MomOir

It's taken awhile, but I eventually came around to listening to my mother.

On a spring day while I was growing up, my mother would say things like: “Doesn’t the air smell wonderful?”

And I would hear her and think “Who the hell notices the smell of air? And if so…Why???

It just seemed to me, as a young person, with so much going on in my busy little life, that there could be nothing less important than stopping to notice the SMELL OF AIR, or discussing air quality.

It had no place on my radar, and it absolutely confounded me that it had room on hers.

But, it turns out that this is one of those things that, with time, instead of taking it for granted, it is something you tend to notice more. Because … you know the first time you open the window at the beginning of spring, when winter is finally, mercifully behind us? Yep, that’s the smell.

My mother and I were very different, which made it hard for us to relate to each other.

Mom was the youngest of nine children raised in the Depression without their father, mostly by her seven older sisters. So almost everything about her was completely opposite of me: I was oldest child with only one sibling, I never had any “hand-me-down” clothes and likely had too much parental attention.

Mom seemed like an odd creature to me. In fact, I was surprised when a friend once told me that she said she absolutely treasured everything her mother said. Because many of the things my mother said just seemed absurd to me at the time.

So, while I may have heard what my mother said, it’s taken most of a lifetime for me to listen.

For instance:

• Now, as I face the daily mind-boggling question of WHAT SHOULD WE EAT FOR DINNER TODAY? my mom’s favorite answer seems almost brilliant. When I’d start getting hungry and ask her, “What’s for dinner?”, she’d offer her best recipe, which was:

“If you’re hungry, you’ll eat it”. 

 And I admit that I offered my kids that same dinner option more than once.

• Or when considering a future plan, Mom’s answer was always the “We’ll see”.

This one used to drive me nuts. We’ll see WHAT? I didn’t understand why she always hedged her bets. We’ll see if something better comes along? Or we might misplace our calendar and completely lose track of our days?

And yet, the weather might not cooperate, or someone might get sick, or any of a hundred things can change a plan, and you just have to be ready to roll with it.

Becoming a mother myself helped me get better at this. Because even if you say “Yes” in the moment, and mean it -- the long view, ultimately, is “Who really knows? Will a new fault line appear beneath us? Will aliens land?

I mean, even AI can’t predict the future.

So go ahead, make your plans, count me in… unless something comes up.

• In her later years, Alzheimer’s made Mom’s opinions more abbreviated --yet she still managed to get her point across. She’d listen to a situation we described, and without mincing words would exclaim “OH BS!”.

Which might be one of best all-around, and most useful phrases she left with us.

But in the end, Mom had the final, and I mean final word.

The morning after her death, I was getting ready to do the things you need to do after that kind of thing happens. Reaching for my watch, I noticed it had stopped at a curious time.

My watch had stopped at 8:45, precisely the time of Mom’s death. I just stared at it, realizing: There are a lot of options in the various combinations of the 12 hours and 60 minutes printed on its face when it could have randomly stopped -- like 3:12 or 7:26, or 11:27…

Mom's Time of Death was recorded as 8:45, and my empathetic watch stopped at the same time.

No, my watch, decided to mark the time of Mom’s death, by stopping at that exact moment.

So, while I waited for the jeweler to replace the battery, I peeked in the estate jewelry case. And what caught my eye was a monogramed necklace, with three very familiar initials -- my mother’s initials. My mom had never owned such a thing, she had very little jewelry at all. Only later did it occur to me how strange it was that a jeweler would even have such a customized estate piece.

I took a picture of the necklace and sent it to my sister.

My mother's initials on a monogrammed necklace caught my eye while waiting the jeweler to replace the battery in my watch that had stopped at her time of death. And then my sister pointed out the word "Believe" on the nearby necklace.

She texted me back immediately asking: “Did you see what is next to it?”

I looked again at the photo of the necklace with my mother’s three unlikely initials, and saw -- right next to it was another necklace, with a single word in script:

“Believe.”

Which also sounds like something Mom would have said.