Missing her

A strange thing happened today: I cried for no reason.

At least it seemed like no reason.

I don’t even remember what I was doing, except that I was out of breath from hardly any exertion at all, thanks to both the altitude here in Flagstaff and my lack of fitness, and it triggered a memory of my mother.

She was always winded because she was morbidly obese — think 5’4″ and 350 pounds.

Her audible breaths were the background of my teenage years, something you don’t even notice because it’s always there.

“Are you embarrassed to be seen with me?” she asked out of the blue one day when we took the afternoon off from her diner to go downtown and catch a movie.

Mom was wearing, as always, her white uniform and shoes, so I thought at first that was what she meant. And then I realized she was talking about her weight, the same way she did when she would ask, “Am I as fat as she is?” looking at some overweight woman on the street or in a store.

My answer was always the same.

“No! Of course not!”

I wasn’t lying. I was fourteen but in spite of my hyper-self-consciousness, it never occurred to me to be embarrassed about my mother’s weight, or even her uniform. I was too concerned with how I appeared to people.

I didn’t think much, either, about the apparently permanent sore on her shin, a hole perhaps half an inch in diameter and a quarter-inch deep, surrounded by a dark purple, almost black bruise that covered her lower front leg nearly from ankle to knee.

Or that in the evenings as we watched our black-and-white TV in the dark together, eating fast-food burgers and fries, she scratched the tops of her feet until they bled.

“Stop that,” I would say from time to time, and she would try, but the itching was unbearable. I can still hear the dull scratching sound, see the white-purple rash.

We were Christian Scientists. Doctors were quacks. I don’t know if Mom ever prayed to make the itching go away or the sore to heal, but they didn’t. I had no idea they were signs of diabetes, even though that’s what had killed my father when I was six.

I didn’t think to worry about her health then. It was just the way things were.

We went to church every Sunday, rushing to get ready in time, then to pick up Gramma and drive up to Eighth Church of Christ Scientist in North Minneapolis. The adults sat in pews upstairs, listening to two Readers alternately quote selections from the Bible and our textbook, Science & Health with Key to the Scriptures.

Then they all sang a hymn — from downstairs in the basement, I could hear my mother’s clear voice above the others — and then they listened some more.

I felt lucky not to have to try to stay awake through that; Sunday School in Christian Science continued until age twenty. Seated at scattered round tables, we took turns reading aloud from both books and discussing their meaning. I loved reading aloud even then (and often think my later radio career began at that table.)

Some of the other kids had trouble pronouncing the strange words in Science & Health — ‘Omniscience‘ was my favorite. I was unattractively smug as I showed off my superior reading ability.

At the end, we all stood and faced the front of the room to sing a hymn with the adults upstairs. As we sang, I stared at the words calligraphed in gold paint on the wall: “Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Set You Free” and the simple yet inscrutable, “God is Love.”

Years later, in a psychedelic haze, I thought of those three words again and wondered if they were meant literally. Maybe that’s all God is, or needs to be — Love. I liked that thought.

One thing was true: Mom was Love. If there was an unkind bone in her body or thought in her mind, she never expressed it in front of me.

And everyone loved Mom. At her diner, the customers came from nearby factories and far away cities in their big trucks. They had breakfast and lunch with her every day. I thought of them all as my uncles and they treated me like a niece.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that she started dating one of them. But it was, and not just to me. Nobody ever thought that a man would find a woman as fat as my mother attractive enough to date. Much less to marry.

But they did marry, three months later. And my mother was over-the-moon-happy that she had at last found love again.

I was thinking about all that today as I remembered Mom’s wheezes. I wondered if my stepfather ever noticed.

I imagined the shame she must have felt, the pain her weight must have caused her as a wife who loved her husband so deeply and wanted him to find her desirable.

And I cried for her.