Why does Ancestry send me hints about my mother?

No, seriously. Ancestry is clueless as far as I’m concerned. It shows me as married to my dead high school sweetheart, and I have zero idea how to change any of that. My super-intelligent cousins on my birth father’s side are whizzes at genealogy websites and could straighten me out in five minutes, but how stupid would I feel, asking them? They are all STEM geniuses and I only have a shaky grasp on multiplication at this point (and I still say “times tables” and “take away” and “carry”, which causes my daughter to shake her head in consternation when I try to help my grandson with his math homework, and do they even still call it math?).

Anyway.

Clearly I helped myself liberally to the other side of the gene pool, where calculators were a fact of life, and not those expensive programmable calculators used by my more intelligent classmates in my rare college physics classes. The free calculators you used to get at the bank.

But back to my mother.

I thought of Mom this morning for the funniest reason: a taste in my mouth. My memory is often jogged by tastes and smells, and today when I gulped down the handful of prescriptions (three) and supplements (seven) that I take to keep my heart beating and the like, the flavor of one brought back a spill of sense memory. I accidentally bought the chewable B12. When I add water to swallow down this mass of pills, most of which probably just give me expensive urine, I taste that chewable vitamin taste.

This brought me right back to being five or six years old and finding a brown bottle of chewable vitamins in my mother’s bathroom. I was into everything as a child. In her notes, Mom called me snoopy and I guess that’s fair, though I prefer to think of myself as curious. Anyway, I opened this bottle and started eating these vitamins, which had a flavor close enough to candy to keep me going.

I don’t know what type of vitamins these were, or how many I ate. I also told on myself. I took the bottle to Mom. She didn’t take me to get my stomach pumped or anything of the sort. She had me drink a few glasses of Kool-Aid made her way: one packet of Kool-Aid and half the recommended sugar. We drank this to mask the sulfur flavor of artesian well water. I drank some Kool-Aid and nothing happened and life went on.

That was how it was in South Dakota. We were Midwestern children in the sixties, a hardier breed with great teeth from all the naturally occurring fluoride. We survived.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I also wouldn’t want any other mother. Ancestry might have hints, but I doubt Ancestry quite appreciates the balance of my mother as I do. She could be impossible, but she was my favorite person in the universe until I had children of my own. She was mercurial, curious, fascinating, frustrating. I am baffled by how she let me down in my adolescence, but she always loved me, a big old furnace of love.

So here’s a hint about my mother, Ancestry. Mom had her first child at age seventeen. An emotional, intelligent young woman left college, which she started early because she graduated high school at age fifteen, to become a mother. I understand why she felt ripped off. Her adolescence ended with motherhood. I don’t think she was well-equipped to help me navigate mine. She put me on the pill and put me out at age fifteen to make it on my own, a weird remedy or echo or repetition of what happened to her.

I also understand why she grieved when I had my first child at 22. She saw my young motherhood as a curtain going down on my life. As she watched me, I know she felt sorrow, anger, helplessness. But she was resigned to it. She brushed her hands together, considered me done for, and moved any ambitions she had for me over to my childless siblings. There, hope for a meaningful life remained.

A slight sea change.

Over time, Mom realized that I hadn’t exactly shriveled up and died. I’d just reproduced. She also felt a little defensive. Why was I making motherhood look so easy? Why did I do it without complaint or anguish over what I’d given up? I didn’t explain to her that much of this was a facade. Motherhood is a monumental struggle, and my marriage was a lonely, lonely place. I survived with the help of fierce friends like Jennifer and Karen and Sue and Bob and Debi. These people provided the companionship and emotional support missing from my marriage.

But here’s another hint about my mother, Ancestry. There’s a part of this of which I am not proud. I wanted Mom to think it was easy for me. As children, Mom let us know that motherhood had ruined her life. This was a steady drumbeat throughout my earliest years. “Never have children. They ruin your life.” “Parenthood is pouring from an empty pitcher. It uses you up.” “I could have had a life, if not for you kids. You took everything from me.” I heard this stuff all the time, and felt tremendous guilt until about age eleven.

That’s when it hit me that I hadn’t had any say in the matter. I began to smirk, roll my eyes, and yes, talk back. I actually said, “I didn’t ask to be born.” Which was terrifically snotty, and my brother and sister would look at me like, oh god shuttup Karen, you’re enraging her. But I figured out early that Mom’s truth should not have been spoken to us kids.

My petty revenge.

So when I was a mom, I wanted to shame my mother for how much she railed against motherhood when she was angry. I wanted to show her up. I wanted to glide and adjust and care for and laugh at the hard parts and make it look like a breeze. And I did, until my marriage fell apart. And I fell apart. And I needed help, and let me stress this, as a young woman with a high school diploma and three kids to raise, one of whom needed massive orthopedic surgery during the year a nasty divorce was unspooling, I needed so much help.

My then-husband had taken control of all our bank accounts. When I asked my parents for the funds to retain a divorce lawyer, I apologized. Mom said, “Honey, you have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to write this check.” She happily dashed it off and sent it. This is one of the many times my mother helped me. Mom showed UP. Two decades of financial help and encouragement and emails and phone calls and laughter. All my visits up to Bainbridge with my girls, and her delight at seeing them. Each daughter has specific memories of a grandmother they loved, and who loved them with no reservation.

Was she perfect? Is anyone perfect? Of course not.

Perfection is not part of the human condition.

I’ve done a great deal of thinking and writing about my teen years. When we moved to Montana, I was twelve years old. My life went off track when I was sent out into the wide world at age thirteen to navigate a dangerous environment. My sister and I ran with a rough crowd. I’ve examined all that, not to understand Mom, but to understand myself. I asked hard questions to ascertain the damage done, and heal it enough to live a better life. It would have been so easy to find myself trapped in sadness and anger. My mother was supposed to guide me, help me. She didn’t.

But I had this amazing experience while taking a memoir class with my dear friend Katrina. I wrote a piece that still hasn’t found a home called “The Corner of Skidmore and Haight.” It is an unsparing look at beginning of my second marriage and birth of my first child. Because I took this class from the esteemed and brilliant Martha Gies, it’s full of journalist-level reporting on Portland of 1981-82. Martha made me research the details of North Portland, the arrival of gangs, police misbehavior. But that’s a backdrop for the real struggle, which was two young people, aged 22 and 24, trying to figure out how to be married parents.

In this piece of writing, I played much of it for laughs, because that’s how I handle pain. But the pain is there. Whenever things at the corner of Skidmore and Haight felt hopeless, we survived. How? It wasn’t clear to me until Katrina critiqued the piece. Ever-so-gently, she said, “What impresses me is how over and over again, your mom and dad showed up and helped.”

The proof is right there on the page. My parents might have foundered in my teens, but from my twenties on, they were right there, helping. Over and over again. And they continued to do that until they both finally died.

I don’t think I thanked them nearly enough.

I was in my early sixties when I took this class. I’d been doing quite a bit of examination of my history, trying to understand exactly who I am before I leave this world. Katrina’s words showed me that I had a choice to make. I could focus my attention on the chaotic decade of my young life when Mom had no idea what to do with me, and whatever I needed was lost in the turmoil of her own unhappy life. Or I could shift my focus and appreciate what she did for me after I left adolescence.

You know, it’s like I finally grew the hell up.

So here’s another hint about my mother, Ancestry. There’s no good, no bad, no right, no wrong. There’s just Mom. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I miss you every single day. And thank you for all the days and ways you were there. There are no words for how much I love you.