May 10, 2006

• Internet Island Topic Entry: 11.03: Mother’s Day

  

  This is an entry for Internet Island Topic Post #11.03

  I can’t think of my dear mother without also thinking of the regret I still have concerning the last few years of her life. I just turned 53, two years younger than the age at which she finally found her peace, in the year 1977. My regret is a deep one, and I have worked out this regret in my poetical journey a few times in the past few years, after years of holding it inside me to the almost bursting point. Although I don’t remember schoolmates actually calling me the term, I would say that growing up I was what is known as a “Mama’s Boy”. I don’t use this term in a denigrating manner. There were three of us children in the family, and I was the eldest. My father actually favored my sister, who was in the middle, and my brother was somewhat of the “black sheep” of the family. But I was my mother’s favorite, and I’ve written many times about her strict upbringing, so strict that my sister still believes we were “abused” as children. I don’t see it that way. I joke about the fact that Mother would call me “her little genius” one moment and chide me for “delusions of grandeur” the next. She lived her failed artistic ambitions through me, and I aimed to please her throughout my young life.

  She was quite a nervous sort, and she didn’t adjust well to her children’s growth and ambitions of their own. After I graduated (with honors) from high school, I lived at home and paid rent while attending college almost 50 miles away, driving the long trip early in the morning each day. Both my parents had a lot of health problems, and Mom suffered a stroke in 1972. She had a relapse and had a bilateral stroke, which completely paralyzed her, in 1973. In 1974 my father died (at the age of 54) following his 13th heart attack. I was 21 and became the head of the household and my mother’s legal guardian. Breaking the news of my father’s death to her was a great burden. Now for my regret. Soon after my father’s death, I stopped visiting Mother in the nursing home, because to me, she seemed not to be my mother at all, but merely a “vegetable”. When she passed away (I’ve always said she died of a broken heart) my brother took care of the arrangements. I didn’t even attend the funeral.

  My behavior at that time started bothering me greatly about 10 years after the fact. I kept my rage at my actions pent up inside me for decades. As a result of webauthoring and blogging in cyberspace, I began writing more poetry in the late 90s and into the Aughts. Last year I wrote an epic poem detailing my Mother’s last years. I have posted the following poem here on the blog before. I received comments telling me not to take it so hard. I wish to implore readers that I don’t take it too hard that much anymore. But this is a regret I still harbor. During her final years, I didn’t show my own Mother, my own womb, my own home, the love that a son should show, and yes, this will bother me for the rest of my days.

  The poem is quite long. I apologize for this as I know people don’t really have time to read such length in a blog entry. Writing this poem in March of last year really opened the floodgates of care in me, and helped to square myself somewhat with my own inadequacies. I do believe that Mother, “Mommy” as I called her well into my young manhood, has forgiven me. Life is full of choices, and sometimes we make the wrong ones, and it colors our lives till we ourselves find ourselves six feet underground.

  MFN

  
  “No Stroke of Luck”
  Poetry by Michael F. Nyiri
  March 9, 2005 4:02 p.m. pst

  
  I
  She wanted to “escape the Mexicans”
  No matter that Los Angeles was part of Mexico once
  No matter that most of the street signs were in Spanish
  As was the name of the town
  No matter that my siblings and I had made many friends
  (and a lot of Mexican descent) and really didn’t want to leave home
  No matter
  Dad deferred to Mom’s rants and uneasy nervousness
  Dad dialed the number of the real estate agent
  Dad secured a place in Glendora, far from “the Mexicans”
  And though the family felt ripped from existence in El Monte
  Torn from friendships and high school shenanigans
  I didn’t mind too much, as I graduated that year,
  And college life loomed fifty miles away the next semester.
  Sis and bro took it all badly, and emotions erupted
  Escalating erratic behaviors
  Eviscerating complacent dreamscapes
  And planting the family in unforseen circumstance

  The nightly dinners grew upsetting,
  But Dad deferred to Mom’s state of paranoia after all
  Sis and bro became rebels
  And I didn’t pay too much attention to it all
  When confronted with the brick walls of academe
  Which collected my attention spanning the new decade

  Mom was growing more agitated
  I’m sure Dad and my siblings noticed more than I
  And I, her “little genius” and most beloved
  grew farther from her, and this probably
  added to her insumountable troubling episodes
  But I hardly noticed
  Preferring to spend time at the library
  between school classes and worktime hours

  I would get home late at night,
  open my own door with my own key,
  and slip inside my own “apartment” within our home
  I would get up early and bathe,
  then climb in the car for the fifty mile drive to school
  before eight in the morning when class started.
  I didn’t see a lot of the buildup
  I didn’t pay attention to the wrenching dissimilarity
  of Mother’s actions.
  The slow nervous laughter of unforseen calamity
  didn’t pierce through my hedonistic armor
  The fast sure slipping into manic obsession
  didn’t register with me, but it did with my family

  Quarrels seemed to grow in number and intensity
  I would quarrel with my siblings,
  gaining chokeholds on bro in the kitchen
  I would quarrel with my Mother,
  Even as her nervous calamity grew larger
  as a black cloud of coincidental animosity
  And the night before she was struck down
  Was one of the nastiest quarrels in our household

  
  II
  That Christmas was the last of feigned happy times
  opening presents which presented a modicum of laughter
  and less tears than usual
  But come the spring, the evil sprung up again,
  Sis and bro were finally getting settled
  And high school daze descended upon them in Glendora.
  They were children, really, and the pleasant auras of
  new friendships and undiscovered lands
  occupied their misery and supplanted it entirely
  Like any older brother, I would greet their new friends,
  And make friends of my own, including sis’s best friend
  who became one of my girlfriends.

  The night of long knives in our household
  followed a trip to the medical center the day before
  I had driven Mom in for a checkup
  because she “didn’t feel right”
  After all, she seldom “felt right” in those last days
  leading to the stroke
  The doctor (after an interminable wait) gave her a
  clean bill of health
  “nervous problems”
  take two of these and call me in the morning

  I can’t remember the subject of the quarrel
  Only that there was one, pitting Mom against me
  And at 19 I felt I should finally “get my say”
  After all I didn’t need to be in the (new) family home
  I could be in a dorm at SC with my friends.
  I certainly didnt’ need the fifty mile drive.
  I felt we shouldn’t have moved anyway
  Just like everybody else (except Mom)
  I went to bed crying, and so did Mom,
  but we didn’t “make up”

  the stroke hit her the next morning,
  and Dad didn’t go into work, but took her to the hospital,
  which in essence she never left for another four years.

  
  III
  I found out when I got home from school in the evening
  We visited Mom in her room at Kaiser Permanente
  Slick floors and the ever present alcohol smell
  White robes and IV tubes
  the first stroke was not bilateral
  Only one side of her body was rigid
  Memory has clouded and I don’t know if she could speak
  that first night
  but in time she grew stronger, and she did come home
  for about a week sometime later

  until the bilateral stroke finished her sentence

  
  IV
  Time has not been kind to a memory I forgot years ago
  The particulars of bad news tend to filter fast
  as sands hurtling through an hourglass with a
  foot wide opening
  Days fade to weeks fade to months
  This was no stroke of luck,
  And it ended quick her pluck,
  Mom’s body took it’s toll, and the fee was very great

  With a bilateral, all muscles freeze
  There is no speech, nor would it seem recognition
  Nor did she appear as Mom to me anymore
  The family put up great facades for the nightly trips
  which seem to have lasted for years, but there were only two
  From nightly, to weekly, for sis, bro, and me
  But Dad kept the vigil, relating to unheard ears
  the events of the day.
  Nothing was normal, my grades began to suffer
  Dad kept having more of his heart attacks
  as the pressure burdened him so
  Mom was relegated from hospital to nursing home
  Money fled the bank accounts, both hers and Dad’s

  The smell always overwhelmed me during the visits
  And I can’t say I looked forward to them at all
  They were a hindrance in an otherwise full life at school
  And with friends, discovering booze, dope, rock and roll and
  sometime romance, the “other life” rarely made an appearance

  Two years of visits, and I needed a vacation
  A vacation from everything.
  Young people are filled with angst and ennui as a rule anyway
  And my situation seemed to fill me with insufferable agony
  So I left for a vacation in the Summer of 74
  And Dad, who never stopped his nightly trips
  Had his 13th and last heart attack when I was
  somewhere north of Frisco camping out.

  
  V
  Mom of course couldn’t attend the funeral,
  as she was hooked up to a dialysis machine
  The day was overcast even though it was the middle of summer
  when I, my sis, and my bro trekked to the nursing home
  to tell Mother the grief stricken news
  She couldn’t cry, but she did
  And something within me snapped shut,
  I made a terrible decision that day,
  One which I regret to this day,
  In fact, the only regret I harbor after living
  over a half century is this one.
  I never visited Mom again after that
  She lost not only her husband but her oldest son
  I felt as if she had been gone for two years,
  And for me, cutting the umbilical held finality
  Her eyes looked like dark marbles
  Her sweet dispostion had quietly melted
  somewhere between El Monte and Glendora
  She was a cipher, a cardboard facsimile
  She was not my Mother
  And I left that afternoon never to return

  
  VI
  I have called myself a poet,
  But poetry seldom tells the truth when the truth
  Cuts as deeply as this does now pondering the outcome
  I am sure as salvation that I have been forgiven
  By sweet Mother’s soul
  I am positive that I have nothing to worry about in perpetuity
  That I have not become an evil being because of my youthful
  naivete.
  Two more years and she finally passed away, softly, and with no troubles
  Her death certificate reads heart failure
  Her broken heart stopped beating at last.
  I didnt’ attend her funeral
  To me she was already dead

  
  VII
  Poetry spoke to me in the years following at times
  Yeilding petty purpose when confronted with the ills
  of my behaviors
  My suicidal urges at once escalated, and thanks to
  good friends, and counseling, and prayers to Jesus
  in time I was able to come to grips with the situation.

  In time my sis, my bro and I got back together,
  but only for a little while, before the family completely
  rent itself out of existence.
  I gave my sister away at her wedding.
  I made love to my brother’s female friend
  We split the furniture in the house three ways
  (I had to sell the house following my Father’s death when
  I was made executor of Mother’s estate at age 20
  so Mom could gain Medicare benefits to pay
  for her stay in the nursing home,
  which cost almost ten grand a month if memory serves.)

  Of course in time everything heals, including bad memories
  And I forgot Mother’s face and Father’s care.
  I slipped deeper into an alcohol and drug fueled abandonment
  which didn’t straighten out until well into the next decade.

  The decades passed,
  And here I am, still here, still writing, still upset
  But no matter what ever happens
  I cannot turn back the hands of time,
  And I cannot apologize for my inept decisions
  All I can say is I’m sorry, Mother, for escaping you
  As you tried to escape those “Mexicans” in El Monte
  You were my rock for many years, and when you
  started to crumble, I just couldn’t take it,
  And I fled
  I’ve been fleeing ever since
  I know I can never go back home
  because it doesn’t exist
  And will never exist anymore

  sorrow seldom soothes the savage hurt
  I cry with dry eyes
  and lift my voice to you in Heaven
  Where absolution sighs
  And let this be an altar to my ineptitude
  thirty years later.

  • 9:40 am
  • 11 Comments