Big Love

My own heffalump has been love, big love. I'm not sure what it looks like or sounds like; I'm sure it's a bit scary and I'm hoping I'll see it before it sees me.

I have loved and I have been loved. But of Big Love, I have been afraid. I have been so afraid, that I have left some loves because I was not ready. My parents, they had a Big Love. It began as an old-fashioned love affair. They met in Stockholm in the 1960s. He was a handsome, American diplomat, thirteen years her senior with three small children. She was a young, Swedish, green-eyed, fiery secretary working at the American Embassy. He was the son of a Southern belle and a Major General. She was the daughter of a prominent businessman and blonde beauty. It was a time of men in suits and hats, of cocktail parties, of elegance, of manners. They married in the city's cathedral, the surrounding grounds covered in February’s snow. To me, it always seemed a magical love.

When I was fifteen, I woke up late one night to the sound of crying. Crouching at the top of the steps, I peered down into the lit kitchen where my parents sat, dinner plates pushed back on the table, glasses of wine half full, my mother smoking, talking, crying. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but their voices were gentle. It was my first memory of what real love looks like.

Back then, I wasn’t afraid of love. I wasn’t afraid of love until my early twenties when my father died. My mother did not want to be without him; it took ten years, but at age 58, she literally gave up living. I have been afraid. I have been afraid to love so much that I will want to give up living if, when, I lose my big love.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. I am not a mother, nor do I have a mother anymore. But over the years, I have been mothered. I was read to, sung to, nursed back to health when my face swelled with mumps and when my body scabbed and itched with pox. I sat at the kitchen table after my first heart-break, comforted with tea poured from an earthen pot and words of empathy. When I wore the very wrong outfit, an - ugh!- dress, to a school dance, my mother – though quite annoyed – showed up in the rainy, dark evening with jeans, a blouse and sneakers, so that I could change. For many years after she died, I had a clear image of my mother flying below my plane, her red hair frizzy in the wind, her pointer finger gently holding my plane safely in the air. From my mother, I learned love.

The other day, I talked to my mother in the car. I explained that I wanted her beside me, but I needed to figure this love thing out on my own. I imagined she was sitting in the passenger seat, listening while gazing out at the passing sugar cane fields. I'm pretty sure the corners of her lips were turned up in a small, satisfied smile.

On Mother's Day

During the years that my family lived in Belgium, we lived in a Flemish area of Brussels. I was barely aware of the country’s deep, cultural and political ‘Flanders vs. Wallonia’ rift. In fact, the only way it touched my life was that street signs were posted in two languages. My mother, on the other hand, ran up against the problem at least once, when she called our local police station after an attempted burglary at our home. Our local police station, as it happened, was also in the Flemish district. My mother did not speak Flemish. The police officer refused to speak French. Then, in English, with no room for misunderstanding, she pointedly told him that she could speak English, French, Swedish, German, Spanish or Italian. In which language was he going to help her?
He assisted my mother in French. Miraculously, the police officer’s command of a language he claimed not to know was quite strong.

If my mother had a motto, it would be: Get it done. As she often reminded us, a job half-done was a job not done at all. The reciting of this maxim was especially annoying when the job at hand involved polishing silver or the annual chore of pulling up weeds from between the stone slats of our terrace (a task that invariably left little callouses to form on the side of the forefinger).

On second thought, perhaps it would be: Suffer no fools. No one wanted to be on the receiving end of one of her steely gazes, especially not when accompanied by a swift tongue-lashing. She could - and would - cut hubris with a single comment. She had a knack for turn of phrase. When my sister was born, the doctor saw her resemblance to our dad and said, “Well, there’s no question who the father is!” to which my mother responded, “There never was.”

When I was 15, I held a party on a weekend my parents were out of town. The following Monday, my mother surprised me by picking me up from school. Immediately, my guilty conscience told me I’d been found out, but instead she chatted pleasantly with me about her day and I breathed a sigh of relief. As we pulled into our driveway, she remarked casually that she had run into our neighbor earlier.
“Phil said he was sorry he wasn’t invited to my party. It looked like quite a success.”
My stomach flipped.
“I had to tell him I didn’t know what he was referring to.”
I had trouble hearing for the pounding in my ears.
“And that I was away for the weekend.”
The jig was up.
And it was then, and only then, that she turned to look at me. There was no reason to speak. The look on my face said it all.
My mother, the tactician.

My fiercely loyal, silly, loving, beautiful mother passed on to me the importance of the Golden Rule, being a good friend, choosing a mate I could laugh with, making time for myself, and finding a doctor I liked. I'm proud to say she also passed on to me her withering gaze.