SuspendedAnimation: life's just one damn thing after a mother

Whatever you meet unexpectedly, join with meditation.

Once, I was a member of a distinct and much-studied demographic: after my parents' divorce when I was fourteen, my sisters, mother and I became one of literally millions of newly-impoverished female-headed households. I don't intend to overdramatize our economic status: we never wondered whether there would be enough to eat; and my mother was able to buy a condo with the equity from our previous house, so we had bread in hand and roof overhead.

But we all knew, too, that we were not living in fat times. Utilities periodically got shut off; we became adept at evading the angry phone calls of creditors; I particularly, and not fondly, remember one of my mother's more memorable attempts at frugality: the purchase of a dozen unbelievably scrawny chickens, frozen in pairs in plastic bags, that on occasion we would vainly attempt to transform, alchemically, into edible food.

My mother at this time was almost literally worn to a gristle: tough but battered. The mental strain of the failing year of the marriage and of the extremely nasty and bitter divorce proceedings cost her about twenty pounds off her small and short-statured frame; her look in the early days after the separation I would describe as 'post-chemo,' though by the time the divorce was over she looked merely slightly gaunt; and in the year or two following, the unrelenting pressure on her to just keep the household going with too little cash and no time, while working at an awful job with an equally awful commute, did not often add up to what you would call "gracious living." But she got the job done--not always a pretty sight; her motto in those days could easily have been "By Whatever Means Necessary."

One weekend, her cousin and his wife invited her to join them in Atlantic City. Never before or after have I known my mother to be the casino type, but she gave herself a modest gambling budget and drove down from Connecticut. On Sunday night, she returned and told us she had good news. She had won three hundred dollars gambling! We rejoiced as she planned purchases of new clothes for us, and a celebratory night out.

The festive air was cut short when she tried to find the cash. There was a brief, feverish search for a little coin purse where she had deposited her winnings, but it never turned up. Mom finally figured that it must have been either lost or stolen during her sole visit to a rest stop while driving back north. She could almost picture laying the little object on the counter as she washed her hands; then--nothing. There was not a lot of tears or talk about this. It was like turning off Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve just before the countdown and the release of the ball. Just a switch from excitement, to nothing--except our tacit knowledge of our mother's heartbreak at being robbed of the opportunity to buy us gifts with her windfall.

I remembered this incident, quite suddenly, this past weekend when we were driving past a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. There doesn't seem to be anything to add to it; it's just been hiding there in my mind for years, lead-heavy, a little stale piece of sorrow.

Comments

Oh that is such a sad story. I also was the child of a single mother and once lost her purse the day after she got her paycheck. Oh how I remember that and how I remember my soon to be step- dad buying our computer (which he later gave to me as a graduation gift) so that we could buy groceries. /hugs thanks for sharing those memories!

Posted by: Angie | Tuesday, 08 June 2004 at 05:04 PM

Oh my...that is heart breaking. I've seen my mother heart broken...or simply broken only 2 or 3 times in my life. I still feel like crying when I think of those times.

Posted by: Melissa | Tuesday, 08 June 2004 at 05:16 PM