Heart-wrenching truth from a nonagenarian

(My mama... young and beautiful, circa 1938)

Full disclosure: For those of you who are not profound introverts, you may not realize that those of us who are need a minute after we leave a store such as Target or Trader Joe's to sit in the car and take a second for a long sigh of relief. (Yes, we are tense and somewhat anxious the entire time we're shopping—too many people, too much sensory overload. Oh, and don't even try to get me to set foot in a Costco.) So when I left TJ's on Thursday, I got in the truck, took a deep breath, started the engine, poked the button that gives me a local NPR station, put the truck in reverse—but didn't back out of the parking space. I took a moment to look around me, to make sure I wasn't about to mow anyone down in my distracted hurry to return to the safety of my home-sweet-home—and that's when I saw the elderly woman sitting in the passenger seat of the SUV parked next to me.

Her body language reminded me so much of my mother when she was in distress—head bowed over her chest, the fingers of one hand splayed across her forehead, as if the pain were mental as well as physical. It wasn't scorchingly hot on Thursday mid-morning, but temps were well into the 80's and rising quickly. With both windows down in the truck, I felt the heat, and I recalled the scene two years ago as I walked out of a pharmacy to find my truck surrounded by police cars and an ambulance. In the car parked next to mine, a man in his twenties had left his elderly grandmother sitting in the heat while he went off to shop. She'd fainted, and he'd called 9-1-1 when he couldn't rouse her. The gathering crowd was hostile when they realized, as the cops questioned him, what he'd done. And rightly so. This woman in the parking lot of Trader Joe's looked to be in distress. I couldn't leave.

Nor could I get out of the truck right away to check on her. Again, full disclosure: For an introvert, interaction with strangers is tremendously challenging (unless the person is in extreme and immediate danger, so yes, no worries, I would jump in the lake or whatever to rescue your loved one even if we'd never met and I would feel severely awkward for a long time afterward). From what I've observed, extroverts have no trouble whatsoever jumping into a conversation with someone they've never met before and asking direct and personal questions. Introverts not only lack this sort of valor, we generally spend a long time before we initiate conversation rehearsing what we're going to say. ("Excuse me... Are you okay?" Is that direct enough? "Excuse me... I don't mean to bother you. But it's a bit warm to be sitting in the car. Are you alright? Is someone coming back for you soon?" Okay, that's too verbose—she could faint by the time I got to the end of my speech.)

See what I mean?

I put the truck in Park, turned off the engine, and sat for a few minutes, willing someone to emerge from Von's or TJ's or wherever, offer profuse apologies to the woman in the car, then leave. Only then would I be able to get the hell home and on with my life. Because I couldn't leave her there, sitting in the heat. But no such relief occurred. We sat, the woman in her car, who occasionally looked up hopefully at the sound of an approaching shopping cart, only to be disappointed, and me in my truck, conflicted about whether I should intervene and angry at myself for being conflicted.

When I couldn't take it anymore, I opened my door and got out.

"Excuse me... " (I had decided to go with the simplest approach) "are you okay?"

The woman's face, dappled with age spots, opened in an enormous smile. "Oh, I'm fine!" she answered, chuckling, adding as a qualifier, "Well, I'm ninety-six." She paused. "Going on a hundred!" She laughed gleefully. Brown hair framed her face. Her short bangs were carefully curled under. I couldn't help thinking of how fastidious my mother had been about her appearance until the day she died.

"Are you sure it's not too hot in the car?" I bravely and directly asked, proud of myself all over the place for breaching the scary wall to make the inquiry. Now that I saw her smile, she was no longer a stranger.

"Oh, no, I'm fine," she said again. "I have a hurt hand." I saw now that she had her right hand resting on a pillow. "My daughter just took me to the dentist." She made the face a child would make about the same experience. "She just ran in to get some things. She'll be right out. She takes good care of me."

Some positive affirmation escaped my lips here. I don't remember what it was. The woman went on talking. Again, I was reminded of my own mom.

"Don't get old." She laughed again. "You know, when your hands don't work, you can't pull your pants up. You can't fasten your brassiere." She held up swollen, arthritic hands. I started to mumble something regarding how much I worry about my own hands, which have already begun to ache and swell, but she continued.

"Stay young and beautiful."

"Well, you look lovely," I told her, omitting the word "still" that makes me cringe every time a younger person uses it in reference to an older person.

"Oh," she said, "well, I still color my hair!" She laughed and nodded toward my silver threads of wisdom. I laughed too, then, and suggested perhaps I might have better luck finding a man if I started coloring mine again.

We talked like old friends after that, about the early onset of gray hair, about finding a good man. We discovered we both have four children, two boys and two girls. She said that all of her children are "wonderful," and I said the same about mine. Her husband died twelve years ago. "I don't know what I'd do without my children," she sighed. "I don't know what I'd do without mine," I said.

We continued to chat about our kids (a brag fest, for sure), and eventually she looked at me and said again, "Well, stay young and beautiful... if you want to be loved." That is what My Daughter the Poet would call a "gut punch." Whew. It nearly winded me with its truth.

I do want to be loved. And so do you.

But I'm just going to conclude this narrative without further comment on that.

I never asked her name. I should have asked her name. An extrovert—bold and young and beautiful—would have asked her name. I just wanted to make sure she wasn't overheating in the car. But I felt like I made a friend, a very wise and sweet friend.

I wished her well and thanked her (yes, I thanked her) for chatting with me. She waved and smiled as I started the truck. Then she turned her head to look hopefully again for the daughter who still hadn't returned.

Some thoughts on Mother's Day 2015

For the uninitiated: Mother's Day can never be the same again once you lose your mom.

For a multitude of reasons, mostly because we were hard-wired differently as individuals, my mother and I never had a close relationship. We just couldn't. But in her later years, we learned to be friends. I called her often just to tell her little things—stories about my cat or the wildlife outside or comments on my blog or what my kids were up to. While she was alive, our Mother's Day celebrations always centered around her. After she passed away, my children's focus became me, which is something I'm never comfortable with. I just don't think I did a good enough job to warrant all the praise and attention.

Still... I know I did do a couple of things right. My son was fifteen when he told me he was gay. He knew he could and that this would not be an issue for me because I never hesitated to let my kids know I have gay friends, and we talked openly about all things, including both gender and sexual orientation. We are also an integrated family, with several races combined, so that my kids grew up seeing people as people instead of people as colors. I have watched my adult kids now pass on this openness and tolerance to their own children, and it has made my heart nearly burst at times to see how comfortable my grandchildren are with people in all their shades and nuances. My oldest grandson will be twenty-one in October. (Yes, young Ben, whom I have blogged about in the past, is now a college student.) I swear this boy loves everyone in the world, regardless of shape, size, color, orientation or capacity to love back.

To celebrate Mother's Day, my son bought tickets to the Drag Queen World Series yesterday, hosted by Life Group LA, a charity which works hard to promote HIV/AIDS awareness, education, acceptance and support "for those infected and affected by HIV." The event itself was hilariously entertaining—drag queens playing softball with a tennis ball but taking the game very, very seriously (and no, no one was in heels; that's how serious this was), two drag queen announcers who composed a lovely combination of sweet but naughty impromptu commentary. (Admittedly, there was a lot of material here—gay guys, bats, balls, swinging, getting on base, etc., etc., etc.) The best part for me was just being there with my son, my daughter, her husband and the two teen granddaughters, laughing with them, realizing how much the world has changed in my lifetime... though apparently not enough. We saw one of my son's friends there. We'll call him Jason. Although drag isn't really his thing, as he explained, he had come because he believed in the work the group was doing, and he wanted to support that. He told us that last year he had worked the event as a volunteer, but this year he just wanted to watch so he could enjoy the fun. Later my son called to say that Jason had left a long post on Facebook about the event, mentioning that he had invited his mother... but his mom wouldn't come. It wasn't "her thing." "But I'm her son, and shouldn't I be her thing?" he went on to say. Yes, sweetheart, yes, you should be your mom's everything.

I made innumerable mistakes in raising my kids. But I tried to put them first in every decision I made about our future because I wanted them to have the chance to have something more than I had when I was a kid. And I wanted them to always feel loved, no matter what. Mamas, we can't give them everything. But one thing we can do is make damn sure they know we love them, just as they are. For all the "Jasons" out there whose mamas aren't equipped to offer you the love, support and acceptance you need, I wish I could just scoop you up and hug you. Be patient with your mom. She's trying to do her best with the resources she has. This is what I had to learn about my own mom. This is how we found our common ground in the last years of her life. I'm so glad we did. I'm really just so glad we did.