Today, June 4th, I’m celebrating my 79th birthday.
And as you might expect, I’m reflecting!
I’m thinking about the journey I’ve been on to get here…the growth, the challenges, and the wisdom I’ve accrued over a lifetime.
I’m thinking about gratitude. And I’m also thinking about the people I’m most grateful for.
One of those people is my mother, Alice Mae Koslosky.
I celebrated my 42nd birthday with my mom at the Pioneer Residence Home of Anchorage, just weeks before she made her transition in 1987.
It was an emotional time for us as mother and daughter. We’d saved all of our healing work in our complicated and estranged relationship until the last three weeks before she died. We didn’t do it sooner, because neither of us was ready.
We laughed, we cried, we forgave each other, and we reminisced.
On June 4, my birthday I had my favorite bakery deliver a chocolate ganache-covered cake decorated with the words, “Happy Birthday Michale and Alice.”
My mother was quite taken back that both our names appeared on my birthday cake. She was also delighted.
For me, it was quite fitting. I was celebrating the day of my birth and I was also celebrating the woman who brought me into the world.
My mother made her way to Alaska from Las Angeles by boat in 1940. She was a beautician and had been hired to manage the Cinderella Beauty Salon in Anchorage. She was a beautifully tanned, elegantly coifed California girl. Alaskan women were eager for her to style their hair in the latest trends. Her best repeat customers and most generous tippers? The working ladies of the night! They adored her.
She met my father, a well-known business man and member of a pioneering Alaska family, got pregnant with my brother Jan, got married and then became a single parent when my sister Linda was born. I was three years old at the time.
Life did not deal her an easy hand. She struggled with finances, with raising three little kids, with a philandering husband from whom she was separated but did not divorce until 14 years later.
My mother fell into a deep depression that lasted the duration of my childhood and into my adulthood. There was unending emotional abuse. I don’t recall a morning growing up that I didn’t wake up with a knot in my stomach.
But honestly, that is not what I think about today as I give thanks for my journey.
What I remember about my complicated, co-dependent, sometimes toxic mother and our complicated, co-dependent and sometimes toxic relationship is this:
I remember my mother, shepherding her three kids downtown, in the dead of winter, to Lucky’s Meat Market for the purpose of purchasing a huge role of butcher paper so that I could have an endless supply of paper for my capturing my dress designs and stories. I can still see her pulling our red wagon (we didn’t own a car) through the snow, the wagon getting stuck in snowdrifts and then watching her hoist the heavy role of paper up the icy steps to our front door.
I remember my mother, gathering us around the kitchen table to make Christmas presents for friends and neighbors. One Christmas we decorated plastic boxes with sequins, pearls and rhinestones and another time it was fabric place mats that not only needed to be stenciled with paint but also fringed along the edges. Even though there was clear evidence of glue here and there on the boxes, and bits of paint that somehow missed the stencil, my mom always said, “A gift you make with your hands is always more appreciated than a store-bought gift.” I’m not so sure I believed her but making our own presents allowed us to gift more people and that always felt good.
I remember my mother, reading from the Blue House book collection as we sat on the hide-a-bed in the living room. She insisted we purchase the 12 volume set with our limited funds so we would have an endless supply of stories for her to read to us and for us to read to ourselves.
When we got older and finally did purchase a car, we would pile in it on Sundays and make our way to the Anchorage Airport to watch the planes take off. To make the day more festive, my mother would fry up a batch of her southern fried chicken, and make mounds of potato salad slathered in mayonnaise to take with us. We would fight over who got the chicken wings as we sat glued to the car windows, imagining what it would be like to actually board one of those departing planes and fly off to see the world.
I can still feel my mother’s hands gently lathering shampoo into my scalp as I sat on a special canvas chair with an adjustable tray that fit over the bathroom sink. I can still smell the lacquer pads she used to glue down the fly-a-way hairs that always seemed to come loose from my braids.
And mostly, I can remember the ways in which my mom would gently massage our hands and feet when we were growing up. The three of us vied for that honor whenever we gathered on the couch to watch “I love Lucy” or read a story.
Fast forward to that time three weeks before her death. My mother was now 74 with stage 4 cancer and thirty brain tumors.
I was told by her physicians she would first slip into a coma and then she would make her way home.
It was during this time I learned things about my mother from her friends that I never really knew before.
How kind she was.
How compassionate.
I was told that whenever anyone was moved into the nursing wing of the Pioneer Home many residents refused to see them fearing that meant certain death. Not my mother. She was always there to bring a resident comfort especially if that person was dying.
They talked about her wicked sense of humor. Honestly, I didn’t even know she had a sense of humor.
They talked about her tenacity. It was my mother who frequently sat in the midst of a group of chain smokers at the Pioneer Home and started coughing uncontrollably to emphasize the impact that lighting up had on others.
It was my mother who placed large sheets of foil on the rooftop railings of the Pioneer Home to magnify the sun so she could experience just a little bit of California in the dead of winter as she sat in a lounge chair.
And I began to realize why it was so important that I give her back the good things I remembered from my childhood.
Massaging her hands and feet as she did for us as children.
Placing fresh flowers around her neck each day when she was in her coma so she could smell their sweet fragrance.
Lying next to her and mirroring her breathing so even in her coma she would know I was there.
Taking her favorite records (Tommy Dorsey, Glen Goodman, Herb Alpert, Louie Armstrong & Zamphir) to the local radio station so they could be converted into cassettes that I could play for her 24/7.
And most importantly, reading to my mom as she had done for us when we were children.
One day, before the coma set in, my mother said to me, “You know your soul picked me out to be your mother before you were born.”
I remember saying, “Mama, you’re absolutely right. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without you.”
So, on this, my 79th birthday, I remember my mother, Alice Mae Koslosky.
I feel overwhelming love and gratitude for our complicated, co-dependent and sometimes toxic relationship because I realize that life is messy.
Love is messy.
What I most want to carry forward for the balance of my years, is the realization that as imperfect as we are.. we are worthy of love—both giving and receiving.
The most important thing we can do, is to express it.
So, on this, my 79th birthday, I want to say, I love you, Alice Mae.
I’m so honored to be your daughter and to carry the very best of you inside of me. Always.