Dancing with Mom

Mom stopped by to drop off some coupons the other day. “I know you don’t use coupons usually,” she said as she proffered them, “but I thought you’d use these.” She went on to tell me that she’d just come from having lab work and needed to get home to eat. I invited her in for a chat and some crackers.

That’s how far we have come as mother and daughter. There were decades in my life when we would have chatted at the door, me never opening it wide enough to let her in, or, if I was at her house, I never would have lighted long enough to warm the chair seat. Even when I was there, I wasn’t there. We were never estranged, but we were not all that close either.

Mom was very young when she married, eloping with my dad the winter of her senior year in high school. She never regretted it; she and my dad are still going strong after 56 years together. All the same, marrying and starting a family that young meant giving up other things, including being a carefree teenager. By the time I came along three years later, she’d already had two children, one of whom died in infancy, and life was moving fast.

There is no doubt I puzzled my mother. She wanted a girly girl and she got me. Her frustration shows in her entries in my baby book: “April shoved aside her doll to crawl after her brother’s cars and trucks.” “April hates dresses and prefers pants.”

As I grew older and more headstrong, the battles became more pitched. I didn’t want to learn to sew (mom was very good at it). I didn’t want my ears pierced (she pierced hers instead). I once asked a boy I was crazy about (and am now married to) on a casual date and she went ballistic: didn’t I know he was supposed to ask me? (Apparently not. Neither did he.)

And I wanted to go to college.

That last was probably our biggest hurdle. Her opposition started when I was in first grade and culminated my senior year in her throwing the acceptance letter at me from across the room, saying “I hope you’re happy.” The sound of the letter hitting the floor at my feet was the sound of my leaving: leaving my hometown, leaving my friends, leaving my roots, leaving mom.

For a long time afterwards, I kept my distance, even after I moved back to my hometown many years later. Nice to see you, mom, gotta go.

What brought us back together, in the end, was not the passage of time or my having children and finally “understanding” her or anything else predictable. What bridged the gap was being my being diagnosed with an incurable cancer five years ago and realizing in that instance that life really was too short and the present really was too achingly precious to hold mom at bay forever. And while I am not grateful for the cancer, I am grateful that I learned that lesson before it was too late.

When I was a high school student about to go to my first prom, my dad taught me how to box step. As my mom and I have reengaged, reconnected, reworked, and renegotiated the mother/daughter relationship, it is not unlike learning the box step so many years ago. One step forward, one step sideways, one step back, one step sideways, and then back forward again. Sometimes mom and I are out of step and sometimes the rhythm makes no sense, but at least we are finally dancing.