Baby Steps (6 page)

I'll never forget the time one of the kids ran away. The teachers woke up all the kids in the middle of the night. They told us someone had run away, and they made us all get into vans to go find him. We finally found him pinned up against the fence, poor kid. He was two hundred pounds, he wore glasses, and I remember that he looked like a bumblebee in a jar, cowering in his black-and-yellow-striped jersey, caught in the intersection of flashlight beams and headlights from the vans filled with all of us, staring at him. They brought him back and we all had to go into the living room of the great house. At three in the morning, they put him in the center of the room and while we all watched, they asked him:

“Where were you going?”

“I was running away,” he said, his eyes downcast, fierce and disgraced.

“Did you think you would go home?” the headmistress asked him. “If your parents wanted you, you wouldn't be here.”

They told us that a lot—that our parents didn't want us, that our parents didn't love us, and that they had sent us there to get rid of us.

Once, I was told to clean dishes for the entire school, and while I stood at the big metal basin in the kitchen, a group of boys began throwing kitchen knives at me, laughing as I tried to dodge them. The teachers never intervened when the students tortured each other. They thought it was good for us to work things out for ourselves, but after the knife incident, I finally called my mother and told her everything: how we were treated like criminals, locked into our dorms, spied on, and abused. My mother drove down to the school that night. We weren't allowed to leave the campus, ever, but she told them she was taking me home for the weekend, and that they were never, ever to allow me to be abused by anyone, and that they were never allowed to tell me that my parents didn't love me, and that they would treat me with respect.

But I wasn't off the hook. We both knew I had to finish, and finish strong, but that weekend, she made me a deal.

“Lis, if you finish out the year and you do well, I promise you that you can go to a private school anywhere else you want to go. A nice school that you'll love.”

That was motivation enough for me. She took me back at the end of the weekend, and things were a little better after that. I felt like she was watching them just as they were watching me.

I hung in there. I kept my chin up and I followed the rules and I did what they told me to do. My new mission was to show everybody that I wasn't “bad,” that I wasn't “incorrigible.” My mother stood behind me the whole time, encouraging me to make it through.

At the end of the year, my grades were good enough to transfer to a wonderful Episcopal boarding school in Tennessee called St. Andrew's–Suwannee, which I loved, with “normal” kids and “normal” teachers who didn't tell you that your parents didn't love you in order to keep you there. At that school, I met my lifelong friend Leslie, who has taught me a thing or two about love in this lifetime. I met a nice boy and fell in love with him. I enjoyed my classes. I lived near my Aunt Laurie, my mother's sister, and having family nearby comforted me. I graduated, and I finally realized I was going to be okay.

Once I had achieved a degree of normalcy in my life, and I was out on my own, my mother changed. She'd done her job. She'd gotten me through the worst part. She'd sacrificed her dream to keep things as normal as possible for me, but now that I was out on my own, it was time for her to do what
she
needed to do.

I went home every holiday and occasionally on the weekends, and I watched with some alarm as my mother began to transform before my eyes. I'll never forget the day she tore up her Social Security card into tiny pieces and threw it into the air. It fluttered down around us like the ashes of our past life, like everything in my childhood,
everything I'd believed in, had been burned away and scattered into the wind.

“What are you doing?” I asked, in horror. Wasn't she going to need that for . . . something?

“I'm through with this life,” she said. The look on her face at that moment made me think of a phoenix. It was a look of rebirth, of pure joy. That's when she told me that she was selling the house and moving to the country.

“What?” I said in disbelief. “You're going to
what?”

I looked down at the floor, which was covered in tiny pieces of paper that weren't supposed to be in pieces. “Maybe I'll find a farm somewhere, a piece of peace in the countryside,” she said dreamily.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I said. “You can't sell this house. This is my childhood house!”

“You haven't lived here in two years,” she said.

“What kind of farm?” I said. I began to have visions of rolling fields and pastures for horses. Then I thought of that movie
Out of Africa.
“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills . . .” Now
that
was a cool farm. Hmm . . . maybe this could be interesting. A step up, even. Little did I know that she would end up in the backwoods of Missouri next to a commune of lesbians and revolutionary single women. Little did I know that she would find
her
paradise, not mine.

At the time, I was hurt that she was willing to pack up my memories in boxes and sell something that I considered to be the last piece of my stability, even if I'd only visited during the last two years. But she did it. She sold it all. She put my entire world into a U-Haul and carted it across the country to a hundred-acre plot of land with a little stone farmhouse without plumbing or electricity, and a trailer where the previous owner had lived.

“I'll fix it up,” she said.

“Who lives next door?” I said, looking around warily, swatting at bugs and eyeing the wild weed patches and unmown grass disdainfully.

“You'll see,” she said, a twinkle in her eye.

Once her new life was a reality, I realized it wasn't a step up. It was a huge step down, at least as far as I was concerned. In fact, it was completely ridiculous. What was she thinking? This was no “farm in Africa.” This was hillbilly hell. But she was thrilled beyond belief. The place didn't even have a bathroom. Just an outhouse. Gross. From Westchester to rural Missouri? I could hardly look at her. She was a traitor. She'd sold me out to live out some hippie fantasy. What kind of mother does that?

It was my mother's turn, and she taught me a great lesson by following her own path after she'd set me firmly onto mine. It didn't matter, ultimately, that I didn't want her to move. She knew enough to know that my desires were for my life, and that hers could now be about her own life. My first inkling that maybe she'd done something amazing came when I spent the holidays with her.

I woke up in the middle of the night, in the dead of winter, and I had to pee. At my mother's new “home,” this meant going outside in the freezing cold to use the outhouse. I was furious every time I had to do it, but when you gotta go, you gotta go. I put on my slippers and bundled myself in a blanket, and stepped outside into the cold December darkness.

The night breathed all around me. The trees rustled in the pitch-black night and the air smelled like snow and fresh dirt. I could hear my mother's horse, Honor, snuffling and whinnying from the barn. I looked up, and I saw millions of stars—stars strewn across the sky in endless blackness, layer upon layer of stars like I'd never seen before. For the first time, I saw the beauty in that place. It was a pure, uncomplicated beauty. It was everything my mother had earned,
everything she deserved. This was her. How could I ask her to give it up? Barn and dirt and horses and sky, the dried remnants of her garden rustling in the winter night. Westchester wasn't her world.
This
was her world, and suddenly I understood. Why was I punishing her for finally embracing the life she wanted?

She was happy there, for nearly a decade, living off the land, and what she made from the sale of the Westchester house, and a small inheritance from my grandmother. She lived with her horses and gardens on that hundred-acre farm, and the more I visited, the more I learned to appreciate what she'd found and how she'd learned to live within her means, in spite of me.

I also grew to love the wild women who lived next door to my mother in a commune called The Mound. They left a tangible mark of freedom on me, just like my mother had in her choice to live next to them. I spent many nights around bonfires that turned into drum circles and howling at the moon. The women had names like Skylark and Kiteweather, and they gave me a name, too. They called me “Bridge.” They said, “You are going out there, into that world, but you also understand this world. Try to be a bridge between here and there.”

I still feel like that's exactly what I am: the bridge between Westchester and juvie, between a distant father and a mother raw with honesty, between my own dreams of being a mother and my own experiences of being a daughter. Those women showed me what it could mean to be a woman, and no matter what happened to me later, no matter how my infertility made me doubt my own womanhood, something about that experience stayed with me and reminded me that, yes, there are many ways to be a woman and, yes, there are many ways to be a mother.

I have to mention my stepmother, Jessica, here, too. It took us years to find a mutual peace, but she has been my great advisor in business
and has always been my example of how to be powerful and sexy and a loving matriarch at the same time. On days when I am in the zone, juggling twelve balls in the air, and I've got on a nice-looking outfit and I'm accomplishing much more than I ever thought I could, I recognize Jessica in myself. She's been an incredible role model, in a completely different way than my mother was.

But I always come back to my mother because the roots she gave me have endured and held me steady through every storm in my life. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices, especially if you are a parent, but at a certain point you also have to take care of yourself. For the first fourteen years of my life, my mother sacrificed everything for me. And then when she decided to take back her own life, I punished her, but she gave me the bedrock to see that everyone has a right to fulfill their own needs. Everyone has a right to live the life they choose, no matter what anyone else thinks or believes. Whether anyone else approves or not.

My mother used to tell me that I had the right to change my mind, whenever I wanted to change my mind. That means she had that right, too. She had the right to marry my father, and to love him, and then she had a right to go off and live her own life. She realized she was on the wrong path for her, but she stayed on that path as long as I needed her to stay on it. Sometimes you have to make things work, but ultimately, you have to make things work for
you.

My mother made every part of my childhood unconventional, and that was the legacy she left me. I've followed in her footsteps, not by living in an ashram or shunning society for a life in the wilderness, but by living the life of an artist, an actor, a rebel, rather than the stable conventional life I might have lived. My mother might have more literally embraced what Thoreau describes in
Walden
by going to her own version of those famous woods, but I've tried to live according to that spirit:

    
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to confront only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

My mother went to the woods and I didn't, but she taught me to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” She taught me how to do that by making her own way. She also taught me that I was born out of love, and that she never regretted anything she did for me. It has been a great gift to know that. If no one else wanted me, and at times they didn't, I never once doubted how much my mother wanted me. I felt valued, and so I felt I had the right to make my life into anything I wanted it to be.

My mother was just trying to figure out the meaning of her life, but she did it while being a mother to me, and I became, inevitably, a part of her kooky, rebellious world of seeking. When I was a kid, sometimes I looked at other adults as if they were privy to some secret world, but my mother never kept her world secret from me, so I got to grow up in this magical garden that was her experience of the world. She wanted me to witness her journey, and I did. I got to witness courage and the drive to live, not just exist.

I often say I wanted to become a mother because I spent so many hours thinking about parenting and how it should be done, but I think that at the core, right down at the bottom of all things, I just wanted to be like her. Maybe without the chanting, but in every other way. I still strive for that: to be courageous and independent, unconventional, and an eternal source of love.

Throughout my adult life, we spent hours on the phone. I told her everything, even things she probably didn't want to hear. Not because
I had to, but because she had earned it, through her insistence on honesty. Maybe I was still testing her, right to the end, but that was our relationship. That was the tension and passion that held us together. Even she thought my decision to try IVF was unconventional. Even she advised me to marry first, but I would go my own way, just like she did.