Memories of Mom
Sometime in the early 90s…
Tomorrow is mothers bring your daughters to work day, and I am excited to finally see the school where mom goes to. She does not work or have a job right now, but she is studying to become a RN, which I am told is a registered nurse. So instead of going to her work, I’m going to go with her to school and tomorrow, I will finally get to see what her school is like. She says tomorrow I will be able to follow her around all day just like I am her shadow. I am a little nervous about going though because she tells me it is like a grown up school where there is no recess or playground equipment to play on. This got me to thinking about what else might be different at a grown up school. Suddenly, I had a lot of questions. When I asked mom earlier today if we had to walk in perfect straight lines with no talking like Ms. Lee makes us do at school, she just laughed at me and said, “You’ll see soon enough,” and then swatted me on the butt and told me to go wash up for dinner.
Mom has been going to school for as long as I can remember, and she always has homework just like I do. Only, hers is much, much harder. Sometimes we’ll even do our homework together on the kitchen table before dinner. I like it when she picks me up from school and she’ll swing the door to the old Chrysler open for me and ask in a cheery voice, “Want to work on homework together? I’ve got a ton of reading to do.”
I like it when she has a ton of reading to do; because I know it means that we’ll go straight home and set our backpacks on the kitchen table and it’ll be just us. Just us for hours and we’ll each pull out our books, hers are always much, much bigger than mine, and she’ll pour studiously over her papers and books with a highlighter clenched in one hand and a coffee mug not too far from the other while I’ll quietly complete each of my worksheets that I didn’t finish at school that day.
I love it this way, us sitting together in the fading afternoon light as it filters through the mini blinds next to the kitchen table casting long skinny shadows across my worksheets. Sometimes when I reach the end of a problem and before going on to the next, I’ll glance up from my paper and watch her when she doesn’t notice. I marvel at the methodical process of her highlighting various words and sentences in her large textbooks she deems fit for highlighting. I study the way she efficiently scans the words and watch as her mouth silently moves along with them. I like it when she seems to finally stumble across whatever it is that she’s been searching for in those giant books and quickly exchange the highlighter for a nearby dull pencil which she uses to quickly scratch out some notes in one of her many spiral notebooks splayed out before her. I let my eyes play over some of the graphic pictures that are laid out in a nearby open textbook of hers that has been haphazardly pushed toward the edge of the table. I allow my eyes to fall on a particular image that catches my curiosity. I take in the image. It is clearly a picture of somebody’s foot with a big toe that has gone bad. The toenail is badly discolored while the rest of the large toe is covered in some sort of black gunk. Disgustedly fascinated, I lean in toward the book for a better view and then immediately recoil from the book, slightly pulling myself away from that corner of the table as if protecting myself from the picture and any possibility of catching the disease illustrated there.
I know that mom has worked very hard like this for a long time now and is getting very close to getting what she calls her degree and then will no longer have to go to school anymore but will be able to work as a nurse. However, I also know that mom is getting very close to quitting school. I know this because she told me so.
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The door to the bathroom had been closed for awhile. I knew this because I had scurried past it a couple of times to retrieve some of Paul’s matchbox cars that had sailed past it. It was one of those seamlessly long and never ending Saturday afternoons and Paul and I had been all over the house that day looking for things to do to occupy our time. We finally settled upon pulling out his old matchbox car collection of which there really were very few, and shooting them off of the nearby stair landing. The hardwood floors in the hallway next to the bathroom made an ideal location for any sort of car activity or in this case, a very satisfying round of staircase car launching.
After a very impressive and somewhat experimental car launch down the laundry shoot, I left Paul pondering the fate of his favorite shiny black car with his head poked into the shoot and his tiny voice echoing down to the basement and scurried up to the bathroom door once again. Squeezing my legs together and bouncing from one foot to the other, I lightly knocked on the door and cracked it open a bit to stick my mouth up to the opening and hurriedly asked, “Mom?”
The sound of bathwater and her familiar voice greeted me, “Come in hon.”
“I need to pee.” I explained as I emerged from behind the door and headed quickly over to the toilet.
Watching my mother’s form from this corner of the bathroom without her awareness I suddenly became aware of her fragility, her humanness. Something about the way she was sitting in the tub, a little defeated. For that split moment she appeared to me as though stripped from the mother’s role that up until that point I had always placed her in my life, and instead was replaced with this other person. It was as though her invincibility had been replaced with vulnerability and it frightened me a little.
Flushing the toilet, I heard her say, “I don’t think I can do it.”
Silently crouching down into a cross-legged position on the bathmat in front of the tub with my hands in my lap, I looked up at her as she repeated with growing certainty, “I don’t think I can do it, “ and then adding as she let her face roll toward me, “I think I’m going to quit school.”
As she said this to me I furiously leapt from my position on the floor and retreated to the wall opposite the tub grabbing a fistful of cheery yellow hand towel in my hand as I did so. I don’t know why, but at that time I felt with such a level of certainty that I’d never experienced before, that she absolutely and without a doubt should not quit. Leaning up against the wall while clutching that towel in my hands I listened as she rationally explained to me from the water below that she’s been going to school for almost five years now, and while those five years were extremely difficult, she wasn’t sure she could get through this last year. Twisting the towel around in my hands I patiently listened while she described a certain professor that had a reputation for being extremely difficult and unforgiving in passing students.
I listened as she pointed out reason after reason as to why she should give up and with each reason I felt more and more desperate from my spot against the wall. The air was humid and sticky from the bathwater. The mirror and windows were fogged over and she looked so humanly deflated and not like the invincible person I’d always made her out to be.
As she went on to enumerate the many logical reasons that she had no doubt been tallying up all this time she’d been in the bathroom, I murmured the only thing that had been pulsating inside my mind since she first started talking, “Don’t quit.”
“And then there’s you kids, I don’t spend enough time with you guys, I’m either studying or…” She paused her rehearsed speech and looked up at me and asked, “What was that hon?”
I boldly stepped forward from the wall until I was standing square on top of the bathmat and looked at her with a confidence I didn’t know I possessed and stated in a voice tinged with defiance, “Don’t quit.”
She looked a little taken aback, but didn’t say anything. Instead, she leaned forward in the tub a little as if interested to hear what else I had to say. I didn’t really know what else I had to say. I just knew with every fiber of my small being that she had to finish school and I was prepared to look for as many reasons as possible why she should do just that.
“You can’t quit.” I repeated again to her. Leaving the towel that I had been holding in my hands crumpled at my feet, I walked to one side of the bathroom and then walked the short distance back to the other. Momentarily pausing there, something flashed before my eyes. Of course!
I quickly dashed out of the bathroom and ran back down the hallway past Paul who was still hovering around the laundry shoot.
“Hey! How ‘bout we try launching these down the shoot?” He excitedly called after me and as I looked back over my shoulder I saw him holding up two large monster trucks one in each hand. Skidding to a stop outside of dad’s study, I called back to Paul,
“Yeah, but hold on a sec! We’ll continue our laundry shoot experiments in a bit. Just hold on!” I glanced somewhat nervously at the trucks he was holding in his hands momentarily before bursting into the study. They appeared to be barely small enough to fit through the opening in the wall leading to the shoot. I briefly wondered what would happen if the truck got stuck halfway down the shoot. I visualized how that would clog up all of the laundry and I wondered with growing curiosity how long it would take before mom would realize it.
Snapping back to the present, I stepped further into the empty study, dad preferred to work from the church office on Saturdays. I padded softy in my socks over to the wall beside his Mac computer. And sure enough there high up on the wall where I had pictured it in my mind’s eye just moments before while I was frantically pacing the bathroom floor was the framed poem. Dad had pulled it down off of its hook on the wall once before and read it to me, and I had never forgotten about it, mostly because he had reminded me about it every now and then when he felt I needed it.
The title of the poem? Don’t Quit.
I stared longingly up at the poem from my spot below it and wondered aloud to no one how to get it off the wall. Pulling up dad’s desk chair and sliding it over against the wall directly below it, I clambered unsteadily atop the chair and stretched my arms out toward it and feeling a sensation of relief flood over me, I grasped it firmly in my hands. Gingerly releasing it from its hook, I leapt off of the chair and clutching the small frame tightly against my chest ran back to the bathroom.
The tub was draining and the gurgling sound of the water being sucked away seemed to fill the room more than it should have. She was standing in the tub a hopeless bright yellow towel already wrapped around her. The water was playing at her feet, splashing up and around the sides of the tub and licking her ankles.
I closed the door behind me and turned the frame around so that I could read it, and there standing facing each other like that, I resolutely read the poem aloud to her word for word:
When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest, if you must, but don’t you quit.
Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about,
When he might have won had he stuck it out;
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow–
You may succeed with another blow.
Often the goal is nearer than,
It seems to a faint and faltering man,
Often the struggler has given up,
When he might have captured the victor’s cup,
And he learned too late when the night slipped down,
How close he was to the golden crown.
Success is failure turned inside out–
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far,
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit–
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.
It had taken me awhile to read through the whole thing, and the sound of the draining bathtub had long subsided by the time I reached the end. When I looked up after I had finished, I could see she had tears in her eyes and I knew this was a good thing. I walked over to her and placed the framed poem firmly in her hand.
She stepped out of the tub and kept looking down at the frame and then back at me. It was then that I knew my plan had worked and that she had somehow found whatever it was she needed to push through and so I walked back to the bathroom door and placed my hand on the handle.
Pausing though before I left, I turned around and faced my mother once again with a small grin on my face and asked tentatively, “Besides, can I quit school too?” Truth be told, there was absolutely nothing in this world I would have liked less than to quit my school. I feverishly adored school and every aspect of it from playing four-square during recess to reading chapter books as a class after lunch, right down to eating lunch and reading the notes that mom always put at the bottom of my lunch pail.
“Of course you can’t quit school, silly. What are you thinking?” Mom was now looking at me with a somewhat perplexed look on her face as I walked back to the bathmat and stooped to pick up the dejected towel I had left there earlier.
I gingerly placed the towel back on its rung on the wall and slowly turning back to face my mother with another small grin playing out on my face I said determinedly, “If I can’t quit school, then you can’t quit school either.”
She looked at me unspeaking for what felt like a long time. And with that, I stepped out of the hot sticky bathroom and into the cool hallway allowing the un-heavy air to refreshingly hit my face. Somehow I knew I’d have her at that, and of course I did. We had that kind of relationship. We understood each other. And that was my day to understand my mother. To see past the strong façade of her various roles, mother, minister’s wife, student and to see her struggles, her fears, her realness.
She would finish out that last year of school and get her nursing degree from the prestigious Oregon Health Sciences University later that year. Sitting in between dad and Paul in the stands at her graduation and watching her walk across the stage and receive her diploma that spring was perhaps the first graduation I had ever been to and would prove to leave a lasting impression on me. I would value and continue to pursue my own education from high school, to college, and on to graduate school with an eager spirit and unfailing determination that I can only have learned together with my mother.
