This Just In – Yeah, I miss my mom.
About 15 years ago, I was talking to my late mother on the phone. By this point in her life (after a stroke, heart attack and lung cancer) she was bedridden in a nursing home in Connecticut. Television was her world, even more than it had been in previous years (which is really saying something).
It was at my mother’s knee in the daytime of the 1960s that I met Art Fleming on “Jeopardy!” and Hugh Downs on “Concentration.” She enjoyed game shows, westerns and a few soap operas. Perry Mason was a god in her estimation. Rick & I rewatched the original Perry Mason series during the most shutdown part of COVID. It was comforting.
My mother was quite a history buff. She appreciated the connection we feel to our ancestors when we learn the details of where they lived, what they did for a living and which side they chose in a war.
Whatever was on television was nearly always Topic A when we would catch up a few times a week, so I asked the standard question. “So, what’s on TV? What have you been watching?”
My mother was beginning to have episodes of dementia-like problems. Struggling for words sometimes … not always recognizing me immediately when I would appear in a hospital room (after she hadn’t seen me for at least six months). So her answer seemed a sad indicator to me that the train was leaving the station.
“Who are you?” she said.
“Mom, it’s Jean” I answered. A pause followed. I figured, she’s trying to place the name.
“Who are you?” she said again.
“Mom (hint), it’s Jean. Your daughter, Jean. I was just asking (using more words in the hope of voice recognition) what you’ve been watching on TV lately.”
“Who are you?” she repeated.
As she would say, we went around this mulberry bush a couple more times. At last, the light from the dim bulb over my head went on. She was talking about a new series produced by Friends actress Lisa Kudrow.
It’s basically a celebrity version of Henry Louis Gates’ “Finding Your Roots” where various celebrities (with the help of Ancestry.com researchers) look through their family trees and surprisingly discover that their relatives were on the Mayflower or fought for the confederacy in the civil war or had another family two counties over.
This show was made for my mom. It had a fun celebrity component, took the featured person all over the world to track down their records (and provide some glory to research librarians).
The name of the show is “Who Do You Think You Are?”
So, yeah, I do miss these “what’s she talking about” puzzles sometimes on Mother’s Day. In recent years, of course, I’m more focused on celebrating with my own kids and grandkids, doing actual puzzles, cooking out, kicking a soccer ball around and having an extra piece of pie.
To be honest, I could do without the million social media ads and junk emails telling me to send my mother flowers for Mother’s Day. My smart phone seems to know when I need to order a pair of socks, I don’t see why it can’t figure out how to block that stuff. (Updated reference to the classic “We can send a man to the moon …”)
Happy Mother’s weekend, everyone.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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