My mother will be 88 years old on Sunday. I will be 60 next May. My father died 30 years ago. I am an only child. I live near my mother, a two-minute drive. She uses a walker and cannot drive or leave the house alone. She is forgetful. She lives alone.
I spend two hours a day with her, more on my days off. She still fixes her own meals, and she remembers to take her medication.
I put out her pills, do her grocery shopping, pick up her prescriptions, clean her house, do her laundry, take her to the doctor, balance her checkbook, pay her bills and change her bed. I have taught myself to wash and set her hair.
I deserve no credit. None at all. I’m her son.
The other day, I went so see her after work, and we were talking about what couples call each other. Honey. Sweetie. Baby. I told her what “bae” means.
My parents married in 1956. They called each other “dear.”
“When we got married, everyone we knew, all the couples, called each other ‘honey,’” my mother told me. “That’s what everybody did.
“So, your father and I talked about it and we decided to call each other, ‘dear,’ because it was different. We didn’t want to be like everyone else.”
How hopeful and young do you have to be to have that discussion seriously? How much do you have to believe in the importance of your love that what you call each other has to be discussed, defined, decided on once and for all time?
How involved young people are about every detail of their love. They leave nothing unexamined because everything is crucial, everything is forever.
It’s annoying. It’s self-absorbed. It’s so beautiful it makes your mouth go dry and your eyes go wet.
A man never knows his mother the way he knows his father. By the time you are 25, you can see your father for what he is, strengths and flaws, and you know if you wan to be like him or you want to be as unlike him as you can.
You never know your mother. She is asexual comfort, the one person who cannot betray you. She uses a walker and forgets things and your heart silently begs her to comfort you, to be the strong one even as she weakens and you have to comfort her.
I know my mother tonight. She was young and it was so important to her what she and her husband would call each other. They wanted it to be different from what other couples called each other, so they had a serious, probably long, discussion and settled on “dear.”
I know that young girl. I washed her kitchen floor and took out her trash tonight. I put out her pills. I promised her I’d bring her some toothpaste tomorrow because she is almost out. I call her “Ma.” She and my father called each other “dear.”