My close relationship with my mother began at birth. While this statement may seem obvious, I’m referring to the fact that Mom went into labor on Mother’s Day (I was actually born around 8am the next morning). All families have their legends and as the story goes, I came into this world with a series of deadly tornados. Hmmm… why couldn’t it have been like Mark Twain coming into the world with Halley’s Comet? Everybody loves comets! (Unless of course they crash into the earth and cause mass destruction. As for tornados, that’s what they do.) Back then, new mothers weren’t kicked out of the hospital as they are now. Mom had the luxury of taking it easy for a few days while my father and grandmother took care of my two year-old brother at home. Until recent years, that was the week of one of the most volitile tornado outbreaks in Midwest history . As it turns out, my homecoming day was the day all Hell broke loose. Fifty seven strong tornados roared in over a three day rampage, culminating in the deadliest of all that hit Ruskin Heights (a small town South of Kansas City) on May 20th, 1957.
Mom had vivid recall of sheltering me in her arms that night, huddled in the basement of their first house as the lights flickered on and off. She listened to the casualty reports on the radio and the ambulances in the distance. Mom used to say that she went from feeling: “How cool to have a baby for my Mother’s Day gift!” to “How can I be bringing home a baby in the midst of all this chaos”?
If one were to think of the grey matter in their brain as a search engine, typing in those key words of “May, Mother’s Day, My Birthday, Monster Tornados, Memorial Day”, always pull up the same memories for us. Somehow they are all intertwined as they were passed from one generation to the next. They became my memories before I even remember having any. I was lucky enough to have never really experienced the devastation of a tornado first hand, despite my Midwestern roots. In fact, the worst thing a tornado ever did to me was frequently cancel birthday parties due to a “severe weather watch”. Once I even sat up on our next door neighbor’s balcony, scanning the ominous sky on a still, humid day in May. I was waiting for something to happen… to say I’d seen one. As a junior in high school (knowing I was about to be relocated to New York), I felt a strange urge to face down one of those demons that dominated my childhood nightmares. It was a frightening and mesmerizing thought. As if I could see one, without getting too close, I would be liberated from years of eerie recurring dreams.
In 2011, I was sitting at the kitchen table feeding Mom dinner and I’ve saw her eyes grow wide and her hands clench when reporters on the evening news were covering the Joplin Missouri tornado tragedy. I guess those images trigger strong emotions, even when the brain is ravaged by Alzheimer’s.
So as the month of May comes to a close , so does what I think of as “The Mother’s Day Season”( an incongruous thought association that the two of us always shared) and I breath an irrational sigh of relief. Not because I feel like I was ever in any eminant danger of tornados coming to Connecticut but because the season of subliminal stress for me, for Mom, has finally passed.
