What My Mother Could Not Teach Me

My mother is 97 years old. Marilyn, my wife, and I take her out to dinner at least once a week so that she can just get away from her apartment. But if you want to know the truth, I never really look forward to dining out with my mother. No matter where we go or what kind of food we are eating, she will usually find something wrong with the food or the restaurant. It is her nature to look for something that didn’t meet her expectations.

She is like that about everything, really. The maid is no good. The food just wasn’t that good. Her home is never clean enough. She can immediately spot a flaw or a quality in some person, friend or foe, which puts her off. She will immediately tell that person what she thinks on the subject or at least tell the closest person she can find. And she has this thing about fat people. If she sees someone who is especially fat, she takes great pains to point out that person to us and to make some kind of derogatory comment. From time to time, she finds one particular something that she can speak well of, but that just does not happen very often.

My mother is one of those people for whom everything must be “just so.” Only with her, the “just so” standards that work for most people don’t go far enough for her taste. For her, everything in life must be “just, just so.” I have always suspected that one of the reasons that she has never been a particularly positive or happy person is that few things or and even fewer people ever measure up to her expectations of what they should be. For better or worse, she fancies herself to be the ultimate arbiter of what is good and worthy of esteem and what is not good and worthy of her high esteem.

When I was growing up as a child, my mother taught me to want only the best of what there was to have, no matter how much that might cost us. She would constantly say, “If I can’t have the best, I don’t want it. If I can’t do something in the ‘best’ way, I don’t want to do it.” For a kid, a mom like that is more than super. Nothing was too good for me. For me and my brothers, the sky was the limit.

Now that I have grown up, I have learned that one pays a heavy price for living that way. Looking back, some of the outrageous and hurtful things my mother said and did now begin to make some kind of sense to me. My father could very seldom please her in the things that he did and there was a sadness in the man. I must take note that he wasn’t the easiest person to be around up close and personal either. But he died before I could emotionally grow up and I never got to see what may have been the more personable side of him.

Be that as it may, It was plain that he was usually at wit’s end trying to make my mother happy and somewhere along the line he just gave up trying to do that. As a child, I especially remember when my mother, my father and I were visiting Houston. I don’t remember all the details, but this was one of those extreme moments when my mother became absolutely furious with dad and he was forced just to go outside and just escape from the situation. He was in one of those “What am I supposed to do now?” situations, in which it really did not matter what he did or said next, it was going to be wrong, from my mother’s standpoint. At that moment, nothing he could possibly do would diffuse the situation and bring him some relief from her anger and her disappointment. Unfortunately for him, he came from a generation in which one did not get divorced except for the most dire of situations. So he simply continued to suffer the consequences of living with my mother until he died many years later.

Because of who she was, my mother was never able to teach me how to make the best of what I had. That thought would have never occurred to her… and even now it would not. For many years, I wanted only the best, the biggest, the most expensive. For awhile, while I was in my forties, I wanted to own a Bentley automobile. A very wealthy cousin of Marilyn’s not only drove a Bentley, but also owned a Bentley dealership here in town. For me, the Bentley was the “IT” car and one of these days I was going to be sitting behind the wheel of my very own Bentley. Yessir, I was. As you have already surmised, that never happened.

Somehow I learned how to discard this “all or nothing” philosophy that was my mother’s most pronounced legacy to me. Marilyn has taught me that most of the time, we need only what is going to get the job done. Somehow I have been able to evolve into a person who can strike a balance in my life. Sure I want a few very good things. Mostly electronic play toys or a really awesome digital camera. I don’t need to have a Bentley anymore, to feel successful. I have even given up on the desperate notion that I need to get a college degree before I die, so as not to feel like I am a failure… a nothing. I have come to value relationships infinitely more than I value things or accomplishments. And I have learned to be tolerant of the flaws and shortcomings of other people and other things. Don’t ask me how I did that, because I can’t really tell you. Going through the school of hard knocks did not hurt a bit. And I owe a huge amount of thanks to my therapist, who helped me to gain the perspective and understanding that it takes to be able to live contentedly in the moment.

I choose not to look back into my past and ponder how things would have turned out for my mother and for me had the circumstances been different. I look at my mother with a bit of sadness. I wish that she could have had a happier life… a more contented life. However, I also know that you cannot protect people from themselves. She is who she is. I am who I am. Ultimately, each of us will have to make the best of who we are and what we get in life.

Of course, we can choose not to do that. That is the choice my mother made a long time ago. But she has paid a fearful price for having done so. I am not willing to pay that price. Life is just too short to entertain an “all or nothing” approach to life. For people who do, there is going to be a lot more of the “nothing” than the “all”, because few things in life live up to the expectations we have of what they are. Living that way, a person will very seldom be able to see the world in a positive light. I won’t live that way because I have seen what doing so has done to my mother.

Children usually survive the bad habits and the sometimes potentially self-destructive attitudes of their parents. Children usually grow up into nominally functional people eventually. My own children have. I am not sure, but I think I have, too. For that, I am eternally grateful.