Working for Contentment

We went to see my parents and take my Mom out for lunch for Mother's Day. 

My Mom finished her chemo about three months ago.  Every time we talk to her on the phone or see them she says, "I finished my chemo..."  Her short term and recent memory is spotty.  She asked what the Wifey was doing now, she had forgotten she's been teaching second grade for two years.  On the other hand she told us more stories about her childhood that we hadn't heard before.

She was born out of wedlock and her mother had given her to her sister to be raised by her.

She was sent to China for a year with my great grandparents and her cousin/sister when she was six. They stayed with my great-great grandparents who had decided to not immigrate to America.

So, my Mom grew up thinking her Aunt was her mother and her mother was her aunt.  Until someone at her 11th birthday party got drunk and spilled the beans. Some time in her 40's she put a lot of family innuendos, pictures and pieces together and figured out that her uncle was really her biological father. Her "father" stayed with us when I was in high school for a few months after my step-grandmother died. My mom asked her "father" if he was her "real dad" and he just said, "Just let bygones be bygones". And that was that.

After she found out her "aunt" was her mother, she went to live with her for a while. It turned out she was a fairly well known prostitute around the Navy Base in Honolulu. My Mom would cook and clean and basically play house maid for my grandmother's "guests".  Popo (grandmother in Hawaiian) eventually married a sailor, my grandpa Willy who I still remember as being very handsome and dapper. While he was gone on sea duty, his friends would "visit". My mom would walk to school and the kids would taunt her, "Hey, how was business last night?"

My Mom woke up one night with Willy fondling her. She told him if he didn't get out right then she would scream.  Popo had a wicked temper (that my Mom got a part of) and both my Mom and Willy knew she would literally kill him if she knew that he had done that. He never bothered her again, but would tell her the only reason he married my grandmother was to be close to my Mom. He eventually paid her plane ticket to move to New York to get her away from her dysfunctional family and start a new life.

When she talks about her life she doesn't have an ounce of "poor me" nor a fatalistic resignation.  It is very matter of fact that it was screwed up, but it is something that has made her who she is. She knows she overcame, and struggled to do that in her marriage and in how she raised her children.  She has fought long and hard for contentment.  The past three years in her battle with cancer and various aging issues she has changed. She has lost a raw edge, especially toward my Dad, and both of them have a lightness and kindness and gentleness toward each other that is enviable.

I was getting into bed a few nights ago and the Wifey (who stays up late and grades papers) came to say goodnight.  She said, "You know, after everything we've been through, I just have this sense of contentment with you... I am so glad to be here."  A few months ago our daughter said to me, "You two just seem comfortable together", and a friend of my wife's from work at her office party said, "It is obvious you adore your wife."  I do, and I thought of the times neither of us were very adorable and the times the peace and contentment were a fog that would dissipate in the heat of a marital struggle.  Now, the contentment is a constant, kindness rules and gentleness reigns. It is a good place to be but a hard one to imagine can exist while struggling toward it.

These are the Mother's Day faces of contentment, won after a hard upbringing, struggling through marriages to ... well, men, raising families and earning perspective. There is nothing more beautiful than a happy Mother.

We are going to be grandparents again.  Our youngest daughter is due in July. She and her fiancee are walking away from their childhood and have just stepped onto the long path to contentment with another person.

They have fun, they have fights, they love each other.  Like all of us just starting out we mistake passion for love, lack of conflict for peace, admiration for respect and comfortableness for contentment.  As parents we wonder how our work will manifest itself in them. But we can only look back and say we did what we did, whether it was best, well intended but wrong, or just plain neglect of duty.  You never stop being a parent, but it is nice to be able to talk to your children as adults (for the most part, they are always "children" even when they're 60). But in the end I suppose there is a lot to be said to want to be something for them to look forward to being like and worth struggling for.

As we left my parents house on Mother's Day I pulled out of the driveway and looked back. They were sitting on the little park bench on their front porch together and waved goodbye to us.  Yes, I thought, that is worth fighting for.