HomeHomeAs a child I learned about life by watching television, and I dreamed of being part of an all-American family like those portrayed on "Father Knows Best," "Leave it to Beaver," or "The Brady Bunch." I secretly wished for a stay-at-home mom like June Cleaver, and a life that resembled a Norman Rockwell painting. However, the gods had other plans for me, particularly when they chose my mother. Helen was a force to be reckoned with--one of the strongest personalities I would ever know, and a true original.
By the time I showed up in her life, her marriage was effectively over, and she was faced with the challenge of raising three small children alone. In those days, divorced women had a hard time getting credit on their own, or even affording their own homes, and they faced financial and social discriminations unheard of today. Helen succeeded in providing a stable home for my brothers and me, and in providing a sense of belonging and security.
My mother was tough because she had to be. She had faced many challenges in her life. She had seen discrimination and prejudice because her father was an uneducated Greek immigrant, married to a South Dakota farm girl of English/Irish heritage. As the child of what was then considered a "mixed marriage," she never felt comfortable among the Greek families my grandparents knew, nor among the primarily Scandinavian families prevalent in our small town. Her feelings of not fitting in would lead to a life-long sense of compassion for the underdog, particularly for the foreign-born.
Helen had also battled serious illness in childhood. A bout with diphtheria left her without her sense of smell. She would never know or understand the joy of smelling home-baked bread, or real French perfume. Like millions of others of her generation, she had lived through the Great Depression, and knew economic hardship. She also knew how to live on a limited income.
She was a straight-shooter, not one to put on airs or play games. She told it like it was, and she was a bit of a non-conformist. She didn't care about material possessions or the way the house looked, she just wanted to go places. She was interested in history--especially if it related to Greece. At the age of 41, she realized her life-long dream of going to her ancestral homeland. This was in 1967, a few months after a military junta had taken over the country. She was a bit daunted by that, but it would not destroy her desire to understand her Greek roots. Helen went on her journey alone, and came home with a new outlook on life. She talked about taking back her Greek maiden name, and about adopting a child, possibly from another country. She saw how much Americans had, compared to the rest of the world, and she believed we could share our limited resources with others.
We had many parties over the years in our small house, and Helen always invited the local foreign students who were far from their homes and families. And she had a ritual that always sent our guests into fits of laughter. At some point in the 1960s, "Mad" magazine had an issue that included a small plastic record. The record was essentially a 2-3 minute party-music instrumental, interspersed with the sounds of a man belching loudly. She loved that "burping" record, and for years it was a party staple.Helen had a wicked sense of humor, and enjoyed horror films. Norman Bates in "Psycho" was no big deal, Hannibal Lector in "Silence of the Lambs" was a mere amusement. She even went to see "The Exorcist" by herself and thought it was "pretty good." This was a woman who thought the dark stories of Edgar Allen Poe were brilliant. When I once confessed to having nightmares after watching a horror movie, I could tell she was a little irked. God help her, she had raised a delicate flower of a daughter who liked Hollywood musicals and silly love songs and fancy perfumes.
In hindsight, it seems odd to confess that Helen was exactly what I didn't want to be, but that's how I felt as a child and young adult. I wished she was more like my grandmother, a genteel Presbyterian lady who would never embarrass me, who worked in the home, and spent her free time making me lots of cookies. But Helen could never be like her own mother, and I was determined not to be like mine. I wanted my mother to stay home, and behave herself. Her ahead-of-her-time ideas scared me. I didn't want a mother with a different last name than my own. I couldn't tolerate the idea of another child in the house. And I wanted nothing to do with Greece. I wanted to be Scottish instead. Our fights were legendary. It was always a battle of two strong wills. She would be my most ardent supporter, and at times, my worst critic.
Like many parents, she worried endlessly about her children. She wanted a daughter who was tough and would be able to navigate her way in this world. My solitary childhood artistic tendencies concerned her. When I was eleven, she sent me across the state to a church camp in the Black Hills, all the while feeling guilty and hoping I would adjust well. I ended up having the time of my life.
This would become a common theme in our lives--her encouraging me to get out and take on new challenges, to not be afraid, to get up and go. And I would always resist initially. It was what she wanted, but was it what I wanted? When I was fifteen, she insisted on taking me to Greece. I didn't want to go. It wasn't really about the place, it was about carving out my own identity. Greece was her thing, it wasn't mine. As it turned out, the trip changed my life and my world view, and gave me a new appreciation for my roots and my grandfather's journey. I began to see Helen in a different light.
A few months after our trip, she discovered a lump in her breast. When she finally had a biopsy, the cancer had spread to several lymph nodes, and she would undergo a radical mastectomy. Her surgery took place a few days before my sixteenth birthday. She also endured a few weeks of radiation therapy. It would be a major turning point for both of us.
Life took on interesting and painful paradoxes. At the same time that I was coping with a changing body and self-esteem issues, my mother had self-esteem and body issues of her own. I wondered, too, if her fate would also become my own, as I had a smaller body shaped just like hers. I was expected to be strong, and behave as an adult . It was at times hard to know who was parent and who was child. I became her cheerleader, encouraging her to have a positive outlook, and not give up. It was also a time when cancer was a subject not discussed openly. I don't remember having any friends who were facing the same thing I was. Nor did Helen have any friends who were experiencing the same thing. In those days, one in twenty women were at risk for breast cancer; now it is one in eight or nine. When other young girls my age were worrying about boys and clothes and high school activities, I carried the secret fear that my mother would die and leave me alone. One of my parents was absent from my life, I could not bear the possibility of losing the other. Every few months, I accompanied my mother to the Mayo Clinic for her tests and checkups, silently praying while we waited for the results. A clean bill of health meant another reprieve, and more time.
It was a lonely place to be, but made me appreciate the time we were given. And we decided not to take that time for granted. In the years to come, we scrimped and saved and traveled as far as we could. Helen was determined to encourage a wider world view in me. My growing Presbyterian-influenced spirituality worried her, and on a trip to Egypt, we visited one of Cairo's great mosques, where she made the point that this was one of many of God's houses. The Supreme Being was accessible through many of the world's great religions, she insisted.
When I was nineteen, the opportunity to spend the summer in Greece came up suddenly and unexpectedly. I hesitated. Helen would have none of it. She packed my bags and insisted that I go. "If you're not happy, come home." she instructed. "You may never get this chance again." End of debate. I arrived in Athens one week later, and had a wonderful summer. Opportunities were not to be squandered.
Over the years, I gradually left home and established my own life. As time went by, and each of her checkups were better than the last, we felt safer from the uncertainties of life, especially when she passed her five-year anniversary of being cancer-free. Helen moved on with her life, too. She eventually had breast reconstruction surgery, which gave her a newfound confidence. She wrote about her experience in the August 1980 issue of Lady's Circle magazine. She wanted to give other women hope that they could feel good about their bodies again--that there was indeed life after a radical mastectomy.
In her '50s, she bought a small motorcycle and drove it around town. She was a bit self-conscious, but really enjoyed it, and secretly hoped that her example would give other women her age the courage to do things like that. She eventually moved to Florida and continued her teaching career there.
Ten years ago, we ended up taking one last trip to Greece together. In an ironic twist of fate, a few months later, and after a nineteen-year reprieve, her breast cancer inexplicably returned and spread to her bones. She bravely endured months of chemotherapy, the ensuing hair loss, and somehow summoned up the strength to go back to work for one last year. Besides the difficulty of watching my strong mother lose a battle to an even stronger foe, this was also the realization of my worst childhood fear--that I would become an orphan of sorts, and would lose my sense of belonging, and safety and security. I not only lost my mother, I lost my childhood sense of home as well.
After a year of bravely soldiering on and "stiff-upper-lipping" it as I had learned to do, I took a leave from my life and work, and headed back to the ancestral homeland. I wanted to run as far away from the memories of her illness, and what the cancer had done to both our lives, as I could possibly go. All those trips to the Mayo Clinic over the years, all the pain I witnessed at the end--it was too much to contemplate. On this particular journey, on the anniversary of her death, I slowly began to come to terms with the loss of my mother. With the benefit of time and space away from home, I could finally admit to myself how much I was hurting. During this trip I also headed for Cyprus, a country we had both hoped to visit. Only afterwards would I come to understand the larger significance of choosing this very special place.
Cyprus has long been a pawn in the national interests of the Greeks and Turks. After a 1974 invasion by the Turks and nearly going to war with the Greeks, the island was divided, and the northern half was taken over by Turkey. Life was never the same for the people of the island. The Cypriot people had lost their sense of home and safety and security. Many had lost loved ones during this terrible time. In the ensuing years, they had rebuilt their lives, despite their pain and tremendous losses. They were strong and had persevered. They had no other choice.
While the pain of losing a parent cannot be correlated to the pain of experiencing war conditions, time away made me realize that everyone faces pain and difficulties in life--some experiences faced by individuals on a national or global level could be horrible beyond belief. Yet life does indeed go on, as I learned from the people of Cyprus. The lessons learned there marked the beginning of a long healing process.
It has been eight years since Helen died, and I miss her still. I suppose I always will. The anniversary of her death still has the power to rattle me a bit, though it's nothing like that first year of grief, when I felt so raw, and tried so hard to hide it. Mother's Day and Helen's birthday can be sad, bittersweet days as well. However, I realize, too, that many thousands of others have been affected by breast cancer, as well. The fact that over 40,000 American women die each year from this disease is unbelievable. What I can only comprehend is that someone else has lost their mother, grandmother, sister, cousin, aunt or even male relative--it is becoming a more democratic disease. The loved ones lost to this terrible disease are never mere statistics, but real flesh and blood humans who have a powerful impact on the lives of others.
When I was a child, I would have been insulted if someone had said I was just like my mother. Today, I would consider it a compliment. With adult wisdom, I realize that the drive to forge a separate identity from my mother was simply part of the human journey--a struggle that has gone on between mothers and daughters since ancient times. Helen's struggle with cancer made the journey more poignant. Her straightforward personality, her love of travel, her questioning mind, and even her battles with cancer gave me a much deeper appreciation for the life I was given. I would never have appreciated life in the same way had it resembled the Norman Rockwell paintings that I loved. Love and pain go hand in hand, and nobody's life is golden or perfect or problem-free. Time is precious, the only real commodity that we have to spend, and we had better spend it wisely, following our interests and passions, with the people that we love.
The gods knew what they were doing when they picked Helen for my mother. It was a privilege to be her daughter.
Teresa Callies
October 2000Photograph circa 1981
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