Yogamama Says
Fixing Mother
By Kathleen Thompson

All my life, as far back as I can remember, I wanted to fix my mother. I wanted to “clean up her act.”

In my childhood fantasy, I saw myself tippy-toeing down to the kitchen in the middle of the night and doing all the dishes in hot, soapy water. I would dry them with a terry towel and put them away.  I would then scour the countertops, remove months of built-up grease from the stove top, and polish the chrome kettle until it gleamed. After sweeping and mopping the floor, I would then creep back to bed and wait for morning, as excited as a kid on Christmas Eve.

In my fantasy, my mother would awaken the next morning with her usual hangover, coughing her two-pack-a-day cough, and stagger to the kitchen expecting to encounter the usual month’s accumulation of moldy food stuck to melamine plates, curdled liquids in half-filled coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays, and a vast array of empty tonic bottles. 

In my fantasy, she would reel back in amazement to see the empty sink, the pristine countertops, the gleaming kettle. And then, in a moment of pure awakening, my mother would see at last, a new way of being, a new possibility for how to live. It would be, anachronistically, a moment of “shock and awe.”

She would then (in my fantasy) ask me to show her how in the world I had worked this miracle. And I would. And after the kitchen, we would have the vacuuming lesson in which I would sit her down and explain the intricacies of bag replacement, and the marvels of the retractable cord. In my dream, my nine-year-old self would watch proudly as my mother squired the Kirby canister through the network of rooms that was our Levittown ranch home.

We would then move on to the yard, where I would show her how to prime and start the lawnmower and how to wield a trowel. Side by side, mother and daughter, we would plant a border of petunias and marigolds in the front yard.

After my mother died, I had a lot to do: see lawyers, pay bills, and make calls—the usual “executrix of the will” stuff, the obligatory “dutiful daughter” stuff, onerous, burdensome tasks that only fueled my tendency to procrastinate. 

Instead, I cleaned. I scraped moldy food from plates, and gagged as curdled andreeking stuff slurped down the drain. I filled two black garbage bags with tonic bottles and another two with Vodka bottles. It took me three days of non-stop scouring to make the kitchen somewhat decent.

The old Kirby canister, an antique by now, was still in mint condition in the closet, as if it had never been used. The old lawnmower rested rusting in the garage, and still no flowers grew.

All my life, as far back as I can remember, I wanted to fix my mother. I wanted to clean up her act.  The day I sold my childhood home, I walked one last time through the empty rooms, denuded of furniture and dishes and vacuums and lawnmowers. The realtor had hired a lawn service to clean up the yard.

I realized that day that only death could fix my mother. The only thing I could do was clean her house.

Kathleen Thompson is the owner of Main Street Yoga in Mansfield, Pennsylvania. To contact her call (570) 660-5873 or online www.yogamansfield.com or e-mail Yogamama@mountainhomemag.com.