Joseph Gross
In 1956, my mom, after graduating from high school, filled a sock with all of her money— money she had made cleaning houses after school—and boarded a taxi to the convent of the Sisters of Mercy on the east side of Detroit. Smoking in the convent, she knew, was not allowed, so she smoked a ceremonial last cigarette in the back of the taxi. When she reached the convent she gave all the money, still in the sock and mostly coins, to the cabbie.
***
Gary, my mom’s twin and younger by twenty minutes, was getting pushed around by a bully in the seventh grade. The boys attended a different school, which must have let out later than the girl’s, because one day when the bully tailed Gary home, my mom appeared from behind some bushes to greet them. She had already reached her adult height of 5’1” and the story goes that she put all of it behind one well-timed punch to the nose. The bully’s parents complained about the bloody nose until they found out whose fist had connected.
***
Money was not something my mom was accustomed to having. Her father, a machinist, often struggled to find work. The oldest of six children, my mom remembers a winter when the family ate nothing but oatmeal. The same winter, her mother cut cardboard to line the bottom of the kid’s shoes when they wore through.
***
When I was in elementary school, like most kids I feared bullies. I feared, especially, the Latino boys in my school who fought often and with much more skill than me. My mom sat on my bed one morning and told me that if I was sure I’d have to defend myself, I should swing first. She said the nose was a good target.
***
In the convent, my mom’s cheerfulness earned her the nickname, “Sunshine.” She organized dances for the sisters with records by Elvis, Bill Haley, Fats Domino. She loved Elvis. I like to imagine that small sorority of nuns gyrating their pelvises in an echoing gymnasium. My mom says that during those early years in the convent she also loved Jesus, that she was “in love with Jesus,” and that the strain of trying to live up to that love made her cry during the evening chapel every night.
***
Once I asked my mom if being a Republican was immoral. Because she had been a nun and because she has always maintained the tolerance that I associate with liberal nuns, I thought I had her trapped. She cupped her chin in her hand for a moment, then with her usual, confident nod, said, “Yes.”
***
My parents once had a party during which all of their friends decided for each other what fruit or vegetable they would be. They decided my mom would be a radish.
***
She loved the quiet of the convent, the camaraderie of the women. She excelled at math and chemistry, double-majored and won valedictorian honors. For advanced study, she was interested in psychology. But someone blackballed her and denied her request for that field, stating anonymously in a report that she “lacked the proper stability.” She always wondered if this assessment stemmed from the crying in evening chapel.
***
My mom has two totems with which she connects: the Turtle and the Dragon. Her bedroom and office teemed with them—blown-glass turtles, turtle earrings, a painting of a turtle by my uncle, legions of Asian dragon figurines. I assimilated the turtle. I started my own collection, drew turtles on everything I had in high school, had one tattooed on my shoulder when I was twenty. I need its patience. And I don’t have the nerve for the dragon.
***
My parents met in New York City in 1968 during summer classes at Fordham University. They were struggling with the religious life—my dad with loneliness, my mom with an intellectual ceiling. She says there were three men who caught her attention together, and describes the charisma of the two she didn’t marry. One, a curly-haired hunk of a priest, the other a brilliant lecturer. She says my dad was “kind.” When I asked her if she was attracted to him when they first met, she said, “No.”
***
As an adult, the penetrating and candid qualities that made my mom an excellent psychotherapist have occasionally strained personal relationships. Once over dinner with another married couple, old friends of my parents, both of whom had sought my mom out for counseling, she remarked on their story of some triumph or another, saying, “The two of you have always had it made, except in the bedroom.” My dad loves this story.
***
I once watched my mom absolutely rip our pastor apart in front of a large crowd of people on the church steps. I was about ten. While my mom’s finger dented the space between them, the old priest and I made brief eye contact. I felt sorry for him.
***
Dinty W. Moore writes in Son of Mr. Green Jeans that the Y-chromosome “is unique, because its genetic code remains relatively unchanged as it passes from father to son. The DNA in other chromosomes is more likely to get mixed between generations, in a process called recombination. What this means, apparently, is that boys have a higher likelihood of directly inheriting their ancestral traits.”
***
When my parents married, almost no one from either family attended. They moved to an Indian Reservation in Quebec where they were both to teach high school. My mom, when scolding one of the big, rough-strong reservation kids, would stand on a chair to be at eye level. She once made the mistake of telling them they were behaving like a bunch of savages. In a testament to the trust she had created with that skeptical group, they eventually forgave her.
***
My junior year in high school we visited some friends from out of town, a family that used to live near us, the father a man my dad had known in the Jesuit order before he, too, left for marriage. My mom and I saw the father unhinge and punch his son in the face while the boy lay in bed, a reaction to news of some typical childish transgression. I thought I recognized a moment of passage when I put my arm around my mom in the minutes after the punch. She shrugged it off.
***
Despite never having taken a course in psychology, my mom earned a Masters and PhD when my brother and I had both entered elementary school. She became the first accredited female psychotherapist in Southwestern Michigan to open her own private practice, developing a fine reputation as a counselor to teens and members of the Catholic religious orders and as an expert in multiple personality disorders.
***
Growing up, I had an easier time connecting with my dad. This isn’t to say I was closer to him than to my mom, just that it was easier to be so. My dad and I gave each other lots of space, didn’t ask too many questions. When we talked, we joked and told stories. We reveled in our sameness. In anger, though, my dad was unapproachable. He was Dad. Period. My relationship with my mom seems to have been based more on mutual respect—her generous respect for me often unwarranted, of course. She allowed me some leeway to express myself in an argument. Sometimes I even yelled a little, and was impressed when she didn’t kill me. My dad approved of fun and freedom, but couldn’t tolerate a side-ways glance of insolence. When I wanted to spend the night at a friend’s house, I asked my dad. When I needed help with algebra, I asked my mom.
***
My friends would ask me if I felt like my mom was “analyzing me” all the time. I didn’t. More likely, she was analyzing them, as many of my teen friends turned out to have been counseled by my mom at some point. Family relationships, though, somehow cut right through training and intelligence. Like most kids, I learned how to deceive my mom—the secret with mine was to divert her attention by admitting to a lesser crime, even an invented one. Her appreciation for her own vigilance and comfort in having solved a problem obscured her normal watchfulness. I doubt she will believe this.
***
As she did in the Sisters of Mercy, my mom can spend hours sitting quietly in one place, simply watching and listening—from the living room couch, from a bench we made in the woods near our house, on a plane. When I sit in one place for very long I have to start making noise to stay sane.
***
Sometime in high school, a friend of mine spent the night at our house. The two of us discovered an old water pipe in a basement stash of my dad’s stuff from the 1960s and early ‘70s. The pipe was designed with a stopper that fit onto the mouth of a narrow glass bottle. My friend and I were just filling a coke bottle in the kitchen sink when my mom appeared, ghostly in her nightgown. I held out the coke bottle to her and hung my head. I confessed to the bottle rockets we were about to fire off. I prayed she didn’t see that my friend was hiding the water pipe. My mom smiled and shook her head, pleasantly disgusted. “No bottle rockets,” she said firmly, her eyes already softening. She went off to bed and my friend and I went behind the garage to smoke his pot.
***
My sophomore year in college I took an elbow to the kidney in a pick-up basketball game, saw blood in my urine and went to the hospital where a series of tests confirmed that my left kidney was barely functioning. This was the result, not of fighting through a tough screen, but of some ancestral genetic material that came from my mom’s family, which has a history of kidney problems. I came home from college at the end of the semester and had half of my left kidney removed. Then a year later a surgery on the right kidney, then another on the left. The sequence has blurred but my strongest memories are of the hours just before the surgeries. In each one, my mom was present or nearby. My dad would visit afterward, bring good things to read, tell me jokes, and head back to his day, but my mom spent the all of the dark waiting time with me, as well as the drugged, early recovery. I was not allowed to feel too sorry for myself—neither of my parents had any patience for self-pity—but my mom and I would talk a little about the process, the surgeon, other things to try to escape the moment. Mostly we read and she would sit near me radiating a quiet confidence. She sat that way, I imagined, in the waiting room during surgery, then by the bed again, waiting for me to surface.
***
The children of two academics, my brother and I spent our twenties and early thirties playing in bands, writing songs, and dreaming of “making it.” My mom seemed more amused than annoyed. She could find dignity in anything. She saw growth and discipline in our efforts. In an interview for our town’s newspaper that focused on my parents as local dignitaries, though, my mom might have revealed some hidden feelings when she described her sons as “aging rockers.”
***
More than twenty years after the “radish” party, more or less the same group of friends suggested at another get-together that my mom embrace her inner silliness. She had always been gracious, optimistic, but her intellectual nature and the rigors of holding three sets of wild male feet to the ground kept her locked into a more serious role. She decided that she would embrace more silliness. This provided a department in which her men could finally assist, and we have thrown a silly party every year on her birthday at which she has been given to wear, among other things, a handlebar mustache, a fireman’s outfit, and a huge plastic “Heavyweight Champion” belt.
***
My dad has always been fond of saying that our family’s internal politics made it the three of us guys against my mom, and that we were overmatched.
***
After three decades, my mom retired from her private practice. If anything she has worked harder and influenced more people in retirement as the member or head of various Boards, as a special advisor to the Sisters of Mercy, and as an active member of the local Catholic Church. When the male clergy who run her diocese consider a decision with which she strongly disagrees, they usually come to their senses.
***
Last winter my mom found a lump in her breast. The cancer had not spread to her lymph nodes, and her doctor recommended a mastectomy, after which she should fully recover. Tests also indicated a possible precancerous condition in the other breast. Maybe, maybe not. My mom chose to have a double mastectomy and get on with her life. But she struggled—so rare for her—with her body’s weakness and her mortality. She did so, however, with much company, and with humor. My parent’s friends threw a going away party for “the twins.” When my mom woke up after surgery, her stomach reacted strongly to the general anesthetic. She could barely get out a word, and for a few hours my brother, my wife, my dad, a close cousin and I flagged down nurses and joked with each other. I laughed uncontrollably about something I can’t remember which, rightfully, pissed off my dad. He couldn’t recognize my fear through his own.
My mom looked small in the hospital bed, less like a radish than something deflated. The nurses finally found a combination of drugs that allowed her to stop retching and lie quietly, and I was secretly pleased when it made sense for me to stay with her alone. I sat by her bed in the dim room and watched the lights flicker under the door from passing hospital staff and looked out the window at the parking lot. After a long while my mom slowly asked, “Are you there, Joe?” I tried to fill the room with the warmest vibe I could. I said, “Yes.”
#
Joseph Gross holds an MFA from Western Michigan University. His essays, poems, and stories have appeared in various literary journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and SmokeLong Quarterly. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of Atticus Review and works as a library director near Kalamazoo, MI, where he lives with his wife, Angela, and their two children. Find him on Twitter: @joseph_gross.