Suzzane
King, a California friend who often sat with Mom when work beckoned me from
being Ma's caretaker, and would read her the Garrison Keillor stories that Ma
liked so well, often got her to talk of earlier mothering days. "Your Mother feels sorry about how she raised
you. She thinks she and your dad didn't
have enough time for you and that you were neglected. You had to make do on your own because they
had to spend so much time taking care of Marlene, and that's why you are like
you are..." 
Yeah, I remember Ma, the things you think I should change,
and will work on those things you called me on, like being "an Exercise Gestapo... don't rest or eat
enough... don't relax... you're mean... work too much... offend people and have
no friends..." For sure, however,
whatever good I am, you and pop made it, and never, never did I feel
neglected. I never even thought of being
neglected till I heard you tell these stories of the hurt a mother carries inside
about her children. You've heard me say
this to you before, and this is an airborne epistle again from fragile, misty
ground control. 
Like Golden Moms everywhere, she kept things inside that she thought might hurt her kids, hid reality from us until she thought it was the right time, struggled with herself on the inside as to whether she was doing right. Yet on other issues, she hesitated not to say her piece. She was as ill prepared as any young woman to raise children, yet often I had heard her say to child rearing advice offered to her, "What do they know about raising children, or raising your father. Until they have been in my shoes, they should keep their mouths shut and mind their own business."
After I had been in India for 6 months as a Peace Corps volunteer, I sent pictures home. I looked very different to Ma, not due to the tight crew cuts but because of the 35 pounds shed from my 6' 190 pound frame and strange color to my skin. Her rapid response letter said, "You look terrible and sick. If you are sick, just come home. Your health is more important than what people will say. Just come home now." My color was explained away by Devali, an Indian holiday on which kids from my Bombay slum had doused me with colored water. And I had another reminder not to scare Mom with regard to her kids. Next to them, she didn't care what the world had to say.
When I explained that Fr. Bierberg flunked me in a required for college graduation religion course, God and Creation, in my last semester of senior year, she lit up her little kitchen. "You mean with all that money we spent on Catholic education, the mass and communions you would go to 5 and 6 times a week, that he is going to keep you, the first kid in the family to go to college, from graduating? What kind of God does he know? And how the hell is he, a priest, to know anything about creation!... You'll never catch me inside of a Catholic Church again, and they won't be getting any money from me again..." Even though I did graduate, I don't remember Ma going to church, other than her old Cleveland Byzantine Catholic St. Nicholas, again.
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