Dana and I Discussed Mom on the Day I Skipped

Dana and I Discussed Mom on the Day I Skipped

            I started to title this “Why I Skipped a Day of Mom,” but I didn’t really skip a day.  Dana was here, and we devoted quite a lot of time to Mom as well as to Daddy in our hours of discussion.  Friday, the first night Dana was here, felt good because we focused on some of the things that were GOOD about our parents.  But here’s an anecdote from yesterday, when I never made it to the blog.

            Dana came in and re-told a story I’d told her, but she’d given it a twist that made me angry.

            “Mother told you that I’d been looking forward to your return from California, so to be sure to show me that you were happy to see me, but you were defiant, so you went straight to David instead of to me.”

            `“No!”  I said, not calmly.  “It wasn’t in defiance.  Mother told me after I’d gone straight to David.  He was my baby brother.  One year old.  He wasn’t the sister who’d beaten me up.  So I went straight to him, and it’s true.  I can still picture him, and I can picture you, too, standing there.  But it wasn’t to be defiant.  Then Mom took me aside and told me not to hurt your feelings.”

            “Oh!  I thought you told it to me as an example of your defiance and of one time that Mother showed she cared about my feelings.”

            “I told it to you as an example of Mom’s caring about your feelings.  It was after that that Mom told me that you’d really looked forward to seeing me so I shouldn’t hurt your feelings as she was afraid I had.”

            Later we decided to tell the story to Shehla, who had joined us at the Rolling Out Café on Taraval.  (She’d met Dana at the Celebration of Mom’s Life and said she’d like to see her when she visited.)  We’d get her interpretation.  It turned out that Shehla thought it was insensitive of Mom not to anticipate what would happen.  She thought Mom should have spoken to me before I had the chance to hurt Dana’s feelings.

            So it didn’t wind up being a defense of Mom against Dana’s claim that Mom never showed she cared.

            But here’s another example:  Dana, who is even messier than I am and maybe even messier than Daddy was, was once neat.  As a child in Blackfoot, Idaho, she kept her room really beautiful—always made her bed with the ruffle showing just so, stuck gummed stars on her windows, and put costumed paper dolls all around.  So before we moved to Knoxville, Iowa, where Dana was going to have to share a room with me, Mom told me how neat Dana had always kept her room and urged me to keep our room neat so Dana wouldn’t feel disappointed about not having her own room anymore.

            Now Dana, always beautiful, looks much more like Mom looked in her prettiest, thinnest years.  But nothing changes in her thinking about Mom.