Second Helping
Week 6
By Russ Lane
I used to buy flowers for my mother on Mother’s Day. I still do, but the ritual became more elaborate last year.
First stop is Michael’s to scan the artificial blooms that would be acceptable to her standards and also withstand the elements. Rows upon rows of crafted buds, and I look at each and think “Is this classic elegance?” I find a few accent pieces to complete the arrangement, keeping my sunglasses on the entire time, just like Mom would if she got emotional in public.
Even for a gay guy, flower decoration really isn’t my thing. But I was on a mission much like Mom went on countless, and I still remember the key lines of a speech she gave for a conference room full of manly men for the medical supply industry in which she was a trailblazer. Lord knows she practiced it enough in our living room until it was perfect.
“…Will, determination and drive, and when those three things enter your account-receivable process, your profits WILL go up…”
Those three words were the essence of my mother. If she could see our family business through the worst of the ‘90s corporate mergers, looking three grown men in the eye asking for three times what the company was worth and proclaim to their shock “Let me explain something to you, these clothes don’t come from K-Mart,” surely I can come up with a decent bouquet.
As my mother’s will would have it, those three men left our family business not knowing what hit them, and she turned the business around on her terms. As my will would have it, I selected a satisfactory arrangement.
Next is Naglia, an amazing Moroccan restaurant in Wilmington, to order a falafel pita. But this is no ordinary pita. A heads up to you Grand Stranders, it’s worth the drive. The chef/owner gives the usually rock-hard fried falafel an unusually delicate touch, and he adds a smear of thick smear of hummus and tahini before finishing the overstuffed homemade pita with Greek salad.
And finally the last stop is Oleander Gardens, sitting on an old gym shirt from the car after I use it to wipe off sand off her grave. I cut and arrange the faux-flowers into the vase by her grave marker, painstakingly created with – you guessed it – classic elegance in mind.
Once my work is done, I unwrap my pita, and Mom and I chat for a while over lunch like we did before. As she would have liked, the atmosphere is impeccable. Swans lounge in a nearby lake, and the beach is nearby. Even surrounded by death, mom’s grave is a tranquil place, almost happy.
This picnic of sorts had all the things my mother liked about dining out: a great atmosphere and companionship that mattered to her.
Food quality? Well, that lagged a little behind. My mother’s relationship to food exhibited a truly glorious lack of sophistication. Early on in my parent’s marriage, my father was so disgusted by her chicken salad with domineering slabs of green pepper that he decided that he’d either learn to cook or divorce her. She knew one temperature setting on a stove and that was “very high.”
As she grew older, my mom developed a repertoire of about six dishes. Broccoli Casserole and Sweet Potato Casserole (a recipe I published in The Sun News once, which I found hysterical) are the two I recall most. I’m sure there were four others around somewhere.
But even with her glorious lack of sophistication, she still informed much of my thoughts about food. This was a woman who scoured Wilmington for weeks in search of a perfect hamburger, or more accurately, in search for a restaurant with an atmosphere suitable to her that also had a decent burger.
Atmosphere was of prime importance to Mom, and though during my angst years I found it shallow of her, I realized when I became a food writer that dining should have a theatrical element. It shouldn’t be just a meal, but an experience. I just placed a slightly greater emphasis on quality of food, is all.
Atmosphere is one of those things that you don’t notice unless it’s wrong, but it can make or break a meal. Blue Elephant was among the best at this in the Grand Strand, I feel. An experience needn’t be pricey either – would you really want an amazing South Carolina barbecue plate in City Bar?
But elitist concerns aside, the atmosphere must always match the intention of the food; it’s what separates the truly great restaurants.
“It’s not what you HAVE to do,” Mom explained many times to my sister and me in so many words, “What you HAVE to do is shit. It’s going the extra mile that makes an impact on people.” And her lessons served me well, even in the face of employers only concerned with what you HAVE to do.
Most self-serving chauvinists in her industry were afraid of her, everyone else respected her. But what most people never saw was how afraid she was most of the time, how eager she was to please but never felt she did, how overwhelmed she would become, and how she would either lash out or shut down in times of trouble with an intensity that was unnerving and for most of my life, totally without warning.
When she had health problems that paled in comparison to the brain cancer that ended her life, I remember watching her mindlessly eating cups of pudding, tuning out. It might as well have been Cheerios, and it felt like there was no force in her that could snap her out of it. Let alone me. And I always resented that the rest of the world always received the best of her and it felt like all I ever experienced behind closed doors most often was the worst.
Yet whether it was pudding or staying in her bed for hours on end or living with brain cancer, I always hated that I could never reach her, never remind her that she was Jane Lane, dammit, and she was tougher than pudding cups, misogynist corporate schmucks, her own fears about pleasing her mother or how good of a mother she was to us, and especially brain cancer.
Mom was the one who urged me to take the job in Myrtle Beach, which I was very reluctant to take given my weight and concerns with the newspaper, and ironically was the one that ended my stint as a full-time food writer. My mother was diagnosed during my tenure at the Sun News, and after my father called to tell me I tried to conduct an interview at Toffino’s but couldn’t focus, made a few calls and started making my way to Wilmington. She almost died before my sister and I even knew; the week following was sneaking in and out of ICU.
Once she stabilized and we knew the degree of her illness, I began living in two cities at once for the next year and a half in addition to my lives in the newsroom and the gym. And throughout she talked her usual will, determination and drive talk, but at least by my perception the feeling just wasn’t there. It was too clouded by very understandable and impenetrable fear of her dying too soon like her father did.
Even if no one else in my family seemed to, I never stopped believing that if I could just convince her to go after her illness like she did those bastards who tried to buy her out, if I could just remind her who she was, cancer wouldn’t have stood a chance. But it was as dangerous and futile as mining for gems, and finally trying hurt too much and I gave up.
Afterward, my visits became perfunctory and I mainly divided my time with cleaning, taking out the trash and sitting at the computer. We didn’t talk much, or of anything of any grand importance. I tried calling her between interviews at work, but she was always asleep from chemo, and Dad insisted that everything was fine, comparatively speaking.
But in those last months of her life something shifted in both of us. She called me once, and after meaningless chit-chat she spoke with a clarity I hadn’t heard since she was first diagnosed. “I really respect your judgment, and I really need you to understand that.”
I was stunned, having never heard those words from a woman who mainly didn’t like my hair, my clothes (she was right, by the way), my sexual identity (she came around on that one in the nick of time), and was afraid that I really shouldn’t be a journalist and should come to work in the family business, where I’d be safe. And suddenly the relationship between two people defined by will, determination and drive stopped butting heads and became something I never thought possible. We’d talk all night about my life, what I wanted from my career and my weight loss, my relationships, what it all meant. She would open up and talk about her life and her illness without her usual anger, and I could start reaching her.
I got my mom in the final inning, and not even my job would interfere with that. Once her death was eminent I began working in Myrtle Beach during the day, fitting in workouts when I could and driving to Wilmington at night to help her stay at home and support my father and sister in the caregiving. Eventually she required all three of us constantly, and my superiors weren’t willing for me to work from Wilmington though I had made arrangement to make it possible.
With no other option, I filed for FMLA without The Sun News’ approval. As a result, they removed me from my beat, said the timing was “very disturbing” as it coincided with elections, and asked for my key despite my eventual return to an as-yet-undecided position. Earlier that day my editor wanted me to cover one last restaurant to cover a hole in the paper from my hasty departure, which was only honorable; right before I left the editor-in-chief messaged me to essentially accuse me of stealing one last meal while knowing it was my last day.
In fairness, my leaving was so quick it was impossible to be smooth or respectful. Also, it was common for the staff to be treated as if their only dedication to storytelling was to get things free and behave like thieves. All that righteousness from both editors and writers dwindled the paper’s relevance to the city.
Sour taste notwithstanding, I knew I would miss my chefs, my contacts within the hospitality industry, my trainer, and my opportunity to use the restaurants in that city as a means of exploring what Myrtle Beach was slowly becoming, even if it wasn’t appreciated by my superiors. I felt the paper only wanted stories of The Redneck Riveria, written as uncreatively and insipidly as I could possibly make them. But I regret nothing. The town needed stories that talked about where it was going, not where it had been stuck for so long, and I regretted not being able to contribute to that anymore.
But I regret nothing in the weeks in Wilmington that followed. In those last weeks with mom I refused to treat her like a sick person. I reminded her how to walk, helped run the house so my sister and father were free to focus on mom, and then mom and I talked all night on multiple occasions.
I finally reminded her she was Jane Lane, dammit, even in her final weeks. She passed as my father, sister, a few close friends and I raised a glass of Chardonnay in her honor, spreading a little on her comatose lips, telling stories of all the extra miles she took to make an impact on us.
I could think of no better way for anyone to pass, and that I contributed to that at all will remain the greatest achievement of my life. Losing 200 pounds is nothing in comparison. I was proud of her, proud of my father and sister, and proud of me.
After she died and with little to go back to in Myrtle Beach, I choose to stay in Wilmington. My editor-in-chief was great about it, but in all honesty I think she was just relieved I was finally gone and the paper didn’t have to pay for unemployment.
Up until the last few weeks we spent our relationship laughing together and butting heads, and despite what The Sun News might think there’s nothing or no one I would fight more for once I got over my own self-pity.
Jane Lane was a complicated lady, and it does her a disservice to show her as anything but – you can’t really grasp her greatness without showing her in all her dichotomies she often hid from the public.
She swore like a sailor and could stare down anyone, often with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Chardonnay in the other, and be as timid and angry as a frightened, spoiled child. She was a fighter but only when there was someone else to fight for, which was often me. She was a lousy cook, but she was an absolute force of nature and was the central figure in my life.
She taught me relationships are complicated, and the relationships people have to food are no exception. My relationship to my mother is no exception.
Nor is my relationship to myself. The year and a half since her death has been spent mainly decided how life was going to be without her. Her passing was like the Pope dying in my own private church. With the Pope gone, what happens to the pews?
I tried to restart again with will, determination and drive. But as anyone who’s faced a major loss might experience, more fell apart than came together in the year following.
I didn’t want to write at a newspaper again, given my experience with my former employers. Soon I didn’t want to write, period. I just didn’t have the same feelings for old friends that I once did. My sister and I were too busy being angry with one another to cooperate; I saw my father in a completely different light. Support systems atrophied from all directions; I kept training but couldn’t progress.
Finally depression set in and tasted like bad McDonalds, Mike & Ikes and Diet Mountain Dew, and looked like World of Warcraft for three months solid, with my unshaven moustache hanging over my lips and wearing the same oversized hoody that I was quickly filling into again. And I’ve never been more alone, and it was something no handfuls of Cheerios would replace.
But I’m slowly finding my way to tell stories again, with a new purpose. Before, I tried to emulate the best of my mother: flex my will, determination and drive like one of my newly acquired muscles.
But that only took me so far; now I want to go the extra step and learn from her mistakes, too. We butted heads often because she could never fathom how much of a rebel she was, how much she lived life on her terms and hers alone, and how much I loved that about her but never saw in herself. And how alike we are.
I honor her memory by striving to rise above the same things that plagued both of us for most of our lives. The fear, the doubt, the need to please people that seem to be unappeasable. The judgments about ourselves, the tolerance of being depleted by the judgments of others, the constant struggle of feeling pulled in 20 directions at once and never finding the middle ground, even if the middle ground was shaky and involved a box of Cheerios. The older version of myself that lingers like a cadaver’s scent, the older version of myself for whom I feel nothing but disgust and a desire to escape. I want to finish what my mom left undone.
This is why I share this. If my mother taught me anything, it’s that you can make your life how you want it to be, regardless of circumstance. You can lose 200 pounds and be a food writer at the same time; you can rise above your self-doubt and despair and transform your life. Things are possible and life isn’t fixed in a box despite what my cohorts in the media, or the corporate mindset so prevalent in our society now seems to dictate. All you need is a will, and maybe someone to fight for. With those, there is always a way, even if it isn’t pretty, conventional, easy or even readily apparent.
Especially on Mother’s Day, soak it all in. Realize what it is you want to fight for; be it your mother, your loved ones, your beliefs, and especially yourself.
And if in doing so, you realize you had given up on any of them, that’s okay. Really.
All you have to do is come back for a second helping.
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