My Mothers Eyes

My mothers glasses. I kept them in a drawer. They had been there for almost 10 years. Truth is I kept them there because I didn’t know what else to do with them when she died. She’d been cremated after a long and painful fight with lung cancer. The disease was cruel, slowly chipping away at the person she was before. Her body diminished, refused to gain weight, and oxygen tubing ran around her once rosy cheeks. She had no energy at the end, no energy to do much else but watch the tv and wait for visitors. I would visit, at 40 years old, and without an ounce of shame, I’d climb up onto the bed next to her. We’d sit, with our knees bent, and we’d secretly douse the O2 machine so we could smoke cigarettes without my sisters disapproving sighs and eye rolls. Sometimes we’d drink tepid coffee from small mugs. This was our time. Just me, just Ma. We’d talk about everything, my kids, our family, my father, the Royals, even Ozzy Osbourne and the crew from Jersey Shore. She did love reality tv. And cartoons. And music. And books. But most of all she loved her kids. She’d had four all together. Two boys, two girls, not in that order. Each of us had a different relationship with Ma. And what are relationships if not complicated and messy? I marveled at her unconditional love for each of us. At different times, and different places, I was sure there were moments we kids didn’t deserve her. We took her for granted. We were selfish. I knew this in the way any adult child reflects on their younger years. 

The night before the tenth anniversary of my mothers passing, I couldn’t sleep. I’d been tossing and turning and smoking the same fucking cigarettes that killed my mother. I was rifling through my drawers for a light, when my fingers walked over that old pair of bifocals. I was inexplicably compelled to put them on my own face. 

I drew in a deep breath and held it as memories that were not my own began to play in my mind. I was an infant, a wartime bastard, left with a foster family, searching for familiar faces. A toddler, newly retrieved by my mother and step father from a farm in Canada. Like flashes of lightning, all of my mothers memories came to me, unsolicited, yet I could not force myself to remove her blush colored glasses. I saw her happiness, fleetingly, but mostly I saw her struggles. Like the photos I kept in an old shoe box, moments captured in my mothers eyes were now in the glasses I wore on my face except these memories weren’t grainy photos, they were bright colored and crystal clear. 

I watched, through mothers eyes, the trials she’d endured growing up in the slums of Boston. The oldest of five kids, an abusive and cold woman raising them. Her father, drunk and violent. She was shy, but the other kids liked her regardless. She made friends easily. She was born with incredible wit and blessed with a sense of humor others envied. Some of the time I could hear her laughing with her brother and her sisters, but those were brief and far between. I saw her cower at the sound of her mothers voice, slapped often, and restricted to her room for what were really minor infractions. I saw my mother grow into a young woman, with steel in her blood, surviving her fathers’ ignorance and her mothers spiteful temper. Those memories from that shit apartment in Somerville ended, the night my mother was once again beaten by her larger than life mother, in a fit of misplaced rage. My 19 year old mother was cast aside by the only family she knew. I saw her clearly, 5 foot 2 and 100 pounds, bleeding, and cold, and wondering what she had done to deserve the thrashing she’d just received. In the corners of my mothers mind I heard her mother scream for her to never come back. She forbade my mothers sisters and brother from any communication with my mom. I could feel the fear she felt that night, the confusion, I could feel the painful welts that were rising on her back as she walked in the dark to a friend's house. 

The images in her glasses whirled for a moment, and I couldn’t keep track of what her minds eye was telling me, no, not telling, showing. 

A small apartment in Lawrence Massachusetts. A colichy baby with bronze skin and thick dark hair, crying from his crib. My mother, heavily pregnant with number two, was also crying. Their father, who she thought loved her, was nowhere to be found. She didn’t know, though he liked to smack her around too, that when he left that last time, it would be the last time. Some of this I knew, as my mother was a natural storyteller, but seeing was believing and my heart broke for her.  

Another baby, this time a girl. She was different from her older brother, she was quiet and content. I saw my mother surrounded by other young mothers, sitting on their stoops watching as their babies play in the dried grass. This time there was laughing, and gossip, and moms hair was pulled back into a bouncy ponytail. Her mother, my grandmother, would not acknowledge my mother or my mothers children for many many years, and by then, it was too late. I liked this memory. Her smile as she watched her two oldest toddle around with the other neighbor kids. In this memory she felt love and pride. I felt it too. 

Like something out of a Dickens novel, all her ghosts came to me. A man, young, slim, tall and handsome. Playing poker at a friend's house, she gave him a twice over, and I could feel her excitement as she flirted with my father. He was younger but she didn’t care. He had an easy laugh and I knew that she knew he was special. Time jumped again.

Four kids. Us four. I had to pause and close my eyes when I saw through my mothers eyes a tiny version of myself. She held me close on a cold January morning, just her and I sitting in bed. She held me gingerly, and grown up me smiled when she leaned in to smell my hair and nuzzle my neck. I registered the vow she made to herself to love her children unconditionally, that we may never feel the abandon and hate that our ‘grandmother’ piled vindictively on her. Wearing her eyes, I could see, hear, and feel everything Ma was feeling during any given moment. 

I knew she never could quite understand her mothers indifference to her, at least not till an elderly aunt told my mother that she was a WW2 bastard. Her real father left her and her mother behind, serving his own homeland, England. She never knew him, save for his name and a photograph, but she often wondered if this was the reason her mother was so hateful to her. I knew she’d never get the answer to that question. I couldn’t ignore the fact that as my mother lay dying, she  asked for her mother. She wanted the knowledge that her mother would be on the other side waiting for her, and without these glasses I would never know why. Now I could feel the empty spot in my mothers heart, the spot she had saved all those years for her mothers love. I acknowledged that I would never truly know how that felt, as my mother was nurturing, forgiving and loving. I never once doubted my mothers love for me. I don’t think the other three ever had to wonder that either. 

Four kids, living in the projects, dad suspiciously missing again. He did that a lot. My mothers eyes showed me the passion and sometimes misguided love for my father. I felt her ache for missing him, I felt her fear of being alone with four of us to feed and house. I brimmed with pride when I felt her steel herself, stretch a buck, and put a hot meal on the table for kids who didn’t know the turmoil she was enduring. He’d come back. He always did. Wearing her eyes, I could see that my father could do no wrong, and no matter what line he crossed, and he crossed plenty, she would forgive him and take him back. I had a front row seat to their love affair. Things that I couldn’t possibly understand as a child, now, wearing the glasses, I saw with absolute clarity. My oldest brother, a prick who was rotten to the core in my eyes. But for Ma, he was an underdog, and with my new perspective, I felt what she felt about her son. Guilt. Pity. Love. She saw him as someone who needed protection, mostly from himself, as he grew into an alcoholic and a drug addict. My mother was never going to give up on her first born and now I knew why, remembering her blood soaked back and the pain she felt when her own mother turned her away on a dark wet night. I remembered her vow. I felt her resolve. 

When pictures of my sister, scared and pregnant came, I felt that protection again. My mother seeing her daughter floundering in the real world, she once again stepped in. She was in the room when my nephew was born, holding my sister's hand. My nephew, who also had no father to call “dad”. My mother’s eyes beamed with pride, and I felt her fall hopelessly in love with her first grandson. She never stopped for a minute, being proud of that boy. I didn’t have to guess at this, because I could see it, with her eyes. 

I laughed her laugh at Mikes jokes, I felt her let go of her anger, as my brother charmed her with the same wit she passed along to her youngest son. She worried about Mike, she worried that he’d inherited his fathers temper, and she was right. I saw her keep him at arms length, I never knew why before. Now I did. She was scared, scared for him and unsure how to deal with his own unique set of problems. He was hot blooded and prone to explosive rants. As a mother she blamed herself, I could sense through her glasses the guilt, her blaming herself for his shortcomings. I watched her turn away as he poisoned his body with chemicals, not having the stomach to see him in such a state.

My wedding, she cried, I cried. My boys were born, both ill. My mother was determined to prove to me that no matter what ailed my kids, it wouldn’t matter to her, so it shouldn’t matter to me. And she was right. I felt her smile her I told you so smile.   

Looking through her eyes, for hours, I watched with a brand new understanding of my mothers life. She was abused and humiliated throughout her 69 years. By men, by her kids, by friends. She’d get knocked down, battered physically and mentally. And when I couldn’t bare to look any longer, but right before I took the glasses off my face, I sobbed as I saw through her eyes, her pulling herself up again, and again and again. 

The strongest, most genuine, loving, forgiving person I have ever met.