Remembering Mum

Mum – Barbara to her friends, Barb – or Barbie, to her husband Ray, “Nanna” to her grandchildren and “Ma”, “M.”,  or sometimes “Mrs. McKenzie” to her children is to me, best expressed as “Mum” with its hint of English origin. She would bristle at “Mom” no matter how long we lived in the States. 

Understanding who Mum was is challenging. Her friends note that she is very private – she was private in the family as well. Much that she could wear her heart on her sleeve and be wonderfully generous, there were parts of her I think none of us ever discovered – a different parts she shared with each of us. 

Her most defining character was her devotion to Ray. So much so that she followed him even in her last days, coming from Florida to Pittsburgh, and I hope she is now with him again. For me to understand her, it is easiest to start at the beginning, with the intersection of our stories. 

My vestigial memories, as much family tales and old photographs as my own memory, are from London, when I was about 3 or 4. I was her best pal. She took me everywhere – to the children’s places – Whipsnade Zoo and Bekonscot Bucks as well as the adult milieus – the Victoria and Albert Museum and Kew Gardens, and  the in between places, Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square.  I was always up for an adventure. I imagine her a somewhat wide-eyed colonial girl – as she remained in many ways to the end — trying to disguise her sense of awe, and protected by a little mite. This was also the time of sleeping out on sidewalks to see the queen or a princess – at heart, I guess a royalist. 

My next set of memories are so different. They come about 6 or so, when my memories became my own and I became aware of my own personality. I can say, I never met anyone more stubborn than my mother. She, in her turn would say, she never met anyone more willful than me. We could be at logger heads just as we could be most precious to each other. She had been forewarned of a certain stubbornness – I was left handed. 

Aphorisms made up her speech patterns. Many reflect a time anchored in the mid-nineteen hundreds, before television, bumper stickers and the sound bites of the celebrities.  She was fond of quoting, “A left handed child is the product of a lazy mother” to which she often added, “I was not lazy, but he was stubborn!” Her aphorisms were a characteristic of her unique understanding of the world, and were full of a character and time a long past and would rise in conversation quite unexpected – at Craig’s birth, she was scolded for taking up space in a hospital bed despite being very sick with measles – she claims the nurses said that with feet her size and it being a third child, she should deliver at home. 

And then came a long hiatus. I was away from home for some four years in boarding school and drifted from the orbit of the family.  I saw them at holidays, heard that Mum was teaching in the school. Her handwriting in her weekly letters changed during this period, becoming more open and rounded, more printed, than her well crafted script. I remember very little from the period – a time inspecting schools, anxiety over my father practicing medicine before his license was fully certified, a sublte challenges to  the conventions of the middle East, but not as boldly as the single Irish girls. 

Then we came to America. We travelled cross country in an Oldsmobile VistaCruiser station wagon. About Texas, things began to breakdown and the strains of travel were telling on all. I remember following Mum to a dry wash after she grabbed a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon and shouted something about Texas and divorce at my father. She sat on the ground, legs pulled up, and drank one, two maybe more of the beers, fuming at Ray. The cause of the argument had something to do with not being allowed to drive the car. I sat with her – spending most of my time thinking about all the creepy crawlies in the Texas campground and wondering what had brought this out. Later that evening, we had to go to a camp entertainment in a outdoor amphitheater. On entering, we signed in as to who we were and where we were from. We rigged it – each of us signing in from somewhere else so that we ringed the globe at least once. Of course, at intermission, we were called out  to stand, my Mum fuming still, stood only in the name of family honor. We got a great Texas cheer and a chow triangle. 

Adolescence can be a difficult time – I suspect it was for her, growing up with her stories of bicycle trips around New Zealand to escape the confines of home and small towns. My memories are of expecting to come home to find Mum on the kitchen floor, packing into boxes battered pots and pans that had travelled the globe with us. And I expected to hear – “We are moving again.” By then we had lived on most continents, so only Asia could be the destination, or perhaps Africa. I never the sense of being fully settled in Pittsburgh. We lived through hugh changes here – we adapted to a new culture, the family grew, and first Robyn, then me, then Craig followed their passions and fortunes away. 

Much later, after I finished college, married, and became a professor, Mum and I grew together. We would keep our independent perspectives but had made a deep peace and honored the work we both devoted ourselves to. The last few years were especially poignant, I wondered who she would become or what I would see of her now that she was alone, determined, and yet in a funny way frail because her body began to conspire against her. Many of her new friends from Florida were New England snow birds, those who wend to Florida in winter and wander back to New England in summer. She was able to have her friends around her in New England and we were able to join with her and in a most gentle way rediscover the place that I have come to call home. As private as she was, she struck instant friendships. Just last week Dot stopped in – bearing news from Margaret and Cynthia and her gang. On Mum’s last visit she gave us a metal garden sculpture of a pair of egrets – one trumpeting preening and one trumpeting to the heavens. When I next see and egret in a pond, I will nod with a private acknowledgment and thank her for watching over me.