At The Foot Of Her Bed

Today is my mom’s 82nd birthday. She has always been the epitome of fun, kindness and grace.  Since I was born when she was 44, I was the only child at home throughout much of my life.  When I was nine she was stricken with an autoimmune disease which led to much of her life being spent in a wheelchair.  These factors (me being the only child at home and her illness) could have led to sadness and loneliness for both of us, but thanks to my mom’s natural self-effacing humor, a Lucille Ball-like ability to land in the middle of a great escapade and amazing storytelling abilities, my childhood was filled with joy, laughter and adventure.   I have so many memories of Mom sitting at the foot of her bed telling stories from her youth.  Many of the stories that she shared are the kind that others would hide.  The ones where we act ridiculous, or end up in embarrassing situations or are otherwise mortified.  She understood from an early age that you have two choices in this life: laugh at yourself or hide under a rock.  She chose to laugh and she taught me to do the same.  For that I am eternally grateful.  It is a hard thing to take ourselves so seriously in this life.  There are so many things that are serious and that we must suffer, it is nice to not let our own need to be perfect be one of them.

I thought it would be fun to reminisce a little on some of the stories that my mom and I experienced together.  When I was about 10 years old Mom, Dad and I decided to take a day trip to a small southern Utah town to search out some genealogy.  While eating lunch at a small locally owned restaurant, my mom decided she needed to use the restroom.  Not arguing with a woman who’d had five children, I jumped up to ask where the bathroom was located.  I was told that it was handicapped accessible and just up a ramp to the second floor.  As we neared the “ramp” it became horrifically apparent that in an attempt to make his facility “accessible”, the owner of the restaurant simply laid planking over the top of his staircase that went to the second floor.  It was a deathtrap. I asked if she wanted to try to find somewhere else to go, but it was clear that the lady needed to go!  No person in their right mind would try to push a wheelchair up that ramp of insanity...except us.  I told her to hold on for her life.  I backed up to get a running start and off we went running up, up, up.  About halfway, my 10 year old legs were still running for all they were worth, but we were at a standstill.  My mom grabbed the railing to the side of her as if her life depended upon it...because it did.  As I tried desperately to gain traction and forward momentum she clung.  We would have made better progress if we would not have been laughing so hard.  By the time we made it to the loo we both were drenched with tears...of course we counted ourselves lucky because we could have been drenched by much worse!

A few years later, when I was 17, my sister, Teresa,  was visiting from out of town.  We decided to go with Mom out to lunch at a restaurant located on a busy downtown street in Salt Lake City.  When I pulled up to the restaurant’s curb my sister unloaded the wheelchair and opened the car door for my mom to get out.  Only then did we realize that the curb was too high for her to transfer into her wheelchair.  I spotted a driveway a half block down that would work better and told my sister to just push the wheelchair down the street to that spot. Now, something that’s important to know at this point is how dramatic my mom and my sister are.  I am too, it’s true.  I have joked before that we all live in a movie with our own theme music playing which varies according to the kind of movie we happen to be in at the moment.  The difference between my mom and sister and I is that they are very innocent and gullible and I...well, I exploit that...and enjoy every minute of it.  Getting back to the story, when we pulled up to the curbless spot it became apparent that it was a driveway for a loading dock.  My mom asked if it was safe for us to stop there and I innocently said “Well... at the moment it is.  But any second a semi truck could come careening in here and kill us all.”  With a gasp and frantic look to my sister sauntering down the block with her wheelchair my mom screamed in the most urgent and panicked voice “TERESA!!!!  RUN!! RUN!!  WE ARE ABOUT TO BE KILLED!!!”  Not missing a beat, my sister took off, wild eyed, pushing an empty wheelchair, that held only my mother’s purse, at break neck speeds down a city street, not knowing what or who was about to kill those she loved.  She looked like a purse snatcher who had just mugged a handicapped woman by throwing her from her wheelchair and escaping with the purse and chair!  The entire distance was frantically run with my mother continually screaming “RUN!  FASTER!  IT COULD BE HERE ANY MOMENT!!”  Now, you would think that I would have put a stop to such a situation that I, myself, had created.  I could have, but I was laughing so hard at the scene presented to me that I was literally unable to communicate.  When my sister arrived at the car out of breath and full of unanswered questions she saw me in a ball in the driver’s seat with tears streaming down my red face and all too quickly realized that I was the source of terror.  We went to lunch and all laughed and laughed until our sides hurt.  Nobody can laugh at a good story like my mom...or be as generous to someone who scared her to death as she always was to me.

My mom and I were always good friends.  I would come home from school and sit at the foot of her bed and she would patiently listen to me recall all the ins and outs of my social life from elementary years through high school.  She is a gifted writer, so I, in turn, would listen to her latest poem or story that she had written that day.  I always knew that I could confide in my mom and she would be loving no matter what I said.  I also knew that she could tell when I was lying which helped me decide to confide in her since she would figure out all my secrets in the end anyway.  We loved to take drives together just to give her a way to get out of the house.  I remember many times that we would take off with no idea of where we were going, just the object in mind of finding something interesting and fun to see.  We were the closest of friends, made so by the circumstances of our lives together.

I spent much of my childhood praying that my mom’s illness would be taken away from her.  I was troubled that my prayer was never answered until I got older and had the power of perspective on my side.  I began to see that God allows mortality to afflict us as the laws of nature require.  We are in a mortal existence and as such we will experience mortality with all of its pain and suffering.  That does not mean that He is not there to lift the burden of those trials and ease our suffering...because He does!  He also uses the trials that we must bear to bless us and teach us along the way.  I began to see that He did answer my prayers, just not in the way that I expected. My mom and I were given a special relationship partly because of her physical limitations.  The trial was eased, in part, because of the blessings the trial itself brought.  It made me a more compassionate daughter.  It gave her plenty of opportunity to listen to and spend time with me.  It gave me more motivation to spend time with her.  God blessed her, and in turn He blessed me, with a sense of humor to be able to laugh at life and the experiences it brings us.  Marjorie Hinckley once said “The only way to get through life is to laugh your way through it.  You either have to laugh or cry.  I prefer to laugh.  Crying gives me a headache.”  This is something my mom understands to her core.  She has faced a life of physical and emotional pain and has laughed her way through experiences that would make others crumple---not to minimize what she has suffered or to insinuate that she has not or could not cry.  For there have been tears.  How could there not?  Yet laughter prevailed and she passed on to me a legacy of laughter, and grace, and kindness in the face of pain.  I will forever admire and love my dear mother who taught me to look for the fun and interest that life has to offer and most of all to laugh at myself and the situations that life brings me.  

When Alan and I decided to move to the middle of nowhere eight years ago we successfully talked my parents into moving down here as well.  It was a safe place where they could retire and I could help them as they grew older.  Mostly, though, I wanted my kids, who were still very young, to be able to associate with my sweet parents on a regular basis.  I wanted them to hear from the lady herself all about her Lucille-Ball like moments and to have the pleasure of laughing with and learning from her just as I had... at the foot of her bed.