She worked long hours teaching. She trekked back and forth to Madison and to Oshkosh to take courses and earn credits that would keep her critical teaching accreditation intact. Taking a page from Trudy’s book, she pinched pennies so that she could take us to the movies on weekends or to the opera in Madison at Christmastime. And each night, she dutifully stayed up late, packing school lunches for us for the next day, filling out permission slips, looking over our homework.
“Aren’t you coming to bed?” I’d ask, finding her still up on those nights when I arose after midnight in search of a cup of water or an extra blanket for my bed.
“Don’t worry about me,” she’d always answer. “I’ll sleep later.”
In taking on that beast otherwise known as single motherhood, she left nothing on the table for herself. I often think of my mother when they make the announcement at the beginning of a flight that, in the event of an unexpected loss in cabin pressure, parents should secure their own oxygen masks before securing the masks of their children. My mother never would have abided by that. She would have been one to smile politely before ignoring the rule—reaching first to save my brother and me and then, even after our masks were secure, only taking a sip of oxygen here and there from her own mask, worrying that by taking even a bit for herself, she might be taking something important away from her children. At every turn, our needs and wants trumped hers, even if it meant growing blue in the face.
When a pair of once-close childhood friends turned mean in seventh grade, ostracizing me from certain parties and conversations, she was there for me at every turn, doling out post-dinner pieces of apple pie and sage words of wisdom: “Why would you want to be friends with people who don’t want to be friends with you? The problem, sweetheart, is that they see the world in different colors than you do.”
“Different colors?” I asked.
“Different colors. This family setup of ours has made you learn to see the world in shades of gray. Those so-called friends you’re missing see it only in black and white. Things are good or things are bad. Someone’s cool or someone’s not. For them, there’s no in-between right now because the in-between suggests life is more complicated than they may want to deal with right now. Trust me on this one, sweetheart: stick with those who understand life is all gray and that most of us are, too. The people who see the gray are more fun anyway.”
When I told her about ideas I had for short stories and plays, she was encouraging.
“Don’t just talk about your ideas!” she enthused. “Make them happen!”
When I won my first citywide writing contest—earning first place for a short story I wrote in the seventh grade—there was no one who seemed less surprised than my mother.
“I told you that was a good story,” my mother said when the local paper published it. “You have a real gift with words. Don’t waste it.”
Anne Diener Pflum was not her mother’s idea of a mother. She was the mother she’d always wanted for herself: encouraging, supportive, warm. Just like her beloved Marmie in Little Women.
At no time was her support more evident than when, at the age of thirteen, I underwent spinal surgery to address a severe case of scoliosis. During my two-week hospital stay, my mother was my constant companion. She talked to me and sang me lullabies in the dark of night, the ones Trudy had once sung to her and that she in turn had sung to me when I was a baby. Along with the team of physical therapists, she helped me learn to walk again. And she listened—really listened—when I cried.
“Why does it have to hurt so much?” I asked one miserable night midway through my stay. The doctors had moved me from the ICU to a regular room and were trying to transition me to a less-potent level of pain medication. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t even breathe without recoiling in excruciating pain.
“That’s the age-old question,” my mother said. She said it in a tone that suggested she was thinking—really thinking—about my query.
“Many writers and theologians believe great pain is God’s way of helping us to appreciate great joy,” she said. “That moments like these will open you up to ever greater happiness down the road.”
I thought about her words for a minute, then wrinkled my nose. At thirteen, I didn’t care what theologians thought.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I think it’s a bunch of hooey,” she said, flashing a weary smile. “I’ve always thought that whole business of ‘that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ stuff is a cop-out that people who have nothing better to say or have never had anything really terrible happen whip out to make themselves feel better. The fact is there’s too much suffering in the world—but—”
“But?”
“But then I look at you and your brother. My path to both of you was paved with suffering. And since you two are the greatest source of happiness for me, maybe there’s some truth to the theory after all.”
My mother best summed up her philosophy of parenthood the fall I was assigned to read The Scarlet Letter in a high school literature class. I adored the book and hung on Hawthorne’s every sentence. But I was caught off guard by the ending.
“It just wasn’t fair,” I said to my mother one night over dinner.
“Which part?” my mother asked.
“All of it,” I said. “But especially the end.”
“How so?” my mother asked, intrigued. “The ending was my favorite part.”
“But it ends with Hester Prynne all alone,” I said of the lead character, one of literature’s original single mothers. “Pearl leaves her.”
“No,” said my mother, shaking her head. “Don’t you remember? It’s made clear Pearl married well and had gone on to have a family of her own.”
“But Pearl moved far away from her mother,” I said, pained at the thought that the woman who had been so publicly shunned for an illicit love affair would go on to be left alone by her only child.
“Don’t you see?” asked my mother. “The greatest sadness for Hester Prynne or for any good mother would be to know her child was leading an unhappy life, even if that unhappy life meant Hester Prynne wouldn’t have had to live alone. And the greatest happiness for any mother is to know her children are happy and fulfilling their dreams. And maybe even fulfilling a few of their mother’s dreams, too, along the way.
“Pearl was living the life Hester had always dreamed of for Pearl and had once dreamed of for herself. She found a good husband and made a life for herself. Hester was thrilled with that.”
I shook my head, disagreeing.
“But she was alone.”
“She was happy in Pearl’s happiness,” my mother countered. “You don’t have to agree with me now. But someday, maybe when you’re a mother, you’ll understand.”
For my mother, doling out wisdom at critical times was not the problem. The problem was those other moments—the quiet times after dinner, the long drives to and from work. Those were the moments when she was at her loneliest. And those moments are what ultimately undid her. She felt as if she had no one. No grown-ups, anyway. Divorce in Beaver Dam in the early 1980s was very much taboo. The friends she’d made upon moving to Beaver Dam, the ones with whom she and my father double-dated, stopped calling after my parents split up. Neighbors—all couples—didn’t include her in their progressive dinners. They skipped our house entirely. Worst of all, even Father Vincent turned his back on her. When he learned that my mother had been accepting of my father’s request for a divorce—instead of being more steadfast in insisting upon remaining married, as per the mandates of the Catholic Church—he wrote her a stern letter, lecturing her on the sanctity of marriage and expressing his disappointment in her. My mother was devastated.
Upon learning of the letter, my father asked, “So do you plan to write him back?”
M
y mother shook her head sadly. “I don’t think I’ll be hearing from him again.”
At her lowest points, my mother cried, sometimes unable to stop the sobs in the hours that stretched between dinner and bedtime. My brother and I would look at each other helplessly. Bouts of insomnia took hold. Soon after the divorce, my mother moved out of the master bedroom that she had shared with my father and began to bed down in various places throughout the house during the few hours in which she slept. For a while, she slept in the living room, falling asleep in an old recliner or on the couch while watching late-night TV. Sometimes she slept on a tired old couch in the basement after staying up late to do her favorite chore—ironing. After she put my brother and me to bed, she spent hours making smooth the wrinkles on our shirts and dresses. “Don’t you wish life were as easy as a wrinkled shirt? That you could just smooth out all of the problems with an electric iron?” she used to ask before laughing at the thought.
When she was done with her stack of wrinkled shirts, she’d retreat to the three-seater couch whose fluorescent cushions were so worn and tattered that the stuffing was falling out.
Eventually, after two years of bedding down in the basement, my mother set up shop in the guest room—a bright-green-hued room kitty-corner from my room that housed a pair of twin beds. My brother and I often asked her when she would return to the master bedroom.
“This isn’t your bedroom,” I gently reminded her one day as she exited the guest room she’d overtaken. “Your room is down the hall.”
“I’m staying here for now,” my mother said.
“But what about your room?” I protested.
“This is my room now,” she said of the guest room.
“But what about your other room?” I said pointing in the direction of the master bedroom. “Your real room?”
“That room needs some work. Let’s give it a break for a while. Don’t worry about me.”
But I did worry, watching as her weight fluctuated—dropping back down to her wedding-day weight in the months surrounding the divorce, then ballooning way up to the plus sizes—18, 20, 22—she would wear for the remainder of her life. Her once-brown hair began to turn silver under the stress. Sometimes, when she had the money or the energy, she bought Nice ’n Easy to cover the gray. But when she was down, she let her hair go.
And just as she began to let her physical appearance go, she also increasingly let the house go. Our house had two phases that I can recall. There was phase one, when my father was home and the house was almost always neat and clean. In hopes of keeping my father happy—or at least to keep him coming home—the windows gleamed. Floors were spotless. Countertops were clear. And mail was opened regularly.
Then came phase two. After my father left, the countertops became littered with debris—school projects, leftover paper plates, a spare set of gloves, a discarded pet leash. Then a little became a lot. The living room became a glorified playroom in one section, with my sticker collections and my brother’s Legos and our various books and bags and school projects that had come home to die. In another corner of the living room stood the mountain of newspapers my mother loved to read at night but hesitated to throw away. Like her mother, Anne Diener Pflum read three, even four newspapers a day: the local paper, the Wisconsin State Journal, the Milwaukee Journal, and USA Today. The papers were forever littered around her favorite recliner, never making their way to the garbage can. Sometimes, she explained, the stack grew so high because she wanted to save a coupon from this paper, an article from that. Other times, it was because she hadn’t seemed to find the energy to straighten up.
By the time I was ten and it became obvious that things weren’t going to change, I tried to wage my own war on the mess. After getting off the school bus, in the two hours before my mother arrived home from work, I used my time in the empty house to try to straighten up. I folded comforters that had been left out in the living room by my mother, who used the large blankets to combat the freezing-cold conditions of the house. I put all the newspapers and magazines I could find into one stack and threw away the oldest ones, which I prayed my mother wouldn’t miss. I washed dishes piled in the sink and around the counter. I used the hand vacuum to suck up the fuzzies I found on the stairs. I mopped up the remnants of Blackie’s hair balls my mother seemed to have overlooked. I applied Windex to the windows and Pledge to the end tables until the cleaning supplies ran out. But the mess was overwhelming. And by the next afternoon, it was back—oftentimes greater than the one I’d come home to the day before.
Contributing mightily to the mess: the mail. It was curiously piled up in stacks around the house, generally unopened. I grew used to my mother’s moving the stacks from place to place before eventually putting a few piles into a big brown paper grocery bag that would sit untouched until tax time or until she realized she desperately needed an envelope from her father—who, I would later discover, was sending us monthly checks to help pay the bills.
Al and Aurelia Diener knew little of how bad things were getting in Beaver Dam. With Aurelia’s health continuing to deteriorate, my grandparents were less and less able to travel great distances. Visits to Wisconsin stopped. They instead relied on my mother to make the drive to see them at the Pine Patch two or three times a year. During our visits, they learned only the specifics of my mother’s life that she chose to share. They knew, of course, of her hospitalizations. They knew about her ongoing visits to a local psychiatrist. But my mother filled most of the conversations with her parents with news of what my brother and I were doing in school, how we were growing, what had struck her about the priest’s sermon at Mass. There was no need, my mother believed, to worry her parents with tales of our freezing house or her growing inability to find things in the mountains of junk. As far as they were concerned, she had things under relative control.
Her siblings remained similarly in the dark. With Patty and Mimi and Kathy and Mike and Al spread out all over the nation, it was easy for my mother to lead them to believe all was well in Beaver Dam. Only my aunt Kathy, who flew out to visit my mother in the summer of 1986, had any idea how messy the house was becoming. For several days during her visit, she worked to help my mother clean out the master bedroom. But in the heat of summer in our un-air-conditioned house, the mountains of junk became too much.
“Kathy, sweetheart, you’re sweet to want to help,” I remember my mother telling my aunt the second-to-last afternoon of the visit. “But I’d rather spend this time just visiting with you, instead of cleaning. I’ll clean up another day, after you leave. I promise.”
That day never came.
Just as mail sometimes went untouched for weeks on end, so too did broken appliances. The big avocado-colored dishwasher that my father had given to my mother on Mother’s Day when I was five broke sometime before my eleventh birthday. But it didn’t just break for a brief spell before being repaired. Instead, it remained broken and unused for the rest of my childhood. Later, the oven would break, then not one, but two televisions, then the massive Lipton microwave. Each time, the items would sit unused, unfixed, unmoved. My brother and I would ask about replacing the items, and in the case of at least one of the televisions, we eventually did. But the dishwasher and microwave remained broken fixtures, and the kitchen began to take on the feel of a used-appliance museum.
Increasingly, we dined out. Since money was tight, the options were few: fast-food restaurants that featured “specials” and inexpensive family restaurants, notably a local coffee shop called Walker’s, which seemed to run a mysterious tab for my mother. We often had sporting events or music practice or play rehearsals after school. Eating out, my mother reasoned, enabled us to visit with one another without having to worry about any dishes or cleanup or the stress of executing an actual meal.
My mother’s culinary skills were extremely limited. She had five meals in her arsenal: pork chops, spaghetti
with meat sauce, hamburgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, and my favorite—a hot dog casserole that consisted of hot dogs, bread crumbs, green beans, and copious amounts of Worcestershire sauce. But after the divorce and the hospitalizations, the idea of cooking became too much for her most nights. Maybe she had finally caved under the pressure of knowing she would never measure up to the homemaking skills of my father’s mother, who was known around the county for her to-die-for fried chicken, which she could effortlessly whip up at a moment’s notice.
As a child, I knew the piles that littered our home weren’t the norm. I would go to friends’ houses and see how everything had a place. My friend Kim’s house was one of those houses. In addition to a super-neat family room and an ultra-spotless kitchen, her house had an extraordinarily formal living room that went weeks without being used and looked like something out of a museum. After a playdate with Kim, I would return to our messy house, stunned by the contrast. The funny thing was that my mother didn’t seem to really notice the mess. Instead of being bothered by the heaps, she would gamely step around them, as if they were invisible.
“Mom, why can’t we have a house where we can walk through the living room?” I asked one evening on our drive home after a dinner out at McDonald’s.
“What do you mean?” she said, her grip tightening around the steering wheel.
“Our living room—it’s a mess,” I said. “We never even vacuum.”
“Our vacuum cleaner is broken,” she said defensively. “You know that.”
“Then why don’t we get a new one?”
“Because we don’t have the money.”
I paused.
“Okay—maybe we could borrow one?”
I watched her face for a reaction. There was none.
“I guess I’m saying it would be nice to have a living room like other people do, where we could have people over to visit us. You know, a living room like Kim’s.”
“Other people have living rooms that they don’t actually live in,” my mother said, pursing her lips. “They’re just there for show. We actually live in our living room. Consider that.”
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