C
oming home from school that dark winter’s day so long ago, I was filled with anticipation. I had a new issue of my favorite sports magazine tucked under my arm and the house to myself. Dad was at work, my sister was away, and Mother wouldn’t be home from her new job for an hour. I bounded up the steps, burst into the living room and flipped on a light.
I was shocked into stillness by what I saw. Mother pulled into a tight ball, with her face in her hands, sat at the far end of the couch. She was crying. I had never seen her cry.
I approached cautiously and touched her shoulder. “Mother?” I asked. “What’s happened?”
She took a long breath and managed a weak smile. “It’s nothing, really. Nothing important. Just that I’m going to lose this new job. I can’t type fast enough.”
“But you’ve only been there three days,” I said. “You’ll catch on.” I repeated a line she had spoken to me a hundred times when I was having trouble learning or doing something important to me.
“No,” she said sadly. “There’s no time for that. I can’t carry my end of the load. I’m making everyone in the office work twice as hard.”
“They’re just giving you too much work,” I said, hoping to find injustice where she saw failure. She was too honest to accept that.
“I always said I could do anything I set my mind to,” she said, “and I still think I can in most things. But I can’t do this.”
I felt helpless and out of place. At age sixteen I still assumed Mother could do anything. Some years before, when we sold our ranch and moved to town, Mother had decided to open a day nursery. She had no training, but that didn’t stand in her way. She sent away for correspondence courses in child care, did the lessons and in six months formally qualified herself for the task. It wasn’t long before she had a full enrollment and a waiting list. Parents praised her, and the children proved by their reluctance to leave in the afternoon that she had won their affection. I accepted all this as a perfectly normal instance of Mother’s ability.
But neither the nursery nor the motel my parents bought later had provided enough income to send my sister and me to college. I was a high-school sophomore when we sold the motel. In two years, I would be ready for college. In three more, my sister would want to go. Time was running out, and Mother was frantic for ways to save money. It was clear that Dad could do no more than he was doing already - farming eighty acres in addition to holding a full-time job.
Like many kids of sixteen, I wanted my parents’ time and attention, but it never occurred to me that they might have needs and problems of their own. In fact, I understood nothing of their lives because I looked only at my own.
A few months after we’d sold the motel, Mother arrived home with a used typewriter. It skipped between certain letters and the keyboard was soft. At dinner that night I pronounced the machine a “piece of junk.”
“That’s all we can afford,” Mother said. “It’s good enough to learn on.” And from that day on, as soon as the table was cleared and the dishes were done, Mother disappeared into her sewing room to practice. The slow tap, tap, tap went on some nights until midnight.
It was nearly Christmas when I heard her tell Dad one night that a good job was available at the radio station. “It would be such interesting work,” she said. “But this typing isn’t coming along very fast.”
“If you want the job, go ask for it,” Dad encouraged her.
I was not the least bit surprised, or impressed, when Mother got the job. But she was ecstatic.
Monday, after her first day at work, I could see that the excitement was gone. Mother looked tired and drawn. I responded by ignoring her.
Tuesday, Dad made dinner and cleaned the kitchen. Mother stayed in her sewing room, practicing. “Is Mother all right?” I asked Dad.
“She’s having a little trouble with her typing,” he said. “She needs to practice. I think she’d appreciate it if we all helped out a bit more.”
“I already do,” I said, immediately on guard.
“I know you do,” Dad said evenly. “And you may have to do more. You might just remember that she is working primarily so you can go to college.”
I honestly didn’t care. In a pique, I called a friend and went out to get a soda. When I came home the house was dark, except for the band of light showing under Mother’s door. It seemed to me that her typing had gotten even slower. I wished she would just forget the whole thing.
My shock and embarrassment at finding Mother in tears on Wednesday was a perfect index of how little I understood the pressures on her. Sitting beside her on the couch, I began very slowly to understand.
“I guess we all have to fail sometime,” Mother said quietly. I could sense her pain and the tension of holding back the strong emotions that were interrupted by my arrival. Suddenly, something inside me turned. I reached out and put my arms around her.
She broke then. She put her face against my shoulder and sobbed. I held her close and didn’t try to talk. I knew I was doing what I should, what I could and that it was enough. In that moment, feeling Mother’s back racked with emotion, I understood for the first time her vulnerability. She was still my mother, but she was something more: a person like me, capable of fear and hurt and failure. I could feel her pain as she must have felt mine on a thousand occasions when I had sought comfort in her arms.
Then it was over. Wiping away the tears, Mother stood and faced me. “Well, Son, I may be a slow typist, but I’m not a parasite and I won’t keep a job I can’t do. I’m going to ask tomorrow if I can finish out the week. Then I’ll resign.”
And that’s what she did. Her boss was sorry about her. They parted with mutual respect, he offering a week’s pay and she refusing it. A week later Mother took a job selling dry goods at half the salary the radio station had offered. “It’s a job I can do,” she said simply. But the evening practice sessions on the old green typewriter continued. I had a very different feeling now when I passed her door at night and heard her tapping away. I knew there was something more going on in there than a woman learning to type.
When I left for college two years later, Mother had an office job with better pay and more responsibility. I have to believe that in some strange way she learned as much from her moment of defeat as I did, because several years later, when I finished school and proudly accepted a job as a newspaper reporter, she had already been a reporter with our hometown paper for six months.
Mother and I never spoke again about the afternoon when she broke down. But more than once, when I failed on a first attempt and was tempted by pride or frustration to scrap something I truly wanted, I remember the time while she learned to type. In seeing her weakness, I had not only learned to appreciate her strengths, I had discovered some of my own.
Not long ago, I helped Mother celebrate her sixty-second birthday. I made dinner for my parents and cleaned up the kitchen afterward. Mother came in to visit while I worked, and I was reminded of the day years before when she had come home with that terrible old typewriter. “By the way,” I said, “whatever happened to that monster typewriter?”
“Oh, I still have it,” she said. “It’s a memento, you know... of the day you realized your mother was human. Things are a lot easier when people know you’re human.”
I had never guessed that she saw what happened to me that day. I laughed at myself. “Someday,” I said, “I wish you would give me that machine.”
“I will,” she said, “but on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“That you never have it fixed. It is nearly impossible to type on that machine, and that’s the way it served this family best.”
I smiled at the thought. “And another thing,” she said. “Never put off hugging someone when you feel like it. You may miss the chance forever.”
I put my arms around her and hugged her and felt a deep gratitude for that moment, for all the moments of joy she had given me over the years. “Happy birthday!” I said.
The old green typewriter sits in my office now, unrepaired. It is a memento, but what it recalls for me is not quite what it recalled for Mother. When I’m having trouble with a story and think about giving up, or when I start to feel sorry for myself and think things should be easier for me, I roll a piece of paper into that cranky old machine and type, word by painful word, just the way Mother did. What I remember then is not her failure, but her courage, the courage to go ahead.
It’s the best memento I’ve had.
- Gerald Moore