The Almost-Good Mother

She couldn't see the good in herself.

My mother always wore pink.

This wasn’t a fashion choice. It was her default setting on the earthly color wheel. She’d arrived at it over a lifetime of editing out the flashy, somber, or bold from her wardrobe and from her life. Pink anchored her as a woman (wife, mother, widow, in that order) who glowed with the joy of salvation. The Lord guided her hand to the modest calicos and corduroys within a narrow spectrum between blush and mauve. It made her happy, to the extent that she allowed happiness to break through her fear that her children and grandchildren would not be ready when Christ returned. For we know not the hour or the day.

My mother has been dead for twenty-four years. Somewhere in my basement is her Bible, bound in pink leather and zippered shut. Between these two sentences is a world that will remain forever unexplored and unmapped.

There are things I know, and things I can only guess at. And others, that I shake my head over in wonder and disbelief.

---

There’s no need to tell you that she was a child of Swedish immigrants, of the Depression, of such deep poverty that she carried a hunger forward into her life that she passed on to me, her only daughter. That as she washed the floor, my grandfather walked across it with his muddy boots, turned around, and walked across it again. His atheism isn’t relevant. Nor is her fury toward cats, equal to my passion for them.

Before starting chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she asked me to do something for her. Knowing how harsh the treatment would be, she put her hand on mine.

“Will you cut my hair?”

Mom had allowed her hair to grow since the mid-seventies, when she’d left our family’s Lutheran church for the full-Gospel church. This was God’s will; a woman’s hair was her glory.

She sat on the kitchen stool. I undid the soft bun, removing the bobby pins that held her hair in place. I made one long braid. With the good scissors, the pair she’d used to cut the lace for my wedding gown, I worked my way through the gray-blond skein across the back of her neck. When I was done, the hair that had reached to her knees lay in a tidy coil on the kitchen table.

I kept that braid in a Zip-loc bag on my bookshelf until two years ago. After my husband died, I got rid of things I had no use for. I kept my children’s baby teeth; they fit perfectly in their cloisonné enamel box. Besides, what higher purpose is there than to creep out my kids after I’m gone?

---

During the late sixties, a brand of pantyhose called Londonaire came on the market. For a long time, you couldn’t watch afternoon TV without being subjected to ads showing a woman’s hand pulling a nail file up the inside of a stocking leg. No runs. Indestructible. One color: a murky tan, some ad agent’s conception of “nude.” They didn’t run, but they snagged. Loops and small horizontal lines appeared in the material, which appeared to be knit from the shed skins of dollar-store Barbies. After a few wearings, they developed an opaque, fuzzy nap. It was as if all of those cats she chased out of the kitchen with a broom had taken their revenge, with claws sharper than those metal files.

It was not long before Londonaire hose dropped in price from $2.99 — worth it, they lasted forever! — to ninety-nine cents, to practically giving them away. That’s when Mom bought them by the dozen, at the places that still sold them.

---

I’d tell you of her delight when the waitress nodded when she asked for a cup of hot water with a slice of lemon. The hundred thousand miles or more that she put on her car as she drove to and from the full-Gospel church forty miles away, at least twice a week, every Wednesday night and Sunday morning unless there was an event, such as the time I got my master’s or my sister-in-law her doctorate. Or when my daughter and son were born and when they were baptized. She did not believe in infant baptism, but she came to the services. And worried until she died about their eternal souls.

But none of these things matter as much as the vivid pink rose still climbing the pergola over my sidewalk, or the deep pink lilac that blooms in front of my house every May around the anniversary of her death. I planted them in her honor. I’ve managed to keep them alive.

They matter.

---

Between the time her pastor paid her a visit when she was in hospice and the time she died, we learned of some changes she’d made to her will.

“It’s best if you talk to her. I don’t think she’d be swayed by anything we could say.”

That’s what we told my brother, the eldest among her four children. After their conversation, we were able to keep the house in the family, while her church received a generous gift in her name. Two hundred members of the congregation stayed away from the funeral we held in the church of our childhood, the one our father had attended, faithfully and alone, for two decades, until his own quiet death.

Her pastor sent a showy spray of red gladioli. A day after the funeral, he called to ask for it back.

“We’re having our own celebration of life for your mother on Wednesday. We’re honoring her memory. She was a pillar of our congregation.”

I didn’t remind him that she was not a scarlet woman.

“We gave the flowers to the hospice,” I said. “The volunteers divide them” — tastefully, I did not add — “and bring them to the patients’ rooms.”

We were not invited to celebrate my mother’s life at the church she’d given her life to.

---

It must have taken — how long would it have taken her? Twenty years, or thirty. How many pairs of pantyhose could she have bought, worn, washed, sorted, and saved? Three thin plastic bags from the fabric store were fully stuffed with flesh-colored hosiery. Not small bags; each could have contained two bed pillows or a mattress pad.

As I pulled them from the recesses of the basement closet, I noticed the little rectangles of white paper, one by two inches. She’d machine-stitched one to the outside of each bag. Labels. Sitting back on my heels, I squinted. Blue ink. My mother’s neat cursive. I leaned into the pale light coming from the casement window above the washing machine.

The first bag was labelled: Good.

The second: One Leg Good.

One leg good?

I toyed with the piece of pink seam binding she had used to tie the bag closed. Nothing wasted. I remembered the tip from one of those columns in what used to be called the women’s section of the paper. Pretty ingenious, really. You cut the snagged-beyond-repair leg from one pair of hose, did the same with another pair in similar condition, and wore them both at the same time. If you were smart and always bought the same brand, color, and size, you’d get twice the amount of wear.

I never saved soap scraps or candle wax or milk cartons, despite all the creative things you could do with them. Toilet paper tubes. Popsicle sticks. My mother, born into nothing, saved everything.

I imagined her coping with two elastic waistbands, each attached to one stocking, struggling in the restroom.

The last bag was packed almost to bursting. The label read: Good or Almost.

Almost?

---

She has more clothes than you can shake a stick at, my mother sometimes said, in a tone of disapproval mixed with longing. I’d imagine Marie the Avon lady or Betty across the street, their drawers and closets bursting sinfully with cocktail dresses rather than sensible shirtwaists. I envisioned Mom standing in front of their open armoires (at seven, vocabulary was bliss, though the corresponding object was often a little vague) solemnly shaking an actual stick. I believed she possessed an ability to cast out the evil spirits that thrived in those hothouses of bold prints and slinky knits.

In my forties, going through her final, spare wardrobe, I thought about that stick and the complicated emotions it represented. Some of her coat pockets contained hundreds of dollars in cash — I had to be vigilant — and knotted hankies full of silver coins.

The widow’s mite.

Then I saw them: cashmere-lined kid gloves and silk scarves, still in their gift boxes. Christmas, Mother’s Day, birthday. Christmas, Mother’s Day, birthday. How carefully I’d chosen them. How the years had cycled past, and how the boxes had stacked up, filling two full shelves above the pink skirts, blouses, and dresses, all homemade, hanging on a single wooden rod. And as I opened each box, I saw the same paper rectangles machine-stitched to the tissue paper. The same neat cursive writing, the blue ink, but only two words, repeated with each gift.

Too Good.

The heart-shaped locket from Kresge’s. The fake-amethyst brooch. My father had helped me choose them when he took me shopping on those Saturdays when he knew it wasn’t safe for me to be in the house. The scented soaps. Whatever you give her, your Mom will love, he’d said. He’d known not to say, She’ll think this is too good for her.

The heavy white terrycloth robe from her last Christmas. The Lanz nightgown from the Christmas before. Too Good.

Too Good, Too Good, Too Good.

It was May; the lilacs were in full bloom and impossibly fragrant. A golden light slanted through the sheer curtains. I leaned back against my mother’s bed.

I found an empty shoebox. I filled it with those bits of white paper. Those labels: the ones I’d saved from the pantyhose bags before dumping them, and their contents, into the trash. The ones stitched to the tissues in those white boxes from fancy stores.

With my mother’s good scissors — the pair she’d used to cut the lace for my wedding dress, that I’d taken to the locks she’d grown for Christ — I cut away everything but the Good. Carefully, I excised everything else. Those words that shackled her spirit.

No more Almost. No Too. No crippling amputations of the flesh or spirit. No defects or comparisons, no unworthiness. No more sadness or sorrow, or trouble I see —

Only the good.

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