Honouring My Mother and My Father;

5 min read·Dec 26, 2024

An aging child’s guide thru language

An essay by Mike Zizis

December 26, 2024

“Songs to aging children come
Aging children I am one.”
~ Joni Mitchell

What to leave out — what to leave in. Some of us have had to make rude choices in life. Like many I have had to choose between lifting my spirits and my life with the help of others, or drowning to death in addiction — as did my dad and my younger brother.

So this is what I am about. My lifelong nurturing my mother to this day was, is, and always has been, language, and the ever fertile dominion of words and their meaning.

My birth mother Maimie, was, for as long as I knew her in the grip of some real evil and the demons of her own making. She was one of 10 children. She and her siblings grew up in the rude and weedy jungle of America: in Pittsburgh. Her Sicilian Greek parents had the old country to remember, while she and her siblings were the firstborn on a new soil, with no memories of the old country, and the threats of the mafia to her father. So she took on the role of silence or death in raising us single handedly, my younger brother and I.

In one of my poems I described her bitterness and stubborn silence — ‘with a mouth as long as winter’.

She was raised in severity, fear, and silence, tho she had her brothers and sisters. She thought that was the way to raise children. I was and am a verbal child always in love with language. I was always getting praise in grade school to high school for my use of language, sadly only and singularly, the English language.

I came home from fourth grade excited to tell my mother what my teacher had said about me; mom the teacher said that “I use language so well I must have an excellent mom and dad.” Her response was “Don’t tell her anything.” As well as our Salvation Army clothes, I was wrapped daily and nightly in her embittered silence.

Some of us who are lucky enough to have at least one parent — don’t have any memory of ever being held or been told anything comforting or complementary as a child. My mothers Hell didn’t slowly or ever depart.

On my dad’s side my father, James, was a muscular and powerful man, in love with opera, and maybe other arts that I knew not of. His severe dad was Greek and his mother was Polish by way of Austria. He was a raging and violent alcoholic perfectly fulfilling the Jekyll and Hyde character who is sober and kind then drunk and a monster:

(The) Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is an 1886 Gothic horror novella by British author Robert Louis Stevenson about alcoholism.

My dad worked in a meat processing company as a truck driver. There were gangs of slaughtered 300 lb. cow corpses — carved in crimson and white down to meat and bone slabs — in the carrier portion of a refrigerated truck. There they were hung by massive meat hooks. There was no take your child to work day but he did anyway when I was 10 years old to the slaughterhouse.

And at 11 years old, I witnessed him trying to strangle the life out of my mother in one of his many violent drunken rages. I went to the kitchen, picked up a frying pan and hit him on the head with it, while we — my slightly younger brother and my mom and I ran to hide in the bathroom. We barricaded the door with an ironing board as he pounded the door and yelled at me from the other side — “You can dish it out but you can’t take it!”

Now on to honouring my mother and my father. In the eighth and ninth grade I fell in love with Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas, (before all the other authors) with their words and their language. I had found my resting place for my stormy mind and heart. Whitman reminded me, of how lofty, grand, elegant, elegiac, and transcendent language could be. Dylan Thomas revealed how atomic and nuclear — desire and life and death could be.

So then as now I am pursuing a goal that never can be attained, chasing gifted precise descriptive language, up and now down that never ending beach. Every day I stare backwards transfixed by my own footprints in the sand while running and stumbling forward as the sun sets on the ever stormy ocean, with an occasional watery tranquil moment caught in my breath and my eyes.

And like James Joyce, I’m a boy wandering on the beach while the waves wash up everything I need. My nurturing mother is language. My guiding moral source, away from that previously calling abyss — that addiction that my dad and my brother suffered, seems not to be my fate, is also the power of words to wound and to heal.

I am addicted of course, to the precisions of language in that poetic sense. Charles Darwin used the most precise language of his time to guide his writings — most especially The Voyages of the Beagle. The most precise language he could conjure up was that of the poets, not other scientists. And likewise Picasso hung out with poets and not painters. Don’t let anyone tell you — there are no words, only those who have given up the struggle.

My father’s fate was to end up in the poorest part of Pittsburgh, consumed by alcoholically induced gangrene, with his lower legs gradually cut off, like vegetables in a cart, in his wheelchair. My mother died in hospital of a viral disease, drowning in her own lungs. As much as I could I helped her cross over to that other distant shore. My aging child, my own fifty-three year old son — we were separated for forty years — is having trouble believing this story that has been etched and burned into my flesh. And so it goes.