Motherless Daughter
I’ve been watching a lot of Grace & Frankie and relating to the show on many levels. One thing that has struck me is how much Frankie (Lily Tomlin’s character) reminds me of my mom, Carla. The outrageous clothes, the free spirit-ness, anti-establishment ethos, loose and rambling logic and wild anecdotes was my mom at her best.
“She had such a vivid imagination and I miss that so much. ”
I think now of how much movement was always in her, more mental than physical, a great charge of, “This will not do!” coursing through her veins from dawn to dusk. How she sat at the kitchen table talking on the telephone, her hands scribbling notes, or gesturing into the air about some outrage or ridiculous act.
My Mom Died and I Miss Her
A quick resume of her life: She wrote two screenplays, had a phone number for Teddy Pendergrass in her address book, nearly took down Toys R Us for false advertising when they claimed to have Cabbage Patch Dolls, ran a TV newsroom as a producer before she was 25, worked on the Ford assembly line to save up money to go Europe when she was 18, invited the Gap band to her 50th birthday, convinced the wall street journal food writer to come to Detroit when she didn’t agree with his assessment of the country’s best hot dog, convinced my dad and Papaw to transport 50 pounds of dirt from a holy site in Israel to sell to religious collectors, wrote a book called The Dickhead Dictionary, was hit on my Tony Bennett at her gym. The list is too long for one life.
She had such a vivid imagination and I miss that so much. We could spend hours on the phone coming up with different scenarios and narratives for this or that. Metaphor and simile were her milieu. If I have a quick wit, it’s because she sharpened it every day.
Always filled with kooky ideas and schemes, some brilliant, others ridiculous. She was a young and fun mom. On her way to the TV station, early in the morning, earlier than I was awake, she would make me a lunch. I can’t quite recall what was inside, no doubt a sandwich with the crust cut off, but what I remember is the colorful lunch bags, covered in stickers would be waiting for me on the coffee table when I woke up to watch Sesame Street while my dad slept in from his late night at the warehouse.
One of my happiest memories is a trip to Wyoming we took when I was probably four or five. My dad was working for my Papaw who was a geologist. So, my mom took off time from work and we all flew out together. I have a distinct memory of all of us in my grandfather’s Bronco (it was always a Bronco in the ‘80s) and Diana Ross’s song “Inside Out,” came on the radio. I had this little bear puppet we had probably bought at a gift shop on the road, and my mom took it and turned it inside out and had it lip synching the lyrics. I thought it was the most brilliant, funny thing I had ever seen. Sandwiched between my mom and dad, my Papaw driving, my grandma in the front seat—the warmth of all my people that close to me felt amazing. My mom worked odd hours in the news room and once my dad started traveling with my grandfather, it was just the two of us, rarely the three of us.
Later, on that same trip, my mom drove my grandmother and I through a nature preserve to see the buffalo. The rental car place failed to tell her that driving a stick shift in high altitudes you should never turn the engine off and park. Well, she did, to take a photo of something, and when we got back in the car, we found ourselves stranded on a very steep and windy road. I was convinced the sleeping buffalo would wake up and trample us to death. My grandmother normally a consummate worrier was surprisingly calm because my mom acted like she had it handled. She flagged down a trucker, he gave us a jump or drove us back down to civilization.
People always asked me if I was lonely as an only child, and I never was because my parents were completely devoted to me and allowed me to dream bigger than what was in front of me. For someone who could be cynical, she believed just about anything was possible. How people were connected mattered. It was useless to apply logic to her thoughts, because then the bubble would burst and we would be back to our mundane lives.
She always loved the stars and the moon, the idea of space travel—on July 20, 1969, she was 15 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, a moment that resonated with her, such an unbelievable feat on her own birthday. She has felt so close to me the last couple of weeks, as the moon moved to fullness and the photos of galaxies from we have never seen before were revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope. Some of the photos looked like distant party lights to me, beckoning us to dream, to go further, to wonder at what might be out there.
She was a Cancer, a water sign—defined by big ideas. I’m a Taurus, an earth sign, grounded, “the doer.” My lack of interest in space travel and discovery shocked her. I am more of the here and now, what’s in front of us. That’s not to say I don’t love looking at the stars or being stunned by the beauty of the moon, but I just don’t have that same wonder. Some of it may be because when I was 10, I watched with millions of other school children, as the space shuttle Challenger exploded with seven astronauts inside, including Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space. Even as it came apart like a decapitated centipede, I still hoped maybe they would survive as each portion of the ship became smoke and one with the air.
“’Cause the Voyager’s in every boy and girl. If you want to get to heaven, get out of this world. You’re the Voyager”
When she went into the hospital last January, things unraveled quickly. Each day the prognosis was worse. I was driving back to Michigan, listening to a random shuffle of songs and “Voyager,” by Jenny Lewis came on. I’d never heard it before, but the chorus is this: “’Cause the Voyager’s in every boy and girl. If you want to get to heaven, get out of this world. You’re the Voyager”
The song hit me like a ton of bricks and I choked back sobs as I tried to not steer my car adrift on 495 outside of DC, because in my heart, I knew she was already gone, that her soul had left the building.
I think of space and galaxies and the heavens differently now—as the balance of existence is to accept the amazing and the terrible. The amazing moment of man walking on the moon alongside the tragedy of the Challenger. The amazing fact that Carla O’Neill was my mother, along with the terrible truth that she is no longer here with us.
One of my earliest memories was when she took me to the Detroit Science Center Planetarium. I was maybe five. We sat in the darkness together, leaning back in our chairs as they took us through space and the stars and I remember, at the end, The Beatles “Here Comes the Sun” started playing. It was just this small moment, a daughter with her mom traveling through space and time, but it has stuck with me, that closeness, that feeling of contentment.
I know she is still with us and I will love her forever.