Don't Call Me Mother (32 page)

We’d known each other for only two months before getting engaged when I was twenty-one. My virginal state was easily dispatched, thanks to the pill, Black Russians, and Bob Dylan. As I lay next to Dennis afterward, I wondered: Why the hell was I taught to fear this? Why the big fuss that Gram and the Baptist Church created about sex?

Dennis and I were buddies, got along well, and genuinely liked each other. Why not get married? Being unmarried at twenty-one made you an old maid. We were wed during the worst snow and ice storm in Illinois history, in January 1967. My mother and father both missed the wedding because of the storm. Gram was too angry to come, still furious that I had left her to move to Illinois. She sent me clothes and a cool, short note. I tried not to care, knowing I couldn’t make her happy. Still, it made me sad. As always during my childhood, Aunt Edith and Aunt Grace were there for me. After our wedding at a little Episcopal church in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, I pinched myself to see if it was all real. I’m finally a Missus, I thought. I’m married now; I belong to someone who’s nice to me, who wants me. He’ll protect me from the raging insults of Gram and Mother, as a husband is supposed to do.

After a pregnancy in which my body amazes me by growing to huge proportions, I’m finally in labor. Bright lights nearly blind me and unbearable pains take away my breath as I writhe on the bed at Kaiser Hospital. The nurse tells me to get a grip, it’s gonna get worse. I’m by myself for this, because Dennis insisted on scheduling an interview in Oklahoma on the baby’s due date. I’d taken him to the airport only a few hours before my water broke—he waved cheerily, saying that babies never come on their due date. The pain slices through me; screams bounce off the gray walls in a voice I realize is my own.

I’d done everything right, visited the Kaiser pediatrician every month, devoured books on the subject of childbirth and labor, but found few exact details. The focus of both the books and the doctor was on having a saddle block to help with labor. Nothing has prepared me for this relentless pain. An angry nurse rushes in after a screaming-hard contraction and shouts in my ear: “Look here—you have to learn to count through it. It will be at least nine hours more! Count with me—one, two, three, four…” I shout the numbers with her, apologizing and crying. When I get quieter, she tells me I can yell and count all I want, as loud as I want, it’s all right with her. Apparently the famous saddle block is available only toward the end of labor. It’s a long, long night for me, in pain, desperate for any kind of comfort. I feel betrayed, abandoned. Bitterly, I tell myself I’m destined to be without family for every important event in my life. The rest of the night passes in a haze of Demerol.

Finally the nurses wheel me into the delivery room where they give me the saddle block and tell me to push. They gang up to press on my abdomen with all their might, trying to move the baby down, discussing me and my baby as if I’m not in the room. Finally, the doctor uses forceps to pull out the baby—a boy, I hear the nurses say. There’s no crying, and I wonder if he’s alive. I lean on my elbows, trying to see across the room. Without my glasses, I see a pink blur that is the object of the nurses’ attention; they make bets about his weight. “Nine pounds, two ounces,” they announce.

“What is nine pounds? Is he okay?” I’ve got to be too skinny to give birth to a huge baby.

“He’s doing great. Your baby weighs nine pounds! Congratulations!”

A nine-pound baby from me? Wow, I really am a mother. Welcome to the world, Andrew.

Six weeks later, in the quiet of the early morning, the only sound is Andrew’s nursing. It should be a sweet moment, but sorrow rises up in my throat and I break into a sweat. This is motherhood? I’m bone tired after weeks of no sleep. Why didn’t anyone warn me? So many long days alone with a baby I can’t comfort no matter what I try. His wails rise to the ceiling of the small apartment, grinding at my nerves. I seem to be helpless with this tiny, mewling creature, completely inadequate. At six weeks, after no REM sleep for that long, I’m desperate for rest, and give in to bottle feeding, though that doesn’t solve everything. When a nipple of one of the bottles gets clogged, I smash it against the wall and collapse in tears. Unable to bear any more baby screams, I wonder why I can’t comfort him the way mothers on the Johnson’s Baby Powder ads do, all serene and humming to their beatific, sleeping child.

Eventually Andrew outgrows the colic and turns into a smiling, good-natured baby. He still doesn’t sleep enough, but we manage to get by on a few hours of rest. I know that I’m destined not to be a good-enough mother. I’ve already failed miserably. This inadequacy must be inherited.

That summer Dennis, Andrew, and I meander through the western states in a camper, stopping to see my father, Dennis’s folks, and my Iowa family. While we’re staying with Edith and Willard in Muscatine, Mother arrives on the train. My childhood of railway stations and mother-longing isn’t over—the same old feelings sweep over me as I wait on the platform—a bone sadness, an ache that only deepens when Mother steps off the train and changes from the mother of my imagination into her actual self.

“Here’s your grandson.” I proudly lift Andrew up to her. He’s a cherubic baby who belongs in a Gerber ad. I should have expected it: Mother doesn’t take her grandson; she barely even looks at him. Instead she pulls out a cigarette, saying in her haughtiest tone, “I told you, don’t call me grandmother. I’m much too young for that.”

Edith blinks in shock along with me, and protests as we walk to the car. “But you are a grandmother. You should be proud.”

Mother’s high-pitched squeal grates on all of us. “Don’t use that word, I tell you. Can’t you listen to what I say? What’s the matter with you?” Mother glares at me and jumps into the car. I’m stunned at her behavior, but why should I be surprised? She doesn’t want to claim my child any more than she wants to claim me.

I get in the car, smothering in her smoke all the way back to Edith’s. Andrew bobs in my arms, warm against my chest, his sweet baby smell and soft skin melting my heart. He’s the next generation in the only family I have. I have to keep trying, I tell myself; I’ll get her to change. Maybe when she falls in love with Andrew, she’ll claim us all, and the barrier will come down at last.

That evening, after the usual Iowa dinner of fried chicken with gravy and corn on the cob, we all sit under the trees in the dusky glow, as we have for the last twenty years. The Mississippi River suffuses the air with its history. Between puffs on her cigarette, Mother glances at Andrew, who gives her a big smile. “He is kind of cute,” she says, before turning away to blow out her smoke. Edith grins behind her hand at this, and Willard winks at me.

Fireflies begin to twinkle in the velvety darkness. Edith holds the baby while I sit on the edge of Uncle Willard’s lap. “I’m not too old, am I Uncle Willard?” Still raw from Mother’s denial and coldness, I need his comfort.

“You’re never too old to sit on my lap,” he smiles. Just as we did together so long ago, we grab at lightning bugs.

“Aunt Edith, can we make lemon meringue pie tomorrow?”

She smiles and gives a quick nod. Mother’s smoke mingles in the darkening air with the magic lights of fireflies.

Return of the
Bad Dream

The baby is four months old by the time we arrive in Oklahoma, where Dennis is scheduled to start his new job in Norman. Furniture and boxes had been sent ahead of time to Gram’s house in Enid. We’ve come to pick them up, and to show Andrew to her for the first time. My childhood memories floating before my eyes, I open the screen door to a smoky house. Gram, like Mother, doesn’t react normally when she sees us. Her cool but polite greeting to Dennis and her quick glance at Andrew tell me all I need to know. Gram doesn’t approve of any of this—marriage or baby. It makes her a great-grandmother, a status she doesn’t want.

Being in the house on Park Street is like returning to a bad dream. Gram has managed to clean up a bit; the books and papers are still stacked all around, but the house is clean and the piles are neat. A borrowed crib stands in the living room, evidence that she has put some thought into our visit. I blink my eyes to adjust to the dingy gray air, unable to take in the fact that I spent so many years here. I’m still embarrassed at its darkness and mess. It hurts to see this house through Dennis’s eyes—he’s shocked, but polite to me about it.

Gram relegates us to separate bedrooms, the anti-marriage and anti-sex message understood by both of us. Later in our visit, she upsets me again by complaining that Dennis has to use her bathroom, the only one in the house. “Men are so nasty. Can you tell him to be sure to wipe off the toilet seat and floor?”

I tell her I won’t embarrass him like that, that he’s a very clean and well-behaved male person.

“Why don’t you mind me,” Gram says angrily, “as a guest in my house?”

Oh, that’s right, the place where I grew up is not my home. The familiar old ache from the past slices through my stomach, the old heaviness on my shoulders, reminding me of where I came from and why I so desperately wanted to get away.

One afternoon, the baby is asleep in my room and Dennis has gone to the store, giving Gram the opportunity to launch into her old ways, picking a fight about nothing. We’ve been at it only a few minutes, but already her face has contorted into a mask of rage. She attacks, I defend. She still wants to control me, to win at any cost. I become angry and she raises her hand as if to strike me. Her Medusa face is a shock to my system, accustomed as I am to living in a reasonable and peaceful world. I flee to the garage, where I busy myself with going through boxes, hoping she won’t follow me. She’s raving, framed by the kitchen door, her hateful daggers pointing at me from wild eyes. Opening boxes and touching familiar objects of my life with Dennis comforts me, but only a little. How did I survive this house and Gram for so many years as a defenseless girl?

I no longer have the steel inside me to bear her ugly cruelty—her frizzed hair in a gray cloud around her face, her lips foaming with venomous words. Through a hazy film I watch her shouting, raising her fist, threatening me. I am frozen in place, motionless until the pressure inside me builds into a scream. “Shut up shut up shut up!”

In my imagination and against my will, I see myself stabbing her with a knife until she collapses into a blessed silence. When I snap back into reality, she’s still yelling, and I’m awash with horror and shame. How could I imagine such a thing? Then despair comes flooding in—this is my heritage? I can’t bear it.

The sound of Dennis’s car pulling in the driveway on the other side of the garage door breaks into the living nightmare. I want to cry, but don’t want Gram to know how miserable I am. She turns toward the living room, where she presents a slightly wild-eyed but otherwise sane figure to Dennis as he lugs in bags of groceries. I run to him, undone by a scene he knows nothing about, and wrap my arms around his neck. He pats me, unaware of my tripping heart, and goes on to the kitchen.

I escape to my room where Andrew is sleeping peacefully, his little legs curled up under his belly. I don’t want to wake him, but I’m drowning with despair and I need to comfort myself by caressing his velvety skin, looking at the rosebud of his mouth, in love with his sweet, baby body. He twitches and smiles in his sleep. My tears finally come, and a silent prayer: “Please let us love each other always, let us never scream or fight. Please God, make this old nightmare go away forever.”

Legacies

It is January 1971. I watch my breath puff in the air on the small side porch of the house Dennis and I are renting in Norman. I’m shivering from cold, or is it intuition, the wind of fore-knowledge in my veins? Daddy was scheduled to have exploratory surgery today, the doctors trying to find out more about the pains in his back and shoulder. It doesn’t worry me too much, though surgery is always a serious matter. Daddy always had ulcers; perhaps they’re acting up. The phone rings, and it’s Hazel, my stepmother, her voice trembling. “He has pancreatic cancer, and it’s in the liver. They give him three to six months to live.”