Mother's Day

1976.

“You’re not being cute! Do you think you’re being cute? I want you to just settle down back there!” She snaps her head towards the back seat, her face twisted into mean geometric shapes. Pointed glasses. Inverted triangular brows. Parenthetical mouth with drawn lips. “I can’t drive and pay attention to what you’re doing. I can’t do this right now. I want you to be quiet.” But this is the opposite of what I want to do: I want to sing, I want my sister sitting beside me to sing along with me – I can lead and we’ll make something of this, and I want my mother to sing along too. It will be a moment, it will be something magical. But she’s so angry and I quiet down. I quiet down for a moment, but already I feel the urge to express overtake me, and I start again in a softer voice. She lets it pass for a few moments – she hears my voice raise slightly in volume – and even in my tiny mind, I can feel her shoulders tighten and huddle. “Please. Quiet. Just let us get where we are going, and you can sing all you want.” And I stop again. I stop again and look out the car window into the rain, the downpour of rain whose expression is irresistible. I can see the rain clearly to this day. It takes some time, but the child will come to realize the relentless drops mean something different to a mother trying to shuttle her two children into JCPenny’s.

1981.

“Mom just saw her old boyfriend.”

“What, on TV?” This novelty proves too great for a ten-year old; I run after my sister into my parents’ room where my mother is exhausted in bed and watching The Price is Right. There is no light but from the television. My sister and I jump on the bed. “He’s in the crowd,” my sister says. She’s younger than me and loves to tell me the things she already knows that I do not.

“Say when you see him again!” as the frame pans past dozens of faces. My mother is heavy-lidded, laconic…wrapped like a mummy in her terry-cloth bathrobe with her arms crossed over her chest. “C’mon, show us!” But she just looks ahead blankly. “So you had a boyfriend before Dad? Is he famous? Or is he in the crowd of people?”

She lights up faintly, a little. “I was probably mistaken. Just someone that looks like someone I knew, I doubt it was him. No, there was just your father.”

“I was just pulling your sister’s leg. It was a joke.”

1985

“Don’t you think it would be fun to own your own restaurant? You would be your own boss; you’d have all these different, new challenges every day. All the people you would get to meet, all the relationships…you could change menus, choose different themes, you would get to work with other business owners to see what you could do for the community…” “So why don’t you? You could go back to school if you want, learn about the business – I’m old enough to babysit – or keep an eye on – Trudi…you can learn about it and get out of your job.”

She was working in a pharmacy as an assistant. Everything was not quite white: the lights, the lab coat, and the labels on the bottles – all displayed different hues of implied drudgery. For most of an eight hour day, she was confined under the anesthetic bulbs to a limited caged space – with a rotating second assistant and a mouth-breathing lead pharmacist. He had made an inappropriate proposition once. She hated any moment when it was just the two of them, when he would unload about his miserable life to her and the bile would churn in her gut wondering if this would lead to another awkward refusal.

“Really mom, you underestimate yourself. You’re really smart and could do better than your job. Doesn’t dad make enough money now so you could do this?”

“It’s not the money…well; it is, since you and your sister go to private school now. We’re a lot better off than we were, but the money from my job goes for your school. And it’s nice to have just in case. Like if your father goes on strike again.”

“But if it’s something you want to do, I don’t care where I go to school.”

“No, honey. It would never work out. I was only imagining how nice it would be. That’s why they call it a dream.”

1992

“I would be so good at it! I love to work with money.”

She’s probably right. If I had any enthusiasm for it, I would hire her as a financial advisor. But my philosophy is to make more money than I need and control my wants to fit my income. This means: no boat, no second property, no feeling obligated to buy something I was never passionate about in the first place. It’s a strategy that has worked, evidenced by a steadily expanding savings account.

But first and foremost, I’m focused on quality of life. And quality of life, for me – is not getting preoccupied with money.

“Well, if you are going to be a radio show financial advisor, I think you need experience in either, uh, journalism? Or like, be an accountant? I mean, I would hire you. Because you’re my mom and all.” I’ve gotten used to the fanciful jobs she wished she had. Sometimes she would become enamored with the lives of people she knew: Christine works as a store window dresser. Sharon is self-employed – she makes birdhouses and travels to different craft shows to sell from her rented booth. Mostly, her fancy rested on whatever she was consuming at the moment. Like wanting to be a restaurant owner because of how exciting it looked in a television drama. Or wanting to be a real estate agent because she and my father were in the process of buying a new house. Lately, she’s been listening to talk radio constantly, and now she’s a financial professional by osmosis.

“Why don’t you find something and really pursue it? You are always wishing and dreaming. You never get beyond just the wanting.”

I think it was the tone of my voice, a mixture of exasperation and condescension. Her recurring pattern – a voiced whimsy that disguised a truly unfulfilled yearning – was disclosed and bared and shown to be something shameful. I could see she was hurt.

“Perhaps you’re right. It’s too late for a lot of these things. It’s not easy when you have to raise two children. You don’t have a lot of time.”

“But I wouldn’t change a thing. I wouldn’t trade you two for the world.”

2007

“We still need to get to where…it’s like you said. Ending your life is a factor in your decisions. It recurs; it never disappears completely. And I’m not referring right now to any physiological factors - we can handle those separately. You tell me you were once this larger than life person, this person who loved to be at the center of attention and do things with…what did you say, bravado? And now you hate drawing any attention to yourself at all. What happened to this confident person, and where did this other part of you … this part of you that does not love yourself, that does not feel entitled or deserving to be alive – when did it take over? Isn’t this is how you put it?”

Dr. Bertrand is correct; this is how I put it. Though for me, it has always been de facto: I don’t want to get used to, or love too much, being alive. To the point of desperation or clinging. Life is a beautiful thing when you are living it fully; a sad case when you hold on in spite of life having no use for you. Pathetic, really. And I tell him this, and he tells me that he’s not interested in my ideology of the thing: he wants to know where it started, what created the twisted ideology in the first place. “Tell me about your childhood growing up. The first moment that created an impression that stayed with you.”

“I had a wonderful childhood. It was a great neighborhood, lots of children my age, and my parents were great. I can’t express how fortunate I feel about my upbringing. It wasn’t easy, it’s not like we were affluent or free of worries. But there was always extended family and friends nearby; there was never a lack of support.”

“My parents had me when they were really young. Shotgun wedding and all. It’s funny, I remember growing up how they would lose years in their ages. When I was a kid, I was under the impression that they got married at 22. Then they’d stay the same age for a year…they did this a couple times. Last I checked, they got married and had me a couple months later when they were both 19. I always thought it was odd that they felt me or my sister needed protection from knowing this…it’s not a big deal, right? I guess they were striving for some kind of normalcy. I asked to see their birth certificates when I was older, and they came clean. It’s odd, because if they were to plan out their lives like most people, they achieved what most people want – just started a little earlier than expected.”

“That’s the thing – they had this incredible work ethic, this responsibility – and they did right by it. They didn’t wait for something good to happen, something I’ve noticed I tend to do. My father worked long hours and weekends, my mother spent all of her time with us until at least I was self sufficient. They just sacrificed so much.”

But Dr. Bertrand wants an event. Because it has played over and over in my head, I tell him about the car, and how I cannot shake being told I’m not being as cute as I think I am. And there are other events, other times when I get spastic or unruly or just a little too precocious and my appeals for attention are curtailed by my mother. It is difficult to tell him these things because I’m concerned he will turn me against her, tell me that she could have treated the situation differently and encouraged my enthusiasm into a different expression. That we were opposing forces of responsibility and free spirit. I have a view of therapy shaped by the fiction that every fault is going to be put on the parent – simply because I’m the one paying his bill.

He takes it in another direction.

“You feel like you robbed your mother’s happiness. You feel like you took her entire life, and you cannot forgive yourself for it.”

“You have to forgive yourself. This came before your ideology. You built the ideology to reinforce it.”

When he says this I feel the notion of forgiving myself like some inoperable cancer in my body, and by the maxim that nothing so true can come easily – I know he is right. And I know it shows on my face that I’m agreeing with him.

“You don’t have to justify your existence. So much of how you value what you’ve done with your life is tied to this taking of your mother’s. You hear her dreams, what she hoped for herself…and it bothers you because it imposes this question on you…‘What have you done with your life?’ And now…you are perpetually apologetic. You are asking forgiveness for the space you take up in the world.”


I felt like a puzzle that was disappointingly easy to solve. Or at least, to diagnose. But the knowing had its own liberation. I never thought to mourn my mother’s living life, but I could feel the tears coming at the thought of it - that it was something that needed to rise above the surface and be recognized. And the tears were real, and the notion was validated.