Daughterly Musings

I had another conversation with my mother lately about why I don’t have a cell phone, in which I pointed out that if she has a catastrophe, there’s not much I can do about it from 2500 miles away. It emerged that she doesn’t expect to have a catastrophe; she expects me to have one, here in San Francisco, and she’s probably right, but she said that at least we could say goodbye.

“Well,” I said, “we can do that right now: Goodbye! I love you! Thank you for everything!”

“Goodbye.”

“What about the ‘I love you’ and ‘Thank you for everything’?”

“Thank you for what?”

“Everything!”

There was a pause while she considered, and then she said, “I’d say it’s a wash.”

A wash! This was shocking news—which in my heart of hearts, I didn’t actually believe—but then I thought about the severe impact having a child would have on my life.

What if, instead of sitting my chair reading or eating cheese puffs or going to get a massage or having brunch with Ann and Mac in Berkeley, I had to take care of a passel of small children, and not just that day, but every day for years and years, and then when they grew up, they blamed me for all of their problems and wrote over and over in their blog, “Have I ever told you how nice my father is?”

The fact is, I never wanted to have a child. I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but I’ve reached that age where I’m going to tell my couple of stories over and over, so:

At the age of four or five, as I made my daily rounds on our little street, one block long, it dawned on me that children and mothers came clumped together: one observed a mother, and a couple of kids attached to that mother. I rushed home to ask my mother how this was. Why do all the women around here have children?

Wonderfully, my mother somehow knew I was really asking, “Do they have to? Is it required?”, and told me that once you got to be a grown-up, if you wanted to have a child, you had one, and if you didn’t, you didn’t, and I was very relieved. I don’t have to!

By the way, have I ever told you how nice my father is? Among other things, he almost never says anything that could possibly cause hurt feelings. I’m sure he has just as many opinions about the people around him as anyone else does, but if they would wound the listener, he keeps them to himself.

Though now that I think about it, I recall that when I was about 14, he crankily accused me of putting this or that piece of Dansk Variation V flatware into the wrong compartment of the flatware drawer on purpose, and would not believe me when I said, truthfully, that I was not doing that. So he’s not perfect, but pretty dern close.

Of course, that’s my perspective as a daughter, not as a spouse. And of course he was away at work all of those years, which, in part, meant that his full personality wasn’t on display every day, let alone under the stress of dealing with X number of children.

In those days, it was just about always the mom who had to leap into the fray and have her every failure to achieve perfection carefully catalogued and brooded over and mentioned every now and then for the rest of her life.

But perfection or the lack thereof aside—and despite the absolute-sounding name, it’s subjective and no one ever achieves it—people come with a variety of personality traits and talents.

Thus I have one parent who never says anything to hurt anyone’s feelings and one who makes me fall on the floor laughing. One who cooks great meals and washes almost all the dishes, too, and one who buys Metallica and Alice in Chains CDs and actually listens to them, just because one of her kids likes that stuff. One who climbs a ladder and cleans the roof gutters and one who can take the dryer apart and make it work again. One who can watch a movie in Spanish and understand the whole thing and one who can play the piano, put up wallpaper, and weave baskets. One who took us to play tennis and one who made sure we had music lessons. One who, without a word of complaint, missed out on a lot of stuff in order to make sure we were cared for materially and one who is wonderfully enthusiastic about, seemingly, every last thing on earth. One mechanical engineer and one marine engineer. One who was named for a jazz pianist and one who used to remind us that spiders are our friends and sisters.

One person couldn’t do all of that stuff, probably.

In sum, my parents are two different people, easy to tell apart, and I love both of them very much.