The Po Show

Fear and Bravery

I was thinking about my mother for some reason today, about how fearful she's been my whole life. She's scared of all sort of abstract things in a very real way, and projects those fears all over the place. Things that would NEVER occur to most people become a source of fear and worry, especially worry. She's a World Champion All-Star Worrier, and I feel perfectly justified in laying the blame for my own obsessive worrying at her feet. (As Ross says, I constantly assume that the worst possible scenario is not only possible, not only probable, but inevitable.)

I gave her a personalized license plate holder last year after she bought a new car; it says PROFESSIONAL GRANDMA (which she is; she takes being Grandma to sublime heights). She put it on the front license plate, rather than the back one. She knew I noticed, because she explained, "I didn't want on the back, where people behind me could see it, because they might think, "Oh, it's a grandma!" and rear end me." Who the hell worries about that? Who the hell would even have that enter her mind?? My mother, that's who.

She offers up fear and worry on the behalf of total strangers. As we were driving on the PCH, past houses perched up on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific, she said, "How can people live so close to ocean, on the hillside? What if they slide down into the ocean? I'd be so scared to live there!" Every single time some natural disaster occurs somewhere in the country, be it a hurricane, tornado, major ice storm that blacks out people's electricity, whatever, she's always certain to mention it to me, saying, "How can people live where they have those terrible things? It would be so scary!" I'm always quick to remind her that there are many people who would never live in CA, because of the earthquakes, but that's not the same to her.

All of these constant worries and fears have annoyed the hell out of me most of my life, especially since I became an adult and my mother grew much frailer and more mouse-like to me. I snap at her way too much about these verbalized fears, which I always later regret because she really is the sweetest person who ever walked the face of the earth.

And today, I was thinking, I consider her such a fearful person, but damn, what she has been through in her life! When she was a teenager during WWII, she was sent to work in a munitions factory in Japan. All these young girls, separated from their families, making bullets and bombs. Some of them had their fingers blown off, and all the girls regularly had to run into bomb shelters when American air raids flew overhead. But she says they weren't so afraid, and she actually remembers it as a nice time, when all these girlfriends were away from their parents and shared camaraderie and went berry picking and laughed together. It was the closest thing she ever had to a college/sorority experience. How brave would *I* have been in those circumstances?

And she left Japan with her husband and three small children, to return to America to start a new life, with no prospects and no money. Of course she didn't have much choice, since my father had decided on the whole thing, but how brave must she have been, to hold her children's hands and keep the family intact? Could I have been so brave?

I really need to cut my mom some slack. She's a hero.