We Will Begin Again

When things are great between my mother and me, we will have Sunday dinner. Her husband will barbeque chicken for my kids, and she will send me home with leftover potato salad and cornbread. When things are good, she will walk her three little furball dogs down to the baseball field to cheer on my son and sit by me in the bleachers. When things are good, she will drop off a little Easter basket for the kids on my porch or give me a birthday present and a card that says she loves me.

When things are bad, however, she tells me in her rich Southern voice that she didn’t raise me like that. That could mean anything to religion to politics to my diet. Anything really so long as she doesn’t agree with me. When things are bad, she will call me and tell me I am the most selfish person she knows and who cares if it’s my birthday that I ruined her life when I moved out at sixteen. When things are bad, she does not even bother to call me or my kids—her grandkids—she just doesn’t call.

But she has been gone for seven days now. She is 2,485 miles from me now. My whole life she has lived less than 10 miles from me, and now she will be 37 hours and 40 minutes by car or a 5 hour direct flight and then a two and a half hour car ride.

She wants to go home. Back to the rich Carolina soil and thick Carolina air. Although she’s lived the last thirty-five years in the same San Gabriel mountains of Southern California, she wants to retire. Home, is all she keeps saying, her vowels drawing out like a sour song.

I do not blame her for leaving, for wanting to start a new chapter in her life, for wanting to return to her two sisters (her only remaining immediate family), for wanting something familiar and warm. In North Carolina she will be able to clear the weeds from her parents’ gravestones, to take care of an aging aunt or two, and walk in the dried-up rows of tobacco plants and corn stalks where so much of her childhood was spent. There, no one will ask her where she is from because it is obvious she fits right in. There she can watch the dewy mist of the cape roll in at night and watch the fireflies ballet on the banks. There she can spend her days quilting. There she can be buried in the family plot alongside her father since she was the youngest of five and her daddy’s favorite.

But in these seven days, I have missed my mom. It’s not likely that we would have seen each other this last week. Sometimes we go weeks without seeing each other. Sometimes the closest I get to her is driving by her car on my way to drop off my kids at school. But that was something, and something is always better than nothing. I know too many friends with nothing instead of mothers.

It won’t be the same without her, and I will have to find a way to climb on a plane every couple of years or try to remember to buy a Mothers’ Day gift weeks in advance and mail them or try to remember to send her goofy school pictures of the kids. Or try to be a good daughter long-distance.

But as much as I am sad to lose her, I am hopeful that this will mean a new start for us. One in which I can imagine her telling new friends at the quilting guild how proud of her daughters she is and mean it. Maybe she will send a nice text every once in a while and call me her “Big little girl” the way she used to when I was little but towered over her petite frame. Maybe she will start calling my kids on Sundays to hear them blab about their impossibly fast-moving lives. Maybe she will be willing to forget that I am a liberal atheist vegetarian and start loving me because she did raise me that way. Maybe we will never again mention the past except to share colorful, almost cliché memories of summer vacation mishaps or the time she made my sister Sarah eat all her vegetables for the next three meals until they were gone. Or maybe we won’t talk at all. Maybe we will sit on the phone with each other and listen to the other—really listen.

The most recent photo I could find of my mom and I on her wedding day in 2007.

I was not there when you said goodbye when his heart finally gave out after thirty-five years.

I was not there when you said No again and again—when you whispered, Come back. I need you.

I was not there when you threaded your fingers between his—the way your mother instructed you to when you were little and she wanted you two to stick together. Take good care of him, she might have said again and again throughout your childhood. How could she have known that you would.

I was not there the last seventeen days while you slept by his side while you teased him about getting up. Get up. When you pleaded with him, GET UP. When you shouted at a god you no longer believed in when he did not.

I was not there when you kissed his forehead. When you ran your fingers through his hair, straightening it because you knew how he would have hated his hair looking crazy at a time like this.

I was not there when you left the room–when you looked back one more time at room 580— when you reminded yourself that it wasn’t him anymore—that he was gone. When you thanked the nurses for all they did. When you rode down the elevator feeling like you had forgotten something like a pit in your stomach. Like a boulder in your throat. Like an enormous piece of yourself. When you walked to the car and the sun heaved its warmth on you. When you said, Fuck you, to the Presbyterian Church bells as they echoed through the parking lot. When you got into your car. When you turned up the radio. When you screamed.

And then you screamed.

And then you screamed.

And then you drove home.

I am too young for a hearing aid.  I am also too blonde and too tall for a hearing aid.  Maybe I am too pretty for one too but not likely.  Mostly, I am too stubborn.

Being hearing impaired is not something I share with a lot of people.  In fact, many of my friends and co-workers probably do not know this about me.  It’s hard to say.  I am not totally deaf; I just struggle to hear out of one of my perfectly normal-looking ears.  The right one.  And my hearing is not totally gone—it’s like I have a thumb jammed in there or maybe a big toe.  I can hear sound, mumbles, tones.  If you stood on my right side and spoke to me, and we were in a quiet place, I would have no trouble at all.  But if we were in a restaurant and you sat to my right and asked me how my day was, I could hear your voice, but I would struggle to make sense of the words.

Sometimes, I can fake this moment.  Guess at what I should say.  Take context clues and answer appropriately.  This is how I navigate many of my non-hearing moments.  But if I cannot do this, I might smile at you and hope the moment passes—that maybe our waiter will ask if we’re ready to order.  Mostly though I just listen to the noise—and see what sense I can make of it all.  The clatter of plates, the murmur of fuzzy conversations nearby, a song overhead that I can almost hear the pitch of a note here and there.

Believe it or not, it is a hard thing to tell people, especially people who I have known for quite some time.  First, there is the occasion.  I feel like the right time never comes up.  Hey, Vicki.  How are the kids?  Hey you, I might reply, maybe even give a hug depending on the nature of our relationship.  By the way, I can’t hear you.  Oh, I’m. . uh. . . well, I’m hearing impaired.  How long?  Um, jeez, since birth, I guess. . . I didn’t tell you because uh. . . uh. . .

Second, there are the questions.  Why can’t I hear?  I don’t know.  Have I been tested?  Yes, a couple dozen times.  Is there anything the doctors can do?  Yes, if I want a hearing aid.  Why don’t I get one?  Oh, because it’s $5,000, and then there’s the thing about being too young and pretty or prideful or whatever.

Sometimes I wish there were greeting cards for this kind of announcement.

Dear Friend,

Ever wonder why I look at off into space when you are talking?  No, really—it’s me.  Surprise!  I’m hearing impaired!

Love,

Me

Sometimes I wish there was a T-shirt that announced such things to the general, unsuspecting public.  A disclaimer so that I didn’t have to explain what I thought I heard.  Something so that I didn’t have to feel like I needed to justify my actions and/or lack thereof.

Take, for example, the grocery store last week when a hollowed out, dusty man approached me while I was pitching my goods into my car.  I could sense him approaching.  (Sadly, there are far too many older, dried-up desert men floating around the Stater Bros’ parking lot.  Most of them want money.  Some of them want rides or food for their animals or food for their families.)  And then, he started to talk.  At first, I continued with the task of chucking the heavy bags into the trunk.  Because I can’t hear well, I often approach the world in this manner—ignore.  But then he spoke again, this time, closer.  I could hear his voice, but the words were gravelly.  I could hear the tone—a question, so  I turned and said, Sorry.  I don’t have any cash.

Of course, this was not what he had asked, as evidenced by his souring grin.  I had guessed wrong and this angered him.  Then I noticed the squeegee.

“I didn’t ask you for a handout,” he shouted; the squeegee pumped up and down with the spit in his words.  “I asked you if you wanted your windows cleaned!  I ain’t no charity case!”

What was I to say?  Sorry, I didn’t hear you and I just assumed. . . It didn’t matter.  I was a jerk either way.  The man stormed off, shouting to the resting of the parking lot how he wasn’t asking for no charity—he was asking for work, goddamnit.

My mother-in-law recently got a hearing aid.  She hears everything now—right down to the cat drinking water from the toilet two rooms away.  But in exchange, whenever she talks, she hears her own voice blast across the room.  As a corrective measure, she has taken to mumbling.  But sadly, where she now hears, I can’t hear her.  I sat across her at dinner a few weeks ago and never once realized she was talking to me until my husband drove an elbow into my ribs.  I had been staring into space, taking in the architecture, the patrons, the closeness of one red-haired waitress and the bar tender with too much gel in his hair.

And that’s the other thing not hearing has done for me.  Oh sure, it gets me out of conversations I don’t want to hear, but it has allowed for a lifetime of retreat.  Growing up, when friends were hard to come by, I could always sit behind a tree and watch lips move, mouths burst open with laughter.  I filled the vacuum of their words and noises with my own.  I made up their lies and their jokes, their playground alliances and betrayals.

So when I think about hearing—really hearing the world—for all its nuance and crackle, I can’t help but to stick to my understanding of it.  So I can’t sing a song off the radio without mis-hearing most of the lyrics, but who cares if “sunset” isn’t actually “bun lift”?  (You’d be surprised how many songs containing “sunset” that “bun lift” is a surprising contextual equivalent.)  So what if I can’t hear my kids shouting across the house that so-and-so ruined their Lego House of Awesomeness?  So what if I can’t hear my husband calling me from the next room to hurry up they’re felling another tree on Ax Men?  There are some things not worth hearing.  The rest—well, the rest I’ll just have to make-do.  Or make-up.