The Mother of a Mommy Blogger
“She reminds me of you,” my mother leaned over and whispered as we watched the movie Morning Glory. She was right. Becky Fuller, a laid-off executive producer trying to make it to the top of her industry, did remind me of me. Only instead of a bungling, workaholic producer, I’m all that for Aspen Real Life, but fiercer.
The fierce, driven part I can attribute to my father, but the writing, and the blog, I owe to my mother. My little whimsical British mother is a voracious reader and a connoisseur of, well, mostly everything, and she has encouraged me to write ever since I was a child.
But her romantic vision of her daughter as a writer is a far cry from the reality of my life as a blogger. My obsessive tapping away at the computer puzzles her, so I decided to bring her into Aspen Real Life and let her peek through the looking glass.
Jillian
“It’s hard for you to picture your daughter as a writer when all you see is me staring into a computer screen, isn’t it? Admit it: if I were sitting at the kitchen table writing with pen and paper while the whirlwind of my life twirled around me, it would be far easier for you to accept.”
Nicky
“In my head there is too much blogging, tweeting and Facebooking, and not enough discussion about intellectual stimuli. I want you to read a great satirical article in the New York Times about it, NOW.”
Back to Jillian
I force myself to leave the madness and sit down with her to read. “Have you read this article about cleansing?” she asks in her singsong British voice, tearing it out and tossing it my way. “Oh, and here’s one about dog people,” she adds, and my face turns red. “I’M READING HERE,” I announce. This is what normal people do, isn’t it? They read together and share stories. But if I’m finally taking the chance to do what I cherish most, I’d like to actually do it… read.
I have no doubt that being my mother is like mothering a baby orangutan, the most intelligent of primates, by the way. I’m difficult, controlling and set in my ways, and it messes with me that my mother, a sort of dysfunctional Mary Poppins, makes me feel “ridiculous” for being so… uptight. I adore her, and so does everybody who meets her, unless she’s having an off day, and I try my best to embrace her wonderfulness and, as my niece would say, “keep my mouth quiet.” But that isn’t always easy for someone like me, who is not known for keeping her mouth… quiet. It’s a work in progress to laugh along when we take six kids to the chocolate shop and she buys Tucker the most indulgent four-tiered marshmallow snowman covered in white chocolate and M&M’s, and after eating it he has a seismic meltdown in the middle of the Aspen mall.
We all have a thing with our mothers, and I worry about payback time when my boys get older. I loathe it when she sweeps under my feet, and I feel like Will Ferrell in Wedding Crashers when I start expecting things from her, like dinner.
Back to Nicky
OK, she has a few good points. Not many. She is quick and I am slow. I tend to smell too many roses along the way, while her world swirls dizzyingly around her. No time for me to dreamily clean up the kitchen, all in slow motion. Slow motion in Jillian time, that is.
I cringe at the dust on the beloved furniture I happily gave to the Livingston family. I thoughtfully write my name on all the grimy surfaces.
But what a wonderful mother she is. Those three boys have the most playful and quirky mother companion. She can roughhouse with the best of them. So it’s a little chaotic at ALL mealtimes, at all bedtimes, at all times to go hiking. Three boys! Yikes.
Gorgeous, charming, slightly undisciplined and spoiled six-year-old Tucker, a force to be reckoned with: giggles and kisses and blond hair shining in the sun, plus a piercing scream when his brothers get the better of him. Quiet, beautiful, rabbit-toothed Axel, the sweetest and most thoughtful, who takes my calling him a nincompoop in good spirit when he misreads a word for the umpteenth time, and who falls asleep in two seconds as I lie next to him on his lovely big bed, Jillian’s father’s bachelor bed from seventy years ago.
Then we come to the oldest, my Brevitt. A volatile shooting star. His mother’s very funny persona. A dynamo in the house. His huge brown eyes shine with mischief, but then suddenly his head is burrowed in my lap with hugs and kisses. What a trio to deal with!
Now, don’t get me wrong. My daughter is no saint. She has NO patience with me at all and is very, very critical, then regrets it later. Maybe she sees my inevitable slowing down as a forecast of what’s to come. I feel pretty zippy, actually. She drags me on a “short walk” up and down hills, across streams and over meadows, and two and a half hours later I limp home, bedraggled and sore. That night I actually had a nightmare about being forced by her to climb a fourteener while sick with some unnamed disease. No kidding, I woke up sobbing in fright.
When it’s time to leave (the week goes so quickly), I dread the days without Jillian’s look of extreme exasperation as I make some false step in her world. I will miss those three little boys. So much love flows back and forth between us, even if Tucker isn’t yet quite sure whether to accept or reject his Grandmother Nicky. Life is never quite what we expect, or deserve.
Jillian Gets the Final Word
Now my mother has gone back home, and I get the final word. Without my mother waking me up to “smell the roses,” I would be nothing but a fleck of dust floating on a road to nowhere, unappreciative of the beauty life offers us. Growing up as an only child in England during World War II, I don’t know where she gets it, her enormous generosity and her joie de vivre, but I love her and need her desperately. So I will try even harder to flow with her and give her everything she deserves, and soon, through Aspen Real Life, so much more!
I love you, Mommy, truly, madly and ever so deeply!
