Mother Superior 

    My mother was a shy nineteen year old when she got married. For the next 38 years she was a wife and mother of six children - seven if you count my father who had a hard time remembering to pay the bills or let my mother move a lamp from one end table to another without consulting him. She loved him. He made her laugh. But the older she got the more she longed to know what it would be like to lead her own life, balance her own checkbook. At the age of 57, she gently, tactfully told my father that she needed to find out. 

    It was a rough transition. There were no funds to support a separate household, so when my mother moved out she became a house-sitter. For extra money she walked people's dogs, took care of a quadriplegic physician, was companion to an elderly woman who didn't trust her enough to show her where she kept the silver. She decided to try her hand at selling real estate. 

    Severely dyslexic, she had to take the California real estate exam four times before passing it. Then she moved to the Mendocino coast where she lived in a series of quaint but poorly-heated cottages and sold property to rich refugees from Los Angeles and marijuana growers. ("Secluded location, intermittent fog and sun.") She knew how to write the ads. 

    The pioneer life suited my mother. Rising before dawn to meditate, she chopped her own wood, picked blackberries out her bedroom window and settled in after dinner before the fire with her wine, her cigarettes, her metaphysical books and journals. Then, when she was 68, she astounded everyone by putting everything she had in storage and flying to France. My mother had never been outside the United States, spoke no French and had nobody waiting for her at the other end. But for an entire year she lived in a small apartment without a phone on the Riviera. 

    It was, she told me later, "an exacting experience." France filled a place in her soul that had been empty all her life and in the decade of her 70's she flew back and forth as often as she could find the funds and friends to go with her. She had begun to suffer from macular degeneration, a disease of the retina, and did not feel confident traveling alone. But at a time when most people are drawing smaller circles around themselves, my mother's orbit was expanding. 

    Then, when she turned 80, I got a phone call. "I think," she said, "it's time for me to take you up on your invitation to come and live with you." Knowing how highly she prized her own freedom, I appreciated the courage it took for her to constrict her own life. "Don't think of it as coming to live with me," I counseled. "You're just having an extended visit." But in the intervening weeks as I prepared myself and the downstairs guest room for her arrival, I felt like I was preparing to get married. We would be together "until death do us part" which I hoped would not be too soon. 

    My mother has already outlived everybody else in the family of her generation. Apart from what she calls "my addiction" to cigarettes, she takes good care of herself - doing yoga exercises and walking at least a mile before breakfast, eating only fresh, organic food and swallowing a large handful of vitamins and minerals every day. But when I saw her coming toward me in the airport, a small, trim-looking woman with silver hair, pulling a suitcase behind her, she seemed wispier, more insubstantial. 

    Driving home, I cast side-long glances at her profile. She looked older but she still had the demeanor of a much younger person, sitting upright in her seat as if she were on an intensely interesting journey and it was important that she pay attention, keep her eyes glued to the horizon. It was this air of expectation and curiosity that kept her vital, made me eager to have her live with me. 

    It is my good fortune to have a mother I have not outgrown, who is still walking ahead of me. It is something I talk about, a lucky break, when my women friends and I discuss the subject of mother-daughter relationships. I concede that my own daughter finds me problematic and that much of the reason she does is because I have not learned to remain at the center of my own life as well as my mother has. If, during the remaining years of her life she can show me how then I can pass that knowledge on to my own daughter, and she to hers. 

    We are home from the airport, sitting on the living room floor with a glass of wine before the fire. It is my mother's favorite place in the house. "I've missed this," she murmured, looking into the flames. I wondered how much, with her failing eyesight, she could actually see. 

    "Tell me," I asked her, 'are you feeling alright about being here?" 

    "Absolutely," she replied. "I don't know why I'm here, or for that matter, why I'm still living. But there must be a reason." 

    "There is." 

    She took her eyes off the fire and gazed at me inquiringly. 

    "You're looking at it," I said.