It’s been over four years since my mom’s spirit molted from its earthy shape, of course, there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about her in some way. The one thing I miss, deeply, is our once, twice, three times a day phone calls. I loved calling and talking to my mom. I’d call her on my way to work, or to the grocery store, or on a walk with Rocco, when I was having my morning coffee or evening glass of wine. We’d call each other with updates on the latest political headlines, or weekend plans, or the recent family drama, or just to talk. 

I think my mom is the reason I have such distain for small talk. Our conversations ran deep and wide, spanning religion, philosophy, literature, sparked with dark comedy often tinged in snark. Few people can make me laugh as hard as she could. I miss visiting her in her tiny Park Row apartment in St. Peter, where Gretchen now lives, or having her come up to St. Paul to stay with me for a weekend. I miss her strong coffee, her vapor hugs, sharing a bottle of wine with her, and our road trips where she’d always get mad at me for some stupid thing (like when I let Rocco have a lick of her Dairy Queen cone, sheesh…”dog spit is antiseptic” I tried to tell her but she didn’t buy it) then she wouldn’t talk to me for miles and I’d try everything I could to chip away a smile from her scowl, then something would eventually crack her, and we’d be back to laughing and talking again. I miss going to concerts with her—she was always up for a night of good music whether it was a local act or Lucinda Williams or Mary Chapin Carpenter, or the Indigo Girls, or the Subdudes…take all that talking and visiting times four more kids and it’s no wonder she died. Poor lady needed a break.

Often, on mother’s day, our conversation would drift to her early years as a mom. She’d tell the story about how each of us kids arrived. None of our birth stories are particularly warm or fuzzy; in fact, quite the opposite, yet we never grew tired of hearing her tell them. She first got pregnant with my oldest brother, Mike, at 16. Our dad was 7 years older than she; she hid the pregnancy from her parents as long as she could, under baggy sweaters and loose-fitting a-line dresses. She was 17 years old, just a baby herself, when she gave birth, in the hospital, alone, on the morning of her senior prom. Years later, she wrote a stark, gutting poem about that day titled, Formals, which ends with the stanza: “the doctor stitched me up/with tiny sharp thrusts/that bit at my skin/he said/I guess you won’t be dancing/for a while” She and my dad married a month or so later, in a small ceremony—was it a Catholic service? I’m guessing it had to be, her parents were very devout, though I do know she didn’t wear white; I still have the tiny mint green Bobby Brooks sleeveless dress that she wore that day, hanging in my closet. Sometimes I put it on, when I want to feel especially close to her.

She was alone, again, when my brother, Kurt, was born fourteen months later, on July 16, 1966. At the same time, all the news stations were reporting about the serial murderer, Richard Speck, who had systematically raped, tortured and murdered eight student nurses at South Chicago Community Hospital the day before. Speck was still at large the day Kurt was born, which freaked the hell out of the nursing staff of every hospital across the nation; the high unlikelihood that he was in southern Minnesota didn’t stop the frantic nurses in Comfrey Hospital, the state’s smallest hospital at the time, running around, closing and locking windows, despite the sweltering heat and lack of AC in the tiny country hospital. 

I was born 16 months after Kurt, in 1967. My mom was just shy of her 20th birthday. It was Thanksgiving, and my mom’s family, including my very pregnant mom, gathered at my grandparent’s farm south of Comfrey, for the holiday meal. As the family lore goes, at some point, my grandmother turned to my Auntie Pat and muttered, “I think Kathy’s pregnant again.” My mom went into labor that night at home, I was born the next day, all of which couldn’t be any more indicative of my mom’s fractured relationship with her mother if it tried. I love the part, though, how every meal my mom had in the hospital after I was born was a variation on the holiday dinner served the day before—turkey sandwiches, turkey casserole, turkey noodle soup. How a withered old man in a room down the hall would sneak out of his room, bare butt flashing through the slit in his hospital gown and shuffle down to the nursery to gaze at the little redhead baby that he had fallen in love with and was going to bring home. How my grandmother appeared at the hospital with armloads of frilly dresses and pinned to the curtains in my mom’s room, how it was one of few times my mom felt she did something right in her life; that giving her mother a granddaughter might make up for some of her perceived flaws as a daughter. 

My mom went into labor with my sister, Jill, the evening of January 2, 1970. As my dad slept, she took down the Christmas tree, packed away the decorations, did a load of laundry, packed overnight bags for my brothers and me, then woke my dad so he could take me and my brothers to Grandpa and Grandma Hildebrandt’s, on the other side of town, before bringing her to the hospital. Jill was born an hour after my mom arrived at the hospital, on the morning of January 3; she was first baby born in Mountain Lake that year; the nurse at the hospital told my mom they should have kept going to Windom and given birth there, because Windom’s hospital showered the first NY baby and family with presents; Mountain Lake’s hospital didn’t do anything except run a news paper article.

My mom got pregnant with Gretchen five years after Jill, in spite of using the Dalkon shield IUD. Gretchen was born in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve in 1974; my dad stuck around long enough for her birth, then took off as soon as my mom gave him permission (was it begrudging or was she relieved to be alone this time? I so wish I could ask her such things now), and hightailed to a NYE poker tournament at the only bar in town. I remember finding a near-empty box of cigars with pink bands announcing “It’s a Girl!” on the dining room table the next day. Gretchen was born with her umbilical cord wrapped 3 times around her neck and had to be transported to Worthington, where she remained hospitalized until she was stable enough to come home. 

If you’re detecting a theme here, you’re probably right. My dad was absent from each of our births; if not physically, most definitely mentally. Mothers Day was probably as much bitter as it was sweet for my mom, maybe even more so. One can excuse it all away with “well, that’s what happened back then,” but it goes so much deeper. Both my parents came from challenging histories, both did the very best they could with what they had available to them. I often call my mom Holy Kathryn, Mother of 5, but I know if she were here today, that she wouldn’t care for the martyr label. She would probably say that she had a hand in the chaos that reigned supreme for most of our family years, by not speaking out or speaking up, by allowing the dysfunction and turbulence to drag on longer than was helpful for anyone, for having a baby, much less five, for getting married in the first place, for abandoning her own self at such a young age, for not loving herself the way she divinely had a right and a holy obligation to be loved, for taking so long to forgive her own mother.

I’ve thought about my mom all day, just allowing all the feelings be felt, the sadness, the missing her deeply, the anger…which at first surprised me because it’s not a place I tend to go. But I swear, I can feel her saying, “I wasn’t a martyr, I’m still not a martyr. I was a messy human who made a lot of mistakes—of course you can be mad. You were just little kids—all you should have had to worry about then was playing with your friends and coming home for meals, and to get enough sleep, but your dad and I piled so much onto you, such heavy, heavy shit that kids should never, ever have to bear…” And then I hear her say, “anger’s can be useful if you channel it, rather than stay stuck in it.” 

I also feel her saying that the best way to lose a hundred pounds and feel 20 years younger is to forgive…yourself, for not knowing better. Others, for the same not knowing. Grudges are unnecessary weight that serve no purpose except to age us before our time, keep us stuck and tight.

There’s so much I wish could have been different, for both my mom and for my dad, but I think a divine purpose of ours is to mine our personal histories, to study the characters in them, for clues about how to live our own lives a little differently, hopefully better, than how our parents did. Instead of repeating, we can break cycles. (even so, I’d still trade it all for one more phone call with her…) xo