My Mother’s Kisses

Today, my mother came to visit me, and we kissed hello and we kissed goodbye.  I watched her get into the car with my friend, who had driven her to my new house.  She looked older, more bent and frail than she had the week before.

My mother and I kiss rarely, perhaps twice a year, on a special holiday, or a birthday.  We kissed on each of my three trips to the maternity floor of the hospital, and on my return home with a new baby.        

But last month we moved.  Our new house is much nicer than the one we left, and I hope its walls will shelter many joyous moments.  Our new house is an hour’s ride from my old house. Our old house was around the corner from my parents.

There will be no more mother-daughter arguments which really are not arguments.  “You and MomMom are always yelling at each other,” my daughter once said, and I laughed, “We weren’t arguing.  We were talking!”

Once, we actually stopped talking – or she did.  It was my first week home from the hospital with my infant son, my third child in five years.  On a freezing-cold February morning, I opened my front door to retrieve the newspaper, looking forward to a quiet cup of coffee before the breakfast onslaught.

 Florence, my mother, was sitting on the cold concrete step, reading my newspaper, waiting for me to open the door.

Uninvited, she had walked around the corner at dawn to help with the children, to sing to them and prepare their breakfast dishes and fill my tiny kitchen beyond its limit – and mine.   

After a few mornings of daybreak bedlam in the kitchen, I got nerve enough to say, “Mom, please don’t come here at 8 o’clock in the morning.  I am not a morning person.  I need to start my day alone – to read my newspaper, enjoy my coffee –  before the kids wake up.”

I knew by the look in her eyes how stricken she was. “I wanted to help you!” she responded.  Then, she disappeared from my house, and our lives, for a week, a very long time when you live around the corner from your daughter and   three small grandchildren you cherish.

I couldn’t stand her absence.  I hadn’t meant to hurt her so terribly.  Still, I needed my privacy.  I needed to set rules. 

At the end of that week I walked to her house and apologized for hurting her.  We talked it out.  She understood there had to be boundaries when a daughter is an adult.  She stopped showing up at dawn, despite her need to help me.

She didn’t wait for an invitation all the time.  And I didn’t expect her to.

I never understood the blessing of having an extended family within walking distance until I didn’t have that blessing anymore.  

You don’t raise your voice to a mother you may not see again for three or four weeks.  You treat her as a guest in your home, and you kiss her hello and you kiss her goodbye.

Life is a series of changing relationships.  One part of your life ends.  Another begins.  Yet you take something from each part of your life and transmit it, intact, to what comes next.  I expect my children to treasure, all their lives, the memories they will surely have of a grandmother who was always there.

To Florence, whose life was wrapped around kitchen and kinder, my little ones filled the void that opened when her children grew up.  My sons drove over to her house on their bikes and went right to the cookie jar (she baked fresh cookies every week) and sat down with her for a snack and a talk.  My daughter, when she was six, got angry with me one day and packed a suitcase, “I’m not going to live here anymore,” she told me.  “I’m going to live at MomMom’s.”  And off she went, full of sobs and bravado, to the grandmother around the corner.  I had to do some fast and straight-from-the shoulder talking to make my mother understand that she was not to open her arms to the little princess.  She was to send her home.

MomMom came to every school play.  She couldn’t have gleaned more pleasure from a Broadway production than she did from her grandson woodenly reciting his two lines as he stood on the stage with the other eight-year-old pilgrims at Thanksgiving.  She often saw the report cards before I did.  The kids stopped at her house on their way home.

 And there was never a fever she didn’t find out about, and dramatize out of proportion, so that all the aunts and uncles in the family called to find out how the patient was doing.   I was annoyed.  .But it didn’t annoy me to call on a morning I had an appointment, to say, “Mom, can you come over in about 20 minutes?  I have to leave and Danny (or one of the other two) has a fever.”  She never refused. 

Once, when I had already returned to a career and was influenced by the women’s movement, I told my mother, “I am raising my children so that they won’t need me.”  Her face paled.

“Your children will always need you,” she said. 

“Yes, but in a different way.” I answered.  I knew I had hurt her.

 The Sunday before we moved to the house so far away from my parents,, my youngest, Stuart, disappeared before breakfast.  It was a pleasant summer morning.  We lived in a neighborhood of small row houses and people who knew each other and looked after each other’s children.  He wasn’t gone long enough for me to worry.  And I was busy packing the last few boxes.

 He returned home when I was making beds, and I assumed he had helped himself to cereal and milk.  That afternoon, my mother called, and said, “Did you know I had a guest for breakfast this morning?” 

My son had gotten on his bike, taken the short drive to MomMom’s house, and waited till she asked the inevitable question.  “Are you hungry?”

“I guess so,” was the answer.  And the two of them solemnly sat down to a quiet, impromptu meal together, their own private farewell.

 I know my mother is happy that my husband and I are taking this big step to a roomy house in the suburbs on a half acre of ground.  I know that we will build new memories here, that my parents will be a part of them.  I hope they will be here for the graduations and the weddings, and that the long automobile ride to MomMom’s house will become as routine to us as the bike ride around the corner.

Our bonds have been woven of strong material.  All their lives, their grandmother will be a special person to my children, even when she is no longer with them.  She knows this.  I know this.  Still, it hurts me to kiss her hello and to kiss her goodbye.

Sissy Carpey is the author of “A Piece of Her Heart” a memoir about growing up in her immigrant family, and the lifelong separation of a mother and daughter by the Russian Revolution.

  She has been published in many newspapers and magazines   and has won many writing awards, including a Clarion Award from Women in Communications for an article about her retarded brother.

Her mother, Florence Litz, died three years after Sissy and her husband and children  moved to the suburbs.