Across the creek that runs along the banks in back of our house, there’s another house. Down a long driveway that threads through trees, it sits nearly atop a waterfall. My view of the waterfall isn’t nearly as wonderful from where our house is situated. I can hear the roar of the creek from my bedroom after heavy rains occupy the space between the banks and spill over the falls but I have to stand at the very edge of the bathroom window to see a glimpse of the pounding flow.
Our backyard is tiered into the banks of the creek. Rickety stairs that need replaced lead down to the levels but never quite reach the water. My children play among the trees, building forts from fallen branches and wind-blown objects. In warm weather, we venture down to the water to catch crayfish, swim and take surging showers beneath the falls.
On the opposite banks, our creek-neighbors can sometimes be seen, sitting in lawn chairs beside their house atop the falls.We wave but we aren’t close neighbors. I know of them ,rather than know them. The husband is well-known in our area as being an activist. Growing up, I heard my very conservative Grandfather refer to this man as “That crazy bastard” , just because the man was always getting arrested for protesting outside the nearest military base or for his public displays of protest as he walked through our village.
Last month, the matriarch of the house at the falls died. I knew of it in passing. In the library,the woman who knits all those blankets for Project Linus was talking to the woman who walks all those dogs everyday . I searched book spines on the shelves while they spoke behind me, carrying on their conversations dotted with ,”Well, it really was a blessings. She’s been hanging on for so long” and “It really was a beautiful service, wasn’t it?” I took interest, if only because I knew that one thing in my life this coming summer would be absent – the woman overlooking the falls and the creek as we played below in it’s waters.
Yesterday I came across her obituary in an older newspaper that hadn’t made it’s way to the recycle bin yet. I read it to myself and declared ,”This is the best obituary I have ever read in my life”. I commandeered my husband’s attention away from the game he was playing and read it out loud. Nearly a nun, this woman chose instead a path that included babies and a house at the top of a waterfall. By our societal measures, she didn’t do anything extraordinary. No stellar education and framed degrees. No successful career. No landmark discoveries or contributions to a field of study.She was merely “heroic in motherhood”.
I remember clearly a day from my early motherhood. I was still chronologically a teenager and a high school student, recently accepted to Tisch School of the Arts at NYU . A group of female friends and I were talking about that time period “after school”, that had yet to be and couldn’t happen soon enough from my perspective. I said,”I don’t really know what I’m going to do. I honestly just want to stay home and be a mom.” The reaction was horrified gasps. I was told by friends, female but not yet mothers, that this would be a waste of a person. “You’re too talented and smart for that, ” stated one friend, as if that was to be my defining moment that would save me from the enslavement of “just” being a mother.
I saw the disappointment and the looking down upon me as I closed the door on one opportunity and chose to be what I honestly wanted to be. They are all mothers now,too. I wonder if they too look back on that day and realize now where I was speaking from and why I never saw the lending of my talent,intelligence and time as ill-invested waste when it came to raising little babies to become good people. I’ve been careful to not lose my own identity in my mothering and not to be defined by it but it is what I am, along with all the other things.
I read my neighbor’s obituary and saw it as being a testament to the idea that being a success in life does not depend upon being anything other than “just a mother”. Am I more than just a mother? Of course I am but if I die and my greatest achievement in life is that my grandchildren remember fondly “her silky braided hair, back rubs, and being rocked to sleep as she hummed their favorite lullaby. Apple slices, pancakes shaped like bears, and the best PB&J sandwiches in the world, only begin the list.”….I think I’ll die a happy and successful woman. If I end up doing more than that…well…the rest is just gravy.
The house at the top of the falls is now for sale. You have no idea how much I want that to be our home now.
[title from:"Not To Touch The Earth", by The Doors]
She was just the handiest at the moment.
