as a whip.

During the last month of her life, she slept in the TV room in a hospital bed which was next door to the bedroom she’d shared with Herb for 54 years. One night, when it was Marianne’s, the younger sister’s, night to stay with her parents, she and Herb lay on the bed in the master bedroom.

“I never noticed how comfortable this bed is,” Marianne said.

“Yeah, it is comfortable,” Herb said.

From the next room, Shirl said, “Hey, don’t go all John and McKenzie Phillips on me.”

I’ve never been good with endings. This became more evident when Molly went off to Sacramento State a couple of years ago. For the year surrounding Molly’s departure, I mourned what we’d been. We’d been a mother and daughter so close she’d called me her best friend. Molly had been a daughter who rarely slept anywhere else but home because it was her favorite place to be. How could I accept a new relationship, an irrevocably changed relationship, now that she was six hundred miles away from me?

I was wrecked. But even at the time, I realized how over the top I was about Molly leaving for college, a natural transition for most healthy teenagers. I started to write my memoir, HOLDING ON AND LETTING GO: A MOTHER’S STORY to figure it out. And by page two I had my answer. Thanks Dad! I’m nine years old. Dad has taken a job in Oakland, six hundred miles away from where Mom, Marcia, Mark and I live in Pacific Beach. This is dad’s fifth career in almost as many years. On Sunday, the day he always leaves back to Oakland, I sit in the back of the Christ the King Catholic Church. While everyone is singing and shouting amens, I have a stomach ache because I don’t want to cry. Why does Dad have to go away? Will I ever see him again? Each goodbye feels final. I learned the feeling of abandonment early. My dad was an alcoholic throughout my childhood. It always felt like he was saying goodbye.

Admittedly my sensor is off. I can’t tell the difference between until next time and never again. Death is surely the latter. But I know plenty of people who see this as a transition, like an adult child going off to college. Over Molly’s two years away in Sacramento, I’ve learned to embrace–no, that’s not the right word–I’ve learned to accept our changed relationship. I’ve learned to appreciate our time together and our relationship which is built on the past and looks to the future.

But how can I accept Shirley’s death? I can’t sew to save my life. I won’t bake cookies from the “Mrs. Fields Best Cookie Cookbook Ever!” that Kelly has inherited from Shirley. I’m sure I will continue to make family dinners and find the remnants months later. But to honor Shirley, I will remember how precious this all is. I will take more time talking with my kids. I will linger. I won’t get stuck in the past but instead remember our good times and live in the moment. I will count myself lucky for being one of Shirley Zive’s daughters.

And oh, yeah, fuck cancer!

“Mom, I have to interview you for  Senior English,” Kelly said.

“Okay, I can do it tomorrow–”

“No, Mom, now.”

I looked up from my computer.  I’d been trying to meet another impossible deadline.

“It’s due tomorrow,” Kelly said.

“Of course it is.” I closed my computer. “Kelly, you know–”

“Please, Ma, lets just do it.” She flung herself in the chair opposite me and pulled out a rumpled piece of paper. I resisted the urge to ask how long she’d had this assignment. Judging from the paper it had been a while.

“Okay,” Kelly said. “What is the one piece of advice you’d give me as I head out as an adult into the world?”

Oh, god, I forgot. Time. Passing. Too. Quickly. Here I was with another daughter who in a matter of months would be graduating from high school.

“Honey, do we have to talk about this now?” I pretended to wipe a tear away. “You know I’m not good at this letting go stuff.”

“Come on,” Kelly said.

“Okay. Okay,” I said. “Give me a minute.”

Kelly tapped her pen on the table. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Times up,” she said. “Give it to me.” Her pen was poised.

This had to be good. This single piece of advice had to carry her through her transition from childhood to adulthood. This single piece of advice had to make up for all the lessons I hadn’t taught Kelly over her almost eighteen years with me. And I’m sure at this juncture there were a ton of these missed opportunities.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

“MOM.”

“When life gives you lemons, turn them into lemonade.”

Kelly rolled her eyes. “Really, that’s the best you can do? The lemons-lemonade quote.” She started to write it down.

“Wait. That’s not it.” I started to sweat.

“If you love something, set it free.”

“Oh, God, Mom. Really?”

I rubbed my sweaty palms on my jeans. Think. Think.

I sang, “Kiss today goodbye. And point me–”

“I am not writing that down. What does that even mean?”

“It’s lyrics from ‘Chorus Line.’”

“I don’t even know–”

“It was a very popular musical when I was in high school.”

“This is 2009. Not 1809.”

“Funny,” I said. “Very funny.”

“Never mind. I’ll just make something up.” Kelly gathered her binder and papers together.

“Wait. Okay. I’m ready.” And this is the story I told her.

During my first visit with Molly at Sac State, I’d begun unbraiding myself from the past and future and started to appreciate the present.  What choice did I have? Oh, sure, I could waste more time kicking my ass with my guilt over the mistakes I’d made and how I’d parented throughout Molly and Kelly’s childhoods.  I could remain on the ledge of the future. On that visit, in the moment, I began to see a life where I let go of my chronic bombardment of what ifs…What if Molly goes to college and she gets into drugs, moves to San Francisco and begs for money on the street? What if Kelly never likes school? Then what? What if Jack continues his obsession with guns and wars? What if…I’d started to live in the present. What if I appreciated that today Molly was safe and happy in Sacramento, and I was more than okay with David, Kelly and Jack in San Diego.  What if I was content.

I looked at Kelly across the table from me.  Her eyes seemed glazed over.   

“So you get it?” I asked.

“Uh?”

“The moral of the story?”  I asked.  “The one piece of advice I’d give you? You get it, right?”

I stared into her dark brown eyes.

“Yeah.  Yeah.  Carpe Diem.”

“Yes,” I said. “Seize the day.”

“Why didn’t you just say so?”

What piece of advice have you given your child as she left for college? Or if you don’t have children or they’re not that old, what would you tell your imaginary graduating senior?  What was the best piece of advice you were given upon graduating high school?  To leave comments, click on to “Read Users’ Comments.”

When Molly, my oldest, was going off to college, people would say, “Don’t you have two others at home.”  This response always surprised me probably just as much as my fretting over my first leaving the nest perplexed them.  Yes, I had two younger children at home.  At the time Kelly was fifteen and Jack was five.  But so what?

Don’t get me wrong.  I love my two underage children, my two who remain home.  But I love all three of my children.  They are not interchangeable.   I have a mom and dad.  If my dad passed, I couldn’t imagine anyone coming up to me and saying, “Well, you still have a mom, don’t you?”

Seeing Molly off to college was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.  Click here to read more about how I “coped” with her leaving and how I let go…sort of.