MOTHERS
Death Rattle
Benjamin and I were still in the full blush of romance when I became pregnant. We’d been dating for five months.
I was 38 years old and had never been pregnant before. I didn’t think it would be that easy. I’d read I had a better chance of being struck by lightning.
New to New York City, I didn’t even have a primary care doctor, let alone an OB/Gyn. In a panic, I called Planned Parenthood and made an appointment. When the day came, I closed my eyes and touched my hand to my belly, and kept it there. I wanted this child.
Yes, we’d been impulsive and careless. But I was in love with Benjamin.
We were married on a Friday afternoon in April. I was already eight months pregnant. We got a slice of Sicilian pizza and a Diet Coke in our Brooklyn neighborhood before walking across Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall. I wore a green coat with big Jackie O buttons and a lavender scarf that matched Benjamin's tie.
On the steps of the courthouse, I looked up at the sky. It was an overcast afternoon, but the promise of spring was in the air. We walked in Central Park and took pictures beside the cherry trees that had begun to bud. Bright crocuses bloomed along the path.
I was happy that day. It wasn’t what I’d imagined for myself. No satin dress or string quartet or sparkling wine. But I couldn’t afford to think about that. It was just the two of us and the baby. And I would make it work, so help me god.
Erasing Mom
In my professional wedding photos, my mother doesn’t exist. Oddly, she does appear in some photos snapped at the ceremony itself, but not in the lifeless images ordered up by my father six months later. The original photos that included my mother were too informal, he claimed. What he really meant was they were an all-too candid record of his ex-wife’s existence that he preferred to forget.
To fix that record, we all gathered at my father’s apartment for a re-shoot. All of us that is, except my mother. Years later, I realized that my father had implicated his children and their spouses in identity theft. My husband Tom and I, as well as my brother and sister, had been drafted to invent an alternative fact of a family. With the squeeze of a shutter, evidence of my father’s failed marriage and its unpleasant aftermath would vanish, as would my mother.
As a visual artifact, the photos had the insidious power to exile my mother from her own sad narrative. But my mother hardly needed reminding of her own urge to disappear. Fearing embarrassment in Princeton, N.J., where we lived, my mother, a high-school dropout, had steered clear of well-educated, middle-class people who unintentionally laid bare her insecurity. With a few exceptions, she preferred the company of others like her, the “disappeared,” including a morbidly obese woman who never left her house, and Peaches, a young Black man born with cerebral palsy, who never left his bed. My mother also hung out in a Trenton bar where she befriended and often spent the night with men marginalized by their race. Their trauma and invisibility put my mother at ease.
Well before we moved to Princeton, I sensed my mother’s desperation. The banality of mid-century suburban life, the mountains of unfolded laundry, and bland prescriptions for motherhood sent her reeling into manic, mad housewife mode. Back then, I clung to her for comfort. I also inhaled her despair. The two emotions were linked together, as pleasure and pain can be.
Mum?
When my husband got a teaching job at NYU Abu Dhabi, I found the best way to meet new people in our apartment complex was in the pool. One day I swam up to a gaggle of ex-pat women talking about how they would never have agreed to move to the Middle East if they weren’t allowed to practice their various Christian faiths.
“Not a problem for me,” I said when they swiveled in unison to find out if I felt the same way. “I have never practiced any faith.”
One woman, who looked a little panicky at this news, asked, “How were you raised?”
Having just peed in the pool, I smiled and said. “Badly?”
The truth is, I was barely raised, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. I was fed, bathed, clothed, and, when very young, tucked into bed, but by the time I was eight, I was pretty much left to my own devices. I am torn between wondering if my mother was clueless, too busy, or merely afraid that, if we were held to account, she would thwart what she most needed us to be: original, self-created humans who were not held hostage by what she thought were the banal influences of a child’s life, i.e., school, friends, TV.
I was never told to clean my room. Never given a curfew. Never punished for drinking, smoking, or getting high. Boyfriends were allowed to sleep in my room, not to mention raid the fridge. Not once did my mother ever utter the phrase, “My house, my rules.”
Post Partum Madness
ince my baby girl was born, I have been a 24-hour sentry. The psychology books I consult describe my behavior as hyper-vigilant. I stand over my child, listening for a break in her sweet breathing. I hold my breath until I see her back rise and fall again.
Late at night, I wake my husband and tell him that I hear mice scurrying within the walls. It’s an invasion, I whisper-scream. My husband says I have dreamed about my parents’ house. Yes, that’s it. I’ve mixed up the decrepitude of my childhood house with the solid home I have made with him.
In another dream, I place my drowsy baby girl inside the microwave with the solemnity of an offering. She has spent too much hypnotic time in her windup swing. I am a failure because the swing is the only way she will fall asleep.
An Admirable Mother
In September 1993, from her hospital bed, plugged into oxygen, my elderly mother motioned for her yellow legal pad. In a squiggly hand, she slowly scratched out a lede on Heidi Fleiss's new pajama line, another on Liz Taylor's husband's eye job. "Call these in," she told my sister. Those were her last two scoops.
The National Enquirer sent three floral sprays to the funeral. She had been their favorite Hollywood stringer. For the last several years, she’d tried to avoid having lunch with the editors when they sailed through town; she was sure that their image of the zesty old Hollywood pro who laughed with them long-distance each day and reliably delivered those hundreds of cover stories was 65, tops. She didn't want them to know she was almost two decades older than that: that she'd been 73 when a 3 AM call from a rock club's men's room made her the first writer to learn the name of the woman who administered John Belushi's fatal overdose -- and 80 when she'd debriefed the batallion of paparazzi who'd hovered in choppers, during Liz Taylor's seventh wedding. Nor did the editors guess that the writer who burned the midnight oil, pecking out, for a dawn deadline, Mr. Blackwell's post-Grammy Awards critiques of Janet Jackson's jeans was a respirator-reliant congestive heart failure patient of 82. It was during that evening that my mother's housekeeper, alarmed by her hacking cough, knocked on her office door after midnight and said, in her quaintly grave Filipino diction: "I worry. You must now stop."
The Secret Life of Mothers
The last thing my mother really hungered for was a lump of cottage cheese with mayonnaise on top.
“Mayonnaise?” my oldest sister cried.
“You mean, on top?” I asked. “Really?”
We were entitled to our shock. My mother’s passion for good food was the clearest thing about her, the one brilliant shade in a palette that disguised most of its colors by blending them to their duskiest forms. She was a truly gifted, self-trained cook, and when she ate, she did it slowly, seriously, like an archaeologist plucking bones from a fossil bed, teasing out only the choicest specimens. I see her now in her sunny dining room, one ankle hitched over the opposite knee, working the Acrostic in the Sunday New York Times while eating lunch in her deliberate, cat-like way. She could make a whole hour’s work of a single sandwich of grilled Gruyere.
The Pants in the Family
When I was a teen-ager, my mother had some trousers that I hated. They were teal, with an abstract dark-blue and white dotted pattern that created the outline of leopards. Mom wore these trousers sometimes with her Topsiders, or her Tretorn sneakers, or occasionally with dark-blue wood-soled clogs.
We lived in a small city in Northern Illinois; it was the late 1970s. The mothers of my friends wore crepe-soled shoes and had frosty-tipped hair that didn’t move. When they opened the car door at high-school pickup to call for their kids, the Bee Gees came out of the car radio, not Bach. Those moms were normal.
Scary Geri
My mother, Geraldine, was not a bawdy person but some of her habits were what used to be called loose. For starters, she always wore skirts but never underpants.
When she left home at nineteen, the first thing she did was join the Army so she could see the world. She didn’t get far; she spent her entire enlistment stateside, first an hour away from her father’s home in south Jersey, followed by Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia and, finally, the Red River Army Depot in Fort Bliss, Texas. She loved her military duty. She loved the sense of purpose. She loved her uniform. She rose to the rank of First Sergeant, something I only learned about after she died, when I found her insignia.
She had a poor relationship with her father, Lou, who was a real dick. When I was small, he liked to wrestle me to the floor, then dribble spittle in my face in triumph. He died a few days before I turned fourteen. Neither of us cried when we heard the news although two days later she beat her breast and howled at his funeral, embarrassing her brother and sister who called her ‘dramatic.’ She was a widow at the time, between husbands, having returned to the one-horse town where she spent her youth to start a business while hoping for help from a father who didn’t want to help.
Baby Fever
I am good with babies. Well, ok, who isn’t? Nature designed them to be cute, so we wouldn’t smother them when they are annoying, but even so, I have a talent. On planes, I don’t mind when the baby in front of me cries. In college, my friends made money by bartending, but I preferred babysitting.
Once, I got a rare gig for the middle of the day. I arrived to find a nervous woman dressed in the career suit of the ‘80’s—aggressive shoulder pads, sensible pumps, blouse with a bow. Clearly, it was her first interview post-partum. I’ll never forget the expression of shock on her face when she arrived home a few hours later to find me sitting on the floor, playing smile face games with her child. Someone could actually have fun with an infant? That was a woman who was not good with babies, though who knows? Maybe she was gangbusters with teens.
Anatomy of a Mother
I grew up in a house full of words, heavy with words, bricks of words. Written. Spoken. Ironic. Cutting. Educated. Words with tornado force, with freight train volume. Screaming words, fighting words; even crying (though crying is sound, akin to the dogs’ whine or the cats’ low snarl.)
In between the words, silence. It was a reading house, a deeply reading, deeply thinking, house. Books everywhere. Stacks of books. Towers of books. Stories built upon stories. Facts burdened with facts. But silence was tricky; unlike words where you pretty much knew where you were at, silence was not always a choice. Sometimes, it was forced upon you.
I am at my weekly 9 A.M. therapist appointment that I have had forever, or at least longer than I would like to admit. My therapist, white haired, even older than me, is listening. His rug is listening. Mostly to silence. Arms clasped together, thumbs worrying my shirt, I tell him, I tell the rug, “I think I have been afraid all of my life.”