The Story of My Mom
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| Me and Mom (1933-2018) |
My mom was born in 1933. Her mother was a school teacher, her dad was a county agent. (That is one of those people who is employed by the Department of Agriculture to help farmers with their crops.)
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| Standard Sized Racquet |
After high school she attended the University of Georgia, just as her father had. She contemplated majoring in music, because she was also a gifted pianist, but instead she decided to pursue another love: science. She received her BS in Chemistry.
It was along about this time, with both their daughters off in college, that my grandparents decided to move to Africa. My grandfather accepted a position with the Agency for International Development. He was going to do that county agent stuff in Ethiopia.
Post college mom was one of two women accepted into the Medical College of Georgia. It was there that she met my dad. He was also a student and a couple of years older. They started dating and then got married after a couple of years. That is when the wheels started to come off the bus.
They decided mom should drop out of school to be a wife and mother. The thinking was “the family doesn’t need two doctors.” She had three children in quick succession and in the process, or maybe shortly thereafter, became mentally ill. My father surveyed the situation and decided that it didn’t fit with his plans at all. So he left. This was the beginning of the second phase of my mother’s life. The less idyllic portion.
It was early spring of 1963 that mom found herself alone, well, except for those three diaper-clad young uns. She could scarcely take care of herself let alone the kids. She had no job and no money. The parents she would have turned to were now living 7,000 miles away (if you could have found a direct flight to their village.) She had just turned 30.
The only relative that could help was an aunt who lived way down in south Georgia, just north of the Florida border. We were going to move in with Aunt Eve when Grandma Sturmer stepped in. That’s right, the soon-to-be-ex-mother-in-law said “No. Come to Atlanta to live with me. The schools are better here.” That’s what we did. We lived with her for 8 years. A while later our other grandparents returned from Africa and moved to a house down the street. So we had all grandparents close by and we’d see them every day.
Mom suffered from what in those days was called Manic-Depression, but there was far more depression than mania. If we could have pulled out something close to 50-50 it would have almost been worth it. For about a decade she struggled getting her meds balanced. She held a series of low paying jobs punctuated by unemployment. Once, when she when she had no job, she pretended to go to work so as not to worry her children.
The doctors finally got the pills regulated. She secured a job processing claims for Blue Cross Blue Shield. This was a far cry from being a pathologist, but it suited her for who she was at that time in her life. She held the position for over 20 years eventually retiring from it and drawing a small pension.
Bipolar Disorder (as it is now called) is controlled by balancing chemicals in the body to alleviate extreme mood swings. The lows are filled in, and that is good, but at the same time the highs are filed off. This can leave the person who is treated with personality that is somewhat flat-line. That was mom.
I think one of the best ways to describe her is that she was emotionally reticent. She signed her birthday cards “From, Your Mother.” Yeah, I know, I recognize the handwriting. She frequently didn’t get my humor. I must have used this phrase 1,000 times: “Mom…IT…IS…A…JOKE!” When we spoke on the phone I would conclude the (always very short) conversation with “I love you!” each time exaggerating it for effect. To which she would respond: “Well. OK. Bye.” That would crack me up.
The thing is I don’t know is how much of my mom’s post-1975 personality was just her reserved self, or how much of it was medication. I assume a little bit of both, with an emphasis on the latter. But I always knew how she felt under that wax paper blanket that was just her.
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| She loved the theatre. Gretchen and me with the Moms |
In spite of all of that, she did ok for herself. She lived a calico life. She never remarried. She liked traveling. She visited Europe, the Middle East, and Japan. She loved playing and watching tennis. She went to Roland Garros (The French Open) with her sister. I took her to Wimbledon and The US Open. She was a bridge player and a flower gardener. She loved birds and her piano. She was able to right the ship of mental illness and live within the confines of it. It was never ever easy, but she approached it with the same diligence that marked her other successes. I was proud of her for that.
When she got older she slid into dementia and had even more trouble communicating. It seemed like she knew what she wanted to say, it was only the words she had trouble finding. In a way, knowing mom was like being a member of a secret society. Her sentence fragments were like Morse Code. Her finger stabs and hand gestures were like a catcher’s sign to his pitcher. But I always knew where she was coming from. We eventually moved her to memory care where she would spend her days clutching a toy doll. She seemed happy and well cared for.
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| With her children. |
Mom had a stroke last week and was given just a couple of hours to live. In spite of that she managed to tough it out another week. She was like that, resilient. I stayed with her hospice, my sisters were also there all day and she was never alone. The whole week we laughed and told stories. I hope she could hear us. She died March 8, 2018 at 10:08 PM. When I left the room I kissed her forehead made sure to that the UNC game was still on. She would have liked that.
Well. OK. Bye.
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| Well. OK. Bye. From the Family. |
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