If I Weren't Here

A Lesson for When You're Up a Tree

No one knew what I was thinking as I stood in our front yard, watching my older brothers climb the Sycamore tree that towered over our house. It never occurred to them, or to my parents, that I would try to climb the tree too. But as the saying goes: monkey see, monkey do. It took me a while to figure out how to do it. My brothers were tall enough to reach the lower branches; at age six I was too short. That didn’t stop me from plotting and planning, though. One day, as I was riding my tricycle along the sidewalk, I had a brainstorm. I could ride the trike up to the tree and stand on the seat to reach the lowest branch. This idea worked splendidly, and I found myself in the tree, quickly climbing upward, limb by limb.

Each branch was just a bit smaller than the one below it but all of them held my weight. Finally, the trunk began to narrow so much that I could go no higher without making the tree top bend over. It was exhilarating! The enormous leaves made a rustling sound as they slipped against each other in the breeze. When the top of the tree swayed from side to side in a gust of wind it felt like I was flying. The clouds were so close! It seemed to me that if the tree were just a little bit taller, I could touch them.

I looked down on the rooftops of the houses around the neighborhood. I was so high I could see into a kitchen window a few houses away. I saw laundry fluttering on a backyard clothesline one street over. It was grand! I felt so free!

I was pretending that I was in the mast of a tall ship like the ones I had seen in the movies, the mast rocking back and forth by the waves. Suddenly my imaginary world was dissolved by the sound of my mother calling me in for lunch. I looked down. She was walking around the front yard, calling my name. I could see the top of her head. She looked so small.

“Here I am” I answered.

“Where?” she said.

“Up here!”

I saw the top of her head pivot back until her face appeared, tilted up toward me. Her expression changed from puzzlement to terror and for a very, very long moment she was silent. When she finally spoke, it was in the most peculiar tone of voice I had ever heard: low, terrifyingly calm and serious. I could tell that she was exerting great effort to maintain control. I would only hear her use that tone of voice one other time in my life, years later: it was the day she told me to call 911 because my father was having a heart attack. I was an adult by then, but I instantly recognized the tone as the same one she used the day I climbed the tree. Both times, it froze my blood.

“You need to come down now.” She said in that calm-awful voice. Up until that moment I had been happy and exhilarated, but that dreadful tone knocked all the confidence out of me. I started trembling. “OK Mommy.” I said. I stretched my foot toward the branch below me, but I couldn’t reach it. Shinnying up the trunk wasn’t difficult, but I couldn’t figure out how to shinny down. I took a deep breath and tried again but I was too short to span the breach.

“I can’t” I whimpered, drawing out the “can’t” into a long wail. My mother tried to direct me, telling me where to put my foot, how to shift my weight, but her voice was so strange it made me panic. I began to cry. I saw the top of her head again as she looked down at the ground for a long, quiet minute. She took a deep breath, looked up again and said incongruously, “What would you do if I weren’t here?”

“W-What?” I asked, taken aback.

“What would you do if I weren’t here?”

“I don’t know” I wailed, bursting into tears again.

“Keb!” she said forcefully, “What. Would. You. Do. If. I. Weren’t. Here?”

This was not a rhetorical question. She wanted an answer. I had to figure this out. I looked down at the branch below me and analyzed the situation. After a long period of pondering I said, “I would hug the tree real tight and slide down to the next branch.”

What my mother did next might sound shocking to modern ears, but it was exactly the right thing to do. Realizing that her panic was making me panic, and that my panic was dangerous, she said in her brightest, happiest voice, “OK. That sounds good. Come on down now; your lunch is ready. I will be in the house.” And she turned and walked away. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I learned later that she did not go inside. She hid behind the porch and watched me from around the corner of the house.

I was alone again. It was just me and the tree. I looked down at the branch below and imagined myself sliding down. Just as I pictured it in my mind, I hugged the tree as hard as I could, closed my eyes and slid down the trunk, knocking off loose patches of bark as I went. When I felt the next branch firmly underfoot, I found my courage. I quickly slid down from branch to branch, breathing a sigh of relief as my toes touched the seat of my tricycle. The red scrapes on the inside of my thighs and arms were a small price to pay for being on the ground again. Mom rushed into the house before I came around the corner. She pretended nothing had happened. I saw my lunch on the table as I entered the kitchen. Mom let me eat in peace but after lunch she gave me a stern lecture and ordered me to never climb that tree again.

This incident gave me much food for thought. I was utterly intrigued by my mother’s question “What would you do if I weren’t here?” At age six, that thought had never occurred to me. My parents had always been here. I assumed they always would be. What would it be like if they weren’t here? How would I manage? What would I do? I began to ask myself that question in various situations and develop contingency scenarios for helping myself. What if I wanted the graham crackers in the cabinet when no one was around to get them for me? What would I do? I would get a chair and climb up on the counter. What if I needed a clean shirt and no one was around to operate the washing machine? I would get the detergent and wash it in the sink. What if no one was around to take me to school? I would get money out of the change jar and get on the city bus that stopped at our corner. Of course I knew that, in reality, if something happened to my parents, I would have to live with someone else; I wouldn’t be alone. But it was a fun thought-experiment to speculate what I would do if I were. With that one question independence took root in my soul. I thought about it a lot, but I didn’t realize how much it had been weighing on my mind until I was out with my mother shopping one day.

In those days there were no shopping malls; there were department stores, most of them downtown. We would park along the street and, after putting coins into a parking meter, we walked from store to store, carrying packages of things we bought. As we approached the next store my mother said, “Open the door for me.” Her arms were full of packages, and she didn’t have a free hand. To this day I do not know what on earth possessed me to say this but, without thinking, these words popped out of my mouth. “What would you do if I weren’t here?” Instantly I clapped both hands over my mouth in horror. One did not sass this woman and live to tell the tale. What was I thinking? “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it!” I said, bracing for a wild outburst of temper.

Instead of becoming angry she just stood there, looking at me thoughtfully. Finally, she said “You are absolutely right! What would I do if you weren’t here? I shouldn’t take advantage of you when I am perfectly capable of doing it myself.” With that she shifted her weight, rearranged the packages to one arm and opened the door with the other. And then she laughed.

From that day on the question became a kind of mantra for us whenever we were together and found ourselves in some difficulty. It became a game, a challenge, and our private joke. But more than that, it became a continuing exercise in independence for both of us. Whenever we faced a challenge, we would first ask ourselves how we would handle it if there were no one around to help. It taught me to work out my problems for myself which, in turn, gave me confidence and self-respect. I didn’t realize it at the time but later I learned that it did the same for my mother.

After I was grown and gone and my father had died, my mother told me of the many times she started to call me to come home to help her with something but chose not to after asking herself “our question”. She became amazingly self-reliant in her older years. On one of my visits back home we went to Walmart together. She needed dog food, among other things. She was in her 80’s at that time and quite proud of the fact that she could still heft a 40-lb bag of dog food by herself. I was not aware of that, however, and when we came to the pet food isle, I automatically reached for the dog food to put it in the shopping cart for her. Her famous temper flared as she slapped my arm and sternly ordered me to put the bag down. She then picked it up herself and put it in the cart. She turned to me and said, “What do you think I do when you’re not here?” I understood the twist on our private joke and nodded proudly. This turned out badly for me in the parking lot, however. As I stood idly by so that she could hoist the bag from the cart to the trunk of her car, a passing stranger stopped behind me and asked in an angry tone of voice. “Is this your mother?” Surprised, I stammered “Uh, yes…” and he proceeded to scold me for being too lazy to help her. He then attempted to put the bag in the car for her. I stepped aside. Waaaaay aside. I knew what was coming.

My mother’s temper flared again. She made him put the bag down. “I don’t want my daughter to help me…or anyone else, for that matter!” she said, “At my age I can’t afford to stop doing these things for myself. I have to keep moving or I won’t be able to move at all. It’s the only exercise I get. After all, what would I do if she weren’t here?” Then realizing that he meant well, her voice and face softened, and she added with a smile “But thank you anyway. You are a real gentleman.”

After my mother’s disabling stroke, I became her caregiver, advocate, and protector. We spent many an evening quilting together, drawing and doing crafts. In spite of her paralyzed arm, and true to her independent spirit, she taught herself how to do these things with one hand. She would show me her clever workarounds and say, “See? This is how I do it when you aren’t here.”

As she became weaker, the question became moot; she could no longer do even simple things without my help. One evening, I was sitting by her bedside as I did every night during her long decline. She looked over at me, took my hand and smiled. She asked me our famous question but this time it had a different meaning. “What would I do if you weren’t here?” she asked. It was the last time she would ever ask it. “Well, I am here and I’m going to stay here so you don’t have to worry about that” I said. I could not speak the question that was stuck in my throat: what will I do when she’s not here?

Inevitably, I had to come face-to-face with “our question” in the most final way possible. Just after midnight one summer night, she passed away. At the time, I couldn’t help but think that I would not be able to manage without her. But I needn’t have worried; I have done fine in the years since her death. I realized that she had been preparing me for it all along through her many examples of self-reliance. In fact, she began preparing me when I was six years old, on the day I got stuck up a tree.