This morning I was thinking about my mother and the whimsy she brought into my life!
The image I got was of her when we lived in Columbus, GA and she would dress up in some " god awful" outfit and go over to the neighbors with a broken Ukulele and sing some sad whiskey tenor song at their front door.
After the neighbors got over the shock and disbelief everyone would fall into a pile of laughter . She is and was the " Phylis Diller" type...always looking for a way to take you out of your misery and give you something to laugh about.
I've seen her disarm crowds and tables of people with the stories she can tell about her life. If you get her started you can have an evening of hilarious fun listening to all the yarns she can spin.
There were times when I was a girl she would come out of the bedroom with mismatched socks, her hair a fright, layers of sweaters, pants and dresses and look as though it was the most normal things in the world. We'd bust out laughing and tell her if she ever went out looking like that we would die dead in our tracks.
I loved that my mother kept us laughing. We didn't always have the most happy life although it was pretty good. She seemed to find ways to make lemonade out of lemons. She could take a boring, mundane day and make it crazy and fun...and still can. Her outlook was always optimistic! Even in tragic situations she can find a silver lining!
Mom loves to play practical jokes on us. She doesn't do it so much now but I remember her throwing invisible ink on my cousin Lavelle's brand new white shirt.
Needless to say, he was pretty angry as she cackled at him.
Then the ink faded away and he cooled off.
One time she told my younger sister that a good looking former boyfriend of my oldest sister had called and to ask if he could take my younger sister out. Mom told her she better go get ready, that he was coming over soon. She hurried,and when she came downstairs mom said, "April Fools"...and yes, it was April Fool's Day.
Sometimes, it's fun to reminisce about the people in your life that have helped you through the yucky stuff. I wish my mom would come to my door and sing me one of her whiskey tenor songs...I could use a good laugh like that once in a while!
This holiday season we have had the opportunity to be with all of our family in some way shape or form. Thanksgiving my sister and husband came up and we had all our children and grandchildren, my mother and step father, my daughter in laws parents from Zimbabwe and all 9 grand’s. During the Christmas holidays we spent a night with our oldest daughter and her 3 boys, have been to my son and daughter-in-laws house, seeing 2 of the grand’s there in their habitat and again visited with our daughter-in-laws parents. Then traveled to KY to see my husband’s parents who are in their 80’s. We are on our way as we speak to visit friends in Ohio for an evening who are of our generation and then we will head back home for a day and head down to VA to spend New Years with my mother.
In each place we interact with each other in different ways.
What occurs to me is how things change over the years and what you become more tolerant of....more empathetic...more mellow.
At times in our lives, it seems like we are not open to any type of differences and become stressed when we are called upon to do things differently from our normal routine, or should I say there are ages and stages that we aren’t able to adapt to others ways of doing things. I understand what the Bible was saying about gray hair and wisdom. I think It means that you don’t say everything you’re thinking and you learn how to be a bit more diplomatic and tactful…at least for a while. I have seen it work the opposite though when a person gets to be old enough that they no longer care what they say or how they say it....at least for a smathering of older people I've encountered.
The thing I’m seeing at the age I am now is that we see things in persons who are older than us that we say, we hope we don’t do that when we get to be their age. We have noticed that the people that are younger than we are tend to be a frivolous, too worried about what others think and uptight. We've also noticed that on the other end of the spectrum the older a person gets they become frivilous because they don't seem to notice anymore, they don't worry about what anyone thinks and they let er rip no matter who is around! We've discussed how we want to make it easier for our children to help us when we get to the point that we can no longer help ourselves. It's difficult because age creeps up on you gradually and it is extremely difficult to admit that we can no longer do something. Often we wait so long that we suddenly discover when we are called on to do a particular task that there is no longer strength to do it...and admitting it might make us appear less than what we are.
I can remember thinking that my parents didn’t understand the things that we were dealing within our generation. It seemed like they were always criticizing our generation. Then, I hit another stage in my life and saw that what they were saying was a pretty good way to look at things and that they had suddenly become pretty smart.
A little later on I had problems dealing with issues that I felt like my parents had filled me with and blamed them for everything that ever went wrong in my life. Then I got tired of being angry at them all the time and decided to embrace the good and the bad and enjoy them for who they were, flaws and all.
It occurred to me as we were visiting my husband’s parents and when I see my mother that we will someday be trading places with them. I would hope that my children and grandchildren will give us grace and not become aggravated and angry at us for being where we are at. I hope I have been realistic and prepared myself and them for what is to come. I hope I won't let my pride keep me from listening to them but I hope I maintain enough pride that I never give up.
I think sometimes the younger generations tend to have little empathy because they have yet to experience what the aging process does to your body. I remember thinking my mother could just start jogging at the age of 40 when I was 20 years younger than she was and keep up with me. I didn’t realize that she needed to become conditioned to running and give her body a chance to catch up with the exercise she was going to push it to do. Years later I felt embarrased when I thought about how I pushed my mom to do something I thought should be effortless.
I often see teen-agers I work with in the high school setting scoff at an older people, myself included,as if we are a curse word. But I feel like I’m one of those people who are on the fence. ( I think they call us the "sandwich generation".)
I know what it has been like to be young, fit, trim and desirable, then I have seen the gazes go from me to my daughters and those younger than myself, then I have felt at a certain age that I was no longer even in the running. I’ve watched the generations interacting with each other, seen my mother and step father and in-laws struggle to hear what everyone was saying, watched them teeter and todder trying to get up out of a chair and then struggle to get their legs going again. Our conversations with our parents center around the things we used to be able to do, and that it is almost impossible now to carry out some of the everyday tasks that used to be so simple and that was taken for granted it would always be easy to do. Things that used to be so easy are something our parents have to reconsider doing now. Things like climbing up on roofs and going up and down stairs with an armful of stuff. or going to the grocery store and getting them back into the house once you get home. I've heard friends talk about how difficult it was to take things away from their parents because it was endangering their lives and the life of others. I think that will be a hard reality.
Yep, it looks like if we continue our lives that we will one day be trading places with the generation of people our parents are. I wonder what changes and adaptations will be made because of the huge population that are baby boomers who will be retirees and senior citizens? I look forward to the inventions that will supposedly rescue us from our waning "fountian of youth"!
I hope I can keep up and stay aware of what is coming on that is new and different. I hope the younger generation will embrace us and allow for our physical inability. I hope I am able to carrying on a conversation that doesn’t alienate my children and grandchildren. I hope they will be able to respect what I bring to the table even if I don’t have a full understanding of what is going on. And I hope I can be an enjoyable person to be around who doesn’t criticize and complain about everything because it’s not done the way we used to do it.
Inevitably we all will face the experience of trading places with someone if we live our lives to our 80’s and beyond. May we learn to do it gracefully.
When I was growing up my family moved a lot of different places. My father was a career navy man leaving his Alabama textile Mill town to become something more in the United States military. His travels landed he and my mother and my sister in Groton, Connecticut where I was born .
We lived in various coastal cities such as Charleston, South Carolina, Norfolk, VA and as far west as San Diego Ca. We also lived in Columbus ,GA . I never thought that my years of traveling with my parents would put me in a position of being ready for adventure in my married life but since my marriage we have lived in several states traveling and living in numerous locations and experiencing many diverse people and cultures.
As our children grew up and moved out they too embraced an adventurous lifestyle and have settled into living with diversity in their own sense of the exploration. As adults some have decided to make deep roots and others are ready to pull them up and be planted in new soil.
Somehow, my husband and I continue to find ourselves in different situations in which we either put ourselves in a closet and try to hide (unsuccessfully I might add) or come out and experience everything that is thrown to us.
In the past few days the experiences have been as diverse as the glass pieces in a kaleidoscope. In Chicago we dined with Zimbabwean, our daughter-in-laws parents; a young couple whose parents are from New York and originally from India; the son in law, he from London, England. We laughed and chatted telling stories and learning about each others lives, education and culture. Our son and daughter-in-law have certainly stretched us in ways that we would never have delved into otherwise, but oh what richness we find in the different people and places we find ourselves.
Fast forward to my husband aging parents in KY, who have hunkered down and are still independently living at the mid 80’s that they are. We found ourselves once again adapting and empathizing with them and their lifestyle recognizing that life continues on and we are trudging towards aging as well.
Then we come in to visit our dear friends in Ohio whom we have know for at least 35 years and we pick up where we last left off laughing,lamenting, encouraging, telling stories, and relating trials and triumphs of life with each other. We come away from times like this feeling full and rich and blessed to be a part of someone elses life that have nurtured and encouraged and challenged us to keep growing and looking at the opportunities, to see the faithfulness of God even in the difficult times we have experienced. We have a history with these people, they have known us in some of our most difficult times. They have experienced the journeys of life, big, small and excruciatingly painful. They know the raw feelings and the retching diversity of life can cause on the psyche and the emotional stability of an individual. And they have watched us as we experienced the joys and the sorrows and lived with us through them.
We came home for 2 days and spent a lovely evening with friends in this area experiencing yet another diverse slice of life experiencing things we have never done before and then we headed to Va to finish up the visit with my mother and step father. Again a whole different lifestyle and set of experiences. We saw snow covered on the MD,DL,VA coastline...something that almost never happens and brought in the new year eating collards, fresh ham and fried potatoes. Yum!
We're home and back to reality, full from the journey with thoughts and pounds. The pounds we've resolved to shed. The memories we want to savor.
Every once in a while I need to get out of my comfort zone and delve into something that "jerks a knot in my tail" so to speak. That place where someone asks you a point blank question that forces you to take stock of what the heck you are doing with your life…or that challenge that makes you angry but knocks the socks off of any train of thought or theory you have decided you may want to hang on to. These are the kinds of diverse people we have found in our lives and that keep the journey exciting and excruciatingly painful. Ah, but there is never the chance of leaving the old skin on…it gets torn off so something fresh can grow. We are in the midst of a storm at sea…right now there is a calm. We are having time to meditate and chew on the events in our past to be prepared for what is next.
I don’t want to accept a smooth ride with a well preserved body but rather to slide in saying "wow, what a ride." That quote came from an anonymous person which we found a couple of years ago before we started our second journey to PA thinking we were going to be doing something entirely different.
Instead, we have found me in working in education and my husband unemployed contemplating options we may have never considered had we stayed in the comfortable place that we were for 16 years.
I don’t want to grow old and grow away. I want to be like a vine that entwines itself in every nook and cranny of peoples lives and become a part of it all. I want my life to have made a difference and to embrace every opportunity. And when I go, I want it to be said that “she really knew how to wring out what ever there was to offer from life” Part of that comes from embracing all the diversity and seeing it as an adventure no matter how tough it was and in it…to see the blessing.
