Technology 2oo4

Dear dead mom (I find it hard to even capitalize your mom name, it's so awkward from lack of use),

How are you today? I know you're dead and you may or may not watch over us, but if you do happen to be watching, are you paying attention to how much technology has changed and how quickly the world is moving forward since you died? I mean, in 2004 I had a flip phone. I was very impressed with its ability to take pictures. Now I have an iPhone that I'm looking at photos if people's houses on in an app for a website called Houzz. When I flip the page to the next photo, the gimmicky little green price tags on the items that you presumably find for sale via the app swing to and fro as though you've really taken the whole scene, grasped it and pulled it sideways. They swing and then the swinging calms down and eventually stops after a few seconds. When you trash a picture, it slides diagonal down in crumpled waves in a way that I find quite trippy and entertaining. What is the technology that allows this to happen? When did they find it? Who invented it and where was it first used? I mean, this is crazy! Imagine taking this app back to 2004 and being like look at this thing that I think nothing of opening up and using on the L train on the way home. It would blow people's minds! And yet now it's commonplace.

I know you would be just as curious and excited about all this stuff as I am. I know you would love to have an iPhone, you would get such a kick out of it! We could iChat each other, wouldn't that be fun? Dad is too old to have gotten on board with texting, and anyway, he has huge fingers. I love how you were so into email when Dad was still trying to figure out how to use the CD player (and still doesn't know). Dad inherited your cell phone when you died, did you know that? It was so weird, for the longest time after, I had your name saved in my phone so that it would say "Mom calling." I had to change it because it broke my heart with hope a little bit every time he called, like this time it was really you checking in to make sure I was okay. I had all these voicemails from you saved too; you calling to thank me for a Norah Jones CD, pleased with my Amazon.com note that said "a little bit of sun to brighten up your winter," your voice husky with chemo treatments; you on the way to New York to visit Grandfather, in the hospital again. He would die just less than two months before you. You said it was "white knuckle" driving in the snow but that he was in good spirits. You sounding cheerful and warm, Hello, my Mia, I got your message, just wanted to call…. Every time the voicemails came up to be deleted, I would dutifully save them. For 8 years, your voice was on my phone, and then I got an iPhone in 2011, and plugged it in, and it automatically updated everything, deleting you forever. I called the Verizon guy and actually told him my dead mother's voicemails had been on my phone, but it was no use. I climbed out of bed and went into the kitchen with tears streaming down my face, and my fiancé said, what's wrong? I had kept telling him I wanted to play him those voicemails for him, but it never seemed like the right time.

This summer I was scouring the web again for evidence of her (how hard it is to speak directly too you! I've switched into the you're dead voice already) and I found a video clip of her speaking on public television in 1981. I realized with a start that she was my age in the video, which was such a bizarre recognition, like I'd discovered the existence of math, or the moon. Parents are so…parental; we don't let them be human, or young. I never thought about her being my age until I was this age. A kid sure, but not a person I could envision in a similar place in her life, thinking some of the same thoughts, having some of the same struggles. She, too, was married, and she'd just had me, and she sounded so professional, so sure of herself, so knowledgable about her field. She looked so young and beautiful. I wish I could go back there and say, you were great, I really enjoyed watching you, you sounded so smart. I'm so proud of you. Like I'm her mother. Someday I will be older than her though. The day I turn 58, I"ll lap her. 

a moment aside

Suddenly the air is full of a sweet and whimsical floral smell and I become aware of the sound I've been hearing for ten minutes but haven't registered; the tearing of paper. I imagine the person behind me, a magazine open in her (?) lap, finding a scent she likes. She tugs at the ad and the fold of glossy paper rips through at the soaked tab. Perfume explodes into the air like a memory cloud of summer, grows more sweeter and intense, dissipates. My spirits lift for just a moment before the spell breaks and I remember where I am.

Remember to be! Remember to grieve

When did I forget how to be myself?
I was reading on the car trip to LEX for T-day this blog post in which the author mentions it being her "Jesus Year" (http://happydeadmomday.blogspot.com/2013/08/happy-dead-mom-day-22-can-you-turn-into.html) and I guess that really resonated with me because I've been thinking about what that means ever since. I've been thinking about turning points this whole year without thinking of it as a Jesus year. I just started my new "save my sanity" job in River North after nine months of commuting to Glenview, and I am grateful for the space and the time and the sleep and the feeling of relief that rushed into my life and the tiny blips of happiness that appear every once in a while. Why am I not actually happy? Is it the dark Chicago winter? The coming of age dilemma? The fear of the aging of my one remaining parent and what that will do to my life just when I'm beginning to feel like a person again? The obsessing over stupid tiny thoughts like this? Recap: I am thirty-three, the year my mom was when she had me. I am ten years a motherless daughter, at least I will be this July 20. To me, thirty-three= pressure to have kids and make a GD decision about the path your life is taking and all that pressure is hanging over me like the sword of Damocles, or a cartoon piano/anvil. I want to do something cool, something big, something kind, and guess what, I can because TOMS shoe guy says so in his book (which I did NOT buy :) I don't know why these entrepreneurs are all so taken with sending me their books, Zappos sent me one too last time I complimented them on customer service). But I feel hemmed in by my inability to know what's brave and what's easy. That should be easy, right? It should be, if you trust your own brain. But is cutting and running the hard thing to do? Or is it the easy way out? How do I know which voice is the universe telling me what the right path is?

^

^

^


So this above was the depths of the Chicago winter. If I'd known how snowy and arctic it was going to be, GAH! I'm glad I didn't. But it's March! Yay spring someday! Every now and then, there's a foggy day where you can smell that chlorophyll hint of spring in the air under all the gravelly cigarette-and-trash-ladden-exhaust-tinted crystal castles of snow and ice that line our proud big shouldery sidewalks. Since it's my birthday month, my so-called Jesus Year is almost over for this year, but not by a long shot for my so-called life. That's what we call 90's humor, y'all. But seriously, Kenyonite John Green wrote “What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?” What is the point? I mean, I don't think remarkable has to be big or even loud, but it should feel remarkable to us, on our level, right? I personally think it's remarkable that my husband knows which of my clothes to take out of the dryer (especially since I've shrunk 2 of his favorite shirts), so I'm easily held in thrall, but I do think you can have quietly remarkable moments, and sometimes it's those things instead of the loud things that reset your foundations in subtle and permanent ways. I'm still trying to figure out what that means to me.
 

All this snow, all this cold, speaking of shifting foundations, has actually moved our apartment. The husband is running around taking pictures of the newly-formed cracks, the doors that no longer shut properly. If winter can move something so rock solid as this 100-year-old brick house, then it's no surprise that it should be able to move me too, crocus-like and grouchy as I am. Winter is an opportunity, for those of us who live their lives in varying stages of grief cycles, to be stuck indoors and confront yourself in a way that doesn't permit running away. Sometimes I just need to lie in bed and cry and feel like an orphan for half-hours at a time, and without that downshift and battery recharge, I'm not good at being whole. Sometimes I forget that I need to lie in bed and cry and feel like an orphan, and then I get mad at The Husband for not being a husband and a dead mother too, which is not his job. 

It's been almost ten years. My 93-year-old great aunt said a year or so before she died that she was as old as she was and still missed her mother. Revelation! I don't know what I thought; that that pain would ever actually go away just because the shape of your body changed? How silly of me! I'll be missing my mom till my dying day, and probably I'll still need to do my orphan rain dance as an octogenarian. Grief never goes away. It just changes shape like we do. 

So, personal voyage, self-discovery: music, words, and organization! I realized that when you start forgetting who you are, you have to go back to the basics. This week, I pulled out my box of music that I've written since the year before she died. Some of it doesn't even have the guitar chords written down, but I still know them from heart. Revisiting the songs that took me through her loss and various heartaches and heart breaks along the way has been like seeing an old friend without any of the shyness or initial pretense. I love these songs; they're part of me, even the embarrassing ones, the clichéd ones, the not so good ones. They make me remember being that age and feeling those things. And it makes me want to beat myself on the head for not keeping a regular journal, because nothing is more useful or entertaining when you are trying to recreate the past in your mind. 

So I try to reconnect and to stay sane by filing all my little papers ways in those delightful legal-sized boxes from The Container Store, making my life more colorful and less clutterful because clutter in your house leads to clutter in your mind (at least in mine). Thanks, Mom, for not only giving me your guitar, but taking it to have it mended and leaving it for me to find, all whole and glorious and full of promise, giving me an outlet for music, but also a key to surviving your loss. Thank you, Husband, for believing in me and letting me be a little crazy sometimes and dead-mom it up when I need to.