Good Night, Sleep Tight, Dream of Me

I know. I haven’t written anything in a while. And I’ve been back from Rhode Island for seven days. I haven’t written because I didn’t want to write the piece I had to write. How strange this is. There has been this narrative in me for a week and I couldn’t write anything else until I wrote it. But I didn’t want to write it. It is as if writing anything else would have been dishonest; to pretend that this thing I need to write doesn’t exist. I couldn’t write about Rhode Island or anything else because I cannot write about Rhode Island without writing about my mother. And writing about her is painful. My mother is 88 years old now and every year the aging process takes its toll. I watch this process with growing sadness and increasing respect for the woman she was and the woman she continues to be. My mother is 88 years old. She was born in 1918, the year WWI ended and the last year prior to 2004 that the Red Sox won the World Series. She was one of seven children and one of a set of twin girls. She and her sister (still living) have never lived more than five minutes from each other. They call each other everyday. And as they once shared the same womb, I suspect they share the same heart.

 

My mother lived through the Depression and saw widespread despair and poverty that you and I can only imagine. She was forced to leave school in the eighth grade to care for an ailing grandmother. She cried herself to sleep night after night because she loved school so much. But though her formal education stopped at age fourteen, she is one of the wisest and most intelligent women I know. She taught herself to play the piano. She could take kitchen appliances apart and put them back together again to make them work. Her practical ingenuity and problem solving skills rival those of MacGyver. She lived through WWII and married one of its Veterans. She worked at a time when sexual harassment had no name and its victims had no recourse but to tolerate it or leave their jobs. She left several. She married at age 32 and prior to her marriage she and her girlfriends would take week-long vacations toOld Orchard Beach in Maine.  She danced and dreamed. She gave birth to three children and had them at a time when mothers could not see their own children being born. She sewed our clothes and cooked our meals. And before it was fashionable to know about nutrition, she’d cook green leafy vegetables this many times a week and yellow ones that many times a week. We’d have red meat this many times a week and fish that many. We hardly ever had dessert unless it was Jell-O or homemade pudding. We had ONE junk food snack a week, on Saturday night. She’d buy the three-box pack of Cracker Jacks and my brothers and I would each get a box. And she’d ask us if she could have some of the peanuts. She had an accordion folder of envelopes in which she budgeted the precious pay my father brought home. She’d put a dollar a week in one envelope for shoes, and in another envelope a dollar for the dentist, another for life insurance and another for Christmas presents. Every night she’d sit the three of us in an overstuffed chair (I, inevitably on her lap) and read aloud.

 

She and I had a bedtime ritual of call and response. She’d say, “Good night.” I’d repeat it. She’d say, “Sleep tight.” I’d repeat. “Dream of me.” Repeat. I could not go to sleep unless we spoke these words to each other. Some nights I’d hug her neck to me so tightly and for so long, she’d ask me to let her go because her back would begin to hurt. When I was in the sixth grade she sewed three new school dresses for me. I’d wear one for two days and it would go into the wash. I’d wear another for two days and then it too would be washed. And so, this cycle until the New England weather required that I don snow pants to school. If I close my eyes, even now, I see the colors and patterns of those dresses and feel their touch; cranberry broadcloth, navy blue plaid cotton and the same plaid in red. Her sewing machine was always whirring. She made outfits for my Barbie. As a seamstress, I marvel now at the tiny sleeves, armholes and collars and the minute work and detail they required. When my daughter received her first Cabbage Patch doll, my mother made clothesfor it too; larger to be sure, but made with the same love.

 

She loved her Church and taught me to love it too. She is one of those Christians who rejects the letter of the law when it conflicts with its spirit. She lives her life as best she can according to how she understands the life and ethos of Jesus of Nazareth, even if her understanding of this seems contrary to the laws and doctrines of the Church. She prays everyday. She is a devout Catholic. And yet, fifteen years ago when I led a protest in front of the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul in the Diocese of Providence, she asked if she could come. She wanted to see “what it was all about.” In reality, I believe what she really wanted to know was her daughter and how this passion for religion had changed so, from participant to protestor. As she stood there in Cathedral Square, someone shoved a protest sign in her hands and there she stood in solidarity with us, or perhaps just with me.

 

To say that her grandchildren are her pride and joy is a statement that may trip too easily off the tongue and on the page so that the reader may not consider enough the profundity of it. Her grandchildren are her pride. They are her joy. And she realizes that to have had the opportunity and pleasure to have been such a large part of their childhoods is a circumstance that many grandparents no longer enjoy in this age when generations move apart. And during the years of all of our travels, she keeps a map of the United States posted on one of her walls and makes a mark every time one of us visits a new city. And so she tracks us, like a mother bear her cubs.

 

She is 88 years old and rides a stationary bike every day despite the pain in her knees from loss of cartilage and subsequent use of a cane. She knows it is the only way to maintain mobility and health. She walks to the drug store and the dollar store, flips her mattress, vacuums, sews her own pajamas and never forgets a birthday, though she sometimes forgets what she has told you three minutes ago.

 

When I left Rhode Island for South Carolina, I know that I broke her heart but after the tears she told me that I was “brave,” and had to live my life and do what was right for me. She tells me still that all she desires is my happiness. She cries when I visit and when I leave. For the eight years that I have lived in South Carolina I have called her every Sunday morning.  Sometimes we cry, but most often we laugh and share with each other the details of our weeks and of our lives. We share our losses and our triumphs, our mishaps and burdens, our joys and disappointments.

My mother is 88 years old. I am her only daughter. And it is Sunday morning.