IN PRAISE OF THE UNCOOL MOM

I always wanted one of those chatty, gabby mothers, the ones who set out the warm cookies and milk after school, eagerly hovering on both elbows to hear all about the day’s crushes, heartbreak and gossip.  I coveted the moms who begged to do their daughters make-up, twisted tresses into French braids and got excited about the latest elephant bell hip hugger jeans and platform shoes.

 

My mother was the exact opposite.  Our after school snacks were carrot sticks and celery.  Cranberry juice stood in for soda and there were no weekends spent trolling the mall for the latest shade of frosted pink lipstick.  My mom’s idea of a good time, her reward for a day of chores and household maintenance, was to curl up every afternoon with a book.

 

My mother is a smarty-pants.  An intellectual.  Her idea of a challenge was reading Will and Ariel Durant’s classic “A Story of Civilization.”  All eleven volumes.  I kid you not.  I proudly told friends in our upstate New York suburb that she had a master’s degree.  Take that, all you girls who’s Moms got the Mary Tyler Moore flip curl and culottes!  Her currency was never the latest hairstyle, although she did get a cropped “Beatles “ cut before I was born.  She wasn’t the interior decorating type, a serious cook or gardener. She was bookish. And she reinforced the importance of that by example, taking us to the library from a very early age.


When we were old enough to ride our bikes alone, I loved the grown up feeling of consulting with the librarians, having my own library card (so COOL!) and then placing the books in my bike basket for transport home.  I can’t quite articulate the feeling I still get walking into a library or a bookstore today. It’s a sense of endless possibilities and want.  Entering a fashion boutique on Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue will never carry the same thrill.   Books are a different form of acquisition, more lasting and fulfilling.  My mother taught me that.


I picture my mother now, absorbed in her book; feet propped to rest her “throbbing veins,” (GROSS! we’d mouth to each other) as the late afternoon sunlight knifed through the living room window onto the mustard colored rug (yes, it was the 70’s.)  The table was set for dinner; the roast was roasting, the vacuuming and dusting completed for the day.

 

Only now do I understand how reading buttressed her sense of individualism during the years when tending to our repetitive needs must have strip-mined her intellectual life.  Books nurtured her own flame, especially as she navigated through three daughters’ teen years (oy vey), bubbling with hormones, churlishness and delayed gratification.  It is in hindsight that I see how reading legitimized her presence among us.  Books were her “cover” as she stationed herself in the living room chair, her antennae alert without meddling; such an under-rated attribute in today’s world of micro-managed parenting and helicopter hovering.

 

I don’t ever recall her telling me what to wear, criticizing a friend or offering up opinions about the boys who cycled in and out of our hearts (especially the one with the red Camaro who reeked of Marlboros.) Adolescence is a desert landscape of shifting sands and petty hurts.  She was smart enough to recognize that the girl who excluded you from her birthday party one day is back as your bestie the next.  My mother taught me how to be the bobber on the fishing line, not the hook with the bait.

 

You absorb things as a kid—even when you are trying not to.  You tell yourself that when it’s your turn you will be a slightly different parent.  You will edit, accept and reject. You will change things from the way you were raised, do it your own way.  And sometimes you do.  But I understand now what she was up to, each afternoon as we walked in the door from school.  She was hanging back, holding her counsel and her tongue, being my parent, not my BFF.  She was mothering—not smothering—and she gave me the space to learn for myself, to make my own decisions, choices and mistakes. 

Now that I am a parent, working to instill a sense of well being and independence in frustrated by her occasional maternal indifference, I see that her approach required far more restraint than the dishy, tell-me-all tact.   Those afternoons she spent at home, quietly reading, were a gift.  They were an act of love equally as important as the love of reading.

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FACETIME

I’ve been a little slumpy lately.  Nothing major, just kind of in a middle-o’-life blah.  I can’t seem to motivate to work out the way I used to, the get up and go is less “go” and more “harder to get up.”  I eat healthy for a while and then suddenly purchase a giant box of Dots or a tub of chocolate covered raisins and consume the whole thing almost without tasting.  It’s not that I feel lousy; I just don’t feel like the old me.

 

That was the initial thrust behind the timing of a mother/daughter spa trip.  I’ve been thinking about doing this ever since my baby girl was born, 18 years ago.  And now she is home from her first year in college.  All in all she’s had a pretty good experience, with the expected ups and downs of leaving the nest for the first time.  She’s worked hard and made friends, all while trying to live up to the decidedly unhelpful “these are the best years of your life” advice that we parents have parroted to them for the last decade.  That’s a lot of pressure to put on someone as they tie the bandana on the stick and head out the door to live with four strangers in a room the size of a handicapped bathroom stall. 

 

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE 

The last two years of high school she was a partial stranger to us, distant, most of her in shadow.  I understood she was hard at work uncoupling from me, sawing off the umbilical cord, sometimes with a dull, Swiss Army knife.  Mother nature has programmed our children during this period to be as judgmental, sullen and eye rolling as possible, presumably to make it hurt less when they finally blow the pop stand.   We were all ready for her to go, mostly her.   And I honestly don’t think my daughter would have wanted to spend a stretch of time with me anywhere back then. I had nothing to offer beyond my cooking, cleaning, step n’ fetch-it skills and my vague resemblance to a punching bag.  So the thought of going to a spa with her in those years would have felt like a Club Med trip with Stockholm syndrome and no alcohol. 

But a year away had made a world of difference.  And when a work trip with her father fell through, impulsively I called a spa within driving distance to check out their advertised deals.  Maybe we could both jump-start our health and well-being, our mind-body energy and our mother-daughter mojo with a little downward dog and green juice?  This was high on my bucket list. 

Each of us has ways in which we have terminally crimpled our children’s wiring through our own life experiences, shortcomings, fears or phobias.  Let’s just say that growing up with parents scarred by a depression-era mentality, my sisters and I inherited what we’ll call a Scotch-Yankee, tight-fisted approach to spending.  Admittedly, we are cheapskates, some of us sisters more than others.   (Ahem, OK, me.) 

And as the daughter of skinflints, I still proudly cling to some of the pioneer-settler tenants of my childhood:  you want the extras?  Work for it.  Go bag a few groceries, rake some lawns and babysit a few snot-nosed kids up the street.   In short, I’m not the kind of Mom who regularly throws mani-pedis around.  I’m not stuffing bills at my kids like sorority sisters at a bachelorette party.  Believe me, no one is suffering in my household.  No one has rickets or scurvy, no one is digging through the Salvation Army bins to accessorize at the gas station.  No one has holey underwear.  My children have what they need and much more, and the truth is they don’t continually ask me for a lot.  By now you are getting the correct impression that it wasn’t characteristic or typical of me to bestow my largesse on this grand of a scale.  

So when I called my daughter, jubilant and bursting with excitement over my spontaneous spa generosity, her first question, uttered with prison guard level suspicion, was “Why?”

“Well, I just want to spend some time with you,” I stammered defensively.  “I thought this would be fun.”

Silence.  “Sure.  Sounds good.”

My sister called me later that night, the one who lives near my college student in Boston.

“I thought you should know that your daughter called to ask me if anything was wrong,” she reported and my eyebrows shot up.  “Wrong?” I answered panicked.

“She told me you had invited her to a spa and she wondered if you’d gotten some kind of major medical diagnosis or if there was anything bad happening with you and Bob that she didn’t know.”  It took me a minute to process that and then I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or be crushed. 

 

True, we are raising children in a somewhat scary time.  They are growing up surrounded by the low level muzak of September 11, war, economic uncertainty and divorce exploding around us like carpet bombs. OK, it’s not so different from eras of the past.  My childhood was punctuated by elementary school duck and cover drills, the Cold War, Kent State, and the polarizing horror of Vietnam.  There’s always some sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, isn’t there?  But I honestly don’t remember being so anxious. Perhaps I was. And while I’d tried to do my best to shield my children from life’s harsher glare, they had experienced the uncertainty of outcomes, the fear of infirmity and the grief of death up close. 

Still, did it have to take an act of God for me to invite my own offspring for a little loofa get-away with an enzyme facial?  Times were tough, all right.  But her reaction caused me to second guess my mothering. Had I actually been more “communist block mother” than nurturing and cozy?   I imagined myself to be a rule enforcing but sporadically indulgent parent.  And what about those hours of glue gunning I’d undertaken with them?  The homemade Halloween costumes, the bunny head cake at Easter and the Jell-O American flag on July 4th?  Had my puritanical approach been so extreme that my child’s first response to a fun trip was to cock her head suspiciously and look for a chemo IV?

As I went to bed that night, still reflecting on my daughter’s reaction to my proposition, I remembered hearing Maria Shriver speak at her California Woman’s Conference.  She had described coming to a life juncture where she needed to define herself, to figure out what was next.  Up to that point she had always been someone’s daughter, wife or mother.  An award-winning journalist, Maria had stepped back to raise a growing family but as her children became more self-sufficient, she was ready to re-evaluate a new direction.

As part of her vision quest she decided to sojourn to a desert spa for reflection.  This solitary repose was so uncharacteristic, that when she told her kids where she was headed, her daughter’s first response had been to ask if she had cancer. 

I felt slightly better remembering the Maria story.  I felt in good company at least.   Maria was a smart cookie, a good Mom and a Kennedy to boot.  Her girls hadn’t been deprived and warped by a cold Mother Scrooge.  I’ll be they’d owned every American Girl doll accessory and unlike mine, probably never wore hand-me-downs.  In short, they’d had a life of privilege and still her daughter had leapt to the same awful conclusions as mine.  I felt better.

When I called my daughter the next day I relaxed as I listened to her growing excitement about our trip. She had already visited the website, reviewed the activities we could do together and determined what classes and hikes we would take.  And me?  I can hardly wait for our weekend.  I’ve been daydreaming and picturing it since she was a wee lass.  I’m already imagining what it will feel like to have her to myself, the essence of that old “little girl” who is making her way back to me, as she peers out of the body of a beautiful young woman.