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Mom's Potato Salad
Here’s the deal: I love my mother’s potato salad. It is legend
in my family, in fact, my love for it. My mother’s potato salad is,
for me, a kind of heaven-on-earth, like the aroma of lilacs or a proper back
scratching.
And in the Motyl universe, it was a given that when I visited my family in Pittsburgh, my mother would make potato salad. My siblings, in mock jealousy, complained about the favoritism shown -- as they scooped it on their plates.
These days, though, I don’t think my mother would have the first idea of how to make potato salad. I’m not sure she could even identify potato salad if a big bowl of it were plopped in front of her.
She has dementia and lives in a ward at a nursing home for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. The place seems to take good care of these poor folks and, as my sisters told me when they first toured the home, there’s no smell of urine.
Whenever I visit my mother, she’s not sure at first who I am. At times, I have been one of her uncles, “Al’s kid” (my cousin), or her husband—that is, my father. Sometimes, all I get is a crinkled face of confusion and my heart breaks for her when she wants to know so badly who this somewhat familiar face is.
It’s hard to look at that face that I’ve known from the first second of my life and realize that she doesn’t know me anymore. She’s there and she’s not there. She’s my mother. Yet, at times, she seems to be inhabited by an alien, who is sucking the life and memory out of her.
Occasionally, there’s a glimmer of recognition—a glimmer that fades in and out like a radio station on a desolate highway. Now she’s tuned in, she’s found the frequency and she sees me, knows me, begins to cry for me, her first-born son, who ran away the first chance he got. And sometimes I cry too.
My mother hasn’t died but we’ve divvied up her belongings among the five kids or sold them in a garage sale. She never really understood that her house was emptied and sold. We often wonder, my siblings and I, where she thinks she is, in this antiseptic place where she pulls herself around in a wheelchair that she sometimes calls a scooter, other times a bicycle.
The last time I saw her, we were sitting alone in an enclosed garden when she asked me if I had talked to her mother—her mother who died almost four years before I was born.
I lied, of course.
“She’s fine,” I said, and my mother seemed relieved.
We went back to talking about the sun and the warm breeze and the birds sitting on the top of the fence surrounding the garden. Then she asked after Aunt Francie. Rarely does she ask about my father, her husband of 52 years.
My dad died in April, 2000. He was ill but his death was sudden—a heart attack—not related to the illness. It was odd what happened at the funeral between my mother and me. We fell automatically, without thinking, into our roles as grieving widow and first-born son.
As if we were drawn to each other, I was there at her side to take her arm when we moved up to the coffin in the funeral home and went from the funeral home to the waiting hearse, and from the hearse to the gravesite.
We fell into these roles in spite of ourselves and our history, or maybe because of it. She clung to me for dear life. I held my back straight for support. We cried together and alone.
My mother and I had a bi-polar relationship: if we weren’t laughing we were fighting. Like dogs we fought, about everything—from my “queer friends” to politics to how she should treat her other children.
When I was a teenager, I hated her. I called her Eva (and my father, Adolf.) I’m sure they hated me for being so cruel to them. Though I could never be as cruel as she, my mother, was -- when she beat us with yardsticks, with belts, with hands and arms and so much venom.
I look at her now and wonder where that cruel woman is. Or did she just disappear? Ever cautious, I wonder if she’s just hidden, about to reappear.
Then I hear a little girl talking, when my mother asks about her own mother and worries about what she will say when she sees her. And I wonder about memory and who I’ll remember when I’m 88, sitting in a wheelchair with no one to visit me. Will I ask for my mother, my father, my siblings, my friends?
I
wonder as I slice the celery, dice the onion, chop the green pepper and hard-boil
the eggs for potato salad, following my mother’s recipe. I wonder after
I glop on the Hellmann’s (only Hellmann’s!) mayonnaise and finish
mixing it all, how does it taste. It is amazingly good.
But when I look at the potato salad I’ve made, I can clearly see that it doesn’t look like my mother’s potato salad. And while I followed her recipe, and mine is good, it doesn’t taste like the potato salad my mother always made for me. Hers was better, so much better.
And I try to remember the last time I had potato salad my mother made for me. Made with her hands, just for me. Certainly, it was after my father died but when? I can’t remember. I can’t remember the last time I had one of my favorite things in life, that wonderful thing my mother consistently did for me.
I want like mad to remember, to savor that last helping of potato salad, taste again the creaminess of the mayonnaise, the texture of the potatoes, the bitterness of the green peppers and all of it coming together in her created perfection. And I can’t.
My mother is never going to make potato salad for me again. And my potato salad will never in a million years be as good as hers, no matter how closely I follow the recipe. It’ll always be good, but never as good as the one she lovingly made for me.