A Life’s Work
By Peter Anderson
There were times I used to think my mother had too much love in her heart. She didn’t seem to be able to restrain it or ration it out sensibly. She emptied herself into each of us every single day like we were only seconds away from drying up and crumbling. I was certain she’d drown us all or run out of reserves first and dry up and crumble herself. It was a race I had no desire to win, yet saw no possible way someone could continue to give indefinitely at the pace she had set.
Her love would burst into our lives like an opened can of shakened soda. It showered my three older brothers and me as we sat in the living room trying to watch football or M*A*S*H or Miami Vice, or when we first staggered in from school or wolfed down our meatloaf dinner or filed out the back door to shoot baskets in the backyard. Her questions, probes – pleas, really – were always there for any information we were willing to divulge about our day, our lives, who her four sons had become. She was at the mercy of our ever-changing moods – one minute we were in desperate need of her expert consultation, the next hidden behind our locked bedroom doors. When we wanted her help, we expected her to provide the correct answers, yet when she craved some answers of her own, we felt smothered by her persistent invasions into our privacy.
Perhaps it would’ve been better if we’d been four girls. My brothers and I were all so competitive, none of us wanted to be labeled the “mama’s boy,” so we took turns pushing her away as politely as possible. Maybe we would’ve felt more comfortable confiding in her if we weren’t in constant danger of being teased for it.
We still talked to her, though – when no one else was around. We all knew she had the answers to every question we had the guts to ask. She was more insightful than all of us, with so many shrewd pieces of advice to offer, I imagined she had to store the overflow around our house wherever she could. There were solutions and remedies tucked away in the linen closet and china cabinet, by her old sewing machine in the basement and behind our dogs’ gnawed dinner bowl in the dining room. She stored them for safekeeping all over our small house until we gave in and snuck a secret consultation with her.
She was aching to help us and keep the peace and guide us through the mental mine field that was our father. She wanted to sort out his ways for us, explain what to take seriously and what to ditch. She poured herself into him, too, yet it seemed to rush out of a different part of her, or at least in a different form. There was no fear with him as with us. Her love for us always lugged the trepidation that she would screw us up irreparably with one wrong word.
I was the youngest of her children and, therefore, her last shot at having a girl. She’d had the name Faith shined and ready for me, but I kept her streak of boys going strong. In later years, some of my brothers brought home grandchildren for her to spoil – all of them grandsons. By the time the final tally was totaled, the boys had routed the girls 11-0. A forfeit, really – the girls never showed up.
So my mother turned to dogs for girls and got five of them, along with four male dogs for the girls to boss around. Nine dogs of all sorts of breeds scattered themselves throughout our house over the years, sleeping on our beds with us, eating hunks of pot roast we slipped them from the dinner table, begging to be let outside every ten minutes. My mother adored them all, along with any book, TV commercial, or calendar that showcased dogs…or cows – she was a big fan of them, too. Sheep, too. Horses weren’t bad, either.
She also loved history and had majored in it in college. She taught elementary school for several years before having kids. She played organ for our church, and taught piano at the local music store. She spoke French, listened to classical music, and read eight hundred-page nonfiction books on a weekly basis. She did most of the chores around our house while we sat on the couch rooting her on. She didn’t get her first dryer until roughly thirty years into her marriage, and the dishwasher never did arrive. She ran all of the errands, coordinated our schedules, fixed the meals, reminded us of what we’d forgotten, shuttled the dogs back and forth to the vet, paid the bills, broke up our wars out on the basketball court, and waited patiently each night at the back of the line for her turn in the bathroom.
I used to wonder how she put up with it all. She had a tiny kitchen in a cramped house in a deteriorating neighborhood. Money was tight, so buying us new clothes was out, not to mention something for herself. My brothers and father and I usually watched sports on TV while complaining about the officiating, which left her reading in the kitchen with her fingers jammed in her ears. When she wasn’t fixing us food or writing our history reports for us, she was sewing our clothes we’d ripped to shreds that day. While we were at school, she did our laundry, vacuumed our rooms, washed our dirty dishes, and braced for our return. The only time she really got an extended break from us was before we were born.
In the summer, my mother had to endure months of humid, restless nights because my father always turned the air conditioner off before he went to bed. He said it was too difficult for him to sleep if it was cold. The rest of us had to suffer through the hot, uncomfortable nights, too, but at least we could turn our fans on – my mother’s bedroom fan was turned off by Dad, too. I was surprised he didn’t drag a space heater in there.
My mother fought a futile battle trying to keep our yard looking nice. Between our dogs racing around digging up everything and our many football and baseball games, our yard got a severe beating. Even her little vegetable garden took at least one or two direct hits a day when our basketball crashed into it.
Most of the friends my mother had made when she and my father first moved to town were long gone because the area had severely worsened, but we lived too close to my father’s job for us to leave, too. The meager food budget my mother shopped with never allowed her to fix much more than stews and casseroles. The public schools she sent us off to each morning weren’t anywhere close to the academic environment she had envisioned for us years before. My brothers and father and I argued frequently, especially at night when my mother was already exhausted from doing everything all day long.
Our home life, inside and out, couldn’t possibly have been what my mother had dreamt of before marrying. So how could she have put up with it for all those years? The why was easy: she did it for us, her four children. She would’ve sacrificed anything she’d ever wanted just to mend our favorite jeans for the fourth time in three months. Even if it was in a shoebox house in a bad-going-on-ghetto neighborhood, there was no place she would’ve rather been as long as we were there, too.
Plus, she knew we wouldn’t have lasted three days if we’d had to cook for ourselves.
But how my mother put up with it all was another question entirely. How could she have taken it for so long? How did it not drive her totally mad? I could never figure it out. For a long time I assumed that she was either the strongest person in the world or, deep down, quite miserable. Or both.
The answer, though, turned out to be pretty simple and very familiar when I finally pieced it together years later, and it shouldn’t have surprised me at all: we were how she put up with everything all those years. We were why she tolerated it, and we were also how she coped with it. Every time we confided in her about a problem or begged her for help the night before a project was due, she got to come through for us and save the day, which gave her greater satisfaction and fulfillment than any big house or fancy dress ever could have. She seemed to live to give of herself to us, and the worse the situation, the more she gave. She didn’t merely hang on the best she could through the inconveniences and disappointments of our home life, she kept pouring and pouring herself into each of us until she’d completely forgotten about everything else. We were more important to her than anything, and she made sure we felt it every day.
All my mother ever wanted in return for her devotion to us was to be included in our lives, even when it wasn’t convenient or cool for us. When we were mad or embarrassed or dejected – that was when she wanted in, because those were the moments she could help us the most. And if she wasn’t included, it hurt her the most then, too, because she felt completely unfulfilled with no place to pour her love. We were her life’s work, her passion, and to be on the outside looking in as we struggled was more than she could stand. No dishwasher or dryer – that was a piece of cake compared to that.
My mother didn’t have too much love in her heart and she was never in danger of drowning herself or us in it. She was just the first person I ever knew who truly awoke each morning thinking about someone other than herself. And it was overwhelming to me. She gave to us morning till night every single day until her whole life was ours. And with her life came so much more than just mended clothes and sound advice. We got an example to carry with us of how our own lives should be, and how far ahead of us all she really was.
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Peter Bowling Anderson |
