Balancing packages in our arms, Mother and I headed toward the car. It was dark and the rain had stopped. Shimmering lights on streetlight wreaths shone soft and surreal, bestowing as much magic as can a California holiday scene for one who remembers the wonder and glow of Christmas lights thrown across Midwestern snows of her childhood.
Why the sudden ache in the chest? Why that forlorn childhood feeling of wanting to talk to mother when she walks here beside me? I'm 37 years old, with teenagers of my own, after all. Why that oppressive feeling that I may come no closer than this to recapturing the magic illusions of holidays past?
Why indeed? Feeling as though I'd spent most of my life trying to catch up with the small, silent woman hurrying on ahead of me, I increased my pace. We tossed packages onto the back seat and I settled behind the wheel. One sack still in her grasp, with a sigh, she scooted in beside me. Her expression betrayed, however, that she wasn't really there at all.
What interior paths did Elizabeth Shannon walk? How heavily upon her fragile shoulders weighed her twenty-five-year widowhood? And would I ever feel I had really communicated with the person who surely resides somewhere within that distant woman who is my mother?
Starting the car, I spoke impulsively. "I don't want to take you home. Come home with me. Have dinner. You're not ready to go back to your apartment yet."
"Yes, I am, Meg. I've too much to do." She nodded and hugged the bag of yarn on her lap as though it was a neglected child. Her eyes reflected loneliness.
I couldn't believe she meant it, so I persisted. "It's not the season to be alone. We'd love to have you."
"I know. But there are only three more weeks 'til Christmas. I'm working on some things I have to finish." Her lips took on that starched look and still her eyes were sad.
"There can't be more to crochet, Mom. You've made us everything. Afghans. Pillows. Slippers. Sweaters. Don't spend all your time making things for Christmas. They'll keep."
I thought of all the holidays that Jason, the kids, and I had been separated from our families by miles. Now his parents were gone. I thought of Bobby and Annette growing up without grandparents nearby, as I had. And I thought of all the things I had looked forward to doing for Mother, things to let her know how important she is to all of us. Now that we had finally settled down and she was nearby I had hoped we would have these times together.
It seems I have always carried a feeling of somehow failing to fulfill this woman's expectations, of guilt at my failure to ease her loneliness. When Jason's job had required us to move around the country, those feelings had grown. It seemed she felt abandoned, although I admit she never said so.
"You've all the time in the world to make things," I protested.
"No. Not all the time in the world." It was a reprimand.
Was she mentally tallying her seventy years, I asked myself with remorse.
"I hate to think of you cooped up there all the time. You need to get out more. You haven't lived here long enough to make friends. Especially during the holidays.
"I do all right. I do just fine. I'm used to being alone. Didn't have time to make friends except at work all those years before I retired, so I just don't know how to go out and make a project of it now." Her voice was matter-of-fact.
"I've got the Dodgers and the Rams and the Lakers," she continued, as though clicking off the names of her favorite relatives.
So much for who tops the list of important people, I thought.
"I've some nice neighbors . . . you kids . . . my grandkids. And I've got my crocheting. That's all I need. Don't have time for anymore. Now don't worry." Her tone said case closed.
As the momentum of the holidays accelerated, Mother continued to resist all invitations. I couldn't fathom how crocheting could be more important. That old feeling of never quite measuring up in the daughter department gnawed incessantly.
Leafing through magazines, I saw a picture essay of a seventy-three-year-old woman scuba diving in the South Seas. Skiers in their sixties smiled from the pages. Eighty-year-old joggers. Ninety-year-old tennis players. Then I'd think of Mother sitting in that blasted rocking chair, crocheting, isolated – a reproof.
"She might as well be clear across the country again, instead of in the same town," I muttered to Jason one evening. "I know she's lonely. But she won't let me do anything for her. She won't get out and meet people. She won't even do anything with us. Just clean house and crochet – that's all she does. Some golden years . . . "
"She's lived alone a long time," he said. "Maybe she's more comfortable that way."
"Surely we can get her to go to the Christmas tree farm with us." I was hopeful. Wasn't that the perfect family outing?
"I'd better not," she said later on the phone. "I don't have time to put up a tree."
I couldn't tell if there was a twinge of regret in her voice, or a reticent desire to go, or both. Perhaps Jason's right, I pondered, fighting the old feelings.
A few days later when I dropped in on her there was an almost convincing gaiety about her. Proudly she displayed her latest accomplishment: Christmas stockings of red, white, and green granny squares.
"They're lovely. They look like heirlooms." I hoped my tone wasn't grudging.
"They are kind of bright and fun," she agreed. "And they'll last a long time. See?
There's one for each of you. I've even made some for Bobby and Annette's future mates."
"A bit premature, isn't it? Nobody's engaged."
"That's okay. They'll be there when the time comes."
"There's time," I said, feeling like an obsolete tape.
"Not enough."
Driving home, I caught myself thinking it wasn't Christmas stockings the kids need . . . but a grandmother.
One evening the week before Christmas I loaded myself with evergreen boughs and Christmas cookies and headed for her apartment. "Here comes Christmas spirit, ready or not," I said to no one in particular.
I couldn't be sure whether she was glad to see me or not. She seems to feel guilty about my taking time away from Jason and the kids to be with her.
"There's enough for a centerpiece," I said, rummaging for a vase. "Ummmm, don't they smell wonderful?" I didn't wait for an answer. "I'll arrange them while you work on that." I motioned to her latest project, trying not to sound impatient. "What is it?"
"Santa Claus." With a smile she held up a crocheted Santa, potbellied and piquant. "I'm making them for you and the kids' future families."
"You're an assembly line, Mother." I shook my head.
Later we sat sipping tea in the softly-lighted living room. Carols from the radio echoed in the quiet and the scent of fresh evergreen brought Christmas close. Almost without realizing it we began reliving events one or the other of us had forgotten – and some I had never known.
Mother's thoughts and feelings had always been her own personal domain. I had never been invited to enter there. When I had tried to, her lips would tighten and her expression would close so swiftly it stopped me dead.
So it was with growing surprise that I listened as she began to retrace her life. She spoke almost as though she talked to herself. And it was with the caution of one tiptoeing across perilously thin ice that she told of being orphaned as a baby.
"My father was killed shoeing a horse before I was born. I was a year old when they put my mother in the tuberculosis sanatorium. They had to separate us. Sent each to a different family, since there were eight. Six months later she died."
Once having opened the heretofore sealed journal of her life, it was as though she must now review it completely.
"I remember once," she said, "when I was just a little thing – six or seven, maybe. A foster aunt came back from a trip with Indian beads for my foster sisters, moccasins for my foster brothers." She paused, lowering her voice. "But there was nothing for me. It was always like that. I was an outsider. I didn't belong."
I was horrified. As she continued, a sick feeling began at my toes and rose straight into my chest. Etched upon her memory, I saw the shadow of a frightened sixteen-year-old girl turned out into an alien world because her aging foster parents felt they had done enough for her. I saw aborted first love and rebound marriage . . . motherhood when there were no recollections of having been mothered herself . . . Early widowhood and a last disillusioning love . . . Struggle, poverty, terror, and loneliness. Always loneliness. As I saw the book of her life unfold, with each chapter of her remembering, all the old feelings of failure and resentment began to drain from me. I sat motionless, unable to speak.
She stopped crocheting and leaned forward. From beneath wispy white hair, for a moment hers were again a child's eyes overflowing with pain and penitence and naked need, peering into a place I could only dimly imagine.
Suddenly embarrassed at the breach of her own reserve, she cleared her throat. In her fleeting glance, I saw mute love. Abruptly she resumed crocheting. Head bowed over her yarn, she painted a fragile picture of perseverance. The study of a survivor. There in her small figure I saw the delicacy of Queen Anne's Lace, the endurance of the Century Plane.
As never before, I perceived the depth of her pain. Her shyness. Her mistrust of words. Her need for a fortress of reserve. The lonely but reliable safety and security of her self-imposed isolation. And her love.
All those active senior citizens wouldn't be so newsworthy if they were the norm. Not everyone would be, could be, the ebullient, involved retirees pictured in the slicks. Getting Mother out of that rocking chair, away from that crocheting, might make me more comfortable, but it was well past time it could be comfortable for Elizabeth May Shannon.
You haven't failed her, Meg, I conceded silently at last. Nor has she failed you. And you can't make up for her past, no matter how much you might want to. You can only love her. Each of us must be what we are . . . Do what we must . . . Love as we can. At these realizations, love and regret and sadness welled from the heavy weight in my chest, forming a lump in my throat.
Mother's determination to make all the treasures she'd planned for us came, I realized, because she comprehended, as perhaps none of the rest of us could, the importance of memories – that they be blessings rather than curses.
From the poverty of her storehouse of childhood memories, she had drawn the desire to leave a legacy to her children and grandchildren. And if she couldn't do it comfortably by spending time with us, doing things with us, or with easy words of endearment, or in ways others did it, she would do it the best way she knew how – with hook and yarn.
Bonded by the alchemy of blood and biology, revelations and Christmas, new insight and love, I sat mesmerized by her nimble fingers fashioning treasures to remain after she was gone. Memories to be passed down from generation to generation. A legacy of love.
With difficulty I swallowed. "It's a treasure, Mother."
"What is?"
"That little Santa you're crocheting…"
"Oh yes. It is, isn't it?" She smiled, a faraway look in her eyes.
