Gilead Revisited

A friend of mine emailed me a few days ago to let me know that Marilyn Robinson, the author of my current favorite novel, Gilead, was going to be on the Diane Rehm Show this morning.  I just started to listen to it and decided that, as I am getting sick and not feeling too upbeat tonight, this isn't the time.  Marilyn Robinson had begun by talking about how the main characters had just come to her: an old father and a young son, whom the father would not live to see grow up.

That storyline and its themes of loss, anticipated and sorely felt, is part of why the book appeals to me so much, I'm sure.  My mother was a young mother who never got to see her children grow up.  So young, in fact, when she died, that I was too young to give any thought to what it might have been like to grow up with a mother.  Oh, I eventually acquired Cinderella's stepmother, but she didn't count insofar as the idea of growing up with a mother is concerned and, after she, too, died, I abandoned thinking of my father's wives as mothers.  (I care deeply for my current stepmother, who is dying now, but I was taken aback when my father referred to me as her daughter a few nights ago.  I haven't thought of myself as a woman's daughter since I was seven.)

As a child growing up, I never had and never expected a mother to talk with me about my ideas, my dreams, my periods, my dates, my schooling, my prom, my career, my wedding, my pregnancies.  No Gilmore Girls there.  I can remember a couple of my friends in law school getting into huge fights with their mothers over wedding plans.  I was dumbfounded.  Did mothers have anything to say about the lives of 25-year-old daughters?

I know better now.  I'm sorry to say that my family was so successful in its grief-saturated elimination of my mother's memory from our lives that I didn't think much about her until two babies landed in my arms.  I will never forget looking down at them when they were a couple of days old, after the grogginess of my in-a-haze-of-drugs delivery had worn off, and thinking, "Oh my God.  There was someone in my life who felt this way about me."  I had no idea.

Ever since then, I have thought of my mother often.  All those events that I got to witness and participate in that she missed:  Kids learning to swim.  Kids going off to camp.  Kids at their first recitals.  Kids with the chickenpox. Kids running up and down soccer fields.  Kids in plays.  Kids struggling against heartbreak.  Kids making terrible mistakes.  Kids achieving triumphant successes.  Kids getting on planes without me and getting off planes to come back to me.  Kids graduating.  Kids calling and emailing aboout college successes and missteps.

One day, several years ago, we were all tubing together on a narrow and gentle portion of the French Broad River in North Carolina.  My oldest son, who was about twelve at the time, had a bowl-cap of blond hair that looked like white gold in the sunlight as his inner tube made circles in the water.  

Another time, a few years earlier, his younger brother had stood at the edge of a small pool and waterfall in the Adirondacks, screeching at the top of his terrified little lungs, "My body wants to jump in, but my mind won't let it!" 

Last week my daughter, a high school senior, was stretched out on my bed for a late-night conversation and, as I wondered aloud whether I had become a bit too lax in my attentiveness to her evening whereabouts, said, "I wouldn't worry, Mom; you've got a firm grip."

Thousands of moments like that. Some terrible, some good, some beyond any description of glorious.  I am SO glad that I got this life, that I have gotten as far as being a very middle-aged mother of almost adult (defined loosely) children.  I had no idea.