Why Are We Both Up So Early?

Our coffee brewer clicks on and starts its daily job each morning at 5:00 AM, by directive of the household management committee. One of us, who shall be referred to as “He”, is routinely already awake at this hour just waiting to start his day.

The other of us – let’s call me “She” – really appreciates the opportunity afforded by her chronic unemployment to get her desired 9 solid hours.

He not only has demons in his brain, but he is a morning person ever since becoming a father in the 1980’s. At his current point in life, he is basically able to leap tall buildings in a couple of bounds on less than 6 hours of sleep. 

She, on the other hand, came factory-installed with a few genetic demons which are routinely adjusted via carefully-curated meds and a structured habit of 9-plus hours of sleep.

For some of us, this time of year burns just a wee bit too brightly throughout the dark night. While I can empathize that we need a little Christmas right this very minute, I also admit to doing some 3 AM fantasizing regarding the availability of individual sensory deprivation tanks for anxious introverts during December.

This particular morning, a youthful couple of neighbors arrived home to their house just across the street a little after 3 AM. I cannot blame them for my own alert state, which had more to do with my own physical realities than their holidaying. 

However, there’s something about a car door shutting normally in the dark night that consistently makes me want to tear open the shutters and throw up the sash. There is a lengthy anecdote about some prior youthful neighbors to which I will not treat you at this moment. 

Digressions notwithstanding, She was in a semi-doze state from around 2:30, when some physical reality related to temperature awakened She and nagged at her to force the large canine in her bed (let’s call him T) to free up some real estate. T complied obediently if not energetically. 

She then allowed the IBM-370 that is her brain to process large batches of life data for the next little while until the post-3AM percussive sounds. At that point, She was compelled (did I mention her compulsive tendencies?) to leap from her bed sans eyeglasses and gently open a corner of her bedroom drapes to see what was the matter.

Only her trust of said neighbors allowed her to return to bed without expecting a red and blue light show totally unrelated to the winter solstice.

It was after 4:30 AM when the squeal from the bedroom door of He awakened She and T, a somewhat normal routine in their household. T is very food motivated and does not instinctively understand weight management. 

T therefore responded to the clarion call of He by springing from his bed to see what was the matter, causing a seismic ripple in the bed force for She. T continued to remind He of his presence down the short hallway by hurling his 70-plus pound self against their bedroom door until He gently opened it and released T.

She didn’t care. She was already jonesing for her coffee and wondering what time it was, while applying self-discipline and not trying to read the clock. 

Therefore, after audibly ascertaining from her darkened bedroom that the morning feeding routine of J and T (both canines) had been successfully completed by He (status code = 0000), She applied socks, slippers, morning medications, and glasses as required by her physical being upon official awakening.

She snuck into the hallway and immediately became aware of a light on in the living room, meaning that He was not in his normal place in their universe (his basement office) at that hour. She therefore made a subtle yet audible amount of sound while turning the corner so as not to prompt surprise-induced heart failure in He.

When He saw She, he shook his head and said quietly to her, “Why are we both up so early?”

‘Tis the Season, y’all. Have a ball – responsibly, please. Thank you.

Mother, May I?

Mothers and May go together like... the two ladies above in the 1990s.

My mother loved her cigarettes. She loved her coffee and her tub baths and her wine. She loved her husband and her two daughters at least as much as any human has ever loved any other.

She also loved her female friends, with whom she laughed loudly, both in person and over the telephone.  Mom typically had more friends than we could count.  She had friends of both types: friends of the moment and friends of the years. Despite having no sisters, she was always abundantly blessed with female companionship during those years before personal computing was a thing.

Mom did not work for pay outside our small house, but she did a lot of volunteering back when she was still physically able to do so.  She took the city buses from our county home to volunteer at an educational program called Head Start in the 1960s.  She later worked at our church school cafeteria, at the Girl Scouts after school, and many other “non-leadership” roles to support our school time.

Mom did not drive a car until both of her daughters were in grade school, at which point she and our small-business-owning and always-working father deemed it to be a practical necessity. I remember Dad teaching her to drive one of the early VW Beetle models with automatic transmission in the late 1960’s at an old shopping center parking lot on Sundays. Technically, all four of us could still have died against one of those heavy concrete light standards. It was clearly a cheap thrill for us girls.

Mom was always a white-knuckle driver after getting her license.  Her story was that once, back in her early 20s, she had been in a horrible automobile accident and thrown into the windshield with someone else driving. Her anecdote continued with dark-skinned people driving the most beautiful luxury car ever pulling over to stop, and transporting her bloody-nosed self to a hospital.  This certainly explained her driving anxiety to my childlike satisfaction.

My mother had been partly raised by a wonderful black woman, who was the help at her mother’s home.  My understanding was that Anna was paid help, as opposed to some kind of property, which was most likely already illegal in Saint Louis County, Missouri in the early to mid 1930’s. 

My mother’s father, a medical doctor, died while Mom, twenty-something at the time, was living away in Chicago and working, about two weeks before Christmas that year. As a result, Mom never enjoyed Christmas.  She did, however, try her best to control the annual circumstances that surrounded that “most wonderful time of the year.”

During our grade school years, my sister and I were frequently confused by Mom’s insistence on gold-only decorations on our family’s annual live tree. Our Religion classes and Girl Scout troops would often make these amazing ornaments: sometimes shiny with aluminum foil, sometimes spray painted red or green.  None of these hung upon our tree of Gold, by decree of Mom’s Rules.

I recall that we even had gold tinsel, which was reused year to year, and felt heavier somehow than the silver-colored stuff my friends’ parents used.  Our gold glass ball ornaments on the tree varied in size, but any non-ball ornaments allowed on the family tree were required to conform to the color standard. 

The lights, which always went on first and were arranged by my father between the branch ends and the trunk to her specifications, were long cords having electrical fixtures with clips. Each socket contained one of these ugly (in my young mind) orange painted glass bulbs.

Mom did have a genuine gift when it came to matching color.  She had secretly wanted to be a fashion designer or artist back in her young and fun-loving 20’s after she got her Bachelor’s degree from Maryville College.  She could match a color without a swatch to some ridiculously high degree of accuracy, and was therefore able to make some amazing clothing with inexpensive accessories for herself and her young daughters.

When Mom married Dad, he was about 6 months her junior, and he did not have a college degree of his own. He was a small business owner by that time, and a good friend of Mom’s two brothers from their childhood Catholic parish. Dad was the youngest of six, born just before the Great Depression, who grew up with some disadvantages. At least he was tall, handsome, and blue-eyed: items probably on some wish list of Mom’s by the time they married at around age 32 for both.

Mom and Dad were both very passionate human beings.  They also both had unusually loud voices, which were great for church choir, but a little scary for the two daughters who sometimes misbehaved. Mom and Dad were never misunderstood, however, when they were angry at their children or at each other.  Ours was therefore a loud home between the singing, the TVs and radios, and the yelling.  My sister and I grew up assuming this was normal on some level.

While my sister and I were in grade school, Dad started having to take Mom to be hospitalized a lot. During her absence, Dad would feed us canned food, restaurant food, or whatever else he could figure out, and we would all go to visit the scary place where there were bars on windows and people screaming.  All we knew the first few times was that our mother was sick.

I guess we were fortunate to have had a lot of cousins back then.  I can remember us staying with at least one Uncle and Aunt on Mom’s side and one Aunt and Uncle on Dad’s side, both couples having children of their own who were older but somewhat near my age. I also remember us being babysat by kindly old childless neighbor couples who gained our young love.

Naturally, our friends and their parents would express concern over Mom being hospitalized. It may have been the church gossip typical back in the sixties and seventies in Saint Louis County, or it may have been genuine concern.  We’ll never really know. I understood early on, however, that I should provide an appropriate diagnosis without getting into the truth.

Mom was eventually diagnosed as Manic-Depressive (now known as bipolar disorder). Mental health was dealt with a lot differently back then than now. Whenever Mom was hospitalized, I typically invented a serious stomach ailment of some sort for my school friends and neighbor children.  The horrible truth was not to be spoken casually, and I was very aware of this.

I spent my childhood hiding who I was and where I came from. I played many roles to appease others, including my own parents, my dear sister, and my classmates. My private time was spent crying a lot, thinking a lot, and wondering if I would ever be normal. I saw many therapists, as well as our family psychiatrist, throughout my young life.

When I was in my late twenties or early 30s, a work friend attended a group for Adult Children of Alcoholics, and one thing she learned in those groups and repeated to me was very helpful.  “Normal is simply a setting on your washing machine.” I have since learned that I cannot use the word “normal” without adding the two words “for me”.

My first marriage was a combination of wanting to please my Father and his Church. I found a willing man through a dating service, allowing enough time to do the big church wedding well in advance of my thirtieth birthday. Time Magazine had recently published something about how women unmarried at 30 were more likely to have some horror befall them than to find the right spouse.

Married at nearly 29 and divorced at 33 was therefore my personal reality.  While both my parents felt the blow of their older “star” daughter failing their Church with no offspring, Mom was by far the more emotionally sympathetic of my parents.  This was a surprise to me, since I had always been a Daddy’s Girl. I started spending more time having long talks with Mom about life and appreciating her point of view.

Mom always said “no one can possibly understand anyone else’s marriage from the outside.” She was right.  My first husband and I divorced as amicably as any, and remained friends for years.  

Not long after my divorce in 1992, Dad started feeling very ill.  He had seen many doctors over the prior several years to gain relief from abdominal pain that was impacting his busy volunteering and performing life. I remember him helping me, during 1993’s hot summer, to move back into the house I had tried to give up in the divorce and eventually bought back. He had to lie down on my couch and have me bring him a cold drink.

In early August, one of Dad’s doctors found the cancer in his pancreas which had metastasized to his liver. Mom cried a lot, but carried on like a soldier as we did daily hospital runs and one brief in-home care stint for the next three-plus weeks until Dad left us.

To this day, I can only imagine Mom’s thoughts upon discovering that the love of her life had cancer. Mom had suffered many episodes of near-suicide and simply wanting to have her own pain stop.  Whenever I would suggest she needed to stop cigarette smoking, she would say to me that she welcomed lung cancer as her way out. And now she was going to be widowed.

To Mom’s credit, she never played the martyr about Dad’s death.  At this point, she was already struggling with emphysema – a much slower and crueler death, in some ways, than cancer. She had inhalers and breathing treatments via both inpatient and outpatient doctor visits. She wound up on 24-hour oxygen via home generator or traveling tanks.

The last nearly five years I had the honor of spending with Mom after Dad’s death were some of the best years of my own life, despite the hard work involved for us both. 

In the summer of 1995, after quitting two jobs and determined to help her find her final and smaller home, my dog Miracle and I spent several months with Mom in my childhood home. She and I would sit in her living room, enjoying wine from boxes and roses from her garden, prompting us to sing the obvious old song together more than once.  We did love our music to the end.

We visited and compared probably a dozen different senior living facilities in our area, any of which she could have afforded easily.  She was not impressed, however.  Her own lack of self-esteem and feelings of deep shame over her bipolar disorder and its possible effects made her desire something much more private.

Mom had stopped driving for good a few years before Dad died, after being in one last wreck with the baby blue 1969 VW Beetle she called Gretchen. This made her fully dependent on others (including me when I wasn’t working) to get anywhere she had to go, including shopping for groceries and other things she hated to do anyway.

Considering all her needs as well as my own, she and I decided that we could remodel my small ranch house to create a basement apartment for me, leaving a handicapped-accessible upstairs level mostly for Mom’s daily living, sharing a kitchen and living-dining room together.

I got some estimates, chose a contractor, and cleaned out my basement, which included taking a few belongings over to my ex-husband’s apartment nearby. The construction on my basement started near the end of 1997.

In January of 1998, I met, via an online dating service, the man who was to be my second husband and love of my life. Mom was thrilled at this, since she told me she had worried about being my sole weekend entertainment when she moved into my home’s upstairs. Mom soon met – and really loved – Stu and his two sons, who were around 9 and 12 years of age at the point all were introduced to each other.  Everyone was happy, and Mom knew I was in good hands.

In early June, with my basement construction nearly complete at last, Mom sounded strange over the phone one evening when I called her after work.  I rushed over to her house only to discover that she was refusing to eat and was battling a respiratory issue that she thought was “just a cold”.

I got Mom’s psychiatrist on the phone immediately (he was a lifelong friend by this time) and we got her admitted to Barnes Hospital in the city via their ER and an ambulance.

Mom hated that she was putting on a display for all the neighbors near her home of 35+ years with the light show and sirens.  She was more worried about their gossip than her own health.  That was typical Mom.

I spent the next few days, between work and hospital, in a frenzy of moving my own stuff into my newly finished basement apartment and cleaning my upstairs in preparation for hastening her move after her hospital release.

Saturday evening, June 13, I spent some extra time visiting Mom in her hospital room, where she described throat pain from the life-saving ventilator tubes and her fear of going to hell.  I reassured her that she would soon be healed and living with me.  My last words were something like “rest well, sweet Mommy” before kissing her goodnight.

In the middle of that night, I was sound asleep after a late date with Stu had ended blissfully. That's when I received two phone calls from the Barnes Hospital medical professionals.

The first call resulted in my sleepily submitting to having the dreaded ventilation tube crammed into her tiny throat one last time.  Their second phone call was the one that ended with sorrow for Mom’s beloved family and her many, many dear friends. 

As we approach Mother’s Day in the calendar year which marks 20 after Mom’s departure, I’m still wishing my sweet Mommy the rest she so deserves, in between desperately asking for her help and guidance from the hereafter – wherever that may be – with my own still-crazy life. I now know that I’ll never stop missing or loving her.