Home, the Mother Place

As my daughter prepares to move from Philadelphia to Baltimore for her career and my eldest niece packs up her own young daughter for a fresh start in Richmond, Va., I imagine my mother saying two more in a lifetime string of goodbyes. My father has been dead for 12 years. Her six children and 14 grandchildren have spread their wings to all parts of the United States and beyond. As we have gone, come home and gone again, she has remained in the row house on 32nd Street in North Philadelphia where she has lived since I was 5, waiting for news and saving our belongings in her basement.

It has taken me some time to appreciate my mother. I am grateful to have arrived at this point of appreciation while she is still alive and I can thoroughly enjoy being one of her loved ones. It is sublime to be able to know her beyond my various resentments and embarrassments and disdain to the point of valuing having her around.

My mother is a worrier. Maybe that is a vestige of having lost both her parents before she was an adult. I remember her gliding through a house full of flu, checking to see that no one had gotten trapped in a knot of blankets. If you were one of her own, as she calls her progeny and their progeny, traveling either to or from her, she would not rest until you called from your destination or showed your face at her door.

She is a fusser, which may in fact be an extension of worrying. She chides us all for not resting enough. She suspects that we don’t eat right. She despairs at the uncovered head, the unwrapped neck, the sockless feet, the grandchild sent for a piece of the summer with too-short shoes or insufficient underwear.

And she is a keeper. Any mail that ever came to her house for any one of hers is going to stay in the house until the addressee collects it. You cannot convince her that the addressee does not want an advertisement from Citibank. If it is not yours, Mother will not let you define its fate. As a keeper, she retains in her memory bank the various preferences of her assorted own. Any favorite food you have ever had will be prepared especially for your three-day trip, your overnight pass-through on business. I can almost taste fried fish and cornbread as I write. She will fuss that I didn’t eat enough, and wish that she had something for my sweet-tooth after dinner.

And my mother is loyal. She probably told each and every one of my siblings how my gypsy habit of moving for career disturbed her, but she wished me well, planned to miss me, hoped that I would eat right. She let me go, maybe not with an optimum of grace, to work in Los Angeles, fussing about how we were just walking away from our lives in Baltimore. But she took all the plants from our Baltimore house back to Philadelphia with her. The plants have thrived in her care, because she is a keeper. When I stop by Philadelphia, stretching the meaning of “on my way home from a conference in Washington,” she points out what she refers to as my plants among the jungle of greenery that she attends to in and around her house.

I thrived in her care. I heard past the loud worry of her voice, through the free-form fear for my safety of limb and spirit, to the love: deep, certain and everlasting. The kind of love that worried when I was thin, wonders when I grow round and decides that I always look nice, no matter what my weight. Love that will brave airline travel, to her easily the most frightening of modern conveniences, to be with a daughter who needs surgery or attention. If I can count on nothing else in life, I can count on birthday money from Mom. And her support. She says, about every life decision I’ve ever discussed with her, “You will make the right choice.”

Her children and grandchildren have gone, from the home and the love of a barely schooled woman who folded hot clean laundry that we might eat regularly, to eight colleges, three law schools, pilot’s licenses, successful entrepreneurship. We have come back to her modest row house, in transition from one to another phase of life, to regroup from disaster, to celebrate milestones. It is because we can count on the constant of her being there that we are able to try other roads. She will look a little worried when we go. She will find her way to Baltimore, to Richmond, to see the little girls all grown up in their lives. And keep their mail, awaiting their return.