I've been lying in bed and have hardly slept at although I guess I must have slept a little. But I've been thinking... there's so much going on to think about.
Before this happened with mom, her death, I mean, I was thinking about writing a post about more of my thoughts regarding my parents. I need to work on writing something up that could be the start of an obituary, though, but not right now.
The thing is that I'm still trying to make sense of my life, which is what this blog is all about, and there are some new thoughts that have come to me and some old ones that I haven't discussed here yet.
First, about dad. I got to thinking more about his title on his business card (post #12), which is "Program Planning and Control Manager." I think the "control" part could be security-related and as such, if this is so, could point to him having some intelligence-related responsibilities, at least enough to make sure his workers were all in line.
Another thing that hit me is when I was a teenager, once mom got recertified as a nurse (after about 12 or so years of being a stay-at-home mom) and started working part-time again, and she used to say how she was so much busier at her work than dad was. And dad used to play bridge with a group of others during lunch at work. So I'm thinking that this could have been some of the sort of security "clan culture" types of things going on that I experienced in Vienna. That is, such activities as bridge and "down times" were not as frivolous as they might have on the surface seemed; they served an important role in the scheme of things by way of "control".
Then I'd also been thinking about mom. I've wondered for years about how much she knew or didn't know regarding dad's work. She was pretty guileless, though, so it's quite possible she was naive to the significance of anything related to dad's work. But she used to go to dinners they had with dad's work, such as after winning a proposal, and she went down to Albequerque at least once with dad when he went on a business trip. It's hard for me not to compare what I experienced in Vienna with what might be going on related to dad's work. In Vienna, even if the women were not active in the ministry (although some occasionally took women's ministry trips), they had to know a lot of the security things, including how to keep their kids reined in, such as how to talk about their father's work and what they (the family) were doing in Vienna. So did mom have any of this kind of thing? Of course, dad's work and our family situation were quite a bit different than the Vienna mission. For example, we didn't have to "explain" what we were doing in Seattle. And Boeing was such a major employer in Seattle that kids especially wouldn't have thought anything about a parent working there... not like the Vienna mission which could have raised childish curiosity.
So I'd been thinking for a while about writing a post like this, but now, of course, it's all different after mom's death. Saturday I mailed off a little something for her for Easter. It was one of those big no-sweat glasses with her initial on it and some homemade chickpea chips I'd talked with her about on the phone. I filled the cup with the chickpeas. So what should I do with the glass now when it arrives in Seattle? Fill it with flowers and put it by the grave?
In a lot of ways it feels like mom was the last person alive that loved me. When I had my surgery in January she was the only one of the family that contacted me during that time, and she called repeatedly while I was in the hospital, especially when I was in so much pain because the nurses weren't giving me enough pain medicine. It really hurt, though, when she didn't even call me on my 50th birthday less then 2 months after the fiasco with my brother that landed me back down here.
Then I think back on the statement by a physicist who had worked under dad, who in 1981, on the sister-city trip to France he said I should have studied Italian instead of Russian - Italian is half my heritage on dad's side, and Ukrainian is half my heritage on mom's side. How much of my experiences and life can be explained because of the conflict with dad's work and my interests? And how much did mom know or understand?
