Pop! Slide! Squish! How I Tortured My Mother with Flowers
In memory of Florence May Perkins
1922 – 2008
As Mother’s Day approaches, I find myself thinking about my mother, Florence, who died this time last year at the age of 86. Mom had spent her later years living quietly alone, doing crossword puzzles and reading the Bible, and once or twice a week making her way across the street to go to church. Having spent many busy and chaotic years raising nine children, she cherished the long hours of quiet and solitude that her circumscribed life provided.
That irritated the heck out of me. Not that she had the peace and quiet she craved – I need that for myself, too –but that she was satisfied with a world that had shrunk so small. Mom had been my first teacher. It was through her eyes that I first began the curious search of the world around me that led me thousands of miles from home and light years away from my beginnings. If my own world was still expanding to fit my hopes and dreams, how could her tiny apartment, a pencil, and a puzzle possibly be enough for her?
So I pushed her. I gave her books and games and music and movies that she never read, opened, listened to or watched. I bugged her to go out, go to the library, call people. Still, she sat in her chair, hour after hour, day after day, contentedly working out the answers to 7 downs and 26 acrosses.
Finally, in what felt like a desperate attempt to push my mother to act like the person I knew was hiding inside her, I made her do a craft project with me. Yes, that’s right. I forced my elderly mother to make tissue paper flowers.
You have to understand, my mother never admitted to needing anything, would never let on she wanted anything, and would barely tell you if she liked something. If you asked her what she wanted to eat, she would shrug and say “Food’s food.” If you asked her what kind of flowers she liked, she’d say, “It doesn’t matter.” If you asked, shall I open the window? Her response would be, “Yeah, OK, I guess.” Now that I think about it, those responses left us needing to fill-in-the-blanks much like a tricky crossword puzzle – only without the clues.
As a kid, I was indefatigably curious and bursting with strong opinions. It came as something of a surprise for me to discover – directly from my mother– that those characteristics drove her crazy. Because I knew in my heart of hearts that I was her favorite, I became convinced that she secretly found me delightful, and that somewhere inside, she was just like me.
So, years later, there I sat, torturing Mom into making tissue paper flowers with me. It wasn’t easy. She grumbled when I showed her how to position a bead on the end of a pipe cleaner, and grimaced when I suggested she choose her favorite colors from the piles of tissue paper cut into circles, stars and sunbursts. She finally got the hang of pop! popping the stem through a round of paper, slide! sliding it down to the bead, and squish! crumpling it, adding more tissue one piece at a time so that later it could be teased open into a blossom.. “There, you happy?” she said, as she finished her first flower. “Make another one,” I replied, and honestly, there was a part of me that expected her to finally come alive and say “Oh, this is so much fun! They’re beautiful!” All she gave me was an irritated a little shrug.
But I knew she’d had a good time. I knew it! She might not have said so, but the next time I visited there was a full bouquet of paper flowers in a little vase on her windowsill. They were still there, bright and cheery, months later when she started to fail.
After her funeral, we started packing up Mom’s things. I picked up the little vase of flowers and looked at the red and yellow poppies, the blue carnations, and the pink star flowers we had made. I hoped that they had actually given Mom the joy I had imagined for her. At the very least, they were symbols of the two of us– two alien life forms– sitting together at the kitchen table trying to connect in some small way, creating something beautiful.
Posted in Uncategorized