My Mom
My Mom turned 96 earlier this year. She was still living in her home, the home I grew up in, on Long Island in the New York city suburbs when COVID-19 hit New York. At that point my sister, who now lives in North Carolina, got her out of New York and took her down to North Carolina. She was only 95 at that time. She didn't know it then but the move out of New York, where she had lived her entire life would be permanent. She would only return a couple of times for short visits. She lived at my sister's house for a year or so and shortly after she turned 96 she decided she was ready to move into a senior facility. With the help of my brother and sister she found one she liked and moved in. She has her own room and meals are provided. It's in North Carolina, close to my sister's place. She tells me she is happy there.
Everyone is unique in their own way, but there are those people who we all run into during our life that are just a little more unique than the rest of us. Their uniqueness jumps out at you and reminds you just how fun, interesting, engaging, and refreshing a human being can be. My Mom, at least to me, is one of those people. She's someone who treats stuffed animals as if they have feelings, brings cookies to day workers (those guys standing in a parking lot hoping to get picked up for some work), finds a job for the homeless guy panhandling out on the roadway, actually hugs trees, can see auras, prefers a dress from the dollar store to one from Saks, likes dark humor all while somehow maintaining a childlike faith. She has a great imagination. She will randomly hug strangers she encounters when she gets the feeling they need it, sometimes telling them that God loves them. Now if someone did that to me I would be wary thinking “Ut-oh, this person is going to be attempting to sell me on religion.”, but no one takes my Mom that way and some have replied “Thank you. You don't know how much I needed that.” My Mom tries to like almost everyone, hates hearing people run down others, champions the weak, and treats both the king and the bum with equal care, interest, and compassion. My Mom comes across as a bit kookie, and maybe a bit simple. Well she is certainly the former but certainly not the latter.
I have always had a sort of psychic connection with my Mom. More than a few times when I was not doing well my phone would ring and it would be my Mom. The first thing she would say is “What's wrong”. This was mostly back when calling long distance cost and you did it sparingly. Mom was always open to hearing new ideas and would entertain ideas outside the box. She enjoys joking around and I think deep inside she would have liked to have been in the theater. One way I have explained my Mom is by saying if you show her a glass half full of water. For the “half-full/half-empty" question about the water level, her reply would instead be something like "What a beautiful glass and what a clever idea to put water in it".
We had numerous religious discussions when I was young from: Do we really believe that Mary was a virgin? Why wasn't Jesus interested in girls? How come there's nothing about him after he's born until the last couple of years of his life when he shows up to get baptized? If the pathway to Heaven is through Jesus how is that fair when he spent his whole life in one small area of the world where most the world didn't even know about him? She told me she had these questions too. However, unlike me, she has developed and maintained a strong faith.
As a family we are reserved and I was shy when I was young. When I got old enough to go to school, my Mom would always send me off with the following advice, “Don't hit the teacher”. She would shout it out to me, for the whole world to hear, as I got out to the street and headed to the bus stop. The teacher probably thought she should have told me to remember to talk to the teacher. But that was my Mom's subtle way of saying you are just as capable as all the other kids, including the bad ones. I missed virtually all of my kindergarten year of school because I kept getting tonsillitis, finally I had to have them removed. After that my Mom kept me home and just waited for the next school year to begin and then sent me off to 1st grade. When the school questioned her about my missing kindergarten my Mom's retort was “He's a well behaved little boy, he doesn't need a year teaching him how to behave with others.” They let it go.
My Mom, like many of us, used to struggle remembering names when she was young. She tells a story of going on an interview for a job. When the guy interviewing her introduced himself, my Mom, in attempt to remember the name, associated it with a bird. Later when it came time to use the name she remembered it was the name of a bird but the only bird that popped into her head was the ever popular Chickadee so she went with it and called him Mr. Chickadee. Let's just say that Mr. Sparrow was not impressed.
One of my family's favorite games when we are all together is Balderdash AKA the Dictionary Game. A game where a word no one knows is selected and everyone makes up a definition for it. Then all the definitions along with the correct one is read and everyone is supposed to pick the one they think is correct. You get points for picking the correct one and for when someone picks your fake definition. Now we, or at least the Backus side of the family, play this game a little differently. My father, my brother, my sister and me we all try to come up with the funniest definition. We go for the laugh and we tend to pick the definition we find the funniest. Some of the others do this as well at times but they also try to actually win in the traditional way. Score is kept but many of us don't pay any attention to it. My Mom plays it yet another way. She pays attention to the scoreboard and her goal is to guess the definition of the person who is in last place to encourage them. She is disappointed whenever she ends up guessing either the correct definition or one of the leader's definitions. My Mom almost always roots for the underdog.
My Mom was not what you would call athletically inclined. There was a period where my Dad was having to work a lot of overtime and would come home late. He was also working Saturdays. He would normally play some kind of baseball with me when the weather was nice. We might have a catch or take turns pitching to one another. I was probably between 8 and10 and my Mom decided that she would stand in for him since he was working so much and wasn't able to play with me. So I told her I'd pitch to her and gave her the bat. She took the bat, choked up, laid it on her shoulder, and then proceeded to stand directly behind home plate facing me. I told her she needed to stand to the side of the plate not behind it. She said she knew what she was doing and told me to just throw the ball. (No one in my family likes being told what to do, including my mother.) So I pitched the ball. She did a tomahawk motion with the bat, missed the ball which then hit her right in the stomach. Kind of knocked the wind out of her. That was the last time we did any sort of baseball activity together. I've been told the story of my Dad taking Mom to baseball games early in their relationship. They got to their seats and shortly after the game started. Sometime in the third inning my Mom asked my Dad when they were going to finish practicing and start the game.
I played on the grade school basketball team. I was actually the high scorer on the team. My parents would come watch our games. My Mom didn't worry about the score. She tracked the fouls. She thought I had a good game if I fouled someone more than they fouled me. I tried telling her that it's better to be fouled than to foul the other guy but she didn't buy it.
My Mom likes dark humor and she had a book of Addams Family cartoons from the New Yorker. When she discovered that I liked that too she used to sit with me and look through it. I was quite young and it's one of my favorite early memories with my Mom. I still remember some of the cartoons.
My Mom was adopted and grew up with criticism. As a young person and into adulthood she had low self-esteem. She was unsure of herself, uncomfortable with people she didn't know, and was even intimidated by the phone. She overcame all this and went on to be a leader. She was President of the PTA for my high school, a school with over 3000 kids. She helped form and lead an exercise group for over 30 years. She took leadership roles in her church and in other places. She evolved into someone who meets and makes friends easily. She could have been a model for the Pat Martin Virginia Slims ad campaign in the late 60's “You've come a long way baby”....
Now that my Mom's living in a senior facility she says she is happy not to be a burden on any of us. She says she likes the place and has made some friends. She is still quite mobile but her memory is going. She tells me how good the food is after which she says she can't taste anything as she has mostly lost her sense of taste. She says this so sincerely, but I can't help but wonder “Is this just her telling me a joke?”
My Mom: Quirky, fun loving, encouraging and still laughs easily. I love her and I can't imagine having a better person for a Mom. There's a lot of her in me and I tend to think that it is my best part.
Love❤️
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