Mom

     My mother is 81 years old. She was born on January 2, 1934 to Glenn and Anna Higley. She was the youngest of 5. Her father worked in the shipyards in the Puget Sound and her mother was a school teacher. She grew up in government housing projects and played outside with her friends a lot, often at a vacant lot where the local kids would dig large holes and lay wood over the top of it to make forts or bunkers. Her oldest brother Dale enlisted in the Army in 1940, he was stationed on a Japanese island and saw some horrors he only retold once to my mother’s knowledge. In contrast in today’s world we tend to think of WWII as the Big One, the war where we had a common enemy, where we knew what their faces looked like and there was no doubt as to the evil they wrought. Through my Uncle Dale’s eyes the sight of a Japanese soldier burning alive from a flamethrower he was manning was enough to haunt him for the rest of his life, enemy of the U.S. or not. Mom remembers the family getting “Ration books” that allowed each member of the family to purchase items like sugar, flour and other groceries. She said that “You could forget about buying tires, they all went to the war effort!” New cars were few and far between as Detroit geared up for war machines.

     Glenna, my mother, is of German heritage, her grandparents came over to America in 1910 in search of a better life in the “Land of Milk and Honey”. My grandmother spoke fluent German but raised her kids without passing on the German language to them, and in fact, her husband forbade her to speak German in public or to teach it to their kids. My mother thinks that this was in part due to the war with Germany…in fear of repercussions from paranoid Americans. I don’t blame them for being careful; look at what happened to the Japanese Americans put into “internment camps”. When I was young my grandmother would visit us and bring along some old German “Beer-Drinking Music” albums and try and teach my brother and me what the lyrics meant. It wasn’t very successful, but I liked spending the time and the attention she gave us.

     Mom does not remember her grandparents at all; they were very old and lived in the Midwest when she was little. Her father Glenn died in 1952, just before her 18^th birthday of a brain aneurysm brought on by a severe coughing fit. His funeral was 2 days after her birthday. She was the last child at home and moved out when her mother went to live with family. Her mother Anna did not remarry for 20 years, in 1972 she married her neighbor in Tacoma, Glenn Shellenberger; a fellow German. He died within a year of their marriage and she never married again.

      My mother grew up in the Pacific NW and has been here her entire life. Mom dropped out of high school in her senior year and went to work in Portland, Ore as an “Usherette” in a big movie theater, she had two female roommates and wasn’t into parties or bars. She did date a Portland policeman for a time though, but it never really went far. I can only imagine what my life might have been like had that fling gone further! Soon the Korean War began and her cousin Leland went off to war, she said she wrote him often and even wrote to several of his friends who had no one at home to write to them. I found this a beautiful sentiment but she shrugged it off.

     She eventually moved back to her hometown in the Tri-Cities, Pasco, WA. In 1960 she met my father, a handsome man who was working as a “grunt” for Pacific Power and Light, hoping to one day become a lineman. He had been in the Navy during the Korean War, along with his brother Clayton they were stationed in Japan and never saw any real action. I have a picture of my father in his Navy uniform and he was an amazing looking man. My mother and he soon fell in love and were married in a small church ceremony with just a few family members present. My mother had grown up going to the Lutheran Church but had slacked off shortly before meeting my father. She said the family had routinely gone to church but they were far from fervent about their faith.  Politically her family had been Democrats through her life, but she shared with me that she had switched to Republican in recent years. I think that this is a common trend among senior citizens as the see the Democrats as being “Liberals” and her dissatisfaction with the current administration is no secret to anyone who knows her. Oddly enough my mom is a big fan of Fox News and feels that the “other” networks can’t be trusted. She even referenced “those damn liberal college professors!” on her litany of what’s wrong with the world today. I don’t think she fully realizes that her son (me) is pretty much on par with “those college professors”. This is a great example how party lines are drawn by rhetoric and false claims and rumors, often fueled by media. Thankfully we just agree to disagree sometimes and I know how to pick my battles with her. I watched her hurt and cry when she lost the love of her life 5 years ago, she deserves every bit of compassion I can muster, as she put up with so much from me during my tumultuous youth.

     After trying for over a year to have children my mother had a “tubal” pregnancy and it ruined her ability to have children. Her and my father sought out adoption as a means to have a child and in 1963 brought my brother Dale home, he was one month old. She said that adopting a child was simple then, you simply signed up, passed some basic requirements and then they called you with choices when they came up. She did say that they were first offered a trio of siblings, including a newborn baby but turned them down after some careful consideration, it makes me sad to think of 3 siblings needing homes and trying to stay together, what was their story…? Mom helped my dad through his exams for becoming a lineman, she said she ended up doing a lot of his homework for him and joked that she probably could have taken those exams and became a linewoman! I don’t think there were any of those at the time, so I asked her about any perceived gender bias that she may have felt. She really could not recall any. Having grown up in the 40’s and 50’s I can imagine why, it’s like a fish being asked how they like the water…what is water?

     I asked her what it was like when she heard that Kennedy was assassinated, she said she was sad and distraught like the rest of the nation, she recalls sitting in a chair in the kitchen while her mother was giving her a home permanent watching the funeral on TV. My parents had gotten their first TV in 1962; it was a large Magnavox console color model; that was a big deal then. She said they often went over to the neighbor’s house and watched Ed Sullivan or The Honeymooners, which were her favorite shows. No TV, can you imagine? In some ways I wish that were the case today, but in a way I don’t really have one either. I do but it is only connected to and antenna and sits silent and dark in my living room excepts for occasional movies, I don’t have a favorite show anymore, I can’t stand commercials so I don’t watch it at all, except Netflix binges of course (Breaking Bad, Walking Dead..). My parents wanted another child and was soon rewarded with a chubby little baby boy they chose to call Matthew, named after Marshall Matt Dillon, the hero in my father’s favorite TV show Gunsmoke.

     I asked her what it was like during the Civil Rights Movement. She said that growing up in the Pacific NW she had friends that were black, Indian, Asian and they all attended school together, there were no “Whites Only” signs during her youth, she said that folks she knew didn’t really exhibit any racial tension. She was horrified at the violence and hate inflicted on blacks in the South that she saw on TV. She said she was pretty much just centered on raising her little family as a stay-at-home-mom and didn’t really pay much attention to global and national issues as they didn’t really affect her that much. I do this too, there is so much publicized upheaval shown to us on a regular basis through our enhanced media that if I chose to be indignant about every injustice I would be in a perpetual state of chaos. As for Vietnam she said that she was disgusted with the way returning soldiers were treated when they came home from the “conflict” (later to be labeled a “War”). Televised and publicized atrocities that were reported at the time did cause some national speculation about how our servicemen had killed innocents as well as enemies, but my mom simply said “Those boys didn’t ask to be sent there, they were drafted and forced, if you weren’t there in front of those decisions they had to make at the time then you shouldn’t judge them!” (Go mom! Yes!)

     Mom didn’t think too much of the “hippies” or Woodstock, she said she just felt that beards and long hair were “kinda stupid”, and weren’t being any too smart with their well-publicized promiscuity; which makes sense since during my youth I insisted on growing my hair long which she had never seen the point of but eventually relented when I was in Jr. High. She divorced my dad in 1970 and remarried in 1972. My father had cheated on her and she was not going to stand for it. She remarried in 1972 to Gary Powell, we lived in Baker, Oregon and then moved to Pendleton, Oregon in 1973. I asked mom about Watergate and President Nixon. She said that she felt that Nixon “got what he deserved”. I then asked her if she thought that such crimes that caused Nixon’s downfall are occurring on a regular basis these days and simply being covered up better, she said that our current administration was “ten times worse than Nixon ever thought of being”.

    Mom and Gary picked out a brand-new pre-fab 14x70 mobile home and got a space in a new trailer park a few miles outside of Pendleton called “Shenandoah Estates”.  They also traded in his Plymouth Barracuda for a Datsun Station Wagon. They also had an old Chevy truck for Gary. My mom reminisced about her first car, it was a canary yellow 1938 Buick convertible, she got it in 1958, and she absolutely loved that car. I would too! Wow. The home was pre-furnished and pre-decorated with tacky 70’s art. We lived there for only two years, mom said that it was a terrible place for a mobile home park as the wind came through unabated by any trees and blew over a few of the trailers that weren’t anchored down, she said that one blew over right next to my brother as he was walking home from the bus stop!

   Mom was getting tired; we had talked for about an hour and a half. She told she loved the Mother’s Day flowers I had sent to her and had arrived earlier in the day. She said she had thought about things that she hadn’t thought of in decades. I told her I was grateful that she and I had had this time to talk about something other than what was going on with me, or my kids. She grew up in a different world, it would be easy to reminisce and feel some longing for such simpler times but it seems to me that it only seems simpler to me, that these are my simpler times. Glenna Marie Higley had a simple childhood growing up with her siblings and parents, it wasn’t any better or worse than my own, I felt the similarities between us throughout our conversation as we paralleled experiences and shared similar attitudes about some things. I may not be biologically a part of my mother, (Nature) but I am culturally and environmentally a product of my mother (Nurture).

   One last thing, I brought up Gary, my stepfather, whom she divorced around 1976. She said she “just pushes that time out of her mind”. He was not a very nice man and was often very strict to the point of abusive with my brother and me. I shared with her that I had gotten over this through exercising forgiveness and empathy. I shared with her that I had finally realized that Gary was just trying to raise kids that weren’t his own the way he had been shown that kids should be raised by his own father, he had done the best he could with what he had, just like me. I think I gave her some pause with this and maybe even a tad bit of peace, since I am fairly certain that she blamed herself for choosing him and then putting up with his sour demeanor and flippant behavior for 5 years before ousting him for infidelity as well.

    My mom lived a fairly simple life through events that we like to list in chronological order and label as significant. To her those were just the times she lived through, the importance of those events has been honed and examined over time, in hindsight she lived through a plethora of historical events, but that is the nature of history is it not? History is looking back and attaching meaning to something. Re-telling and examining an event is not the same as living through it. We can change our experience with the past by changing our perception of our relationship to it…like I did with Gary. It’s all over, done, gone. It only lives in memory and in documentation. Her life, like my own is slowly coming to pass; it will only live in the memories of those we share it with. To quote the famous street artist Banksy, “They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.”  That thought struck me deeply, because I recognize it as true. Lately I have been considering what I am going to be leaving behind and what I can offer to my kids and grandkids, maybe this happens to all of us as we hit 50 and above, stories of how someone “dropped dead” of an aneurysm after a coughing fit resonates a bit more as you age. My mom has lived 81 years, she recently buried one of her siblings and a niece, she is feeling her age but rarely lets on that it bothers her. I can hardly imagine what my life will be like without her. But I know one thing, I want my kids to keep her name on their lips and pass it on to theirs so my mother will never have to die twice.