Badass Mama
My mother is a badass. Right about now she is reading that sentence and feeling both pride and shame. Pride because she knows it is true. Shame because she wishes her children wouldn’t use such language — especially not in a public forum!
She is unashamedly 80 years old. She lives alone with her irritating little dog (I think I feel some sibling rivalry though I’ll never admit it beyond here). While she can feel in her bones every single one of those eighty years, she still buys her own groceries, makes her own bed (Hey, Mom! I made my bed today too!), and drives wherever she pleases. All with grace.
When I think back to being a child living with her and my dad, I can’t picture her very still. She was always DOING something. Often it was cooking or cleaning in the kitchen. She also would spread all the bills out on the kitchen table and balance the family checkbook by hand. On Saturdays she cleaned the church so that it would be ready for Sunday — I HAD to help. That was after we had cleaned our own house. That is what Saturdays were for when I was growing up. I hated it. All laundry had to be cleaned on Saturday too. I used the washing machine on a Sunday once when I was a teenager. Once. “The Lord’s Day is not for washing clothes! You had all day Saturday to do that.”
She was a successful business woman selling real estate. She had the golden blazer! Then, she and a friend opened their own real estate agency. Sometimes I would sit in their small office in the middle of our town and answer the phones. I don’t think I ever told her that I thought it was awesome. I’ll do it now.
“Mom, I am so proud of you. I thought you were such a badass! I didn’t act like it. Sometimes I didn’t even understand what I was thinking or feeling, but I thought you were a super woman owning your own business.”
She is smart and funny and patient and kind. And, I have a story to prove it.
When I was in my twenties which put my parents only in their fifties, (It sure felt old back then. It does not now!) our father had a heart attack. I was the baby, as I like to remind everyone all the time, and I was married and moved to another state. My siblings were all married. Mom and Dad lived in a semi-remote area. It is more probable that Dad was just too stubborn to call an ambulance, but whatever happened, I know that they got in the car and Mom drove him to the Emergency Room.
The story goes that all the way there, Dad (who rarely agreed to be a passenger) sat in the passenger seat in great pain while Mom drove. Of course, they were both panicking a bit. Dad would moan “Oh, honey, speed up, speed up.” Mom would speed up, of course. Dad would yell, “Slow down!”
They made it to the hospital. Dad liked to tell about the $1000 shot they gave him that stopped the heart attack in its tracks. No telling how much that shot costs now. $1000 doesn’t sound like a lot for medical care anymore. It is.
The doctors did all the things that doctors do when a patient has a heart attack and it was clear that Dad needed to have by-pass surgery. My sister and I traveled home from five hours away. We stayed in a family room made for just that sort of thing so that we could be in the hospital but actually rest the night before his surgery. It was a hotel room. They had a few connected to the hospital. Mom was not going to leave that hospital that night.
It was hard and terrible and everything that watching a loved one go through such a thing is. He was in the ICU on a vent for a bit in recovery (probably longer than he would be now). He was in the hospital for a few days which included learning about new diets and exercise and smoking cessation and emotions likely to come over the next six weeks.
Mom will have to give me the specific details because I can’t remember exactly when it happened or how it happened. But, while Dad was in the hospital, my grandfather, her father, either had a heart attack or had a test that showed he also needed by-pass surgery. I guess he would have been in his seventies at that time. He also had the surgery. Then, my smart, funny, patient, and kind mother brought those two stubborn men to her home to help them through recovery from heart surgery.
For the most part, she did this all alone. There were two recliners in my parent’s den. At some point I visited during the recovery time. I just have the faintest image in my mind of my father and grandfather in matching pajamas (light blue) sitting next to each other in those tan recliners watching TV while Mom attended to their every need.
She did that when there had been no heart attacks, so of course she was going to do it when they each had an 8 inch scar over their sternums. She cooked them three meals a day, delivered those meals on trays to their chairs, she helped them to bed when they were tired, and got them up walking when they were supposed to do that. She brought pillows for them to hold when they needed to cough to try to help with the pain. I’m certain she helped bathe them too — separately — though none of them would ever talk about such a thing.
My father and his father-in-law got along okay, but they were not best buds. For six weeks they sat there together being cared for by this badass woman. She was with each of them years later when they died too. We absolutely hate that Daddy died so soon, but we thank God that he went before Mom! Of course it is torture for her in a lot of ways, but she is a badass. She can take care of herself. She cleans like a badass. She cooks like a badass. She cares like a badass. She grieves like a badass. Dad wouldn’t have made it a day without her. She has been living fourteen years without him. She has moved twice (once into the home she bought imagining they would retire to), cooked Thanksgiving and Christmas meals for her enormous family and continued to be the badass that she is.
I don’t know why the aging process has to be filled with such pain (physical and emotional). I don’t know why it has to be so hard. There are many days when my Badass Mama doesn’t feel like one. And, still she is. She always will be. I don’t think I’ll ever live up to that, but if I can be 80 with the grace, beauty, joy, patience, and kindness of this woman, I will have truly accomplished something special.
And, it will be because of her.
