Big Mother

I love my mother. I can’t imagine my world without her in it. We are completely connected. Yet, my mother can be exhausting. Literally–she is inexhaustible. I can’t keep up with her. She’s an 81-year-old energizer bunny and now that I think of it, she always has been.

Mom still works three days a week as a therapist. I thought perhaps she did it because it keeps her young. She actually does it because she loves to work and is still ambitious. Recently she asked my marketing advice because she’s not as busy as she’d like to be-at 81.

Honestly, I don’t know how she has time to see her patients–she’s always busy. Bridge games, charity meetings, luncheons, and book clubs. A few months ago she decided to have the bridge ladies for lunch and made enough to have two more dinner parties for different friends in the same week. Have I mentioned she’s 81?

I also can’t figure out how she has time to cook because she’s always driving into Manhattan for at least 3 cultural events a week. And if she isn’t driving into the city to see a play, go to the museum, or to the opera, she’s seeing one of her trove of doctors.

In January I drove through a snowstorm to spend a night in New York with her. I was dropping my daughter off at a camp reunion. We arrived after a harrowing 8-hour drive through our only snowstorm of the year. We were exhausted, but my mother insisted that we go out to dinner at a favorite restaurant at 9:00 p.m. It was a French restaurant so the hour wasn’t late for them at all. She treated my daughter and I to her first truly French dining experience: escargots, frogs legs, and veal sweetbreads; waiters who only spoke French and who served us from silver platters. Exhausted as we were, we had a blast.

The next day Mom was the first one up ready for lunch and a matinee as well as dinner and an evening show–all that same day. I’m certain she would have gone on to a late-night cabaret if I hadn’t cried “uncle.”

But this is consistent. A few summers ago we decided to spend a few days visiting her in the City. We ended up needing a vacation from our vacation with her. We started the day by taking a boat to Ellis Island, then a walking tour, museum, Broadway show, dinner in Chinatown, desert in Little Italy, and burgers late night at White Castle, “Because, Pamela, the kids should experience it once.” (Just once).

Yes, my mother is an amazing woman. But she’s always been that way. She operated at full speed despite four kids, a house to run, a full-time career, and school. The lessons I learned from her come from her unbounded energy and intense passion for just about everything. Her flair for hyperbolic language and living was perhaps the seed of my own affair with the dramatic.

She’d say, “Why cook for 10 when you can cook for 40, Pamela?” She owned dinner service for 100 because she might need it one day for a big party. She was renowned among her friends for her amazing dinner parties–cooking everything herself–never using a caterer.

To me, she was my “Auntie Mame” as much as she was my mother. She always found time to take us on adventures. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, then tea at the Plaza. A trip to Tiffany’s-not to buy, just to soak up the atmosphere. Shopping trips to obscure discount stores in Brooklyn, selling high-end samples with the labels torn out–definitely to buy and not for the atmosphere. To her, Loehmann’s was for amateurs.

And then my favorite, trips to Elizabeth Arden where I was treated to the most amazing hair wash by a woman named Elvira. While my hair dried, I’d wait for my mother on the balcony overlooking 5th Avenue. Eloise might have lived at the Plaza, but she didn’t have my mother to play with.

After our hair was done we’d go out to lunch at one of her favorite restaurants. Her eyes would gleam and she’d whisper in a conspiratorial tone, “Don’t tell your father Pamela.”But I think that was just for effect, because she eventually told him everything. He was the love of her life and I can’t imagine her keeping anything from him.

She says they met in the baby carriage. But he ended up dating her best friend Frances all through high school. He eventually broke up with Frances and on a trip back from medical school in Switzerland, swept her off her feet. Their romance continued past the birth of their four children and the pressures of daily life.

I’d often find them stealing kisses in the hallway. They’d argue passionately and then joke about how much they enjoyed making up. He was devoted to her, protected her fiercely, and loved to please her. But she was equally devoted to him. Watching them love each other taught me to look for that kind of romance in the man I would eventually marry.

My mother taught me what it meant to be a wife and a mother and an independent woman too. She worked as a teacher but dreamed of becoming a therapist–going back to school herself when I, the youngest of four, finally went to school. She followed her dreams at a time when women often didn’t take those risks. So when I wanted to change professions from being a lawyer to acting, she understood and came to see me perform as often as she could. Her greatest compliment to me was that my performance as a lawyer having a nervous breakdown was, “Very disturbing Pamela.” But I think she was most proud when she could show her friends my profile in People Magazine.

Now I must say as much as an inspiration as she is, my mother can also drive me mad. She selectively hears what I have to say, but insists she can hear when she needs to. Her use of dramatic language about inconsequential things–“It was a disaster, Pamela”–often makes me question her judgment.

Even though we sometimes get heated and there is some yelling and phone slamming (it comes with the chromosomes)-we always make up. It is perhaps the most enduring relationship of my life–given that it started in the womb.

But my mother not only gave me life, she can always be counted on to give me things I had no idea I ever needed until she told me I did. Like cabinet liners.

Whenever we moved my mother was always there setting up my kitchen, insisting on lining the cabinets each time, until finally I asked her why they needed to be lined, and she said, “I have no idea Pamela.”

My mother made sure that all her girls, daughters, and daughters-in-law had every kitchen gadget imaginable on hand–big choppers and small choppers, pastry shell makers, and ice cream makers. My favorite was the Mickey Mouse toaster oven that actually sang the Mickey Mouse song every time the toast was done.

I had no idea where she was getting these things from until I opened the box with the enormous outdoor dryer vent (she noted we didn’t have one and was worried about it). I looked at the catalogue inside and realized she’d been sending me things from the Home Trends catalogue, a company right here in Rochester. She was delighted and asked if we could go visit the warehouse, “Perhaps they gave discounts, Pamela.”

When we moved to Rochester my mother was here, cabinet liners in hand to help me unpack and deal with the move that I was reluctant to make. After we took my parents to the best restaurants in town my mother said, “You’ll be fine Pamela there is good food here and you’ve got Wegmans.

But I think the greatest life lessons my mother’s taught me have occurred in the last few years since my father’s death. I’ll never forget getting the phone call that my father had taken a fall from a ladder and that I should get on a plane. I threw some things in a bag and took the last flight out of Buffalo to JFK. I arrived at my childhood home around 1:00 a.m. My mother had returned from the hospital where my father lay in a coma. She looked so tiny and she kept saying, “How can I go on without him?” That night, as I crawled into bed with her and listened to her cry I wasn’t sure she would. That night, I thought I had lost both my parents.

But when he passed away two days later she had already started the long hard road to living without him. And she did it with the same fierce energy she displayed in her life with him. She went back to work almost immediately. Within a few months of his dying she’d flown to London to see close friends. She booked trip after trip, including a trip to Russia–by herself. She called me from all over the world, St. Petersburg, Bogota, and Nova Scotia. She had two hips replaced and had surgery on both shoulders because she wants to keep moving for a long time. “Pamela, I’m not doing the widow’s walk–I’m running,” she said. Yes, she’s sad without my father, she says she’ll miss him for the rest of her life. But you’d never know it because she just keeps on moving–my bionic energizer momma-may she keep going and going and going....strong.