quaker_mole (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} quaker_mole) wrote,@ 2008-05-11 06:04:00 |
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Good Night Mom
Dial M for Mother
By CAITLIN FLANAGAN
Los Angeles
NOT long ago, I was riding my bike through a quiet stretch of Van Nuys with my friend Francie, her dog Pearl, and my 10-year-old son, Conor. One of them spied a cellphone in the middle of the street, so we doubled back and Francie picked it up.
“What should we do?” she said.
“Can I keep it?” Conor asked.
“Call Mom,” I said.
Huh?
I repeated myself, and then, because they didn’t understand me, I broke it down for them. “Turn it on, scroll through the names, and when you get to ‘Mom,’ hit ‘send.’”
Francie looked at me for a moment with her head cocked slightly to one side, the way Pearl does when she sees a bird in a tree. Then she looked back at the phone and did what I said.
“There it is!” she said. “‘Mom!’”
She and Conor looked at me in this sensationally respectful way, the same way I had looked at the friend of mine who had picked up a stray cellphone on Venice Beach last year and said, “I’ll call Mom.”
Not everyone who has a cellphone has a mother, but among the subpopulation of cellphone owners who are careless with them, the number is apparently high.
Mom wasn’t home, but someone named Hugo was, and he called us right back. Francie told him the name of the nearest intersection, and that she would hide the cellphone under the porch of a particular house. I don’t think Mom would have approved the plan — there was no provision for locking the phone against outgoing calls — but Hugo was fine with it, so we were golden.
Calling Mom when you find a lost cellphone is satisfying for a number of reasons. In the first place, of all the people on that address list, she is the only one who is both fully accustomed to cleaning up the owner’s messes and also completely willing to wipe up the next one. It’s as though from that first meconium diaper she’s stuck with your stinkies and foul-ups until she draws her last breath.
It’s also satisfying because the cellphone shedder has inconvenienced you, however mildly; the social contract requires that you find a way to return the thing, but along the way your lovely bike ride is interrupted. Because it has an address list, the cellphone gives you one of the few opportunities that you can, in effect, say to another adult: “You’ve messed up, and I’m going to call your mother!”
You spend your entire adolescence and much of your adulthood trying to shake her, trying to be a grown-up, a smooth operator, but you keep blowing it, and the person you call out for — like a toddler shrieking in a playpen, or a soldier dying in a ditch — is Mom. She co-signs your car notes and wires you cash, she takes in the dog you should never have adopted, pays for your wedding and then keeps up your spirits during the divorce.
Your vision of your adult life with your mother is one of spoiling her, of being so successful in your endeavors that you are able to cradle her in comfort and luxury, and that your visits will be demonstrations of largess and tenderness, the car trunk opening to reveal some expensive new kitchen appliance or extravagant winter coat. Instead, you get some frightening news from a doctor, and the first person you call — because making her weep with fear and grief seems like the one thing that might cheer you up — is Mom.
No mother and child loved each other in a more singular and devoted way than my mother and I did. The day she died, I experienced such an unexpected combination of emotions that I thought I was, clinically, in shock. There was deep, ragged sadness, of course, but there was also something that felt like euphoria, like the best high of my life. There were moments when I stopped crying and started laughing in long crazy spasms. My sister was doing it, too, and we realized we weren’t fit company for anyone but each other; we slunk back to the house, and sat next to each other on my mother’s love seat, giggling.
It wasn’t until much, much later that I realized that what felt like euphoria was, indeed, euphoria. I was free. No more of her looniness and meddling, no more being the sole subscriber to her round-the-clock clipping service. (I went on the Scarsdale Diet for three days in 1983, and for the rest of her life she sent me every newspaper story she ever came across on the subject of anorexia.) No more apologizing for her — toward the end she went batty, and called a maître d’ a vulgar name — or trying to settle her endless fights with my father. No more being a demi-adult, ever on the verge of someone calling Mom to reveal my ineptitude, my need for a bailout, my lost cellphone or poorly chosen apartment or mismanaged episode at work.
Mother’s Day, of course, is not an occasion on which we are invited to examine the whole equation that is — or was — Mom. It is time for putting her through her paces, sloshing bowls of Special K onto her comforter at the crack of dawn, or slapping an orchid on her lapel and propping her up at the Hilton for brunch.
It is an exercise in manufactured emotion whose roots lie in maternal suffering: Woodrow Wilson declared the first official American Mother’s Day as a tribute to the mothers who had lost sons in the war. Its fortunes are now so intimately involved with those of the National Restaurant Association (it’s the biggest dining-out day of the year) that we can hardly expect anyone to jeopardize five million mimosas in favor of a more honest consideration of the ways in which the most intimate relationship of our lives has formed and sustained us.
My own mother did not believe in God and she hated religion, but she read me certain children’s stories the way other mothers read Bible verses.
We felt that “Goodnight Moon” had been written with us in mind. It’s been long enough now that I can’t always remember the way her voice sounded, but I can hear it as clearly as if she were here beside me if I say the old incantation to myself: “Goodnight room. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.”
“Goodnight Moon” is a poem about going to sleep, and like all such poems, I realize now, it is also a poem about death. As a little girl, I used to think of the “old lady whispering hush” as my own mother. And now — at 46 — I still do. I once read a newspaper account of an elderly man who lay dying in a nursing home bed; a few hours before he passed, he cried out fitfully, “Ma, Ma, open the door!”
Maybe that’s how it ends — maybe it’s not God in his wisdom and judgment we have to confront, maybe it’s just Mom, opening up the door because we’ve lost our keys again.
Until then, if you happened to have come across a red-and-black flip phone lost three months ago in the mid-Wilshire section of Los Angeles, would you send it to me, care of this newspaper?
Caitlin Flanagan is the author to “To Hell With All That.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Dial M for Mother
By CAITLIN FLANAGAN
Los Angeles
NOT long ago, I was riding my bike through a quiet stretch of Van Nuys with my friend Francie, her dog Pearl, and my 10-year-old son, Conor. One of them spied a cellphone in the middle of the street, so we doubled back and Francie picked it up.
“What should we do?” she said.
“Can I keep it?” Conor asked.
“Call Mom,” I said.
Huh?
I repeated myself, and then, because they didn’t understand me, I broke it down for them. “Turn it on, scroll through the names, and when you get to ‘Mom,’ hit ‘send.’”
Francie looked at me for a moment with her head cocked slightly to one side, the way Pearl does when she sees a bird in a tree. Then she looked back at the phone and did what I said.
“There it is!” she said. “‘Mom!’”
She and Conor looked at me in this sensationally respectful way, the same way I had looked at the friend of mine who had picked up a stray cellphone on Venice Beach last year and said, “I’ll call Mom.”
Not everyone who has a cellphone has a mother, but among the subpopulation of cellphone owners who are careless with them, the number is apparently high.
Mom wasn’t home, but someone named Hugo was, and he called us right back. Francie told him the name of the nearest intersection, and that she would hide the cellphone under the porch of a particular house. I don’t think Mom would have approved the plan — there was no provision for locking the phone against outgoing calls — but Hugo was fine with it, so we were golden.
Calling Mom when you find a lost cellphone is satisfying for a number of reasons. In the first place, of all the people on that address list, she is the only one who is both fully accustomed to cleaning up the owner’s messes and also completely willing to wipe up the next one. It’s as though from that first meconium diaper she’s stuck with your stinkies and foul-ups until she draws her last breath.
It’s also satisfying because the cellphone shedder has inconvenienced you, however mildly; the social contract requires that you find a way to return the thing, but along the way your lovely bike ride is interrupted. Because it has an address list, the cellphone gives you one of the few opportunities that you can, in effect, say to another adult: “You’ve messed up, and I’m going to call your mother!”
You spend your entire adolescence and much of your adulthood trying to shake her, trying to be a grown-up, a smooth operator, but you keep blowing it, and the person you call out for — like a toddler shrieking in a playpen, or a soldier dying in a ditch — is Mom. She co-signs your car notes and wires you cash, she takes in the dog you should never have adopted, pays for your wedding and then keeps up your spirits during the divorce.
Your vision of your adult life with your mother is one of spoiling her, of being so successful in your endeavors that you are able to cradle her in comfort and luxury, and that your visits will be demonstrations of largess and tenderness, the car trunk opening to reveal some expensive new kitchen appliance or extravagant winter coat. Instead, you get some frightening news from a doctor, and the first person you call — because making her weep with fear and grief seems like the one thing that might cheer you up — is Mom.
No mother and child loved each other in a more singular and devoted way than my mother and I did. The day she died, I experienced such an unexpected combination of emotions that I thought I was, clinically, in shock. There was deep, ragged sadness, of course, but there was also something that felt like euphoria, like the best high of my life. There were moments when I stopped crying and started laughing in long crazy spasms. My sister was doing it, too, and we realized we weren’t fit company for anyone but each other; we slunk back to the house, and sat next to each other on my mother’s love seat, giggling.
It wasn’t until much, much later that I realized that what felt like euphoria was, indeed, euphoria. I was free. No more of her looniness and meddling, no more being the sole subscriber to her round-the-clock clipping service. (I went on the Scarsdale Diet for three days in 1983, and for the rest of her life she sent me every newspaper story she ever came across on the subject of anorexia.) No more apologizing for her — toward the end she went batty, and called a maître d’ a vulgar name — or trying to settle her endless fights with my father. No more being a demi-adult, ever on the verge of someone calling Mom to reveal my ineptitude, my need for a bailout, my lost cellphone or poorly chosen apartment or mismanaged episode at work.
Mother’s Day, of course, is not an occasion on which we are invited to examine the whole equation that is — or was — Mom. It is time for putting her through her paces, sloshing bowls of Special K onto her comforter at the crack of dawn, or slapping an orchid on her lapel and propping her up at the Hilton for brunch.
It is an exercise in manufactured emotion whose roots lie in maternal suffering: Woodrow Wilson declared the first official American Mother’s Day as a tribute to the mothers who had lost sons in the war. Its fortunes are now so intimately involved with those of the National Restaurant Association (it’s the biggest dining-out day of the year) that we can hardly expect anyone to jeopardize five million mimosas in favor of a more honest consideration of the ways in which the most intimate relationship of our lives has formed and sustained us.
My own mother did not believe in God and she hated religion, but she read me certain children’s stories the way other mothers read Bible verses.
We felt that “Goodnight Moon” had been written with us in mind. It’s been long enough now that I can’t always remember the way her voice sounded, but I can hear it as clearly as if she were here beside me if I say the old incantation to myself: “Goodnight room. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.”
“Goodnight Moon” is a poem about going to sleep, and like all such poems, I realize now, it is also a poem about death. As a little girl, I used to think of the “old lady whispering hush” as my own mother. And now — at 46 — I still do. I once read a newspaper account of an elderly man who lay dying in a nursing home bed; a few hours before he passed, he cried out fitfully, “Ma, Ma, open the door!”
Maybe that’s how it ends — maybe it’s not God in his wisdom and judgment we have to confront, maybe it’s just Mom, opening up the door because we’ve lost our keys again.
Until then, if you happened to have come across a red-and-black flip phone lost three months ago in the mid-Wilshire section of Los Angeles, would you send it to me, care of this newspaper?
Caitlin Flanagan is the author to “To Hell With All That.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
