How's Your Mom?

Mom in physical therapy with Kiley.

Many people, including those not in Blogville, have been asking about how my Mom is doing. She is doing amazingly well, thank you. I wish she knew all the people who are concerned about her, because it would make her feel better about the whole process of getting over her two broken bones, but she doesn’t appear to need to know how many are rooting for her. She has an ability to heal from her wounds that younger ones would envy. Recently her doctor said she was way “ahead of the game” as far as knitting and getting movement back.

We have been going to physical therapy sessions at the Silverdale Harrison for several weeks now and we have been assigned another one of those lovely angel girls to help Mom get her range of motion and strength back in her arm and her leg. This new angel is named Kiley. She is small and lithe, smart, interesting and gentle. When she spied my Obama button she knew she could talk to me about politics and we’ve been at it ever since. Each time we come in the second question, after asking after Mom’s progress, is “what did you think of the latest McCain statement, or the Palin pronouncement or the last debate?” We’ve been having fun dissecting the political scene while she massages Mom’s bicep muscle. Recently she was gone for awhile traveling to the Midwest for the Chicago marathon. While she was gone another tall, agile young woman took her place. Laura, too, took note of my Obama button and struck up a conversation about it. I think the therapists like to talk politics if they can and they really aren’t supposed to bring the subject up, but when they see a blatant sign, they jump on it. Laura liked calling my Mom Lou and watching her foot-o-meter, as I dubbed her pain reaction that showed up in her tensed feet. Mom doesn’t feel much pain, but occasionally when her arm is moved to a place it hasn’t been for 9 weeks, her feet flinch. She tries to be brave but her feet give it away every time.

We have been going to physical therapy sessions at the Silverdale Harrison for several weeks now and we have been assigned another one of those lovely angel girls to help Mom get her range of motion and strength back in her arm and her leg. This new angel is named Kiley. She is small and lithe, smart, interesting and gentle. When she spied my Obama button she knew she could talk to me about politics and we’ve been at it ever since. Each time we come in the second question, after asking after Mom’s progress, is “what did you think of the latest McCain statement, or the Palin pronouncement or the last debate?” We’ve been having fun dissecting the political scene while she massages Mom’s bicep muscle. Recently she was gone for awhile traveling to the Midwest for the Chicago marathon. While she was gone another tall, agile young woman took her place. Laura, too, took note of my Obama button and struck up a conversation about it. I think the therapists like to talk politics if they can and they really aren’t supposed to bring the subject up, but when they see a blatant sign, they jump on it. Laura liked calling my Mom Lou and watching her foot-o-meter, as I dubbed her pain reaction that showed up in her tensed feet. Mom doesn’t feel much pain, but occasionally when her arm is moved to a place it hasn’t been for 9 weeks, her feet flinch. She tries to be brave but her feet give it away every time.

Monday of this week Mom got to take off her leg brace, the huge black foam, plastic and Velcro monstrosity that has been keeping her leg straight since she cracked her kneecap on the evening of August 20th. The dang thing was made for someone much taller than her 5 feet. The bottom several inches of this thigh to ankle brace were cut off with scissors in the emergency room, but it has never fit properly and as Mom’s leg got thinner underneath it, it kept sliding down until it was resting on the top of her foot. I’d unstrap it, move it back up, restrap it and within minutes it would have slid down again. Both physician’s assistant and physical therapists noticed that after several weeks it was no longer keeping her leg stick-straight, but they let it slide and considered the fact she could bend her knee slightly inside of it to be a form of therapy. The day the brace came off was a day of celebration. I had authorized the removal of the arm immobilizer the previous week, it having been in place for 7 weeks, a week longer than the PA had ordered. We couldn’t reach him for his approval, so I made a command decision. I got a phone call from his office that afternoon verifying that it was okay, but I would have done it anyway. It was time to get that arm moving.

This Wednesday Mom went to choir practice, the first time since that night when she fell in her driveway on the way to get in Aunt Billie’s car to go to choir and this Sunday she will go back to her church. She is beginning to feel like a “human being” again.

This healing process, from that first stormy and scary night in the emergency room, through the six days in the nursing home that seemed interminable, through the immobile days at home while I tried to make it all work and now during the physical therapy part of the recovery, has been good for my Mom and me. I would not have predicted how it has affected our relationship.

Mom and I have not been close in the way some mothers and daughters are. I was never one to phone daily like some daughters I have known or to visit more than once a week. My weekly visits didn’t start until it was clear I had to take on the financial responsibilities for my Mom a year after my Dad died and I found the checking account and credit situation in shambles. Before that it was holidays and birthdays. In our family it was me, as first child, who became Mom’s rescuer, even as a kid. The story I tell to illustrate this is that one day I came home from school in the 7th grade, to find my Mom cradling my little brother in her arms, waiting for me to help her clean up a wound he had sustained on his leg. She didn’t want to handle it. But as a 7th grader, I took it on. Certain situations scared her and I was the one, if Dad wasn’t available, who stepped in and took over. It is odd because Mom has survived many physical hardships very well, as she has this one. A pot of boiling water spilled on her leg when she was three years old, leaving a big scar. She spent nearly a year in bed with Rheumatic Fever when she was 17. She fell in the well next to our house in Tracyton and clung to the pipe, hanging chest-deep in water for two hours until she was discovered by the local minister and the volunteers from the fire department fished her out. She had a stillborn baby. She lost her sister to cancer. She lost her husband in 2001 and her son in 2003 and in 2004 she broke her ankle in several places and healed well enough to take a trip to Scotland with me and my daughter after only 12 weeks of recovery.

She is a trooper and a survivor, but she has never been the advice-giving, warm, cookie-baking, house-cleaning, soothing mother that I had expected. What she has been is plucky, colorful, artistic, musical, lover of movie stars, reader of mysteries and celebrity biographies, appreciator of beauty and nature. She has never been a hugger or someone who expressed tenderness or told me she loved me. She pats rather than strokes. She has barely cried over the deaths of my Dad or my brother. I could tell she liked me and thought I was smart and sensible, but I also knew she didn’t understand what I was anymore than I understood who she was and why she operated the way she did.

But because we have been together so much in these last months, and because I have wanted so much to make her recovery as pleasant as it could be, we have come to know each other at a much deeper level. During my weekly visits I used to ask, “So how are things going Mom?” and she would answer, “Well, they’re about the same”. Now, of course, we have many more things to talk about. “How is your arm feeling? Do you have anything you need to have me do? Have you called your friend, Jay, yet? Can I get you a drink of water, a cookie, a piece of fruit? Can I help you with those buttons?” During our journeys to doctor’s appointments and physical therapy sessions the conversations have turned to the beauty of the Fall days, art, marriages, divorces, friendships, husbands, raising children, age, illness. As I listen to my mother expressing her views and and telling her stories, I find that I am more like her than I had thought. I see that my philosophy of life is very close to hers, that my opinions have, of course, been influenced by her, that my love of nature and life comes directly from her. I am a bit overly interested in celebrities, I love color, I am fascinated by faces, I am intrigued with discussing people’s motives, just as she is. Her artistic nature is in my love of photography and beauty. We disagree on religion, but neither of us really believes there is a Heaven or Hell. I am much more serious about politics, but she is interested, not apathetic. She is as fascinated in finding out how other people think as I am. She loves to watch people as I do. She writes, reads, works crossword puzzles, loves movies and TV and so do I.

We differ in how much emotion we display, I cry weekly, she rarely cries and never seems to get angry; in how serious we are, I read literary novels and non-fiction books about philosophy or politics and she reads celebrity biographies, I value friends more than she does, but we are both cheerful gregarious types, like to look nice, can chat with strangers, are friendly to those we are working with. Mom didn’t ever work outside her home. She tried but was intimidated by cash registers, making change and invoices. I worked from the time my kids went to school. The Mom I most idealized was Nancy Kvinsland’s Mom, who worked, kept a perfectly clean house, made fabulous meals, had a wicked sense of humor (and had her daughter ironing sheets and her older brother’s boxer shorts, incidentally). I’m not so sure I really would have enjoyed being her daughter, but I thought she was the cat’s pajamas when I was a teenager. Do we ever get the mother’s we think we want? I doubt it. I’ve asked many daughters about their mothers and almost without exception they wish their Moms had been different.

I still wish my Mom had been more demonstrative—it is hard for me to say "I Love You" to those I love—nobody said that in my house and hugs were not common. I wish she had been different with my brothers in some way that would have given them ambition, so that they could have gone out and had jobs and families, to provide cousins for my kids and so that we could have had lots of relatives and big family get-togethers. But that’s not how it was or is. Mom has given me half of what I am and I thank her for that because I like who I am. I can learn to say the love words and I can learn hugging and I have learned to accept what my brothers became. And now, at this late date, I have come to know my Mother in a way I never thought would be possible. And she has said more than once in the last 2 months, "Love ya, Chris". I can’t say that I would ever have wished such injuries to happen, but because of them we have become closer and that is a very good thing—a silver lining entirely unforeseen.