RANDOM RAMBLINGS

Do You Think I'm Stupid?

My mother spat the question at me, and glared as if I, in fact, had no brains. Her words hit my arrogance like gunshot, shattering it like tempered glass. We stood in the cold basement of the family home, where she had been mother to eight children, now all grown and gone. I looked at her, struck by the sudden transition from her normal, acquiescent nature to challenging mother-superior. The cerebral hemorrhage she had suffered a few years prior had left her with Alzheimer's-like symptoms, and we had all become used to the repetition of questions, or the easy slide to the past, her smiling gentleness. She often searched for her kids when darkness fell. The night she yelled at me, I had, to my shame, been impatient with her lack of understanding, casually dismissing her in my mind, making some comment that displayed a lack of compassion, and of understanding, just a different kind.

In all my years growing up, I never heard my mother argue with anyone except one neighbour. At age four, or five, I sat on the bottom step of our side door and covered my ears every time Mr. O'Brien said something, because I knew he had to be wrong, and hateful, to attack my mother. Patient and loving to an extreme degree, her own deference to and acceptance of others over the years was played out in particular towards my father, the man she married and loved. He, unlike her, had many moments of anger and impatience, which he expressed quite readily, and more frequently, as children, responsibilities and worries came along and grew. She never, to my disappointment and frustration, ever fought out loud with him, ever called him on his faults, or ever simply told him to shut up.

"Your father seems to be in a bad mood today," she said to me one morning when once again he was complaining, this time about her not putting his orange juice out early enough.

"Today?!" I countered, unable to withstand her continued defence of him. I was maybe fourteen.

Her refusal to fight him angered me. In my head, I fought with him a lot, but I was forbidden, by my mother's unspoken words, I guess - to ever display anger in that house. As an adult I did tell him what I thought on two occasions and suffered his outrage. Then some years later, after she had died, I refused to take his outbursts or irrational opinions. He responded with a mock-surprise lifting of his eyebrows, and a "Hmmph!" which seemed to say, "OK, then", backing right down. I was even more angry at my mother then, realizing how little it would have taken from her to stop his dictatorial temper tantrums, and to give herself a respectful and loving mate, and the confidence she had lost.

In the basement, assuming her true rank, she hurled her disdainful words at me, fixing me in her cold stare, and she was right, I was wrong. But I also think that perhaps I was the stand-in for my father and all the times she wanted to, but couldn't defy the authority that she had learned was automatic to fathers, husbands, doctors, the Church, and all the males who made all the rules. When she was born, women were not counted as persons under the law.

My mother's life was private, quiet and humble. She took the course open to her as eldest of eight siblings in her childhood family. At sixteen, she went to work when her own mother died, marrying at twenty-two, raising all her own babies, and then went back to work after those children were grown, and after caring for two grand-babies. Her home life did not give her the scope that she needed, nor the appreciation she deserved, but she played her role with dignity. Only once, when I was an adult, did she divulge a secret wish she'd had, and told me she had always wanted to learn to pilot an airplane, shocking me, and shaking my idea of her as a nondescript parent.

At the visitation, when she died, so many people came up to me and told stories of how they had known my mother, and the times they had spent. The most common refrain in their tales was "She was so smart!" And she was: she read books constantly, ran a busy household, taught her children to read before schooling, loved music and dancing, and travelled with her bowling team. She had been typing champion at the Canadian National Exhibition. At the funeral home, the assessment of her intelligence was frequent, a distinguishing characteristic.

I do remember that she broke a hairbrush over my head once. I was probably adding to the chaos of eight kids misbehaving, and she had her angry moments. But she definitely was not stupid.