Three Moms

"What are you going to do with your one wild and wonderful life?" (Mary Oliver)

It's hard to imagine that my grandmother was 48 when I was born -- she always seemed old to me! -- but my first memories of her must date from when she was only a year or two beyond my age now. She loved long walks in the country and on the beach to look for birds, she loved music, and she loved to travel the world, almost always with a grandchild in tow.  My grandfather refused to board a plane or a boat, which restricted his choice of destination considerably.  At the age of 58, my grandmother shrugged her shoulders at his recalcitrance and took me on an experimental little jaunt: a week in Colonial Williamsburg.  Her final excursion, at the age of 80, was to Trinidad and Tobago to see tropical birds.  In between, she managed to hit most of Europe and much of Africa and Asia.  These days, she spends most of her time sitting in an assisted living apartment, barely able to see or hear.  Now 98, she has had a long and rich life, equally full of expansive joy and devastating sorrow, but these final years are sobering ones for her family as we observe the restrictions nature can impose on someone who liked to push the limits .

My mother had 70 fewer years to work with.  She died at the age of 28  in an automobile accident. She left to me neither her blond hair nor her lovely singing voice, both of which skipped a generation and reappeared in my daughter, but I like to think that she provided as a generous legacy her capacity for enjoyment and appreciation of other people.  She spent the entirety of her few years in southern Ohio, with the brief exception of a year in western Massachusetts and one in Florida, and took a genuine pleasure in others that filled her life with laughter and friendship.  When eight families, complete with large and hungry teenage males, crowd into our home for Christmas dinner, or when I manage a day in which I teach Orthodox Jewish students, attend a class taught by a Muslim imam at a Catholic university, and respond to e-mails for my Protestant church, I think: that's my mother, filling my life with everyone.

There's one other mother of whom I think every day: our son's French mom.  Our son spent his junior year of high school in Rennes, France, attending school as part of an American program, but living with a wonderful French family.  Marithe' was about to begin a year-long course in nursing home-administration as she mothered three teen-age boys.  A generous hostess and outstanding cook, she seemed easily able to slot our son in between her college-aged and middle-school boys.  It's a challenge to send a 17-year-old across the ocean for a year, and I lost plenty of sleep in the weeks before his departure, wondering what family life would be like for this child over whom I had so carefully watched every day. But when the rest of us arrived a few months later to a beautifully prepared Christmas Eve dinner and a table full of laughter and friendship, I could see that he had landed with the best mother in all of France.  I don't let a day go by without thinking of her with love and gratitude.

Happy Mother's Day!

Walked: 4 miles.