Soul Mosaic

As I type the title of this post, I ask myself why I feel such love for my mother. Why am I no longer angry about the times she didn’t protect me or didn’t “turn around” to see what he was doing?

Painting by author

And most of all, why, at this point in my life, am I less angry with what Dad did to me, but still absolutely enraged at how he demeaned and abused her? The word “fury” comes to mind.

Watching all through my childhood years when he hit her, yelled at her, and no other adults in that house came to her aid…when the only thing I could do as a child was listen at the wall when he beat her in the bathroom, hoping he wouldn’t kill her — it was hell to witness. What more was it to be her?

There was only one time any of us stood up for her, and that was the day I saw her on the floor at his feet. I was in my late twenties; he had been at her downstairs. I heard her fall, and that was the last straw for me. Fearful for her and raging at him, when I saw her on the floor at his feet, I lost it. Despite my fear of him, I yelled that he needed help. And then he nearly choked me.

It was then that I knew I had to leave. I knew she would never leave him, and I would be destroyed if I stayed. But to this day I remember how much I wanted to rip him apart for demeaning the woman who gave me life, and I was glad that for once, finally, I stepped up for her.

The eulogy I wanted to give

When she died, I delivered her eulogy. There was so much I wanted to say, to put in that text. And I did do a good job of honoring her gifts and highlighting her personality. But I left the elephant in the room untouched. It didn’t seem like it was the right time or place to bring up “all those things she had endured at his hands.”

Since then, I regretted that I stopped short of saying all I wanted to. And I always wished I could do it over and give her the eulogy she deserved. So now that I come to the part of this book to talk about Mom, maybe I can do that.

The “Teshuvah trip”

I didn’t even know what I should be looking for or what to expect on this trip. It’s like going into a grocery store, uncertain of what you need or what you may find. So you just start looking around and flinging everything into the cart that you guess “might” be useful.

Then, when you get home, you find you have bags and bags FULL of things. So many things that you have to spend a fair bit of time just unpacking it all, then sorting it, before you can even consider “Is any of this useful…and…how?”

This post is the “unpacking.” I collected so many bits in the journal I kept on the trip. I’ll let those entries do most of the talking in this post. I’ll “sort and prioritize it all” in the next one.

“Landing…back in time

Looking out the window, it struck me that Connecticut always looks the same when we return: Thick bank of clouds below…as we descended, so much so that the plane got very dark inside…It was the familiar gray, bleak outside, the usual “Connecticut gray” overcast….”

As soon as I stepped from the plane into the building, “it was like stepping right back into ‘then’ as if it was all still waiting there….Like a radio that had been turned off, but as soon as I walked in there, the radio came on and resumed from where it left off.”

Walking through the terminal, I felt like I had stepped into a time warp. I was in the present, but at the same time, I definitely was NOT.

As usual on any afternoon, my Mother was preparing a full meal for dinner, including a homemade dessert. Dad expected full dinners, including desserts, with his meal. While store-bought” Oreos were allowed for snacks because Dad liked them and he brought home the paycheck, desserts had to be homemade.

On this particular afternoon, Mom had two cake layers cooling on top of the stove, and they gave off the sweetest vanilla aroma that I couldn’t miss as I ran into the kitchen. I stopped near the stove to examine them because they smelled so good, and that’s when I spotted the problem.

Poor Mom! She always worked so hard to make all her desserts from scratch, usually from recipes out of the red binder — her Betty Crocker cookbook. But today, looking at the cake tops, I felt bad at how they were turning out. That’s when the perfect idea popped into my head for how to help her and fix the problem.

Happily, I set to work with a knife. A few minutes later, I was almost done when Mom came into the room. She stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes wide in horror, and she yelled, “What are you doing?!”

“I’m helping you!”

I pointed to the piles of cake chunks I’d cut off the top of each tier – the uneven bumps that, to my mind, marred the smooth surface.

“The cakes were all bumpy, so I figured I’d cut them off and make it all smooth for you!”

My mother stood there, staring from me to the cakes, then back again, as she struggled to process my logic. For several moments, she said nothing. I wasn’t sure what was wrong. This was not the reaction I expected.

Then, she took in a deep breath then let her shoulders drop as she exhaled slowly, and said quietly, “It’s okay. Go play. I’ll fix this.”

Now, many years later, I realize the artful skill it must have taken her to spread frosting onto those two cake layers whose tops were almost totally crumbs….

**

I love looking at pictures of my Mother from her early years. She was beautiful and had a radiant joy that seemed to burst out from within.