Opinion | Fulfilling Our Mom’s Dream to See the Solar Eclipse

Her body may be broken, but our mother is still the experience-seeker she has always been. She left home at 18 for a college a thousand miles away, traveled alone to the Middle East and never met a boat, big or small, she didn’t love.

These days, our mom can barely walk. She moves around via a scooter. Her back is so damaged from osteoporosis and an unsuccessful surgery that she cannot sleep, stand or sit without pain. Still, she remains the same stubborn and determined person she has always been. Years ago, this meant going to law school at the age of 40, traveling the world as a divorced single woman and starting her own business just shy of her 50th birthday. Now it means bristling when we mentioned that we are coming from our homes in Massachusetts and California to “take” her to see the eclipse.

“I decided I was going, so I am going,” she told us. “Compliant” and “rule-following” are words not generally used to describe our mom. It wasn’t true when she was a girl at Catholic school, and it certainly isn’t true now with her adult children.

As for us, we don’t always feel like dutiful children. Sure, we send flowers for Mother’s Day and her birthday. We try to speak at least weekly with our mother, but we also frequently end up in yelling matches over politics. In those moments, we tell her she has lost her mind, and she wonders aloud where she went wrong in raising us. Although we visit every Thanksgiving and Christmas, we have never vacationed together as adults. The daily demands of work and our own children long ago got in the way, and those yelling matches are wearying. It’s easy to end a phone call. It’s much harder to stop an uncomfortable conversation at the dinner table.

Despite all that, we have spent more than a year making the arrangements to escort her to this phenomenon of nature. Flights, rental cars and a wheelchair-friendly rental house have been booked since last spring. Most important, we identified an eclipse event at Baylor University in Waco that could handle my mom’s needs while giving us the best chance to view the eclipse under clear skies. We asked the organizers so many questions about walkways, bathrooms, seating and parking that a representative replied via email, “I can see you are putting a lot of thought into making this happen for your mom.” It is a lot of planning, but then my mom (and dad) did the same for four children. Our childhood was filled with trips to see the birthplaces of presidents, Thomas Edison’s workshop, Civil War battlefields, the U.S. Mint and more. Now, like many people in their 40s and 50s, we’ve reversed our roles.