Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir (38 page)

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Authors: Melissa Francis

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #Entertainment & Performing Arts

BOOK: Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir
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In my mind, I heard Tiffany say, “I’m so scared . . . it would be so nice to have a mom.” And as I stood there and looked at her tattered robe on the tile floor, I closed the door on my mother forever.
She’d never called, never returned the money, never opened her heart to the daughter who needed her.
There was nothing to forgive. And nothing to salvage. Our bond was just wiped away. Gone.
 
 
Tiffany had spent that one semester in college, backpacking around Europe, and had come home the sister I had always wanted. Calm, clear, sharp. Full of life and at ease with it at the same time. I had blown off friends and boys to be with her. I thought maybe during the sabbatical from college she’d left the crazy life she’d created at Berkeley and the weight of Mom’s boundless disapproval in a Eurail car, hopping off the train before it could catch up to her and crush her.
I remembered that day on the beach, racing down to the water as the bottoms of our feet burned, jumping into the waves as the surf sprayed our clothes. Our only worries: how dark we could make our tans, and if we should try to beat the beach traffic home. That day, she was the person I knew had the capacity to be happy.
It was the best summer of my life, and I will always save the memory of it in a quiet corner of my heart.
When Tiffany drove back to college that fall, I mourned. I wanted to hang on to that new sister for dear life, and not let her out of my sight, fearful that I had imagined her, that she had been a dream, a mirage. I worried that she’d disappear and I’d never know if she’d really ever existed.
I was right to be afraid. I never saw that girl again.
 
 
I told my dad that I would take care of telling Mom. It had been more than a year since I had given her the choice of coming back to help Tiffany or losing us forever, and she had chosen to throw all of us away. Thirteen months of silence.
I wrote her a letter and sent it to Marilyn’s house, since I wasn’t even sure where Mom was living, I informed her that her oldest daughter was dead, and the window of opportunity with me was now closed forever. She’d made her choice, and now she’d have to live with it. Her chance to make things right on this earth was gone.
This cycle of madness, this pain—it ends with me.
EPILOGUE
 
I
held my first son after his birth, and I could not believe how much I loved him, and at the same time, how much of a stranger he was. I wanted to breathe him in, consume him, devour him. Where did this person I could not get enough of come from?
I had spent my life making sure that I didn’t drown. Sometimes swimming strongly, sometimes barely staying afloat. But I did not do enough to keep Tiffany’s head above water. Not nearly enough. Or she’d be here now. That’s my pain to carry forever.
I have never been able to save anyone but myself. I’ve never been able to bank on anyone but myself. So who was this person tied to me now? This little boy?
I knew who he was. The person I’d drown to save.
I would happily give my life for his, and not even consider it a sacrifice. It would be my
pleasure
, my love for him is so great.
I have whispered in his ear a thousand times that he is the smartest boy in the world. He is my most precious treasure. And I know I love him above myself, as I was not ultimately loved by my own mother. As neither my sister nor I was loved.
The endlessness of my love for my son was matched only by the enormity of the love I later felt for his little brother when he arrived. Those boys make it impossible for me to understand my mother.
I haven’t figured out what I am going to tell my children about any of this. I don’t know how to tell them where my mother is, or why they will never see her. Or what happened to my sister—their aunt they will never meet.
My dad is an important and loving part of our lives. My sons cherish him and chant to him on the phone when he is not visiting.
“Hi, Grandpa!” they shout.
He pretends to scare them through the phone, “Boo!”
They scream and run laughing, a game they love when he is here. He is the only thing they know of my family before Wray.
My older son asked me if Martha, Wray’s mom, is my mom too. I could see the wheels turning in his head.
I simply said, “No.”
He couldn’t quite figure out what to ask next. But he’ll be back.
 
 
With the rest of the world as well, I have become a master of not answering questions. The skill is subtle. I do not lie.
“Does your family still live in California?” someone asks.
“Yes,” I reply.
“Are they coming for the holidays?” they ask.
“Not this year,” I respond.
“Do you have any siblings?” they ask.
“It’s just me,” I say obliquely.
If you tell someone you had a sister, but she died, they are mortified that they’ve pulled the scab off an old wound. The truth kills the conversation. If you tell someone you have no idea where your mom is, where she lives, if she’s alive, and you haven’t seen her for more than a decade, they blanch. It is so abnormal, it begs an avalanche of uncomfortable questions that even friends are too shocked to ask.
My non-answers are not lies, but, of course, they aren’t the whole truth either.
The truth is that my Dad and I grieve the loss of my sister, and that pain will never go away. It just dulls very slowly over time. We cried over her ashes, just the two of us without a formal funeral, and there was nothing more to do but say goodbye.
Dad told me that Mom came by his house shortly after she received my letter. She sped up his driveway in the Porsche she’d bought, though Dad couldn’t discern exactly what she wanted. She just stood on his front porch, yelling and crying, angry and hysterical, screaming that her most treasured daughter was dead.
Dad said she’d had the unflinching nerve to claim that the daughter she’d deprived of love, the daughter from whom she’d hoarded and stolen money when that girl was actually dying and needed her the most, was her princess, her favorite child. The girl she’d hardly bothered to nurture as she grew up had turned into a woman she heartlessly let wither and die without a mom.
“My baby,” she’d called her, weeping.
Dad said he told her there was nothing left for her there. Tiffany was gone. And then she sped off as quickly as she’d appeared.
Poof.
To this day, he hasn’t heard from her again.
They never formally divorced, she never gave back a dime. She’s just gone.
 
 
A few months after Tiffany’s death, I was offered the job I’d always wanted, reporting for a financial news network in New York. The job at CNBC was exactly what I’d been aiming for since college.
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I wanted to physically move away from all the pain. Put a continent between myself and all that had cast a long shadow over my life.
My mom had held a power over me, over all of us, for a long time. I was a hostage to her moods, her violence, her praise, her favor, all doled out in random doses and with confusing inconsistency, which had been designed to control me, training me to crave her attention like a starving dog.
 
 
I thought when I anchored shows on CNBC four years later, visibly pregnant with my son, Thompson, or three years after that, with my son, Greyson, she would be compelled to act. When I read the news on the
Today
show or stood on the promenade at the close of the program, in Rockefeller Center, holding my older son as he waved into the camera and grabbed my microphone to speak to millions of viewers, I wondered if she would be watching somewhere and wouldn’t be able to stop herself from reaching out.
But I’ve heard nothing.
Make no mistake, I’m relieved by that. I used to live in fear that she’d show up at my door. Just the thought of one of her loud, angry, manic scenes playing out in my home or my office would make my muscles tense. I told myself that if she ever knocked, I simply wouldn’t open the door. I’d stay calm and say almost nothing. I’d tell her the truth through the intercom or through the window: There is nothing left. Go away.
Now I’ve grown confident in the silence that I won’t have to explain myself again. I won’t have to tell her that I’ve seen so many other women, especially in news and on television and in other driven careers, who can physically weather a hurricane or climb over a hundred other women gunning for their jobs, and do it with ease. But those same heroines are instantly reduced to tears, cut down in their path, by a few hard words from the controlling moms who gave them strength in the first place.
“You look fat in that dress,” one such mom offered a fellow anchor over the phone after a newscast, quietly crushing her.
When I see those moms and daughters, I feel relieved that I’ve escaped. And I wonder if a different approach to mothering my sister would have stopped the descent into tragedy before it accelerated beyond recovery.
Having my own children has shown me that they are each different from the other. Like my mom, I have two very different kids. Ask my younger son, Greyson, a question, he shouts out an answer immediately. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong.
“What sound does
O
make?” I ask him, reading from a book.
“Ooooooo,” he sings, not yet two years old, but his big blue eyes and wide smile are already brimming with confidence. He’ll try anything, unafraid of a mistake.
But it took time for me to realize that when my older son, Thompson, refuses to participate, he’s not defying me, or testing my will. He’s telling me something else.
“Which one in the top row,” I said, pointing at a workbook, “goes with something in the bottom row?” I was trying to help him with a type of question I knew he’d be asked at preschool soon. I’d learned firsthand how valuable it was to be the first one to know the answer to a teacher’s query, even at four years old.
But his eyes wouldn’t touch the page.
“Thompson?” I asked. My son, usually the mayor of any room, gregarious and friendly like any handsome politician courting votes, this time pretended not to hear me. He wouldn’t look my way.
“I don’t want to,” he said turning his back to me.
“You can do it,” I said softly. “You are the smartest boy in the world. You
know
that. Look at these things in the top row. An airplane! You love those,” I said, tempting him.
“Look! It’s flying through the sky. An airplane and what’s that?” I asked, pointing to the object next to it.
Silence.
“Hmmm. Looks like something we take to the park to scoop sand,” I said.
“A shovel,” he said, turning to me now, still pretending not to care.
“For the sandbox! Remember last week, we played in the sandbox in Central Park. That was fun. Now look at the bottom row,” I said.
His eyes slid down the page and he came and stood next to me.
“A train, and a flower. You ride in a plane. Is there anything you
ride in
down there,” I said, pointing back to the train and the flower.
“Train! Airplane and train go together!” he said, now suddenly pleased with himself and sitting next to me. A few examples later, he was holding the book and asking
me
the questions with authority.
When the time came, he aced the exercise at school, confident that he could do it.
It took failed attempts at forcing him to do things for me to realize that if he doesn’t believe he can do it, he won’t try. Unlike his brother, who may not know the answer but will bark out a guess without hesitation.
“I won’t, really means, I don’t think I can,” a wise teacher told me around this time. I didn’t believe her at first. Why would he put pressure on himself to succeed at things he hadn’t even been taught to do yet? How could he be so hard on himself? He was brilliant! Was that my fault? Did I expect too much?
“Don’t see him as not trying, or defying you. Hear him telling you ‘I don’t think I can,’” she said.
She was right.
It’s just one small example of how differently my sons are hard–wired. They were just born that way. From the start. Different children. And Wray and I have had to adjust the way we nurture and teach them to bring out the best in each of them. We had to figure it out along the way.
The once–size–fits–all, hardline approach: pushing children as hard as you can and demanding the very best doesn’t fit them all, as it didn’t fit Tiffany and me. A fire-breathing dragon of a mom may produce a champion, or she might burn her child to death.
Still the biggest lesson my boys have taught me is also the hardest.
 
 
“What do you want to see first, boys?” Wray asks, pushing Greyson’s stroller through the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History. At five and nearly two years old, the boys make the “Dinosaur Museum,” as they call it, a regular outing in New York City.

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