Bad Decisions and Alligators

I’ve been thinking a lot about the 4-foot-long alligator they found in Brooklyn this week. Most likely, it was someone’s pet and the owner decided to rehome it in the wild. (If you can consider Prospect Park wild.) Whoever the pet owner might have been, I’m reserving judgment. 

When I was growing up, we took all kinds of strange animals into our small, urban home in addition to the usual cats, dogs and fish. I don’t know what our mother was thinking. She either had a soft spot for animals or a soft spot for my sister and me, but if we wanted an animal, it was ours. (As long as we could afford it. No pony ever materialized, despite our pleas.)

Often at Easter time, in particular, we ended up with animals we had no business taking into our home. A few times, we had baby rabbits. Another year, baby ducks. And then there were the cute little peeps that were dyed pink. I can’t recall exactly how they came to live with us, but they did. 

Of course, the problem came after Easter had passed and the cute little babies grew into adults. We built a hutch for the rabbits, and a pen for the chickens. I recall the ducks swimming in our one and only bathtub. I think about all of this now and it seems bizarre to me, but at the time, it felt perfectly normal. 

At the end of the summer, the ducks were rehomed at a private pond. I have no idea what ever became of the chickens. But my point is, what may have seemed like a sweet gesture at the time always led to the difficult decision about what to do with these animals when they became adults. I remember crying each time they had to leave us. 

My mom isn’t around for me to find out how she dealt with this. I would love to ask, Mom, what were you thinking? How could you have done this again and again? Did it bother you when the animals grew up and you had to figure out how to move them out?

And then there was the alligator. I was in third grade and my sister Lorena took me to Florida with her. I had $5 for souvenirs. After spending $2 on a shell decoration with a lightbulb inside as a gift to my mom, with the remaining $3 I bought a baby alligator. I thought it was the cutest little thing, and I couldn’t resist. (Now, I think, EEK!) It was about 6 inches long and harmless. In true Kraft fashion, I didn’t think through the repercussions of this decision. I also didn’t tell my mom about it; I wanted to surprise her.

On the drive back to Ohio, I kept “Allie” by my feet in the backseat in a cardboard box  that was poked with lots of breath holes and lined with wet newspaper. I threw in a little ball of raw hamburger for him to nibble on. (How did I know it was a he? I must confess that it never occurred to me that such a hideous creature might possibly be female.)

Allie died before we made it through Georgia. I don’t recall being terribly upset over it; we hadn’t bonded. But I do remember some serious buyer’s remorse. I had spent most of my money on an animal that didn’t even make it home so I could show my mom. What a waste!

I still wonder how Mom would have reacted to my purchase. After all the other animals we had taken into our home -- turtles, salamanders, frogs, horned toads, hamsters, about a million prolific guinea pigs – I couldn’t imagine that she would have a problem with an alligator. But perhaps that would have been where she drew the line. It certainly SHOULD have been where she drew the line. It never got that far, so I never knew how she would have received the little beast into our home. Thankfully, we also never had to deal with an alligator that outgrew our ability to care for it. It wouldn’t have been pretty. 

So when I hear about the gator in Prospect Park, I don’t wonder so much about how anyone could take such an animal as a pet. And it’s hard for me to condemn them for dumping it at a public park. Bad decisions and alligators are a part of my story, too.   

That woman was my mother

When my children were young, I muddled through motherhood as best as I could. Some things I did well and some things, not so much. While I was finding my way, it dawned on me that my mom had done the same thing. As a child, I had assumed that she was all-wise. As an adult, I grew to realize that had never been the case. As I’ve matured, I have forgiven her for being human. That’s an important task of adulthood. We learn to forgive our parents for being human, just as we hope our children will one day forgive us.

I suspect that, as children, each of us saw ourselves as the central character in our parents’ lives. We couldn’t see that they were people with lives of their own who also happened to be parents. Our moms and dads have their own life stories, just as we do. We’re only a part of those stories. What I didn’t realize until recently is how the circumstances of our parents’ life stories may have more to do with the way they parent us than their intelligence, or their temperament, or their innate ability to nurture.

I’m one of six children. It was a yours-mine-and-ours family. Both of my parents had been married before they married each another. My father had two girls, my mother had a boy, and together they had three more: my brother, and then me, and then my sister. There is a huge age spread from the first child to the last. Even among the three of us “ours” kids, there are five or six years between each of us. My father died when he was in his mid forties and my mother died in her sixties, so we’ve been orphans for over thirty years now. Often, when we get together, we’ll talk about our mother. And, invariably, I will hear my siblings say things about her that leave me asking, “Are we talking about the same woman?” It’s as if each of us had an entirely different mother. But she was the same woman. Or was she?

My brother Bob had a mother who was inexperienced. She probably made more mistakes with him than she did with the rest of us. And while he was very young she had to deal with an unfaithful husband, whom she divorced in a time when divorce wasn’t all that common. That was the mother he had. But that woman was not my mother.

My older sisters, Roberta and Lorena, lost their mother to cancer while my father was away fighting a war. Within months of her death, my father came back home to Ohio and with him he brought a new wife from the far-off land of New Jersey. My sisters met the woman who was to become their “new mother” for the first time. It was not a good beginning, but they got past it. And yet, in many ways, it colored their relationship with our mother for as long as she lived. That was the mother they had. But that woman was not my mother.

My older brother Ken, my younger sister Wendy, and I also had three different mothers. We lived through an event with her that changed everything, but we were in different stages of our lives when that event occurred. My brother was twelve when our father died. But he got to spend the first part of his life with June and Ward Cleaver. My mom was the happy homemaker during that time. She sewed our clothes and pulled every weed out of the yard by hand and had a shiny kitchen floor and trailed along with her husband to his softball games and bowling tournaments and fishing trips. That was the mother my brother Ken had. But that woman was not my mother.

My sister was only a year old when dad died, so she never knew him. My mother went to work outside the home when she was still a baby and my aunt was the childcare provider who filled in the gaps while my mom couldn’t be there. The only mother my sister ever knew was one who worked outside the home. That was the mother she had. But that woman was not my mother.

When my dad got ALS I was five. So, I can remember what he was like before he was sick. But I particularly remember what my mother was like before and after his illness. Not only did the disease take my father’s life from him, it took my mother’s life from her as well. Life as she knew it ended. She had to become someone else. So, when I lost my father, I felt like I lost my mother, too. After he died, she became pre-occupied with survival. Even at the age of six, I was aware of the fact that I was not the main character in my mother’s life story.

When my father was diagnosed with ALS, both he and my mother knew he would not be around to do the things he had been doing for her. So, he had to show her how to write a check and pay the bills. He taught her how to drive a car. He prepared her to provide for herself and her family. This was no small thing for her. On top of knowing that the man she loved would soon be gone from her life, she had the added stress of re-creating who she was in order to prepare for a life she never would have chosen, but had to accept. That was the mother I had. That woman was my mother.

And so, if there is one value that my mom passed along to me, it is to take care of myself. Don’t count on a man to take care of you, Nancy. Have your own career. Be independent. That’s what I learned from my mom. Under the circumstances, what else could she have taught me? Of course, it’s been both a blessing and a curse. Yes, I can take care of myself, but it’s also been hard for me to ever admit I need help. Yet, that’s a big part of who I am. And it’s because of the woman who was my mother.

For thirty years now I’ve been living with the strange paradox of being without the one who will always be with me. I will always remember her courage, her generosity, and her quick wit. But I also can’t forget her brutal honesty and the deep sorrow that weighed her down like a lead apron. Not only do I remember these things about my mother, but I also see them in myself. I would not be the same person if I had the mother any of my siblings had. She is the mother who was unique to me because of the time I entered into her life story. I’m grateful.