my mother, the practical romantic

My mother isn't someone I would characterize as romantic. In fact, I might even venture to say she is spectacularly unromantic. If you call and ask how her day was, she'll answer that it was either "productive" or "uneventful." A bad day might be "challenging," but you'll get no more than that. She believes in the inherent and unquestionable rightness of the Christian Bible, the 40-hour work week and the Republican party. She watches FOX news for fun and drinks jug wine because she likes it. "It's not that I don't enjoy expensive wine, but why bother?," she'll say. She loves buying shoes, but only on sale and thinks that generic brands are as good, if not better than products with fancy names attached.

Practicality is the bar by which everything is measured and if it's not practical, it's better left to liberals and heathens. You know, people with tattoos. "I just don't understand why someone would do that to themselves," I've heard her moan, with real dismay and confusion etched across her features. "It's just so painful." As you might expect, the beauty of pain escapes her.

So it's not so surprising that she divorced my father when I was five. It's not that she didn't love the big lug of raging alcoholism, but the pain and unpredictability, not to mention the sheer impracticality of staying in that dysfunctional relationship was anathema to her. And she was right, of course. It takes either a great fool, a great romantic or someone with more than a few screws loose themselves to stay in a relationship with a person who hides vodka bottles under couch cushions and expects people to neither notice nor comment when they sit down only to get poked uncomfortably in the nether regions. Whatever you say about my mother, her screws are threaded tight, firmly set and since he refused to get help, she refused to play along.

It took me a lot longer to learn that lesson. But then again, I was five. I thought that couches were where bottles were supposed to be stored.

So when we met a complete stranger on a plane and she married him a year later, it came as a surprise to us all. At seven-years-of-age, I was shocked, dismayed and simultaneously intrigued by this mustached hottie from Texas who swept my mother off her feet and sweet-talked her into moving us from Forrest Hills, New York to Lubbock in less time than it took for my front teeth to come in.

What was she thinking?

If you ask, she'll hedge a little. She'll tell you that there was something about how his tie was loosened, just so. How there was something in his smile and in the way he patiently and with only a minor grunt of pain let me step on his feet and practically crawl into his lap to watch the baggage handlers toss our luggage into the belly of the plane. Something about the way he invited her out and then when he came to pick her up didn't even blink as my mother's twin sister, my Aunt Ann (whom we were visiting), issued the third-degree before scurrying outside to jot down his license plate number, just in case he turned out to be some sort of sister-snatching sociopath.

There was also a practical element, of course. Because, there's always a practical element. She needed to get us out of New York as neither of us was moving forward with my father still in the picture, popping by in alcoholic hazes, leaving behind his bags full of confusion and uncertainty and sadness with each and every visit. So in some senses, Richard, (or Dad as I prefer to call him), was a perfect marriage of romantic adventure and practicality, all rolled up into one handsome, boot-wearing Texan. (Actually, he grew up in Florida, but he's always had a knack for assimilating. It's part of his charm.)

Still, as I approach the age that she was when she met my Dad, it's this one romantic gesture that belies the picture I've held of her all these years. And in that light, the more I think about it, the more I see her life as less a series of practical decisions as I see a woman of deep passion with deep-rooted beliefs working each day to make things happen. It's just that hard work, quietly and consistently done, doesn't get the kind of screen time that irresponsible whimsy does.

When she was young, she knew she wanted to be a nurse. Now, she's been a nurse for more than thirty years, working with the sickest of the sick, in surgical intensive care units, in burn wards and in emergency rooms. She's overseen dialysis departments and run free clinics. When my mother says a day is productive, it means a patient improved, even if just a little. When it's uneventful, you can breath a quiet, "Thank God," as you know the families do of the people for whom she cares. When it's challenging, the truth is you don't really want to know the gory and sometimes heartbreaking details. And she doesn't share the details, because they aren't romantic; they're often grueling and sometimes sad and she guards peoples' dignity by holding her tongue. It's with good reason that the beauty of pain escapes her, because she's seen real pain and in truth, it holds no beauty.

Recently, I was on the phone with my mother discussing my cousin Allyson's pregnancy and all the names she and her husband were contemplating. "You know," my mother said, "when you were born, I thought about naming you Esperanza."

"What? Are you kidding me?"

"No. I really liked the name. I had a patient when I was pregnant with you, a little girl named Esperanza."

I can hear the tears in her voice, tears still readily available for a little girl she knew more than thirty years ago.

"But we're Irish," I say, shocked by the revelation, part of me wishing I'd had the chance to be an Irish Esperanza.

"Thank you for reminding me," she says, pulling herself together. "I know that. That's why I would have called you 'Hope.'"

"Oh," I said, just a little disappointed.

And then she adds dreamily, "If you were a boy, I wanted to call you Julian."

"Seriously?"

"I also thought about Chevonne."

"Oh NO. Really?"

"Yes. Really. It's Gaelic and I liked that."

"Huh. But instead you ended up with Jill?" I asked, still in a bit of shock. Those names!

"Well, yes," she sighed, "It just seemed so practical."

And you know maybe she's right. Jill is a definitively practical name. Easy to spell, easy to say, and with an economy of letters, for sure. But there's something I've failed to mention, something she swears she didn't think of until after the certificate was signed. Both her father and mine are named Jack.