My Mom Discos

My son at my mother's grave for Mother's Day

I was dancing with my son to Mika's Grace Kelly last night while he was feeling sick.  It made him throw up his peaches, but he laughed the entire time.  After Mika was MGMT's Time to Pretend.  Great music for dancing with a baby.  I love it.  I want to be the kind of mom that my son tells his friends is crazy.

"She dances to Frank Sinatra - by herself - while she is cooking", he will say.  "And then plays Abba in the shower."  He will roll his eyes and tell his friends that I am not hip... or cool... or smooth... or whatever adjective happens to be en vogue at the time.

But I want my son to see that I have joy in my life.  I am a terrible dancer, but right now, he doesn't seem to mind.  He will, though.

And it got me thinking about the mom I knew.  My non-specific memories of my mother are on her hands and knees mopping the kitchen floor every day or listening to one of her kids playing the piano and hollering, "C Sharp with the 3rd Finger..."  But my mother rarely danced.  She was too refined to really let loose.   She would rarely do anything crazy.  With the exception of that one time in a Jackson Hole movie theater watching Kevin Costner in Robin Hood when she stood and cheered when Sean Connery came on the scene.  Other than that, my mother was reserved.

That changed when she found out she was dying.  As I was dancing with my son, my favorite memory of my mother came to mind.  She was sick - very sick.  It was April and she died in August.  She wanted to go to the planetarium.  She always wanted to be a scientist - specifically an astronomer.  She had the brains for it.  So, we went to the planetarium in Salt Lake.  She was too sick to walk to all the exhibits, but refused the wheelchair.  She wanted to see the 3-D movie and so we rode the elevator to the theater and got our snazzy glasses... huge red things that covered half our faces.  We both commented on the sexiness of it.  We sat in a very full theater waiting for the movie to start and overhead Neil Diamond began to sing Forever in Blue Jeans.  My very reserved, very quiet mother stood up and started dancing disco with her over-sized glasses, swollen left arm, and wheezy lungs.  I laughed so hard that I almost wet myself.

And the other patrons cheered her on enthusiastically.  A few even joined in.  Young kids.   And my mother became a teenager to me.  Laughing, dancing, and not caring about another thing in the world.  When did she stop dancing?  Why?  Unfortunately, I know too many answers to the question, "Why?"

And so, last night, I decided that I want my son to roll his eyes and say to his friends, "my mom...  she dances disco to Neil Diamond.  It is awful."  It will be music to my ears.