Mother's Day; What do you thank mom for?

Still down with a bug; this is a repost from 2006 – Have a good one!

My birth mother and I had our rough times, and they’re not worth expounding on, but she was an interesting person. A child of the depression (she had me kinda late in life – I’ve always been a surprise in one way or another), and of deaf-mute parents, she grew up an only child given many responsibilities at an early age. She was the polar opposite of the generation of children coming up, whose parents seem intent on infantilizing them and not “burdening” them with cares. Let no day of our darlings be the slightest bit dark, seems to be the Grand Theme of Parenting for the 21st century.

Anyway, my birth mother – let’s call her Alice, because she always liked that name – was shuttled around from parents to grandparents to willing aunties, pretty much at the whim of her fun-loving, hard-partying parents. Don’t be fooled, just ’cause some folks can’t hear or speak, don’t think they can’t trash a joint and start a brawl for the sheer fun of it. My experience at one of my grandparent’s “quiet” parties remains one of the most raucous, slightly terrifying memories of my childhood. I recall a man tumbling head first into the snow and giggling, laying back and cradling a bottle of something aged and warming as he began to “sing” in a most God-awful voice, and two jolly men taking a sledgehammer to one of the walls in our small house, because my mother had once mentioned to them that she wished she had a built-in bookcase. Under the spell of the poteen, starting up such a project in the wee small hours seemed perfectly logical, and generous, to them.

We did get the bookcase, eventually, out of necessity. I mean…we didn’t have a wall, anymore…

Growing up, little Alice lived poor with her parents – in a cold-water flat in Coney Island – or slightly better-off with the grandmother, a German woman who had been disowned by her well-off family for daring to marry a hardscrabble, fast-talking, kinda-not-really-respectable shanty Irishman who always had something cooking, but never made a dime. Caught between a boozy, cheerful but silent world and the grim-but-educated alternative, Alice became one of those quintessentially Irish loudmouths who “needed her noise” and who adored multi-syllabic pronouncements so much that she seemed to spit them out in capital letters. As a kid, I would listen to her speak and imagine the words surrounding her head in a bubble, as in a cartoon, and they seemed to me to spark and burst and careen around the room. She would never use abbreviations or short-cuts. If she sent me to the store for a Nabisco product, I was told to buy the cookies from the NATIONAL BISCUIT COMPANY. She despised the INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE and had friends in the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE. She knew nothing from ABC, NBC or CBS -why call them that when the COLUMBIA BROADCASTING SYSTEM just sounded so much better!

From her mouth, words became alive – they were her playthings, and when you consider the silence and non-verbal aspects of her early childhood, that’s not really surprising.

She gave me that – the love of words – of the very sound of words – the ability to take delight in a well-turned phrase or a crafty sentence, the ability to sense something beyond vowels and consonants, something that sounds like real music and gives almost as much delight. Drunk or sober, angry or gleeful, the stuff that poured from her mouth would routinely stop me in my tracks for the sheer glory of her word usage. I reveled in her immense vocabulary, her flawless diction. If some surprising, or obscene, words occasionally found their way into her soliloquies, even those were rendered inoffensive thanks to the plucky, affectionate way she inserted them.

She was very good at picking up other languages, which I always found fascinating. I suspect that having grown up, as it were, “bi-lingual” – her second language being sign language (or perhaps that was her first) she had a knack for translation and application. Her dream-job, she once confessed to me, would have been working as a translator at the UNITED NATIONS (not, of course, the UN). I can see where that would have seemed a glorious vocation, to her.

She didn’t give me my faith,not wholly; that came by way of herself, plus a grandmother, some nuns, the BVM (believe me, she grabbed me by the hand and led me to Christ) and even via my husband. The best thing Alice ever did for me, faith-wise was to leave me alone when I abandoned it, to let me find my way back on my own. I’ve always been grateful to her for that, and I managed to thank her for it, before she died. I thanked her, too, for not stopping me when I deemed it in my best interest to leave home at an early age. It was the right call.

She was smart; not well-educated, but world-smart and people-smart. She loved to read but I always gathered that her books were bought less for entertainment value than for the culling of new words and phrases, for new ways in which to celebrate and employ human language and to endlessly, endlessly use her tongue.

I am not much of a speaker, myself. As a kid I had a stammer that took years to get over, and even now, if I am particularly exhausted, that will return. While I can certainly talk a blue-streak around friends, among strangers I am almost morbidly silent and unwilling to draw attention to myself. But I do love words – I love to read them, write them, hear them – speak them, if I feel safe. I love moving through a New York City street and hearing the rumble of words spewing forth from a thousand different voices. I love visiting my husband’s Italian relatives and hearing the odd pidgeon-talk they (second generation Sicilians) use amongst themselves, a weird mixture of Italian and Yiddish and New Yorkese. I love how, when they get excited, they speak to me in an English whose syntax is otherworldly.

I love sitting in a restaurant and hearing Hindu or Spanish or French or Urdu at the next table; even though I don’t understand a word of it, I find I often comprehend the inflection, the humor or urgency or sadness beneath the words, and that makes me feel connected to humanity in a chummy way. It reminds me that beyond our differences of expression and culture, our life-experiences are, for the most part, pretty similar. We love, we celebrate, we mourn, we sneer, we harangue…(what’s more fun to listen to than a Asian-Indian mother giving her teenager a tongue-lashing? Almost nothing!) I may prefer, in the end, to hear it all in what Churchill called, “that noble thing, the English language,” but I believe my mother gave me an appreciation for the spoken word (and for tones and structure and diction) that transcends a narrow regard.

Before she died, I wrote Alice a note, thanking her for all the words I’d received from her, the stupid ones, the slurred ones, the brilliant ones. “Without intention, without realizing it, you have handed me my profession on a platter – amid all the coal mined in our time together, there have been these diamonds, and I will not forget.”

You don’t have to have a perfect relationship with a parent in order to find something for which to be grateful, even if you are only grateful for a bad example which kept you on a straighter path. Today, I think I will lift a foamy Guinness to my birth-mother, Alice the Tonguerunner. Alice the Downshouter, Alice the Thesaurus, Alice the Wordgleaner.

Thanks, Mom. And Happy Mother’s Day.

UPDATE: neo-neocon has a charming look at her mother and grandmother and herself, and some thoughts on genetics and heredity.