A Sing-along for Those with Special Needs--

  When Mom moved to Aegis, I visited her two or three times a weeks, and I never knew which mother I’d be seeing. 

            This is the composite of the best of my visits with the best of my mothers.

            Mom had finally gotten a roommate who didn’t make accusations and insist that she leave.  (Cut:  She’d gotten one who wandered into bedrooms and lay down to sleep most of the time, and when she was awake, she’d just take Mom’s hand, and kiss it, and say, “I love you”before fallling off to sleep again.)

            Mom, very weak, and spending more time on her own bed, still tried to make this woman comfortable, asking me to re-arrange the sofa so that Sweet Dorie could put her feet up.  Mother was always trying to take care of the residents at Aegis, and I think she thought that was her job.  Once again, she was a counselor—just one who never seemed to get off work.

            Mom said she just wanted to nap, so I lay down next to her and put my arms around her frail and bony body.

            “This is comforting,” she said.

            “Yes, it is.” Then I started to sing the songs she used to play on the upright piano in our upside-down home with Daddy and, in later years, in the neat and cozy house with Kathy.       “We’re going to have a sing-along for your birthday.”

            We sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” the song from Carousel I’ve heard people dismiss as maudlin. I remembered my mother’s saying back in the early 1960s, “This should be our family song,” and I remembered my father’s angry--almost defensive-- contempt.        

            “Oh, come on!  It has no melody.  It has no…” 

            I don’t remember what else it didn’t have.  But I remember wondering why Daddy couldn’t indulge her.  If this helped her face what she had to deal with every day— children diagnosed with “special needs” as well as those of us who weren’t diagnosed—two of my sisters and me and Daddy himself—then why did he respond in such a cruel way? Was he  hurt because the song wasn’t a romantic love song about them or about him? 

            That October day at Aegis Living, holding my mother in my arms and being held in hers—we sang that song all the way through without crying, and then I led us into  South Pacific.  When we finished singing “Bali Hai”—and mother remembered every word—she said, “Oh, that’s such a beautiful song.  If you got that for me for my 90^th birthday, I think that would be my favorite gift.  But I wouldn’t tell the others.”

            Then, when we’d finished our sing-along, and she was ready for me to leave, I said, “I love you, Mom,” and she said, “I love you too, Tina.  You’re my representative in the bigger world.” 

            So here I am in that bigger world, wishing that I could be a better representative.