Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul (32 page)

Our family gathered on Christmas morning with rolls, coffee and juice. By this time John and I were experiencing equal parts of anticipation and anxiety. What if they all thought it was a dumb idea? Maybe they had been adults too short a time to appreciate being a kid again.

John gave each child a single gaily-wrapped package. On the count of three, I told them, the gifts should be opened. The kids looked at each other as if to say, “What gives here?” But within minutes the floor was littered with wrapping paper and ribbons.

The scene that unfolded brought tears to our eyes. At once the truck was zooming across the floor. Kristin was playing with her doll. The jack-in-the-box was both delighting and terrifying Marjorie. Melissa was pretending to talk to her boyfriend, Ryan, on the toy phone. Tim was taking the robot apart just as he had always disassembled every other toy. We were astounded and overjoyed by their reactions. That childlike magic had returned.

The “toy” Christmas became an instant tradition in our house. Now, ten years later, our family has spread across the country. Sons-in-law, a daughter-in-law and grandchildren have enriched our circle. Still, the requests for toys are at the top of everyone’s lists. One year Kristin asked for a favorite book from her childhood. The successful search for that out-of-date book was an exciting adventure in ingenuity rather than drudgery. The coffee table in Marjorie’s Victorian cottage holds a small train and track. Dressy Bessy sits on the bookshelves in Kristin’s California house. The toys given to Melissa and Ryan over the years now make their home in our grandchildren’s rooms. Tim has moved several times, but the carton labeled “toys” has never been lost.

Who would have thought that the act of giving toys to our grown-up children would bring such excitement, joy and closeness to our holiday and our family? We never know just where or when we will find magic. Sometimes, I suppose, it simply finds us.

Lee Sanne Buchanan

In the Eyes of the Beholders

T
he older you get, the more you need the people
who knew you when you were young.

Mary Schmich

The staff at Assisted Living has Mom ready, just as I asked. I take Mom’s hand and say, “Come on. This is going to be fun.”

My smile says we are going to fly kites or eat banana splits. She follows me, a slight drag to her step. I open the car door and remind her to sit. I have to press on her shoulder so she remembers what to do. I drive carefully, watching to make sure she is not fiddling with the locks. Time before last, she got the door open while we were driving. Dad fell apart when he heard about it. “Do you think she’s trying to commit suicide?” he wanted to know.

“An adventure,” I say, swinging Mom’s hand as we walk into the beauty salon.

The woman directs me to three pink, vinyl-covered chairs and a glass-top table that holds a worn copy of
People
and a large thick hardback called
Style
. I guide Mom to a chair and open the big book. Each page gleams with a large picture of a pixie, vixen or sexy woman from the neck up. One has moussed hair that looks like the prow of a ship. Another has curls as still as marble and another’s hair waves like it’s in a wind tunnel. I hold the book close to Mom and point at each picture. She likes pictures. The largeness amuses her.

We have looked through all the picture books, and I can feel Mom getting restless. At the nursing home, Mom has refused to bathe, refused to let them wash her hair or trim her fingernails. “She gets combative,” the nurse told me. “We’ve got to let her get past this.” My father went to intervene—he would bathe her himself. But Mom fought him as well. Meanwhile, her hair has grown long and greasy, her nails are gnarly and yellowed. She looks like the crone in the old fairy tales, the kind of witch who will take your bread and water and give you a valuable secret that might save your life. As much as I enjoy fairy tales, I want Mom to look like her old self, not some disguised heroine.

“Frances?” a stocky woman wearing a green smock over black pants stands before us. “I’m Kim. Pleased to meet you.”

I take Mom’s hand and lead her to a chair in the center of a long row. I hold her hands while Kim puts a smock over her.

“So how do you want it cut?” Kim asks.

Mom is swiveling in the chair.

“She usually wears it short,” I say. “We need to be quick, because I don’t know how long she will last.”

Kim nods and gets out her scissors.

I kneel and hold Mom’s hands. Mom smiles. Locks of Mom’s silvery hair float down on my knees, at my feet. Mom has always been her own barber, until last year when scissors no longer made any sense.

This is only Mom’s second time in a beauty parlor. The first time was when her niece got married, and all the women went together to get a hairdo. My mother got her first dose of rollers, hair dryers and hair spray. She was introduced to the idea of protecting hair, like it was an endangered species, wrapping toilet paper around the set so it wouldn’t deflate during careless sleep, sleeping in a chair, so her head wouldn’t loll unnecessarily.

I sit on the floor, hold Mom’s hands and talk to Kim about the pictures of her grandchildren, four of them. The hairs blanket my legs and the floor. I have never knelt before my mother and it seems like I should be saying, “Thank you for birthing me, for raising me, for being such an interesting and constant person in my life.” It seems I should be thanking her for my very being, instead of saying to Kim, “Let’s try to wash her hair while we’re here.”

We lead her to the sink. Mom giggles when Kim sprays warm water on her head, then lathers. Kim is quick and when Mom emerges, she looks like the woman I know, clean, with glorious naturally curly hair.

“Is there a manicurist available?” I ask. “One who could do Mom’s nails very quickly?”

Isabelle is available. She speaks with a soft Spanish accent. I sit right beside Mom as Isabelle puts Mom’s hands in soaking water, then shows her colors of nail polish. Mom picks up a bright red bottle, one that a younger Mom would have warned me against, as being too bold. But when you’re in your eighties, you can be bold. Mom doesn’t want to let go of the bottle, so Isabelle works on Mom’s other hand, using a similar color. Mom watches for a while. When it’s time, she unfurls her fingers and Isabelle quickly transforms the other hand.

In her real life, my mother never had her fingernails polished. She thought it was vain and unnecessarily flirtatious. Perhaps she would still think that now. But that simple sparkle of color and elegance adds to Mom’s presence, gives her an extra vibrancy.

“I add some lipstick and blush. For free. Your mother, she is a beautiful woman,” Isabelle says.

When my aunt got feeble, her one despair was that she couldn’t make it to her hairdresser. This hairdresser lived across town.

“Why don’t you go to the salon in your neighborhood?”

I had asked Aunt Ann. “It’s so much easier and closer.”

“It’s not the same. I’m used to my hairdresser.”

Every week, I drove her to the hairdresser. Though I saw how happy she was, emerging with her hair freshly set, tinted, her nails glowing pink and her lipstick freshened, I still did not understand how being coifed and groomed could make such a difference.

Until now. Now that Mom looks like she used to, I feel a sense of ease and hope. The dread of seeing Mom with dirty old-woman hair melts away. Back at my house, we sit on the sofa and I hand her a cookie that I had stashed in my pocket, ready to bribe her into stillness if needed. She holds it like it is jewelry she doesn’t own. “It’s to eat,” I tell her, moving her hand towards her mouth.

“Where is . . . ?” Mom can’t find the next word, but I know she is asking about my dad.

“He’ll be here in about an hour,” I tell her.

We eat cookies and look at pictures in magazines. It feels like after school with a beloved child.

When my father arrives, his eyes fill with tears when he sees Mom’s hair. “What happened?” he asks. “Did you get her to take a bath?” His voice is low and awestruck.

“We went to the beauty parlor,” I told him.

We look at her, as if she is a brand-new person, pretty and full of possibility.

Her hair changed. Her fingernails got polished and cut. She looks pretty again. Maybe that means she will be able to button her clothes again, remember my daughters’ names again and recognize a Hershey bar. Maybe something else will change. For these few moments, we believe anything is possible.

Deborah Shouse

Sunday Afternoons

When I was a child living in suburban New Jersey, we saw my father’s parents every other Sunday afternoon. We usually went to their apartment in Queens, but occasionally they would come to us instead. My mother’s relationship with her in-laws wasn’t what you would call warm and loving. It was more like a truce called by two countries at war. The two parties—my mother and my grandparents—grudgingly tolerated each other for the sake of my father and the grandchildren. But they remained suspicious of each other, and from time to time, there would be skirmishes. One of these happened shortly after my youngest brother, Jerry, was born, when I was almost seven.

On this particular visit, my father was working in the attic when my grandparents arrived. Our house had only two bedrooms, and now that there were three children, we needed more room. My father had finished framing out two new bedrooms and the doorways, but he hadn’t put the floor in yet. There were just narrow joists with pink fiberglass insulation between them.

My grandparents were eager to see the new baby, so my mother took them into our bedroom, where little Jerry lay sleeping peacefully. Suddenly, loud banging sounds began coming from the attic.

“
Oy gevalt!
” my grandmother exclaimed in her thick Yiddish accent. “
Vas is dis?
”

My mother explained about my father’s remodeling project. Immediately, my grandmother turned and walked out of the room and headed for the stairs.

“Selma, wait, you can’t go up there,” my mother called, hurrying after her. But my grandmother paid no attention. She started up the steps to the attic as quickly as her arthritic legs could carry her, which actually wasn’t that fast. But what she lacked in speed, she made up for in determination. My mother followed after her, becoming more adamant by the moment. She even grabbed my grandmother’s arm to try to stop her, but my grandmother shook her off angrily.

“Leave me!” she insisted. “I just want to see, is that so terrible?”

We were all about to see just how terrible it would be. When my grandmother reached the top of the steps, she peered around the corner, but she couldn’t see my father. He was working in the other end of the attic, just out of view. The fact that there was no floor didn’t deter my grandmother. She stepped onto one of the joists, and began making her way gingerly down the hallway, as gracefully as you’d expect from an overweight, arthritic sixty-five-year-old grandmother. Needless to say, she lost her balance and fell. Her foot went right through the insulation and through the ceiling below.

My brother Richard and I were still in the bedroom, drawing with crayons, when my grandmother’s leg came plunging through the ceiling. We jumped up and ran to the steps. My father hopped from joist to joist until he reached his mother, and then he and my mother and my grandfather struggled to hoist her back to her feet and guide her down the steps. She cried and complained the whole way down. My mother was furious. She must have said, “I told you not to go up there” fifty times. But she got even more angry a few minutes later when she went to check on the baby. He was still sleeping peacefully, his tiny thumb tucked into his pink little mouth. And lying on the sheet, right next to his soft, downy head, was a ten-pound chunk of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling where my grandmother’s leg had come through, right above the crib.

“You could have killed him,” my mother hissed through her teeth.

My grandmother waved her hand dismissively.
“Ach,
he’s fine,”
she said.

My father took my mother aside and pleaded with her until she cooled off a little. But my grandparents decided not to stay for dinner.

My mother was still angry, though. It took her a couple of more days before she could even discuss the incident without steam practically coming out of her ears. But nevertheless, when Sunday rolled around, we all piled into the car and drove out to Queens.

My grandparents lived on the sixth floor of an apartment building on a busy street. My brothers and I weren’t allowed to play outside, and there wasn’t much else for us to do there, except watch TV. There weren’t any children’s programs on during the afternoon, and none of us were interested in watching baseball, so we usually had several hours of being bored and restless in the cramped apartment, hours we typically filled by whining and fighting. “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” came on at 7:00 P.M. and after that, there was “Lassie,” but all too often, my parents decided it was time to leave just when Lassie was about to rescue Timmy from the abandoned well.

Understandably, we didn’t exactly look forward to these visits. We didn’t really understand why we had to go, especially since my parents didn’t seem to enjoy it much, either. My mother typically spent the entire afternoon engaged in a heated political argument with my grandfather, whose newspaper of choice was the
National
Enquirer,
which my mother said she wouldn’t even use to wrap fish. My mother’s and my grandfather’s political views were completely opposite: my mother was a passionate, strident liberal, and my grandfather was, basically an extreme conservative, suspicious of the government and resentful of racial minority groups. It didn’t occur to me, as a young child, that since he had started out as a poor Jewish immigrant himself, my grandfather should have been a little more understanding of the plight of other minorities. But although his marginal command of English was no match for my mother’s quick and brilliant facility with words, he outshined her in pure stubbornness. The arguments would become louder and angrier. My father, unwilling to take sides, retreated unhappily behind the newspaper. I hated hearing the arguments, all of the yelling and the obvious fact that this was more than just a political disagreement, it was also a personal attack on both sides. I begged my mother to stop, and I told her that I didn’t want to go to my grandparents’ house any more. But she refused to listen to my complaints.