Pieces of My Mother (22 page)

“Isn't this the greatest place we ever lived, Jamie?”

“I think it is. I think it is,” he said back.

He was right. Even with almost nothing in it, the house still feels like our castle.

There are some things I instinctively know. I can't always explain, but it's as clear as can be: we will lose the yellow house after all.

It is only a matter of time before we will say good-bye. We will lose the barn, the blackberries, the pink tea roses, the garden, the lilacs, and the very earth that we have traveled across every day.

What
would
you
rather
lose? Your house or everything in it?

Neither.

Someday I'm going to find the Good Fairy in the back of an antique shop, and I'll buy her no matter what she costs. I will seek out all the treasures that left our yellow house. I will frequent antique stores, curiosity shops, and flea markets where I will look into silver teapots in hopes of seeing my grandmother's reflection. I will rummage through boxes of sterling in hopes of finding a copy of her Victorian cranberry spoon. I will line a cupboard with hand-painted flower plates. I will not forget the way my favorite painting of the cowboy always hung slightly crooked in our hallway.

I sit in the blue chair and tell myself one more time that things aren't supposed to matter. People can be unreliable. People leave. But the things were supposed to stay.

I keep rereading her letters. I am the fool still searching for something that will give me some fragment of closure—that one sentence that tells me why she left. I come across a letter she never sent to Bill, the horse trainer from Texas. Her love affair with him almost broke my parents apart the first time. And there were many others along the way too. Perhaps she left because she loved another man.

Dear Bill,

Whatever prompted me to call? Perhaps it is because the day I spent with you made me realize exactly what it is like to be free and single and twenty-one. And how I long to be free! Maybe I just want to avoid all responsibility. I don't know. But I am so full of desire to be a thousand places at once, to do exactly as I feel—to be exhilarated by my life instead of bearing with it. As to what I'm going to do now? First of all, get away from the complete chaos around me.

By hook or by crook, I'm going off by myself for at least two weeks of thought and rest. Something has always come up to show me what a compensation I am living. Except always in the past I've turned up pregnant and have had to stay—and pregnancy is a panacea for all ills. No babies going now though—I should add “unless it's yours” and scare you half to death, but jacks are jacks and I'm as good as sterile.

In actuality you are the very nemesis of my soul—whatever nebulous thing that may be—saturated and suffocated by a love that really has no right to be. So what to do? Somewhere there is a place for me, a time when I can be happy with myself.

Later—So running off to Texas with you would be the most God-awful step I could take—though it certainly wasn't very nice of you to tell me so.

Oh Mom, I think your heart never knew which way to go. Why was it so hard to stay in one place, or even if that was too much, to be a reliable presence in your children's lives? I too long to be in a thousand places at once and do exactly as I feel—“to be exhilarated by my life instead of bearing with it.”

But we can't do what we want all the time without a thought for others. Yes, I resent that sometimes. I resent my life being dictated by the endless duties of mothering. And I resent that you managed to get away—“by hook or by crook.” You walked away because you weren't strong enough to handle the responsibility of family—and the messy, maddening beauty of it.

It amazes me that some of the answers have been lying all these years in this dusty folder at the back of a filing cabinet. As I read through her final letters, I see how blind I've been to her attempts to express her love and interest in me. Her letters show me now that she
was
reaching out to me, trying to see who I was and who I was becoming. She writes in a letter never sent:

Now, darlin'—you must write me. I want to hear about school and your friends and the animals at home. I will find it difficult to believe you aren't considering “beaus” so I want to hear about any special fellows. And please, please, let me know how you feel—I mean really feel—about my going away so suddenly and about things in general. Are you lonely or depressed, high or happy, worried, frightened, confident, pleased—all that about everything. It's “real” important.

In her letters, I feel her presence—the beautiful, complex, and full human being she was. Her words are tangible evidence that her life mattered, that she had a voice. There are no concrete answers in her letters. There isn't really anywhere where she says “I'm sorry.” But her words here are something that I can hold onto. Here is her voice—the one I yearned to hear, to understand for so many years. This is the window I can look through to glimpse her complicated, confused, bright, mindful, and longing self.

Yes, perhaps a mother is supposed to make the commitment to stick around and raise her children, and yes, that is the commitment I have made. But not my mother. She was always pulled into her own desperate soul-searching journey. And if she couldn't figure out who she was, even if she had stayed and stuck it out with my dad and with us through thick and thin, in the end how could she ever have helped us figure out who we are? And I know from another letter never sent that she must have passed her fierce desire to write on to me.

My mother says it this way:

There is such a need, a compulsion to write. I am trying so very hard to release all that is in me—to spill my very guts so they can fall loose and be observed. What is in this body and mind of mine? This disintegration of all my self—a gurgling mass in a gutter of vomited dreams flowing silently, sinfully into oblivion. So yearning to be strong that I made a mockery of strength. So foolish, this mind of mine that must bend to the heart. Jelly, pulpy mass with no integrity. To what? If my mind cannot overcome my heart, then what good is it?

Like my mom, I write to understand myself and lure the voice inside me out of hiding. I write because of my brother Jamie, who always reached for pen and paper because he needed to draw. His voice lived inside of those drawings. Where is all his beautiful artwork now? And I write because of my grandmother Joan's journals, which sit in the drawer of my desk at home like heavy lumps of clay that longed for a shape but never got formed. I write because of my brother Eden, who once told me, “I've got a suitcase underneath my bed and it's packed, filled with story ideas, movie scripts and stuff producers are just dying to get a hold of—it's all pure gold,” I don't want to die with a suitcase full of ideas underneath my bed or a hundred spiral notebooks full of stories beneath my desk. I want to set the words free, unearth what has been buried for too long. I have to believe that a leap of faith was better than standing still. I had to get the memories and stories down on paper, and if I didn't, this history would be lost or—an even worse thought—repeated. Sometimes all I have is this instinctual, obsessive need to put pen to paper—to set fire to something inside me that may or may not save me.

I pull the covers around me and settle into the slope of the mattress. It occurs to me that I've come here for the wrong reasons. I am the pitiful daughter who waited too long to reach out to my mom for answers. I got on a plane Christmas Day believing that I would come home a different person. But my mom is still alive, and I am still her longing daughter. My very presence must remind her of her failures and poor decisions. I curl into a small shape by drawing my knees to my chest. It's true: through all these years, I've yearned for that acknowledgment, but she has never been able to look at my face and say “I'm sorry,” or “I'm so sorry for leaving you,” or “I'm so sorry for not being there for you.” Is that really all I've needed?

It's my last day here in Olympia. Outside the window, Kim is loading the truck with crates of pink and green apples to take to the farmers market.

There is so much more I need to say and fix before my mom dies. But words can only come when I have everything inside me under control. Maybe now is one of those moments when I can put on a courageous face and keep my emotions in order.

She is lying on her back, half-awake with her mouth partially open and her coarse hair damp and matted. I rest my hand on her arm, and her parched lips almost stretch into a smile. She can tell it's me.

“Mom?”

She nods.

I hold onto the edge of the blanket covering her. “Mom, I'm scared.”

She keeps her eyes closed, waiting for me to continue.

I don't know what to say next. I'm waiting for her to say something to me but she doesn't, so I come up with the first thing that springs to mind, “When you're gone Mom, I'm going to plant a garden for you. With purple dahlias and mums and blue forget-me-nots.”

“Oh yeah,” she says. “That would be real nice.”

And then there's nothing more to say. She keeps her eyes closed. I wipe mine with the back of my hand. I'm glad she doesn't open her eyes and look up at me, because having to really look at each other, eye to eye, would violate the distance we have maintained for so long. There is a loss and love so great between us that we have forbidden ourselves from truly connecting. It is simply too painful.

When Bella asked me, “What did your mom do when you were scared?” I stared up at the yellow stars on the ceiling and could not tell her the truth of who I was. How could I tell my daughter that my mom left when I was a little girl? I thought if I told Bella that, she would become afraid that I was that kind of mother too and would always be watching or waiting for me to leave. And I feared this myself. What if that leaving gene lay dormant inside me? What if something inside me snapped one day and I walked out the front door? No mother is fully immune from the possibility of leaving her children.

These thoughts are unbearable. But it is my history and I have no choice but to embrace it. I come from this circle of mothers who left their children. Grandma Rita was dropped off at a convent to be raised by Catholic nuns. Her mother couldn't take care of her. My grandmother Joan drank herself to death in her forties when her daughters still needed her. My mom's sister gave up her firstborn for adoption. By choice, my mom did not raise her three children.

My mom didn't pass a “leaving gene” on to me. I know this now. While I feared a genetic marker could sneak up on me, I know I could not endure leaving my children. I would never be able to stitch myself back up and could never, ever forgive myself. I could never be whole again, because my children are pieces of me and I of them. Just like I am a piece of my mother, and she is a part of me—even if she couldn't recognize that.

A piece of her sorrow will always lie within me, like a shard of broken glass. There are times I feel just like her—“a dandelion blowing in a thousand directions all at once” with no idea which way to go.

I feel her when I carry my children's bodies, heavy with sleep, up the stairs. It's not always thankfulness that I feel, but resentment for the simple and relentless things she never had to do. I feel her when a glass of wine hits my bloodstream and I get that brief sensation of warmth, euphoria, and limitless possibilities. I feel her when I sit on a horse and know that she gave me my natural rider's seat and strong hands.

Kim's truck rumbles down the driveway. My time is up here. I arrived believing that I would bear witness to my mom's death, and through that, I would experience some kind of cathartic shift—an aha moment of truth. A release of all I have been holding inside me.

I know now that I'm not going to have that moment I hoped for with my mom. She's hanging on, and I'm going to keep my promise to Bella and Dominic and be back for New Year's.

I run upstairs and grab the whole file of letters never sent and stuff them into my suitcase. I will steal her letters because they are the most intimate pieces I will ever have of her.

My flight leaves this afternoon. I will travel through the turbulent sky 960 miles to my family where I belong.

Thirty-six years have passed since I watched my mom drive away in her baby-blue Dodge Dart. I've played that memory over in my head a thousand times, wondering: if I only had called out to her, was there any way she might have stayed? In the end she always drives away and I am left standing at the windowsill—waiting.

This time, my mom has gathered the last of her strength and come to the window. She is standing on the other side looking out at me, her hand against the glass, open like a pale starfish. I am sitting in a red rental car outside her house in the rain, staring straight at her. She is searching for my face through the heavy downpour.

I know this is the last image I will have of her. Ever. I will not see her again in this lifetime.

She balances herself against the edge of a table cluttered with a collection of treasures—ceramic frogs, seashells, and clay figures from Mexico. Her hand presses against the window glass and I lift mine against the window of the car. The outside world wobbles in the rain, and it seems like we can almost reach each other.

I hold on to every bit of her—her blue eyes; the wavy hair surrounding her angular face; the texture of her sweater, dark and bumpy like the skin of a ripe avocado. Rivulets of rain run down the window in front of her, making her appear like an Impressionist painting. A Pissarro or Cézanne in later years. The palette is yellow, cerulean blue, and deep umber. She is still alive, standing to wave good-bye to me. But her body is shutting down, a firefly flickering in the distant woods.

I wrap my fingers around the door handle. I'm so close. I could reach her in six or seven seconds. But I can't run back in one more time. I have a plane to catch. A rental car that's on empty and needs returning. My family is counting on me coming home tonight. We will ring in the new year with our tradition of banging kitchen pots and pans and lighting sparklers in the backyard.

I turn the key. My mom is still at the window, her hand still against the glass. Underwater, everything is quiet and full of ripples. There is so much more than sawdust inside Bun-Bun and me. There always was.

I
am the one driving away this time.

Her letters offer me comfort now.

My darlin', my Lou,

May it never be too painful for you to look inside and to share all that you find within. There is so much beauty in you that it would be selfish to lock it away. And beauty includes any pain or anger—all things must have balance.

I wouldn't trade my mom for any other in the world.

My hands clutch the top of the steering wheel too tightly, and blue-green veins spread out like a map under my pale skin. I look in the rearview mirror. My mom is still waiting at the window.

As my hand touches the turn signal to bear right, I feel my mouth break open like a fish gasping for air, opening and closing. I push my foot against the pedal and feel the car surge forward. There is the strong scent of evergreen and wet earth all around me. Olympia is a beautiful place to die.