I had planned to talk about being a crone in childhood this time around, but regrettably my mother-in-law passed away last week. She was a crone of a very different sort than I am. At 93, she’d lived a long time, the last several years with Alzheimer’s, a debilitating disease that robbed her of everything, one piece at a time.
I never met Phyllis in the mother stage of her life. Yes, she is my husband’s mother, but my husband was a later in life child, and when I met her she was a little older than I am now. At 58, Phyllis was formidable. Not in the way I mean formidable usually. I think of formidable crones as women who misbehave, who defy age, who do what they damned well please. Phyllis seemed to my young and stupid eye a woman who acquiesced to a lot of people. I gotta tell you, I didn’t know jack about Phyllis.
Because…being a crone is also about being comfortable in your own skin. Phyllis was a nonagenarian who was pro-choice. She actually said, “Until all those people who want those women to have babies tell me how they’re going to take care of them, to feed them and their families, I’m not going to listen to them.” She was a believer in standing up for the rights of the downtrodden. “I don’t believe in war, but that Hitler, he had to go.” She supported gay rights. “One of my aunts had a special friend. We all knew they were more than friends, and what was wrong with that?”
Phyllis did a great job raising her son as well. Once, when my husband came home from a particularly rough day of being bullied verbally, he complained to his mom. Phyllis, of course, comforted him, but reminded him that those bullies had to be hurting in some way to be mean to him like that. Saying that kind of thing a lot really made my husband…thoughtful and contemplative. Damn.
The biggest difference between me and Phyllis was a simple one: she wasn’t noisy. But oh my god, she had it together. I am not sure if I can ever be the woman she was, but it behooves me to try. And I’m going to miss her a great deal.