My New Year’s Wish: one more call with my Mother
Starting in high school, when I would be invited to a house party to celebrate New Year’s Eve with friends, I would call my mother just after the ball dropped. She was always awake, sitting in her recliner chair. My father would be planted nearby at the kitchen table, drinking silently, blowing cigarette smoke out of the window. She would be watching Dick Clark; was there anything else to watch on New Year’s Eve in the 1980s? I would wish her a hasty Happy New Year, and, delighted by the call, she would say “Happy New Year” in response. She might ask if I was having fun, or what time I would be home, but I don’t recall much of those brief conversations. We never ended the call saying “I love you.” We were not really a family that frequently, or ever, said those words to each other. One year, as we counted down the seconds to midnight, my friend Janet shoved a bottle of cheap champagne toward my mouth and chipped my front tooth. I remember running my tongue over the jagged edge as I dialed the rotary phone mounted on the wall in Janet’s kitchen, giggling but also worried about how I might explain the injury to my mother the next day.
As I reflect on those midnight phone calls, I find it curious that I started this tradition when I did. As a teenager, I was desperate for independence, anxious to break free of my parent’s strict home and tight control, and thrilled to be among my peers. I’m surprised that I emerged from my self-focus long enough to think of my mother. Perhaps I knew it was a quiet, joyless night for her in our home. Maybe I worried that my father was getting very drunk, opening a bottle of champagne and forcing her to drink some (she didn’t drink), or that he was being unkind to her, his old demons raging. Somewhere deep down, I wanted her to know that I remembered her. I recognized even then how mothers are mostly invisible, and that it might be important to make my own mother feel seen.
These calls set up a habit of telephonic connection with my mother that would continue into adulthood. After graduate school when I moved to New York City for my first corporate job, I would call my mother every afternoon from my office phone. These calls were brief and perfunctory. In Ukrainian, her native language, I would greet her and ask her what she was up to and then seamlessly shift to speaking English, my native tongue. She would ask about what I had eaten that day or the night before. We would chat about the weather. More often than not, she would say, “you know who died?” and proceed to tell me the latest church gossip. As I sat in my cubicle high above Times Square, twisting the telephone cord around my finger and staring over the Hudson River into New Jersey, we would exchange a few words. It was never anything too deep; she rarely asked me how I was really feeling, whether I was happy. If she heard from me, that was enough. All was well. My colleague Matt who sat in the cubicle next to mine would usually stand up when he heard me begin to speak in clunky Ukrainian. As I finished up my conversation with a quick “chom-chom (kiss-kiss),” he would rest his chin on top of the low cubicle wall and say, “So, who died?”
My mother has been gone for over a year now. I’ve celebrated two holiday seasons, and watched the calendar roll into two new years. As I embark on my second year without her, I’m still occasionally struck by a nagging flash of worry; I need to call Mama. It’s similar to the experience (widely talked about in mid-life circles) of walking into a room and forgetting why you entered it. Something is missing, I’m supposed to be doing something, but what is it? I always called her at the end of the day, around 4 or 5 pm. Every once in a while, I’ll glance out the window at the setting sun and reach for the phone. I can still hear her voice saying my name, the way it would lilt up at the end, the emphasis on the second syllable. Without thinking, I can conjure the words of banter that we repeated to each other over and over again, over several decades, in our daily phone calls. At midnight on New Year’s Eve recently, I felt a similar tug of memory. I was standing in Janet’s kitchen, the television blasting in the other room, shouts from a gaggle of teenagers squealing with delight as champagne spilled. I could hear her sleepy voice on the other end of the line, wishing me a happy new year.