Grambo

RAIN
I opened my eyes
And looked up at the rain,
And it dripped in my head
And flowed into my brain,
And all that I hear as I lie in my bed
Is the slishity-slosh of the rain in my head.

I step very softly,
I walk very slow,
I can't do a handstand-
I might overflow,
So pardon the wild crazy thing I just said-
I'm just not the same since there's rain in my head.
~ Shel Silverstein "Where The Sidewalk Ends"

My mother has always been obsessed with mystery and murder. She lives for Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie and looks forward to "her" TV shows: Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and all of the Inspector so-and-so English mysteries on Channel 21. Murder and CSI-type shows stop her dead in her tracks giving her face that glazed over look much the same as the look small children get when watching Sesame Street or Thomas the Tank Engine.
My mother is the last of nine children. Eight girls and one boy. The first six, five girls and the boy, Uncle Billy, were fathered by a man named Bobby. Bobby, my grandmother's first husband, was killed in WWI leaving her a widow with six children. At some point, in the not-too-distant future, she married his best friend, Tom, and then had his three children - my mom and her two older sisters. My grandmother was 42 when my mom was born which, in 1928, was, well, old. My grandfather never missed a day of work or a night at his local tavern. Anyway, I tell this as a way of explaining my theory that my mom didn't get a whole lot of parenting in the traditional way. Her older sisters often took care of her. My grandmother was very much present and a truly wonderful grandmother and mother but, I suppose, by the time my mother came along, she was just plain tired.
This all leads me to a place of deep understanding when my mother, at 82 years old, still sometimes behaves very much like a child. It used to be a source of great disappointment and frustration for me when she'd walk away from a "discussion" and close herself off in her bedroom. Or, even worse, the time she actually put her fingers in her ears and began humming while I was trying to express a feeling.
As I've gotten older and, especially, because I have children of my own, I can see that parenting is not always an automatic leap in to maturity. Especially if you're still in need of parenting yourself.
When I was a teenager, and especially after my Dad left, my mother was a scary woman. I look back at that time and think that she must have been the woman on our block that the neighborhood kids thought of as the "witch". She never did anything terrible to anyone, she just never spoke to anyone and spent all of her time inside the house surfacing only when she was going to or coming from work. When my kids and my nephews were younger, they sometimes sat on the front porch of my mother's house, ducked down low like special forces commandos or pre-school Maxwell Smarts, to watch for her as she turned the corner of the block on her way home from the train station after work. The "sentry" would, upon sighting and a postivie ID, shout "GRAMBO," and then they'd run, as if their little lives depended on it.
She's turned some kind of corner in her older age, though, and I'm not so sure I'm completely comfortable with it. She stops on the street and makes remarks to drivers that she thinks are in the wrong, as if she's driving her own car right there on the sidewalk. She talks to everyone now, especially little babies. She likes to reminisce. Her stories are very detailed and I know, in the re-telling, that some of those conversations and interactions from her past are happening the way she'd have liked for them to and not so much how they really occurred. Yesterday, I took a walk to the local pet store with her to buy some food for my dogs. As soon as we entered, a very precocious, somewhat misbehaved 5-ish year old boy was shouting and stomping his feet. I knew enough not to make eye contact with him but my mother immediately smiled and bent down and said,
"Ohhhh my, what a BIG BOY you are."
To which the bad seed replied,
"I am NOT a big boy. YOU ARE. You have a MOUSTACHE!"
As I turned toward my mother I could see her face morphing into a combination of the old Grambo plus her own unique version of Bette Davis at her Baby Jane worst... and before I could stop her she looked at the kid with her arthritic finger pointing and snarled,
"I DO NOT HAVE A MOUSTACHE! YOU DO!"
I took hold of her arm and said,
"C'mon mom,"
and as I was leading her to the back of the store she wheeled around, utterly intent on getting in the last word as the boy skipped out of the store sticking his tongue out at her as far as it would go as my mother shouted,
"OH YEAH, YOU HAVE A BEARD!! AND YOUR FEET STINK!"
We walked quietly most of the way home as I could practically hear her internal discourse. Finally, as we neared my corner she said,
"You know what I should have said to that little brat? I should have said,
your MOTHER has a beard!!!"