"She wasn't a good mother, but she really loved you."
Back in May 2025, my first Mother's Day after my mother's death was approaching. I started to write my reactions to this pending holiday, though my words quickly morphed into my own complicated feelings about my mother. I never finished my thoughts, but I poked at this rough draft off and on for a bit before the impetus faded away sometime last summer. The post sat unfinished and unrefined, similar in ways to how my mother's cremated remains resided in a cardboard box located in our living room.
This year, I finally resolved to bury my mother's cremains with her own mother. After a lot of back-and-forth via email, I finally reached a point last weekend when I could transfer the ashes to the cemetery, complete all necessary paperwork, and hand over money for the services. The burial is currently scheduled to take place on Friday, July 10. With all of the preparations made, I felt now was the time to revisit my rough draft to see if it could be massaged into something I felt comfortable publishing. What started as a revisitation turned into a long drawn-out history of my mother's life, only stopping once I reached her death in October 2024. Reviewing my writing was a struggle as I didn't believe it was suitable for posting online in its current form, thereby making me question why I wrote it out in the first place. There were some great passages in the draft, but a fair amount of it came across as tedious, even to me.
Given how close I am to laying my mother to rest, I want the same level of completion for my rough draft. The year-by-year recap was significantly edited, but a fair amount remains to situate my mother's life and our relationship in context. Additional context will be needed to explain the post's title, though I have alluded to it in the past.
A year has passed--it's time to finish what I started.
I had to make peace many years ago that my mother was...well, look at the first half of this post's title. It's not uncommon to read about people whose relationships with their parents were difficult, with "difficult" carrying tons of weight depending on the situation. Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему. I know my situation was nowhere near as difficult as others, and for that I am thankful. Still, to reference Tolstoy's quote, it's my own way that I know best.
A couple phrases that come up again and again to describe my mother were "trapped" and "unfair." My mother was effectively trapped at the age of 19 when her mother, V., died suddenly after Christmas 1968 at the age of 48. V.'s death came about from complications due to pneumonia, unfortunately aided by her heavy smoking. My mother was in her sophomore year at college when her mother died, which was as far as she went due to the changing family circumstances. V. was very close to my mother, as she was an only child, and from all I have gleaned from many relatives who knew them both, their relationship was genuinely filled with love and support.
Meanwhile, V.'s husband, M. (who went by his nickname "B." at this time) was the polar opposite. He was constantly disappointed by his daughter, setting up various conditions or needs to gain his approval. On top of gatekeeping his love for his daughter, M. was also seeing a neighbor's wife on the side. News of the affair started to spread at V.'s funeral, which to me says this closely-guarded secret broke containment due to the event at hand. Or, perhaps, it wasn't that much of a secret, as it's possible M. had other affairs that V. knew about, up to and including the neighbor's wife. V. was a homemaker with no outside job experience, so life would be difficult if she were to leave M. The "trapped" and "unfair" phrases could also apply to V. as well as my mother, a theme I'll return to later.
V.'s death certainly made life more convenient for M. He took advantage of my mother's grief and naiveté by having her sign documents after V.'s death that would "take care" of her mother's affairs, though in reality my mother unwittingly signed a quit-claim deed that renounced her claim to their house. When V. & M. bought their house, it was placed in V.'s family name, with ownership reverting to my mother upon V.'s death. M. had no claim to the house, though once my mother signed the deed, he made his move and quickly took possession of it. He also gave my mother 24 hours to retrieve V.'s belongings before he purged them, and ended support for my mother's time in college. M. effectively abandoned his daughter for the neighbor's wife (a real piece of work herself who also had conditional love for her two children, which came out during her messy divorce in 1969), and in turn, my mother had nowhere else to turn except to her longtime boyfriend--my father--and his family. When they were married in June 1970, this act seemingly ended my mother's entrapment by her father, though it didn't fully end those feelings altogether.
(Side note: M. sold the family house, bought property in Mountain Home, AR, then moved there in 1970 with his new wife, R., whom he married just one month after my parents' marriage, and yes, he and his future wife were present. Upon moving to Arkansas, M. dropped the nickname he had in the Chicago region and just went by M., whereas R. decided to pick up a nickname, which was also M. To paraphrase what L. has said, it's like they both fled a crime scene and assumed new identities in a different state. R.'s only daughter became the favored child of both her and M., and we'll get to the consequences of this decision soon.)
I came along in September 1971 while my father was stationed in Taiwan during the Vietnam War. We all came back stateside in 1972, and occasionally would visit the folks in Arkansas. I have no memories of these visits, though pictures exist somewhere of them. In October 1975, my sister came along for only five hours of life. She was born with significant birth defects that were impossible to resolve, and nobody is sure (or has ever openly discussed) how these came about. Her death started the end of my parents' marriage, which was unfortunately aided by actions from the Arkansas crew. When news of my sister's death reached them, they...sent a sympathy card. A month later, R.’s granddaughter from the "favored" daughter needed her tonsils or appendix removed, so R. and M. drove from Arkansas to Chicago to see her. My mother was already in a depressive state, and this treatment by her father and stepmother intensified these feelings to where she didn't want to be a mother or a wife anymore. Those feelings of entrapment came on hard, but her way of coping was...well, ill-advised. She copied her father's actions from barely 10 years earlier, and she herself stepped out on her marriage and family. My parents were divorced in 1977, and I briefly ended up in custody with my mother the following year. However, my father appealed and won custody of me in 1979 (space does not permit me to say how rare this event was, but this decision has shaped my life for the better).
While my life improved in my father's custody, especially after he remarried in 1981, my mother went through some rough years afterwards. She broke up with her paramour sometime in the 80s, bounced around from apartment to apartment in the southern Chicagoland region, and made some bad financial decisions that caused her to file for bankruptcy. We didn't have much contact during this period, and what little contact we had was spent watching movies on VCR together...or sometimes even by myself when she would work as a waitress. It wasn't a memorable time. I think she started to get her life together around the time I graduated high school in 1989, or maybe around the time I graduated college in 1993. In either case, she knew that life as a waitress was coming to a close and other life changes were necessary. My mother had supplemented her waitressing income by working as a veterinarian assistant, and during the mid 1990s she decided to parlay this medical knowledge to work with humans. She took some nursing classes, but ended up stopping at the point where she could get EMT certification, which she reached in the late 1990s.
Our relationship as son-to-mother started to improve as her life improved. My mother started to take better care of herself, as she took up cycling and peaked with a 50th birthday celebration before the 1999 (XXVII) edition of RAGBRAI. She started each day of the race, finishing all but one day around Decorah due to the hot temperatures causing the road tar to liquefy and bubble. She was also ecstatic when I married L. in 2006, as in many ways she now gained the daughter she lost back in 1975. We continued having a decent relationship afterwards, and whenever we would be in Chicago, L. & I made it a point to visit her. She was increasingly unwilling to drive the 250+ miles to see us in STL, as she was always way too high-strung behind the wheel. Regardless of how our visits were one-way affairs, we were still in a decent spot with how well we got along. Still, I realized even back then that this may be as good as we can get. Our relationship may never become great, but it may simply be "fine," and at that time, I was fine with that thought.
When my mother retired from her EMT job in 2016, it is apparent that this was when things began to change between us. She was mentally unprepared for retirement life, though physically, her body was showing signs of wear and tear from the high-stress hospital life. Her retirement at 66 made sense in that aspect. The big issue, like with many retirees, was how to occupy her time without work, and she utterly failed at that. Many of our phone calls centered around how bored she was with being retired, but she did little to alleviate her situation. Some of her longtime friends were also retired, but all of them were changing in ways that affected their friendships, and in one case, ended it. Oddly enough, the COVID era actually helped my mother out in spite of her asthma placing her at high risk of contracting it. She gleefully accepted all of the recommendations to prevent catching COVID, as it actually gave her a purpose, or at least something to do. On the flip side, though, the isolation with COVID lockdowns and her asthma-related reluctance to socialize only accelerated the mental decline we saw in her final years.
In many ways, the end of her life was something of an echo of our time in the late 70s or 80s. Fortunately, this period wasn't an exact copy of the immediate post-divorce era, but these timespans were more alike than different. In hindsight, some of these similarities were due to mental decay, as some of my mother's last financial decisions were questionable at best. She declined assistance for low-income housing, or paperwork to file for benefits, as she felt capable of doing so herself (or in the case of the housing, decrying whom she may be living near in rather rough terms, and I will leave it at that). Her money was rapidly running out, and she kept on running into proverbial walls when she sought part-time employment. She managed to get hired as a cashier at a nearby Walgreens, but her rapid decline made this job increasingly difficult to perform. Our last visit with her was in July 2024, three months before her death. Her condition was troubling, but there was very little we could do about it. My mother lived independently since she and the paramour mentioned above called it quits, so she was rather proud about her ability to live alone, and for 40+ years, she managed to make it work...until it didn't. After she died, I found out about how messy and painful her last days truly were, which is why I still believe she may have hastened her own demise in one capacity or another. She was sundowning mentally, but still had enough wherewithal to know of her situation, perhaps feeling trapped again like other times in her past. In the end she may have decided she had had enough, and that there was only one way out of her deepening morass. I'll never know for sure, but I'm not certain if I would want to know. What would that knowledge change?
My mother was declared dead on October 24, 2024. It is likely she died days earlier, but due to living alone, nobody was aware until her workplace called the police for a welfare check. I found out when the police found her body, then called me afterwards to tell me the news. There weren't many people to notify afterwards, as most of her family on V.'s side had passed on or had limited contact with her. I talked with my father, a couple of her lifelong friends, one of her neighbors, and her manager at Walgreens. Beyond that, I made one post on her Facebook page, and that was the extent of communication surrounding her death.
When I spoke with N., she unknowingly brought about the title of this post. N. is a couple years older than me, and was the daughter of my mother's lifelong friend L.A. This was the friendship which ended, as I mentioned earlier, due to L.A.'s rapid descent into dementia. My mother kept trying to help L.A. out, but her rejections and violent mood swings drove everyone away, even N., who was happy to move to Kentucky to get away from her own mother. N. had always viewed my mother as her aunt, as someone who had been in her life one way or another since she was born. She was understandably disconsolate during our call, and could barely speak between tears. Because of her grief, she would often repeat herself, which included her saying the title phrase over and over again: "She wasn't a good mother, but she really loved you." It's a phrase that has stuck with me ever since, as I know it is true. Or at least I know it's true, but I can't say that I feel this truth within me. It may never feel true, even if I know it to be. Our history was complicated, so my feelings about her and how she related to me are similar.
As mentioned at the beginning, the actual burial will be on July 10. My mother will be reunited forever with the only parent who ever cared for her. Both V. and my mother had some unfair hands dealt to them throughout their lives, and in some cases, those hands trapped them in bad circumstances. In other cases, they simply made bad calls that were understandable in hindsight, but bad decisions nonetheless. My hope is that in the next world, any feelings of entrapment they have will dissipate permanently. In this world, I hope that laying my mother to rest will help me to better understand my feelings about our time together. Maybe at some point, the second part of N.'s statement may feel true inside my heart.