The Aged Mother

By Roger Rosenblatt

Another Mother's Day down, the awkward ceremony survived. Loaded like a German fruitcake, you smiled wide as a freeway, wobbled under tulips, chocolates, a witty card, wished her all the happiness in the world and told all the old stories. Wasn't it fun? Wasn't she pleased, the ancient matriarch who, in a time so distant that it seems made up, slid you out soaked, milky, blind into the sheets? On her designated "day," that same panting, sweating girl sat dry as a museum bone, a china plate receiving alms.

You remember her as reckless, consenting to squat to catch what you called your Feller fastball: clumsy, imperiled dame. Young mothers have the constitutions of gaming stewards, the organizational ferocity of sergeants, show an abundance of guts and style. (Didn't she look the bee's knees in those swishy navy blue dresses of the 1940s?) Want to go to the park, Mom? Yes. Want to watch me do a jackknife dive? Yes. Sure. Can do. Can read Tom Sawyer aloud at bedside. Can tie sneakers. Can poach an egg, hold a job, do long division, mend porcelain, ride bikes, chase dogs, go.

But these days the eyes water like a weak opinion, and the skin on her hand < feels like pie dough rolled on an enamel tabletop. (Let me give you a hand, Mom.) A Whistler pose, she is content to sit staring outward much of the time, as if on the deck of a Cunard liner, or to dip into that biography of Abigail Adams you gave her (a lady for a lady), at manageable intervals. Television interests her not, except occasionally the nature shows that PBS specializes in. Motionless before the mating eland. The memory clicks on and off. The older the anecdote, the clearer in detail. Typical of her much analyzed years, she will forget the sentence before last but in the next will come up with a name from 1923 and a Gershwin lyric that, once sung, swims her back into a world she really occupied.

In the world as it is, she seems only to have the place of a designation. The Aged Mother. Like a painting of the aged mother, or a play called The Aged Mother, or an essay in a magazine. Swathed in the shapeless dress, the indefinite hairdo, she has become something to be noticed and attended, as if she were forever on the verge of vanishing lest one remind oneself to look in on Mother. (And how's your mother?)

Is the woman still a mother? Impertinent question. You dared not ask it on Mother's Day pumped up with bonhomie, but now a few weeks afterward, in the cooler hours, the problem takes a tomblike shape. In terms of technical, logical definition, can a mother be a mother without doing a mother's things? At her advanced stage of life is she supposed to function institutionally, monumentally, like mother nature, mother wit? Mother Russia: perhaps she is to be seen as Yeats' country for old men. Mother earth: big as all outdoors. Not her, the featherweight fossil in your arms, as you help her up a step. Who, what, does she mother these days?

You could say she mothers the past, not yours alone, but a whole world gone. She superintends Coolidge, Chaplin, the Charleston. (She danced the Charleston.) Or that she mothers the future, herself the future to which you begin to resign yourself as your own eyes blear a bit and breaks in the bones take eternity to heal. There she sits in old age ahead of you, still mothering experience, if only by example. Can do.

But the fact is that the problem is not hers, it's yours, the designation yours: the aged mother. To the person in question, she is the aged woman, the aged teacher, the aged Charleston dancer. Motherhood was merely part of a swooping, long and complicated ride that included a sizable fraction of American history, with vast tracts of Europe tossed in. She reads her category in your attentiveness, but privately she has other fish to fry. Who, what, does she mother now? Your attentiveness. Still the center of your universe, you assume that the only thing she really wanted out of life was to play catch in the park with you.

There comes a time when one learns to recognize that the people to whom one is related are not usefully defined by that relationship and are actually diminished by the act. One learns this with children first. Something said by the child offhand, an unusual gesture, an unfamiliar fact, and suddenly you recognize that the creature you cuddled seemingly a moment ago has been off on a life of its own. It achieved its education elsewhere. It has some weird ideas about social justice. The transformation is alarming. The favorite son, the my-little-girl is a stranger, an impostor in the house, until you pipe down, readjust your vision and see that a different sort of relationship is possible, one that requires of you real imagination, a true athlete's reflexes; you have to start listening to what the creature says. Gradually, it comes to you that the mind, even one as heavily padlocked as yours, is capable of affection and judgment all at once, though you look as if you've seen a ghost.

With parents that process of recognition seems more difficult, perhaps because as parents grow older, they need you more, and more basically, and need reinforces the sense of family. Or one may simply wish to retain a parent to retain one's childhood, to establish a comforting mythology in which, however dignified and responsible one feels, still there is the illusion that somewhere the elder presides, like a god. As long as she is enthroned as Mother, you do not have to ascend the genealogy and command the family line.

But see how huge she stands on her own two feet: a colossus, Queen Lear exulting in a private language about ripeness being all. Motherhood was an achievement, but so is age. Is it not time to look at the woman squarely for the life she led outside you? Before her inaccessibility gets out of hand, is it not time to celebrate her other days?

The tulips you brought her have a capacity to curl and lose their body after a while. You may not approve of their progress, but change is not in your control. The aged mother might like you to know that, might wish to teach you to love things as they are, but sometimes she forgets what she means to say, and besides, it is impossible to be severe with a child who means so well, and who will weep like a baby at her death. She smiles instead. Her day gone once again (thank God), she returns to her evening and to the image of that night she glowed like a plum and swept your father in her arms.