Bringing Up Mommy: One more trick-or-treat

DEBRA-LYNN HOOK
BRINGING UP MOMMY
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
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Looks like my family might have one more trick-or-treat in its repertoire.

He's 13, he's the youngest of my three, and he wants to be an Avatar.

I don't tell him that visions of the blue people from the 2009 movie have given me a two-Advil headache ever since he announced his choice. Or that I have a co-dependent relationship with Halloween costumes in general.

He needs a bow and arrow, he tells me. No, he needs a spear. He needs his skin to be blue, and kind of glittery in the face. He needs slanted eyes and pointy ears.

He tells me what he needs.

What I need is therapy to find out why I believe Halloween costumes are the measure of a mother's worth. Just as in past years when all three children simultaneously requested the most complicated costumes from my inadequate hands, I still don't know how to sew on a machine. I refuse, like my mother before me, to buy store-bought costumes and masks, or to send my children off to the dress-up box to do-it-yourself.

And yet, I want the perfect costume, the perfect fantasy - the perfect childhood moment - which leaves me every October, and then some, quietly agonizing, then apologizing, while they dream about the number of Reese's Cups they will collect in their pillow cases.

I tell myself this year I'm not going to reach for the stars or even the perfect shade of Avatar blue. I will, in chance moments, saunter around the costume and fabric shops, until I find adequate-enough supplies. I will, in perfect harmony with human limitations, accept my Singer-less self by joyfully, calmly, stitching whatever needs sewing by hand.

Mostly I will find happiness in my intimate attachment to this hallowed of all childhood-pretend days, which threatens to disappear from my repertoire, like sippy cups and tire swings and the blue stool in front of the bathroom sink.

"When did Emily and Chris quit trick-or-treating?" he wanted to know the other day about his older brother and sister, who are 22 and 18.

"I think they were 14 or 15," I said.

I don't really know the answer for sure. But if 14 or 15 will keep him trick-or-treating one more year, that's what I choose to say. That's what I choose to believe, much like I believe I will one day quit being a perfectionist mother.

One more trick-or-treat.

One more fantasy costume in a reality-show world.

One more opportunity for me to enjoy all of Halloween, including the lead-up, including the pure privilege of putting together a costume that means one of my children is just that, my child for whom I am responsible.

One more Oct. 31, patting the ears in place and the blue paint not too thick, then hurrying him out the door to join the Batmen, Dorothys and ghosts of the world.

One more pot of chili simmering on the stove, waiting for him and his friends to come flying back in the door, some of them flying for real on Harry Potter brooms.

One more watching in the living room, while he and his friends dump their candy in separate piles, and then begin trading Milky Ways and Three Musketeers, Mary Janes, candy corn and pennies.

One more year of me sidling into his room midday while he is at school, to steal my favorites from his pillow case, and hope he doesn't notice because, I justify, he has too much anyway.

One more opportunity to hear him, in the still-sweet voice of a boy still young enough to look past the imperfection of his mother: "Thank you, Mom, for doing such a nice job on my costume."

One more childhood moment.

Unless he decides next year that 14 isn't too old either.

And I will gladly be imperfect again.

A tribute. Happy Birthday, Mama.

I wrote this in May 2005, less than a month after my mother's accident and death. She would have been 74 today.

WHEN LOVE PREVAILS

For years, my three sisters and I braced for the call: "Mama fell." "Mama had a stroke." "Something bad happened to Mama."

She was only 68. But my mother had Hepatitis C and had suffered all her life from debilitating depression, which led her to prescription drugs we know not what or how many or whether she was taking them properly. She lived alone, in a tumble-down bungalow in New Orleans, on disability.

And so the call came, but not nearly how I expected.

"Your mother has third-degree burns to her chest," the emergency room nurse at Charity Hospital in New Orleans told me.

Burns to her chest. Was she cooking? Did she fall into a bonfire? My three sisters and I couldn't figure it out. Only one of us talked to her that day, and by then, she was in shock. What we eventually did piece together was part fact, part imagination:

Sitting in the den of her New Orleans house with a whirring fan overhead, Mama had been trying to fill a cheap, 39-cent cigarette lighter with the wrong fluid. Instead of the fluid going into the lighter, though, it had dripped onto her clothes. When she went to flick the lighter, the polyester sweater she was wearing went up like a cheap paper napkin. This beautiful woman, her silky dark hair, her high cheekbones and her full smile -- even in her 60s -- likened to Sophia Loren, had run to the bathroom to strip off her burning clothes in the shower before they burned through to her skin. But it was too late. She'd already suffered third-degree burns to 40 percent of her body and second-degree burns to her face.

That was on a Monday, April 18, 2005, to be exact.

By Tuesday afternoon, 24 hours after her accident, we were all with her. All four of Audrey's daughters left husbands, jobs and children to rush to the Baton Rouge burn unit where she was transferred. We couldn't talk to her; she was in an induced coma, sedated and intubated, and bandaged from her scalp to her knees. But we stood by her bedside as often as they'd let us. And when we couldn’t be with her, we held onto each other in the waiting room. We cried. We also laughed -- a lot actually, at the nuttiness. We tried really hard to make sense of this new suffering.
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My mother had already suffered enough, you see.

Severely abused by her own mother, who threw skillets at my mother's head and wielded belts, who shrieked obscenities when Mama tried to sing, who once clawed my mother’s face because she wrote in her diary that a boy tried to kiss her, my mother had suffered plenty.

Mama tried every way she could to make the suffering go away. At the age of 17, she escaped into marriage, and at 18, motherhood. By the time she was 26, she had four girls under the age of 7.

For the first decade or so, Mama managed to hold off the demons, parenting, as she used to say, "with Dr Spock in one hand and a rosary in the other.”

She threw herself into this role that would save her for awhile, becoming a Girl Scout leader and a volunteer at the little Catholic school where she drove us every day. She made three home-cooked meals a day. She made our Easter dresses. One Christmas, she locked herself in her bedroom with her sewing machine while she made tiny Barbie clothes sets with matching purses and muffs to put under the tree.

Mama believed in family. She also believed in good education, good manners, good teeth and God - especially God. She took us to church on Sundays, sometimes to the only African-American Catholic church in South Carolina, which her rich Lebanese uncle helped build.

And then my father left. And the bottom on the picture frame fell out.

In 1968, at the age of 32, with an absentee ex-husband who refused to pay more than sporadic child support, my mother worked 14-hour days to support girls who were 15, 14, 9 and 7. This was the era of drugs and sex. Post-Vietnam. Woodstock. Self-discovery. Thirty-two years old, vulnerable beautiful and tired, Mama, who'd never had her own adolescence, got swept up in the after-hours.

There were young boyfriends. There was pot, lots of it, and parties. There was neglect, sometimes no food. There was also a lot of moving around, sometimes to sub-standard housing. Once, she moved us all the way to Napa Valley, to a house on the edge of a vineyard, where we lived with a houseful of people whose names I don't remember.

She took us with her into some iffy situations. But she always took us with her, eventually to New Orleans, where her counter-culture soul took root.
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Sometimes back then, life was almost normal. There were, in fact, deep pockets of happiness, joy and even success at times for Mama, who'd managed to earn one nursing degree when she was in her 30s and another in her 50s. Throughout her later years, she found purpose in her nursing work, especially with the downtrodden. By and through her own struggles, she developed an intense empathy and compassion for the poor and the left-behind, which led to her work on the psychiatric unit of Charity Hospital in inner-city New Orleans.

She also found joy in music, becoming a fixture at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival every spring where she would hang out, decked out in bling and tank tops with my sister, Susan, and Susan’s musician partner, Charles. Charles was her ticket into New Orleans' inner circle, garnering her introductions to the Neville Brothers, Dave Bartholomew and other greats. She loved being a groupie.

When she was at her happiest, though, was when she was with us, her four girls and our growing families. She loved being with her young grandchildren, who were too young to hurt her, whose love for her was as unconditional as hers for them.

As for her daughters, she viewed us as her best friends, sometimes her only friends. But the road with daughters-as-best-friends is not lined with fairy dust. On our own quest for wholeness and healing, we adult daughters were a pain for her already tortured soul at times, as we delved into the demons of our past: Why, as a child, did she demand I always be happy, while she got to be the sad one? Why exactly did Daddy leave? Did she DO something to MAKE him leave? Why did my older sister and I always have to baby sit the two younger girls so she could go out at night? Why, even now, was her pain always worse than mine, even on her good days?

I remember one conversation in particular, when I asked her to admit that she demanded too much of me and my sisters.

"Just say it, Mama," I said into the phone, 1110 miles away in Ohio.

"But you don't know what my mother did to me to make me that way," she said.

"Yes, I do. Just say it."

"OK," she said. "I demanded too much of you in your sisters."

Her voice was so small, it hurts me deep in my bowels now to recollect.
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I remember these difficult conversations.

I also remember the good ones - lively, intelligent talks on her good days, about religion and politics, about Saints football, about my children and their accomplishments. I always said she was the most intelligent woman I knew. She always said, if she'd had a better upbringing, she would have been a lawyer.

I remember good moments, especially the joy on her face as she met each of my children for the first time, all the pain gone, if but for a while.

I remember that one time I came down by myself to New Orleans, without my kids, and stayed for a week. Determined that I was going to get respite from my busy life, she insisted I sleep in her bed while she slept on the couch.

Every night, she’d call out to me, “You OK in there?”

“I’m great,” I’d say.

“Night night,” she’d call out.

“Night night,” I’d say back.

What I remember most, though, is the suffering.

And the depression. After my father, there would be a second marriage, and then a year later, another divorce, and the spiraling down, down, down, always down. Sometimes she was able to work. Sometimes she lived off Food Stamps. Sometimes she had electricity. Sometimes, as I sat in my comfortable home with my husband and children, I knew the electricity company was threatening to turn hers off. Sometimes I'd talk to her on the phone and she'd be my mother. Other times I'd talk to her and she'd be so depressed or doped up, she could hardly say my name. At 49, she had uterine cancer and a hysterectomy. At 57, she was told she had Hepatitis C, contracted from a blood transfusion during her cancer surgery. She was branded “permanently disabled.” Unable to continue nursing, always worrying about money, she began to spiral further and further into the haunting of her childhood, the awful reality of a loveless childhood and a wanting for the mother she never had, which would leave her in later years spending hours on her couch or in her bed, with the pillow over her head, unable to get up.

If she was left with a void, we daughters were left with the terrible pain of knowing we could never fill that void, no matter how whole we would become.

No matter how hard I loved her, I couldn't fix her.

I couldn't be her mother.
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And then there were those hours and days with Mama at the hospital.

Four days, she fought, as each of her bodily systems, first her kidneys, then her lungs, and eventually her heart, gave way. They had told us on that first night she wouldn't last 24 hours. It took her four days to leave us.

My sisters and I awaited each visitation like we were awaiting the birth of a new child. Two of us never left the hospital but slept huddled like puppies together on the hard floor of the waiting room next to a Coke machine, waiting for the next time we could see her.

When it was time to go to her room, we would go, two-by-two, rosaries wrapped around our wrists, stuffed animals tucked in our arms, pictures of grandchildren in tow.

We would stand at her bed, stroking the top of her head where her hair poked through the bandages.

We would hold her hands and kiss her feet. Thank God for her hands and feet. While her face was too raw, inflamed and oozing to touch and the rest of her body was wrapped thick with bandages, her feet and hands were blessedly open to our touch and caress.

Sometimes, she’d shake, her whole body would shake, when we were in the room with her. Whether it was because she was trying to tell us something or whether she was simply twitching from all the morphine, we don’t know. I kept wanting to take the sedation down enough so that we could know, so that we could have one last conversation with her. They kept telling me she would be in excruciating pain if we did.

And so, because they said she could hear us and because we needed for her to hear us, we would talk at her. We told her stories about her grandchildren, about our homes, the weather, our jobs. We told her how much we loved her and wanted to take care of her now.

And we sang.

The acoustics in the room favored by angels, on the Thursday night before she died, Audrey's four girls surrounded her bed in the dim light and lifted the voices she let us have. Nurses standing outside her door later told us we brought them to tears, as with Charles accompanying us on guitar, we sang her favorites -- James Taylor, Emmy Lou, Alison Krauss, Bonnie Raitt.

"Now we get to be your mama," I whispered into her ear that night.

A few hours after we sang to her, eight days before Mother's Day 2005, Mama's heart quit. No longer able to maintain her heroic clinging to life, she moved on to that place people keep telling me about.
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Before this happened, I had planned to write a special column for this Mother's Day, about the love that even a wounded mother can inadvertently teach, perhaps by and through her own suffering.

As it turns out, I was busy the day my column was due, delivering one of several tributes at the funeral of this complicated woman, which I capped with a personal note sent to me by a close friend, also a mother, in the tender days just after my mother's death.

"...Although I did not know your mother, I keep feeling that somehow I have glimpsed her, because I have watched you be a mother. It seems to me that in some way, your wonderful and intuitive mothering, though chiefly a testament to you, is also in some ways a testament to her. And I can only think that wherever her spirit is, this fills her with joy."
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"Weeping may endure the night. But joy cometh in the morning." As seen on a holy card taped to the wall over her bed.

Special language all my own

I like words, the kind that are in the dictionary and the kind I make up. There have been several over the years, which I will add to this list as I remember them. For now, here are two:

Bloop bloop – In the year 2005, during some particularly tragic, awful, heinous, unfathomable events in my life (which I will write about One Day), my mind got a little overloaded.

Tired of thinking and trying to come up with words, I began to substitute “bloop bloop” for words I thought I could get away with omitting. For example: While having dinner with my Blood Sisters (BSs), who were likewise gathered around these tragic, awful. heinous and unfathomable events (TAFU-E), I might point to a bag of crawfish on the table and say: “Pass the bloop bloop.”

As time went on, an entire, goofy system was built around bloop bloop. Any time during TAFU-E that any of the BSs didn’t want to say a word or couldn’t think of a word, we started saying “bloop bloop.”

This was eventually disconcerting for others in my life, i.e. my children and my husband, who often get dragged involuntarily into BS, especially when bloop bloop started becoming as common a phrase as bread or water in my head, but it didn't translate well to those around me, as in “Chris, do you want to bloop bloop with me today?” This could mean have lunch, swim or take a zip line from the flour mill to the river.

Meanwhile, my sisters and I, so obviously cut from the same crazy quilt, continue to often and randomly love our "bloop bloop, which we have come to say with a popping, melodic cadence.

BS Susan (BSS)’s partner Charles has even taken to calling me “Bloop Bloop.”

“Is that Bloop Bloop on the phone?” he calls out to BSS.

Otter – Otters are my favorite animal. Hands down. Ever watch them play? They are playful, but they are also smart. They have to be to swim around in water all day long without bumping into each other. And they are loving. They hold hands, to wit this popular utube (14 million hits) from Vancouver Auditorium. www.youtube.com/watch?v=epUk3T2Kfno". Of course, I didn't make up the word, "otter." But I kind of made up its usage: People that I like a lot, I call otters. And puppies. "You're a puppy, a kitty and an otter" is a really good thing.

A blog by any other name

Up until three days ago, this blog was called BloopBloopOtter because I say "bloop-bloop" a lot and I like otters.(See future post on "language" for deeper meaning.)

But it didn't work.

First of all, I just slapped it on there when I created the blog and needed a title. Secondly, nobody knew what it meant. Thirdly, I didn't know what it meant.

For months after the christening of BloopBloopOtter, I considered other names, even as I also considered this blog's reason for being.

I considered "Raison d'Etre."

And "Joie de Vivre."

I thought about "Ambient Light" because I'm all about natural light, photographically and otherwise.

Maybe "Soul Sistah" because I am my mother's daughter?

How about "Synchronicity" -- a play on words?

"Taking the Long Way Around" because that's the angle of my journey?

Or "Daily miracles" because I believe every day has at least one?

Everything was too literal.

And then my children and I came up with the current one. And God it fits.

It sooo fits.

First of all, I love me some funk music.



Secondly, I love me some funk shoes.



Thirdly, I thought of a summer night about three years ago, when, after wayy too much wine, two friends and I started The Passion and Intimacy Club. We didn't really DO anything. We knew we weren’t chartering a real club with membership dues and meetings. We were just making a statement about what was important to us.

Tragically, one of the “members” up and died not so long ago. But the other one is here. And she manages to get up offa that thang every ding dang chance she gets. Does she dance every day like James Brown? Actually, I think some days she curls up in the fetal position, just like the rest of us.

But I do believe she experiences all of life from the middle of the dance floor.

That's what this blog is about: Refusing to sit it out.

Into each life, a little James Brown must fall. Unh.

I do believe this blog will address either directly or indirectly...

---Photography. I have been taking pictures for a very long time, and in the last couple of years have begun taking wedding pics and portraits and soccer pix and landscape pix for people who give me money when I give them my pictures. I. Am. Having. The. Time. Of. My. Life with this newly developing creative expression. Every blog post will include at least one of my pictures, usually more, i.e., as many as I can tastefully cram onto the page.

---Writing. My kids once asked me if I had to choose between writing and photography, which would I choose. I refuse/d to answer. I have been writing as a way of expressing myself since I was 7. I have been a newspaper reporter, a columnist, a blogger and a wanna-be memoirist. I believe every time I put my fingers on the keyboard that an opportunity is before me. I not only love the craft, but the study of it.


---Food. My Lebanese great grandmother had two ovens and two fridges in her kitchen. I ate a lotta grape leaves and raw kibbeh in that kitchen. Add to this: New Orleans. Somewhere along the way, we left SC, where I was born, and we moved to New Orleans. What this means: I love to eat okra in my gumbo and plain yogurt on my fried chicken. And I love to cook it. And take pictures of it.

----Daily miracles. I'm not talking about fishes and loaves. I'm talking about saying yes to a bike ride because your husband asked you, even though your middle-aged knees hurt from yesterday's Latin dance class. And on this bike ride that you didn't really want to take, you encounter on either side of the breeze-blown springtime path, incredible, other-worldly wildflowers you didn't know existed on the planet. I'm talking about everyday daily miracles.

----The human connection. Besides dancing, I believe this, right here, is why we're here. This is what we're put here on Earth for, to say "Good morning" with special vigor to the grocery store clerk who looks like she's having a bad day; to give a piece of jewelry to a stranger because she's just told you she likes it; to stay on the cell phone, long distance, with a Blood Sister while she's having a uterine biopsy. Speaking of women:

----The Sisterhood. By this, I mean women and body image, women and the desire to break out of routine and long-standing rote, women and the power they hold if only they knew how much power. Specifically, I will very often address the aforementioned Blood Sisterhood (BS -- my three sisters, who were all borne of my wild-child Mama, who is an entry all on her own and who taught us about Soul Power way before we ever got to the City of New Orleans. Yeah, you rite:

----New Orleans. Music, food, culture, fire, flood, power and lack of power, people, love, birth and The Rebirth Jazz Band. "Ain't no party like a rebirth party, 'cause a rebirth party don't stop. Unh." This is the city where the aforementioned Mama moved us, when I was 17, from the South Carolina hills (where Mr. James Brown was born). This is the city and state I left when I was 26 after graduating from LSU. This is the city I return to at least once, sometimes four times, a year, because this is where I am most me.

----Motherhood, and the healing power of circular love.

----Therapy and living in the present while integrating a complicated past.

----Theology, philosophy and the never-ending search for Truth, post 60s-Catholic upbringing.

----Death and dying.


I'd like to say I will post daily. That's what the blogger gurus say you SHOULD do. You SHOULD post every day so that people get used to looking you up every day. Should? Should? I hate shoulds. But hm.