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Our Life | Наше життя May | Травень 2021 15 & How well do you know your mother? I ask because recently, I had an experience that made me question how well I knew my own mother. I had called my parents during Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony in January to discuss the inaugural speech, the moving performative poetry of Amanda Gorman, the fashion choices of the Vice President and the First Lady. It was when we started talking about the singing of the national anthem that my mother quite casually threw out her thoughts on Lady Gaga’s image. Mama has a theory that Gaga started her career embracing wild futuristic costumes to make a big splash on the music scene and slowly discarded the outrageous fashions to reach a wider middle-America audience. And Mama was clear that Lady Gaga’s choice of voluminous red skirt for the inauguration was a much better choice than the time she wore an egg costume. (I had to Google that myself!) When I laughed and said I didn’t even realize she knew who Lady Gaga was, my mother, just shy of 90, took umbrage: “What, you think just because I’m old I’m not interested in the world around me?” That stopped me cold, and I realized that, clearly, I didn’t know everything about my mother, as I had assumed. We have always had a close mother/daughter relationship, so many questions swirled in my mind. How much do we really know about each other? Am I guilty of ageism and making assumptions that people grow less interested in the world as they age? Have I underestimated the depth of my mother’s worldview and locked her into my own clichéd ideas of who she should be? Have I been interacting with her simply as “my mother” rather than as an “interesting older lady I like talking to and spending time with”? Apparently, my mother has quite the rich inner life, which was exposed by accident during that Inauguration Day conversation. Far from embodying My Mother Marta Zielyk , Branch 64, New York City Marta Zielyk with her mother Larysa Zielyk, also a member of Branch 64 in New York City the stereotypical image of an older person being a technophobic, sedentary TV watcher, she is staying mentally and physically engaged. She has discovered the joys of computers and recently self-published her memoirs. She loves browsing in Barnes & Noble and attending Zoom webinars on diverse subjects like Ukrainian hip hop music and the restoration of New York’s famed Grand Central Station. How wonderful that at her age my mother can still surprise me with the discovery of another facet of her life. She had very specific thoughts on Lady Gaga’s outfit. What else might she know that I am not aware of? Might she be taking a break from reading the hefty, 900-page tome of Maria Matios’s Bukova zemlya to see what Justin Timberlake is up to these days? (His latest movie, Palmer , is clichéd and formulaic, she tells me.) Maybe she alternates diligently working her way through our family archives – scanning old photos and digitizing documents – with perusing the Style section of The New York Times – you know, just to be in the loop on up-and-coming young actors in Hollywood? We all have inner lives that are kept hidden, inten - tionally or unwittingly. What a pleasure it is, then, when someone you thought you knew inside and out opens another door into her world and invites you in. You have been there a thousand times, you think you know each and every room of her heart and mind, and then ... a surprise. You stumble upon the room where your mother keeps her knowledge of pop culture and out tumbles her opinion of Lady Gaga’s fantastic red inaugural skirt. What sheer delight! Lady Gaga
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