Amy Lu's View

According to the theory of the multiverse, there is a reality somewhere in which my mother is alive and well and on Facebook.

Sadly, this is not that reality. My mom died in 2000, before the interwebs were widely adopted by middle-aged (okay, almost elderly) elementary school teachers from rural Wisconsin.

In this version of the multiverse, we will never be treated to my mom’s Facebook posts which would most likely alternate between “I live in a shitty shack,” “My son-in-law Chad is a genius” and “What is Amy’s work schedule?”

My mom never read a blog in her life. I can only imagine how she would have unintentionally misprounced “blog.” Plog? Blob? Gullag?

So it may be slightly ironic that I’ve turned to the interwebs and a blog to help me process my grief over my mom’s death and absence from my life. And it’s maybe rather meta that this is a blog about those blog posts.

Actually, it’s more a blog about the chance to read from my blog in-person, in front of real live people. I had the opportunity to do this recently and it was terrifying and exhilarating and humbling and beautiful.

It was such a powerful experience not because I’m all that as a writer or performer (although not being completely inept was a good baseline), but because there is such power in sharing and being open and taking a a risk. Oh, I definitely was seized by feelings of “WTF am I doing?!” and “This seemed like a good idea at the time I planned it!” and “Just how boring and self-indulgent am I?” and “Why didn’t I bother to see if I could actually pronounce all these words that I can type?”

And those feelings, like almost all feelings of self-doubt and inadequancy and questioning, never went away while I was reading. But as I looked out at the faces of my friends who came to hear and support me, they co-mingled with feelings of “Wow, how lucky am I that I get to do this” and “I think we’re all actually sharing a moment here. We have a connection.”

You can watch my reading (Blog reading) and/or read the blogs as I intended to present them (I did a little ad-libbing and introduced a prop glass of crappy blended red wine at the last minute. A prop, but real wine. I did agonize over if it was too embarassingly crappy but I was willing to suffer for my art.

My Dead Mom Blog Reading: 

March 21, 2014:  Say, This Is Amy Luedtke…and I miss my mom, due to the fact that, she is dead.

That may sound a little harsh, but that sentence actually makes me laugh. It combines two of my mom’s favorite sayings. Whenever she made a “business” call, mom always started it with “Say, This is Colleen Luedtke.” My older sister, Jenn, and I used to love to listen in on these calls while we imagined the person on the other end repeating, “This is Colleen Luedtke.” We don’t know how or why mom picked up this verbal quirk, but just thinking about it still makes me smile.

“Due to the fact that” was a favorite phrase of Colleen’s for written communication. Whenever I had missed school because I was sick (or pretending to be sick) the note my mom would write was a variation of “Amy missed school yesterday due to the fact that, she was ill.” Again, thinking of that one little (yet mysterious and completely unnecessary phrase) captures so much of my mom’s spirit.

On my mom’s birthday (which was St. Patrick’s Day), I had some aspirations of writing a blog post that would honor her and be a slightly profound reflection on life lessons learned. Or something like that. Something inspiring and poignant but not depressing. And while I certainly learned so much from my mom, I cannot put these things easily into words.

So for now, I just want to capture some of the little, unique things that I remember about my mom, things that live on in my memory (rather accurately or not) and my heart and keep her spirit alive for me. Perhaps these little, seemingly inconsequential quirks are the things that are the most important and precious pieces of any of us?

So, in no particular order:

• Mom was fanatical about doing laundry, and even insisted on doing Chad’s laundry on a weekly basis. She also regularly ironed everything, including t-shirts. She was actually very talented at “ironing out” t-shirts, and as a big lady, it was useful that they often ended up at least a size bigger than when she started.
• “They can’t take that away from you.” That was one of my mom’s favorite sayings. I wasn’t always sure who “they” were or what they wanted to take, but at least once it was meant as encouragement for the artsy fartsy liberal arts B.A. degree I was getting. As in, “you may never get a job, but at least you will have your education!”
• Mom was not a good driver. I offer this evidence: she hit a cow on two separate occasions, in the daytime. But she never admitted or recognized her driving deficiencies. Her biggest troubles were driving too slowly (so it was very ironic when she got stopped for speeding) and being distracted and flustered. One time when we made a field trip to the Cities to go to the Renaissance Fair, she accidentally turned her hazards on and drove around who knows how long with them on. It was actually a pretty good idea.
• If mom sat down for more than 10 minutes she fell asleep. And she moaned in her sleep. This could make church or movies a little embarrassing. She also never owned up to this, and would just say she was “resting her eyes.” She even started laughing in her sleep, to make it seem like she was awake and laughing about whatever television show we were watching. Again, this could be embarrassing at movies or church.
• Mom was a great storyteller. Some of her best stories included the time when she was a house cleaner for a professor and vacuumed up a Hummel figurine; when one of her high school teachers died during class while screaming at the students and they had to walk over her body to exit the classroom; and many tales about her high school days in Milwaukee where the girls fought with hat pins and they sent my mom to special ed because she came from the country. They also sent most of the black kids to special ed, just because they were black, and they looked out for my mom and watched over her at pot parties.
• Mispronouncing words and names was an art form for my mom. I can’t do her talent justice right now but sometime ask me what a “commune” is.
• Mom used to say sex only took 30 seconds. This wasn’t meant to instill me with a “why bother?” philosophy, but to support her position that teens will find a place and a time to have sex if they are really motivated. I always wondered but never had the courage to ask if the 30 seconds included foreplay.

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That was a post from my blog. My mom died before I had a blog, and I’m not sure she would have got the concept of a blog. She died before the internet was really an everyday thing, so I have a hard time imagining her living in the cyber-world. Thinking about her on Facebook is both hilarious and terrifying.

Anyway, I love to write. To illustrate: Here’s another snippet from my blog from a post on Feb 9, 2014: When I was in my mid-twenties (post-college) my mom told me she had run into Mike, a guy I had known (vaguely) from junior high. Reportedly, Mike had asked my mom what I was doing and if I was still writing, and mom said she told him, yes, I was a writer. I replied, “WHAT? Mom, what in the hell do I write?” (I was working retail at a now deceased mall bookstore at the time). And mom said, “Well, you write all the time. You write checks.” As often happened when my mom made (at least to me) nonsensical comments in her completely confident Colleen way, I was speechless.

I love this story, because it totally captures so much of my mom’s personality and her unabashed insistence of seeing the world her way. It also reminds me that I did want to be a writer from a very early age. I don’t know why my mom told Mike I was writer. I don’t think she was embarrassed that I was working retail, I think she just believed that I was happy and successful and that was her way of telling Mike that.

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And back to the present: blogging about my mom through the years has been a therapeutic way to process my memories of her and feelings about her death. When Suzanne proposed her cabaret about her experience of motherhood, I got inspired to share some of my blog for a different perspective of motherhood. This is an experiment that could fail spectacularly, as I’m not sure if what works—more or less—in print, will work when it’s read aloud, even though I do try to write in my speaking voice.

So thanks for taking this risk with me. I hope what I share with you tonight will make you smile and maybe even think fondly about a loved one you’re missing. And hey, even if this really sucks, my mom, with her superpower of overvaluing my talent, would consider this a resounding success.

And on to another blog post…

August 13, 2014

In the days following Robin Williams suicide, Facebook has exploded. I don’t have anything enlightening to add and I am in no way an expert on suicide or depression. But I would like to suggest that even a life that has such a tragic ending probably (hopefully) had moments of joy, love, and even just contentment and pleasure. After his death, Williams’ widow said: “As he is remembered, it is our hope the focus will not be on Robin’s death, but on the countless moment of joy and laughter he gave to millions.” No doubt that he gave those moments, but let’s not forget he experienced some of them, too.

Whether its a job or a relationship or a life, just because it ends in a spectacularly bad or painful way, the ending doesn’t negate the reality of the good or even mundane moments that happened. And again, not to minimize the suffering of depression or any illness, but just because a life has pain does not mean there isn’t any joy…sometimes occurring at the same time. I think one of my college professors would have called this the “coincidence of opposites.” We need to be creative enough to tell life stories for ourselves and each other that feel authentic but also aren’t too simplistic. People are rarely simply “good” or “bad,” “happy” or “sad.”

And yes, I am thinking a lot about my mom, and even my dad, as I write this. My parents certainly weren’t celebrities or comedians (or only for a very limited audience), but both their deaths have challenged me to tell their life stories in ways that are real and complex. After my mom’s death I was confronted with facts about her life that tempted me to despair it was all suffering and she was never really happy. But I now believe, and it is our unique human power to choose how we give meaning to our experiences, that the happy, funny, sassy, mom I knew was real, too.
It is a cliche to say you never know a whole person, or you never know what goes on behind closed doors. I agree, but also think that doesn’t mean that what you do know of a person isn’t real. We never see the whole picture, but that doesn’t mean the pieces we know are false. Human beings, and therefore human relationships, are extremely complex and multi-faceted, and so we will only know pieces of “the truth.” I think that just makes it all the more vital to pay attention to and really appreciate and value the pieces we do know and experience.

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October 22, 2014

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I keep and what I do with it, and what I try to let go of. This idea is a central theme of the one-act “Bird Icon” that Chad and I are in the midst of re-booting. The play opens with my character, Claire, going through her recently deceased father’s things and deciding what to keep or toss.

Claire is much more on the ball about such matters than I am. My mom died fourteen years ago today, and I finally took some time this afternoon to go through a stockpile of her jewelry. Although I didn’t specifically remember most of the pieces, it’s amazing how, after all this time, the jewelry reflected my mother’s tastes and personality and conjured her up in a way. These pieces were bold, colorful, and unique, just like my mom.
It’s hard to believe that I’ve put off looking at this jewelry for fourteen years, and even harder to believe my mom has been dead so long. Every year on the anniversary of her death I’m amazed another year without her has passed, and I’m sure I will continue to feel this for as long as I live. These death anniversaries are such strange milestones, mixing together how much I miss my mom with feeling old.

Or maybe “feeling old” is just a euphemism. I’m not really thinking about my age so much as my mortality. My mom was exactly twenty years older than I am now when she died.

The anniversary of my mom’s death is also a weird milestone because it highlights all the things, big and small, that have happened since my mom died that she never got to experience or be a part of. I also think about all the ways I’ve changed. It’s trivial, but way back in 2000, I didn’t drink coffee. Now I can’t imagine life without it. Somehow the fact that my mom never knew me as a coffee addict symbolizes many levels of loss.
Of course it’s not just about what physical things we have and keep, but what our possessions symbolize. All the intangible attributes, emotions, talents, passions, and whatnot that we inherit and accumulate are more crucial than any object.

I was motivated to go through my mother’s jewelry today, but I’m even more inspired to think about what intangible pieces my mother gave me (whether she intended to or not) and what I want to do with them. Some things are easy to identify, like the taste for loud jewelry that I inherited from my mom, or my willingness to put up with badly-behaved pets or my penchant for hyperbole. I would also like to say I’m as generous, compassionate, loyal and strong as my mother, but those are pieces I’m still aspiring to fully own.

What we toss can be just as important as what we keep. Again, sometimes these decisions are easy. I decided long ago that I don’t have to keep my mother’s love of cheap gas station donuts alive (although thinking of it always makes me smile). But what should I let go of? What don’t I even realize that I’m holding on to? I’m slowly letting go of the pain of my mother’s illness and death, but can I let go of some of the sadness and fear she carried her whole life?

I also worry about what I have unintentionally let go of and what is slipping away because of the effects of time. Worse yet I wonder what I don’t remember because I didn’t pay attention and notice in the first place. I find hope from the song “Home” by the band Field Report and the lyric “The body remembers what the mind forgets.” I know body memory is often seen as something of a curse, but if our bodies remember all our traumas, they should remember all the good things, too. I want my body to remember all the love I received, especially when I was too young to have any memory of it. I hope my body remembers all the hugs and all the spaghettios my mom ever gave me.