Giving thanks for the original survivor

I love my mom. She sends my children wonderful, thoughtful gifts in the mail.  Things like Mathmania and Puzzlemania books and are helping my son build a collection of maps from each state in the U.S. Not crappy plastic trinkets or embarrassingly expensive toys. They, in turn, offer up gushing phone calls, illegible construction paper cards and letters in Spanglish because they neither read nor write in either English or Spanish terribly well yet as they are in the first few grades of Spanish Immersion program in our local public elementary school.

But if you hold their letters up, squint, cock your head and consult a phonetic dictionary and occasionally log on to www.freetranslation.com,  you can just about  make out all the symbols of how much they adore her. Each lays claim to her as “their” Grandma, certain they know more stories about her, secure in the thought that each is her favorite.

It was in transcribing my son Zachary’s last letter to his grandmother that I gave pause.  His last sentence was, Cuando tu puedes venir a mi casa? Basically, when are you coming to my house?

The answer is never.

My mom has emphysema. She can no longer travel long distances. Well, she could actually … dragging so much paraphernalia with her just to breathe. Getting on a plane is another issue – she basically has to be a patient in a gurney to do this. Then there’s the organizing, ordering and stocking the destination with proper medicines for her nebulizer (4 -6 times a day)  and sufficient oxygen (twice daily and overnight). Still, at 75 – she is bright-eyed, interested in life, grateful to spend time with her family, sports a sense of humor, and all in all, is pretty mobile in spite of all this. (She’s also a colon and breast cancer survivor – so we count anything where we get to see her other than a funeral cause for celebration.)

We are on the West Coast; she’s on the East. She struggles to keep a relationship going with her grandchildren so far away. And so, I resolved several years ago that I would be the bridge.

I’m the one that gets on the plane, usually with at least one of my three children in tow. We made the trip to my uncle’s 80th birthday in Miami. We made a trip to spend a week with her on her 75th birthday and planned a festive luncheon. She couldn’t travel to Miami the following week when her brother, my uncle, passed away; so I made the trip then,too, bringing all the love and sadness she was experiencing with me. And I will continue to do it. Tomorrow, we travel again – missing school and precious down time – so that our whole family can be together for Thanksgiving. I’ll continue to do it, because one day, we’ll be making a final visit, and on that day I won’t regret a thing.

But through it all, I swallow a lot of lumps. It’s hard to explain to my children, why --  despite the fact that it’s killing her -- Grandma continues to smoke. Despite the fact that she’s been given more than one new lease on life, she continues to sabotage her health. Addiction is difficult to talk about with young children. But mine get it.  Here in Silicon Valley a cigarette butt is harder to find than an admitted Republican. However, they have spent time in Europe, Spain in particular, where young and glamorous looking youth work hard to keep the myth alive that smoking makes you looker older and more glamorous. They understand it just makes you look old, and your body look even older.

When my mom does venture beyond her home even for a short visit with relatives -  you’d swear she was running away for good: she stocks her car with 3 large boxes of “supplies” as she calls it. There’s three oxygen tanks, two cartons of cigarettes and one blind Yorkie named Pogo.  All that and she’ll still have an anxiety attack when she arrives wherever she’s going and need to light up immediately. (Personally I would have been panicking when lighting up cigarettes while carrying oxygen in a car full of gasoline, but whatever – we each have our quirks.)

I call her the original survivor and, yes, I do find her inspiring. Not all our heroes have to come dressed in superman costumes or toting weapons of mass destruction (unless you call a cigarette lighting-oyxgen-carrying grandmother “armed”).  Mine is as imperfect as she is frustrating. But what she is – is an amazing Grandma who has built an honest relationship with grandkids who adore her for exactly who she is.  Kids who hardly get to see her, but who nonetheless know all her stories, who can quote her “Grandma –isms” verbatim, and know in an instant whether Grandma would approve of their actions.

She does this without benefit of great riches, never showing up at their performances or soccer games, without taking them on exotic trips, or even the benefit of being a typical role model herself. Yet they know her character, her spirit --  and she knows their hearts. And that’s the stuff that legends are made of, at least in my book.

This is an original post to Silicon Valley Moms Blog.