Island Girl

(What would have been my mother’s 100th birthday passed a week ago and I was sufficiently distracted to not take a proper note. She was a woman, for her six children, of significant consequence, and why I was able to find my way in the world. A lesser soul would have surrendered to her travails. I wanted to share a reworked essay I wrote about her after she had passed in her eighties. I’ve been around some, and have still never met her match. My love has only grown through the years. - JM)

She never should have left. But when the handsome military policeman stopped at her mother’s door to get out of the cold in St. John’s, Newfoundland, their lives began to swirl off into the storms of history. My father’s years had been lived without parental love and mostly as a laborer working the cotton fields of the Mississippi delta, and when he met someone who cared for him, he never let it go. Neither did she, raised as she was without a father when he died of gangrene poisoning at only thirty six after returning home from the battles of World War I.

Ma got pregnant with her first child at only age seventeen and her husband went off to the European Theater of World War II. She had no sense of whether he might return but he wanted her to go down to Dixie and live with his parents until he got home. By the time she reached the platform at the train station, she was holding her new baby, Elaine, and departing for a strange country where she knew not a soul. Her mother stood next to her, saying good bye.

“My child, you’re going to have a very difficult life,” she said.

And in the way of mothers, she was painfully accurate with her assessment. What my Ma knew of the U.S. she had learned by watching “Gone with the Wind” at a movie house. When the soldier at her door looked a bit like Clark Gable and Errol Flynn in uniform, she fell in love and dreamed of living on a big plantation, sipping sweet tea and wearing hoop skirts as he rode a mighty horse across their vast holdings. Instead, the suffered and struggled mightily in abject poverty.

Home was a sharecropper’s shack in the middle of a cotton patch. There was neither plumbing nor electricity and at night she lay on a straw mattress holding her baby while watching the stars pass between the open roof slats. My father’s parents treated her, she said, coldly, because she was a foreigner, and Daddy, too, slowly began to change. She had no idea he had been institutionalized after a nervous breakdown at only sixteen and he was likely beginning to be haunted by the ghosts of what young men saw at war.

My mother’s dreams were very simple, though, when she came to America. She wanted a man to love, who would love her in return, a few children, a small house, a dependable income, maybe, eventually, a gathering of grandchildren around her table. She could not have been expected to have sophisticated ideas about the possibilities of life and romance in the States. I thought because of her father’s death when she was only five years of age that she was vulnerable to an emotional connection to a strong man before she had matured as a young woman.

Elizabeth Joyce Hiscock Moore - Work Was Often All She Had

I do not know if my mother ever had happiness. Surely, there must have been times when they were newlyweds and she was ironing Daddy’s socks and underwear, an almost absurd act of love, that she felt great emotion and dreamed about their future, a time when all of their aspirations might be realized. What were they, though? I always wondered. Daddy was a man out of time and place, born a century too late and driven to a geography that left him feeling permanently displaced. Southern sun and piney woods had been replaced by the cold, dark rumblings of a factory’s driving wheel.

They had been forced to go north to find work in the automotive towns of Michigan because sharecropping offered nothing but endless labor and shriveling hope. My father’s anger and mental instability, though, had nowhere to go, except at his young bride. I have cried many times thinking what it must have been like for Ma when she was first struck by the man she loved, what rushed through my mother’s mind, what were the accommodations and compromises she made with herself because she was alone and so far from Newfoundland and had small children and no money?

I lived too much of my life away from my mother. I owed her more than I could provide. As I came of age, I was always leaving. I don’t know why I had to go, only that I must, and each time she held me so tight I was certain she thought she could keep me from departure. She never did, though, and there were always tears. She had been absent from our lives because she was always working long restaurant hours and trying to avoid being around her husband. She worked up to sixteen hours a day as a waitress earning nickel and dime tips at a roadside restaurant to supplement Daddy’s income at the factory on the assembly line. Eventually, she turned to speed, sold in $3 dollar pill packets by a local doctor, and she ended up with a then-radical surgery called a colostomy.

Regardless of her physical, financial, and emotional challenges, Ma always communicated her love to her children, and we ran to it when the house seemed to vibrate with anger and sometimes hatred, when Daddy was laying on the floor crying and screaming for his momma, and when the police came constantly to take him away to shock treatment or incarceration. When my contemporaries were breaking into houses and stealing from the grocery store up on the highway, I was always able to turn them away despite the intimidation leveled at me for refusing to participate in their petty crimes. My mother’s love gave me the courage to say no. Even if I wanted to indulge in teenaged stupidity, I resisted because getting caught and arrested would have destroyed Ma. She wanted something better, which she was unable to even define, for her kids. I was barely smart enough to not be a punk and insult the hours she suffered on her feet trying to improve our lives. I was unable to imagine hurting her because I had seen her endure enough pain.

Ma’s personality was transformed to mostly maudlin when Joe, the man she had met after divorcing Daddy, had slipped from her arms and returned to his family. She became a hypochondriac, I thought, to simply get attention. Every muscle twinge was a tumor, headaches were signs of heart attacks, and each pain or sniffle required a trip to a doctor, often an emergency room. When Ma finally sold the little house on the curve of Woodsdale Drive, she moved in with my sister Becky, and almost harmed Beck’s marriage by frequently calling 911 to rush Ma to the hospital for a heart ailment that did not exist. Even after my mother had adjusted to life with a colostomy, she still thought constantly about dying but ended up living a long time and survived a quadruple heart by-pass in her early eighties. She took her joy as grandchildren began to gather around her feet and grew to sit at her table.

Ma had moved into an assisted living facility when she left Becky’s house up in Michigan and had her own room with a television and a bathroom, a sitting area and a bed. There were pictures of her children and grandchildren on a cork board on the wall and I was saddened by the notion that all lives, including my mother’s, can shrink to such proportions. Her small space often felt large and lonely, though, regardless of how devoted her kids were to regular visits. Ma also complained that the people around her were old and they did not listen to her, though she seemed the center of attention whenever I visited.

My last time with my mother I walked into the common area of her group home and saw her sitting in the sun near a courtyard window. She smiled as I came in her direction and I gave her a lingering hug. I sat next to her rocking chair and she did not look at me and seemed to be watching the front door. The thought struck me that she had become convinced her youth and health might have been outside the building, waiting to reconnect with her, and she just wanted to escape. In Ma’s mind, she continued to come and go as she pleased, but her body was still failing.

“Son?” Ma touched my forearm. “Can you get me out that door over there?”

“What do you mean, Ma?”

“If you can just get me out of here and down to the border, I’ll be okay.”

“Ma, please, I don’t understand what you are saying.” I looked directly into her eyes. They were clear and wide but looked glistening with tears.

“Just get me to Canada, son. Take me down to the bridge in Detroit.”

“Why? Why do you need to cross the Ambassador?”

“I can get home to St. John’s as soon as you get me over that bridge.”

“Ma, how would you ever get to St. John’s? Do you remember how many miles that is?”

“I’ll tell you how. I’ll just use my walker and I’ll walk and walk and walk until I flop over and I’ll go to sleep by the side of the road and then I’ll get up and start again, and I’ll keep doing that until I get there.”

“Oh, Ma, I love you so much. You know that. But you can’t do that, and even if you could, who would take care of you when you got there?”

“What do you mean who will take care of me?” She had raised her voice, insulted by my question. “I will take care of me. That’s who will take care of me. I always have, haven’t I?”

“But Ma, you’re….”

“Don’t tell me anything, son. I’ll get me a job at one of those restaurants down on the harbor and rent me a room off Water Street. I just need you to get me to the border. Don’t you worry about how I’ll get home. You never let me worry about you.”

“I know, Ma. I’m sorry. You worried anyway, though.”

How was I supposed to leave her and just go back to Texas? Her heart and memory were going home to Newfoundland and her body was stuck in a building with strangers. I held my mother’s hand and felt her faint pulse against my palm. I sat with her through dinner and went back to her room, helped her take pills, and we watched late night local news until she fell deeply asleep. I looked at her a final time, her gray streaked hair falling away from her shining forehead, the round face that always wanted to give me a sense of importance, and the dark spots on her hands. As she slept, I went out the door that was keeping her from returning to her youth and home. In the rental car, I turned on the engine and sobbed, hardly able to drive off to my sister’s home for the night.

My sister Beverly called me a few months later to tell me of Ma’s passing and I went back north from Texas on a train. I needed the time to think. Bev also explained that our mother wanted to be buried in the cemetery in the plot next to Daddy, which he had reserved in her name. I was not surprised, and, in fact, was quite pleased. As the train trundled north up the Mississippi River Valley, along the great river and past the cotton fields where they had started out together in Northeast Arkansas, I imagined for my parents a happiness that had evaded them as they moved through their difficult lives. I was very comforted that my mother had decided to go back to her husband, a man she had loved in spite of his faults and her fears. Her choice was a statement that she had never stopped hoping. I have chosen to believe they will always be together somewhere and are eternally as full of wonder and excitement as they had been when they were young and had first met and fell in love.

Eternity owes them a second chance.