Aunt Rose's Buttons

Cleaning out my mom's house

I’m going to write this article here in an effort to write and not get held up by perfectionism. You needed to know that, didn’t you?

My life doesn’t look like a lot of people’s lives I know.

I don’t have a 9-5 job and haven’t for many years. When I was in-between working at VFX studios back in Los Angeles, I used to joke that I was in my mid-life retirement. My mom would joke that when my peers were finally retiring, maybe I would finally be working again. Ha. Ha.

“I am working, Mom,” I would say. At that time, I was loosely pursuing acting, seriously writing my second screenplay, and doing standup comedy. My mom had been an accounting professor for her career, in a university town, and she did NOT understand my life’s choices, as they did not look linear, practical or stable.

However, due to my non-attachment to a linear life path, aka career, I didn’t hesitate to move back east when I learned she’d had her first stroke. And despite my “mid-life retirement” period where I wasn’t at a VFX studio, as mentioned, it wasn’t like I wasn’t employed by a global VFX studio at the time of her stroke or that I hadn’t worked hard over many years to create a career for myself in that field. I was finally in a management position, and that suited me really well, and my boss had just told me he was excited to see the leadership trajectory of my career.

When I moved back east, I didn’t have prospects of “work” or stability. I mostly had the motivation to care for my mom as she recovered from her stroke. I wanted to be with her. As long as my partner, Bunny, was open to us moving to the small Western North Carolina town where we live now, as long as he was on board, then I knew it was what I was going to do.

What about the buttons, Rachel? For goodness sakes!

I’m cleaning out my mom’s house. She died five years ago from COVID, and I am just now able to tend to her things. Her fourth husband just died in April. Before he passed, I was taking care of him, managing his health issues and a personality that I’ll not get into here right now. There was only him. I couldn’t spend time with her things, with her memories.

It isn’t like my mom had that much and certainly not of market value. My mom officially retired at the age of 55 years old! As much as she gave me a hard time about my “work life,” she couldn’t wait to end hers and move on to her retirement years. Of course, she bored and made many efforts to volunteer as a consultant for local non-profits and her Unitarian Church. She was effective in getting organizations financially organized.

But when it came to furniture or knick-knacks, or prized possessions, she didn’t have many and would easily let go of what she had if she felt burdened by them. Clearly though, she did not let go of Aunt Rose’s buttons! Goodness me. I believe they came from my Grandma Luedtke’s house when the family moved her into an assisted living. My grandma was in her 90’s at the time, so I can’t say my mom held onto them for too long. My mom only lived to 75. She would have been 81 this June.

I finally get to take care of my mom after all these years. I found her marriage/divorce papers (she was married 4 times), her creative writing pages, pictures of her as a child with her birth mom, Faith, who died when my mom was 4 years old, her wedding dress to my dad neatly hanging wrapped and protected, and all of her clothes from mostly Talbots (her favorite) that are still folded neatly in her dresser drawers while the house around her memories was treated like a toilet. (More on that another time!)

But the buttons. The glorious box of buttons. I’ll get back to you on who Aunt Rose is, as I know my mom had the family tree Grandma Luedtke had typed out. It’s around.

In the mess and the magic,

Rachel

To all my lovers of books and learning and learning about ourselves…here we are. xo Rachel

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