Getting Mom to Participate

This afternoon I picked Mom up from her assisted-living facility and took her to feed the ducks at El Dorado Park. When we arrived, she said, "I'll stay inside." I calmly told her that my entire life she had refused to participate and that was no longer going to be the case. "You can help feed the ducks, Mom," I said. And in contrast to the past half century, she didn't insist on non-participation but instead got out of the truck without a fuss.

She enjoyed herself! What a concept: You engage in life and the people in your life and you have a good time! She smiled the whole time and took special interest in ducks she felt were hungry but unable to wrestle the bread from the seagulls. I couldn't help but think how her life and my relationship with her would have been so different, had she taken an active part in what was occurring around her decades ago, instead of holding back at every opportunity and refraining from interacting with the people she was with. Might she have remarried? Might she have stayed in Wisconsin, surrounded by a tight circle of friends who would watch over each other? Might she have forged a bond with my brother? It's hard to say how participation might have altered so many things.

Perhaps as she nears the end of her life, she is becoming the person she might have been all along. Well, except for the two years she spent in Europe in the early '50s. As Aaron remarked when we were sorting through the photographs from that time, "This is the woman I would have liked to have known." During these years, she was bright-eyed and smiling, seemingly ready for an adventure at every turn.

What then changed to make her into someone who lived a separate life from her husband, even while they slept under the same roof? Someone who didn't know the most basic things about her children, like where they had worked for 20 years and what kind of work they did? Someone who, when on vacation, always stayed in camp and read the newspaper instead of going on morning hikes with the rest of her family? Someone who would walk away while I introduced her to someone? Someone who has yet to attend a Wednesday outing, though she's had more than a year of opportunities to do so?

There's no telling at this point what happened to change her approach to the world, but it seems, after 55 years of dormancy, that perhaps she is waking up again. She's not in Europe and will never be again, but perhaps she will recapture a little of the excitement for living that she obviously possessed in abundance while in Europe so very many years ago.