Today (July 1) is my mother’s birthday. Had she continued to live, she would be 102. She was many things to me, most of them unpleasant. Yet I found myself missing her as the clock reached midnight.
A friend asked me if I was going to her cemetery today. I told him that she is part of the earth. Her ashes were scattered along a beach at Montauk, New York when she died about 25 years ago. Although she lived her last three decades in New Jersey, her real “home” was Manhattan and Montauk was where our family vacationed when I was a young child. I’m sure she has other memories of that area, but I certainly don’t know about them and those who did are also long dead.
But my earliest memory of Montauk was one of being in a small cottage without hot water. We would walk across Old Montauk Highway and go to the beach. I vividly remember being afraid of the Atlantic surf. But my mother held my hand and held me and I felt safe. I also remember picking wild blueberries in the area. We would have them with milk and sugar and they were wonderful.
My father would take me to Montauk’s fishing piers where we would get the catch of the day or some lobster. My parents loved fresh seafood but I never developed much of a taste for it. I just didn’t like the “fish” smell.
A memory of Montauk that I only vaguely have is one my mother remembered vividly. I was about two or three years old and my mother took me to the local IGA supermarket. She was busy planning for dinner or whatever. And after packing the car, drove away – leaving me in front of the store. She got back to the cottage and emptied the car. Then realized I wasn’t with her. In a panic, she returned to the store where I was found still standing there. My memory is very vague. I just remember standing there, but no feelings of being lost or anything remain. The IGA is still there today and when I visit Montauk, I sometimes stop by simply to observe the family memory.
In general, I thought my early childhood was pretty happy. There were a few ugly incidents, but there wasn’t the constant drama that I remember in later years. My parents moved to Denville, New Jersey around 1953 and my first two years of school did not seem abnormal. I was too young to understand her alcoholism and chain smoking at the time.
But as a history teacher, I have used my mother’s own memories to understand her youth. She was born in 1908 and by the time she was six or seven, her father had died in the trenches of France in the First World War. She became a vaudeville performer going by the name of “Baby Peggy.” Cute little Irish girls were a mainstay of the circuit. In her later years, when she had too much to drink and thought no one was looking, she would sometimes do one of her routines.
She came of age during the height of the Roaring ‘20s and was a flapper. For those too young or too uneducated to remember, a flapper was one of the first major groups of female social rebels to appear in our history. The women of the suffrage movement preceded them. In fact, they were probably enabled by it. Flappers did not focus on politics. They were a social phenomenon. Unlike their predecessors of the war era, they wore very short skirts, smoke, drank and were sexually liberated. They were viewed as party girls and would populate the speakeasies and private parties on Long Island. If you’ve read “The Great Gatsby,” you will have an idea of the era.
But decisions made in youth have the tendency to stay around into old age. Her alcoholism destroyed her marriage and eventually her brain. Her smoking lead to an agonizing death via lung cancer. Her sexual liberation led to a couple of abortions. I was born when she was 40 because she was finally married and she was desperate to have a child. There was also a tremendous amount of social pressure to have children as the Second World War ended. She was married on New Year’s Eve in 1946 and I was born on Sept. 15, 1947, a honeymoon baby and one of the first of the boomers.
Old habits die hard. The flapper of two decades before remained the partygoer when we moved to Denville. We lived in a lake community and the club there frequently had many social events. I remember the holiday picnics and my cousin performing in a talent show. But the adult events were a time of drinking and more. One night, I remember they went to a costume party, possibly around Halloween. My mother dressed up as a nurse. My father was in a straight jacket. As I look back, it seems fitting, but in a more modern era I would probably think she was the one who should have been in the straight jacket. What I do know about these events was there seemed to be arguing after each of them.
Anyway, though I have little knowledge of it, some events at the club set the wheels in motion for my mother leaving my father. It was in the spring of 1955. I was 7. She stood in the living room and it was dark. My father had not come back from work yet and she said, “Tell your father I’m leaving him” and walked out the door.
After a few days with my father, I lived with my aunt for a couple of months until school was over. My mother claimed me for a few weeks where we wandered a lot winding up in a cheap hotel in Morristown. I spent the summer at a sleep away camp and at the end of the summer; my mother had rented a small upstairs apartment.
Things did not go well. She was constantly moving and changing jobs. We lived in 11 different places and I went to five different school districts in four years. I cracked up and wound up in a home for boys while both of us tried to pull our lives together.
When I came home from Bonnie Brae, things seemed to look up for a while. She had worked a couple of times for a Judge and when he retired from the bench, she returned to work at his law firm. She apparently was a crackerjack legal secretary and was decently paid. And though she started drinking frequently in the evening, she always seemed to be ready for work.
But the drinking increased at a slow but steady rate. Within a year, I spent my nights working at the YMCA as a lifeguard. Then there were other evening jobs, like an usher at the movie theater and delivering chicken. I figured I didn’t need the hassle. Now it stands to reason that if you are spending your afternoons and nights at work, you are not going to do much homework. I survived high school by passing tests. If you max out your final, they couldn’t flunk you no matter how many Fs you got during the school year. But survival is a relative thing. I graduated 380th out of my class of 400 despite a 142 IQ.
After high school, I got my own apartment within a few months of graduation and I lived with her very little for a couple of years. Then, I began college and asked to live with her. Things were OK for a while. But then came an event that was seemingly minor, but had a huge impact on me. I had gotten my first college report card. I received an A, a couple of Bs, a C and a D. For me, it was an incredible job. I never had decent grades in high school and I was really proud of this. My mother ignored the A and Bs and focused on the D. I was crushed. But it also was the last time I tried to please her. I really bombed out the next semester and wound up in the Army a little bit later. It took me 25 more years to finally get a bachelor’s degree.
My mother had a history of sabotaging my relationships with girls. When I returned from Bonnie Brae as a high school freshman, I had left a girlfriend a few towns over. The first time I dated her she got drunk and after dropping her off at the house turned mean. I never did date the girl again. Another time I had a girlfriend who was Jewish. She went into a drunken tirade about the Jews that sounded like it was straight out of Hitler. I had asked the girl to marry me a few days earlier and after that, we never saw one another again. In general, she would alternate between being nasty and nice with girlfriends. I learned to stop letting them into that part of my life and, as a result, did not permit several potentially good relationships to develop. When I lived with her, the apartment was located on the second floor of an old civil-war era Victorian house. I would meet friends downstairs and say they couldn’t come in because my mother was sick. Eventually, I didn’t have that many friends.
But her greatest moment of drunkenness came at the Christening party for my first son. I had very few relatives. I had wanted to invite my aunt and three cousins, but she threw a fit. So she and my friend who was the godfather and his wife were the only ones from my side of the family to attend. Meanwhile, my wife’s parents each had six siblings and so there were well over a hundred aunts, uncles and cousins at the party. The booze flowed freely and my mother found a drinking buddy, Uncle Robbie, from my wife’s family. The two of them had a great time.
Now her usual pattern when drinking was to first become mellow and often very outgoing and fun loving. But then she turned really mean and vicious after a bit and finally she collapsed into a comatose state.
She was thoroughly smashed by the time the party was over. She was spending the night at my house because she lived in New Jersey. As per her usual pattern, she became mean, verbally abusing both my wife and I because we didn’t pay enough attention to her. Unlike her usual pattern, she didn’t pass out. She was roaring most of the night. At one point, she walked out of the house to find a bus. She knew we lived on 43rd Street and the Port Authority bus station was on 42nd Street. The only problem was that we lived on 43rd Street in Queens and the bus station was in Manhattan. I had to show her the 42nd Street in Queens in an attempt to make her realize her error and she just became angrier. I finally had to pick her up and carry her back to the house. She finally went to sleep around 9 a.m. and I had to spend the day exhausted at work.
Run ins like this happened often enough that there were stretches of around six months when we didn’t even speak to each other on the phone. One day, I got a call at work saying “I think I’m in serious trouble” and could I come to see her. She had gotten a chest X-ray and there were spots on her lungs. She had to go to the hospital for a biopsy. The results were well advanced lung cancer. Her doctors in Morristown gave her about 9 months.
The woman had guts. After getting the bad news, she went to an attorney she knew and had a will and power of attorney drawn up. Then she went to the funeral home and arranged and paid for her own funeral. We then went to her home, now a senior citizen apartment, and talked. I had been going to Al-Anon for a while and confronted her about the drinking. I told her how it had nearly destroyed me and that many of the ways I acted was a result of the way she treated me. It was a very long conversation and she gave me a very sincere apology. It was enough for me to let go of the past to some extent and help her through her final days.
She lasted about 18 more months. She stopped drinking that day. But smoking was another issue. As the disease progressed, she also became senile. She thought she had lost her electric when every single light bulb in the apartment went out over a period of time. People in the complex would ask her if she needed anything and all she ever asked for was cigarettes.
Eventually she became too disoriented to live alone and I took her to my house. Caring for her was nearly impossible. With her cigarettes, she was a fire waiting to happen. The pain from the tumors had extended to pushing on her nerves and she was in agony. She had refused radiation treatment and we finally convinced her to have it to relieve the pain, not slow the disease. She spent a couple of months in a local hospital. She was once so disoriented that she walked out the front door in her hospital gown with her bare butt hanging out and asked to get a taxi. She thought she was in a hotel. After that, she had to be restrained. Eventually she was moved to a nursing home and grew worse.
But when I visited one day, I mentioned the tumor. She took me aside, completely lucid, and told me she didn’t like to think about the tumor and asked me not to talk about it. I wonder to this day if the senility and disorientation wasn’t an act – her way to avoid reality.
One of the biggest issues for her was her religious views. Born into an Irish Catholic family, she had many battles with priests after separating from her husband. She turned against the church completely. The only times she had been in a church was for weddings and funerals since I was in high school.
As Christians, my family despaired about her salvation. My son, then about eight, once spoke up in an evening service begging people to pray for his grandmother since she was not “saved.”
There came the inevitable day when the nursing home called and said I should get over there now as the end was in sight. In a coma, I talked to her for a while. My wife left the room and I didn’t quite know what to say. But I asked her if she minded if I prayed for her. There was no response, but I asked God to forgive her sins and be good to her. At the end of my prayer, she smiled and her face turned peaceful. It was the face I remembered as a child when she held my hand in the Atlantic. She took a few more breaths and was gone. After a lifetime of trauma, her last few moments were of peace.
I don’t always remember her birthday. And usually it is a simple acknowlegement of the fact. But how I yearn for that peace she had in the end. I am overwhelmed with tribulation at the moment and could really use that hand reassuring me as I wade through an entirely different ocean. Wherever you are mom, I hope you are at peace and that we will someday meet again. I love you.
