Don't Call Me Mother (36 page)

He’s strapped in his car seat, his small hands pressing against the window. I wave and smile, trying to comfort him. “I love you. Be a good boy. See you soon.” Andrew strains toward me screaming, “Mommy.” I can read his lips through the glass.

As Dennis whirls out of the parking place, Andrew’s eyes are glued to my face, tears running down his baby cheeks. “Mommy,” he cries over and over again, turning around in his car seat to see my face for as long as possible. His horrified look seems familiar, but I don’t know why. I sit in the front seat of my car, shivering, my mind awhirl.

Suddenly I recognize that face—it’s my face as a little girl. There in the rest-stop parking lot, the full weight of my history crashes down on me. A chaos of memories, thoughts, and fears overtake me. My son is gone. I’ve turned into my mother after all.

Amanda

It is the fall of 1974. The scent of burning eucalyptus leaves filters through the crisp morning. The pottery teacher tells us, “After shaping your pot, we’ll bisque it and put it in the raku kiln. Raku means ‘happy accident.’” That phrase best describes our arrival in dream-come-true California, my second husband and me, both of us attending Stanford. I’ve given myself over to my love of art and have promised myself I would develop my creativity, beginning with pottery. The child in my belly flips and swims on this fall morning as I grip the clay. Suddenly I know this baby is a girl. I am so certain of this body wisdom that after class I buy pink baby clothes and pink accessories.

My husband and I intend to stick together, and planned this baby, but deep down I know that we need her to be the glue that holds us together. In our small apartment near campus tempers often flare, trust is broken, dishes crash. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve never left my childhood; other times we are desperately in love and pledge to do better. With no model of healthy love to follow, I let passion sweep me along. I surrender myself to its power, glad to forget my terrible past—until it comes roaring back again, but this isn’t completely clear to me now.

Every time I press my fingers deep into the clay, I dream about my baby girl—we’ll be wonderful together, we won’t make the same mistakes that my mother and grandmother did. She’ll grow up having a father who loves her. One night I dream that she rests quietly in a blue room, a silent and spiritual place where my father watches over her from the other side of the veil between life and death.

My grieving for Daddy hasn’t stopped, those endless dreams of finding and losing him. I send desperate prayers to the heavens, wondering if I deserve help—according to Mother, I’m not living a proper life. At twenty-nine I’m already divorced and remarried. I’m even an art student, not the most stable thing to be. Society says that I should have a different life. Occasionally I wish I do too, but I have no idea where I’m going or what I should be doing except that I hold on to the idea that if this marriage can only work, when the baby comes, things will be perfect. I whisper a wish into the silence: to no longer be tormented by these dreams. All this grief can’t be good for my unborn child.

In bed one morning, I wake up with the sense that someone’s hands have just touched my shoulder. I’m sure my father has visited me in answer to my prayers, that his presence is still nearby. In a dream I receive a letter from him:

“Dear Linda. Oh, how beautiful it is here, green fields for golfing. There is nothing to fear. I am with you, I will be with you. You don’t have to grieve for me.”

The feelings and images in the dream are effortlessly translated into words, as if from another language, which I write in my journal.

For a few minutes I sit quietly by myself in the living room, my heart lightened. I understand the message of the dream: it’s time to make the transition from death to birth, from darkness to light. It’s time to focus on the impending birth of my daughter. The dreams of my vanishing Daddy stop that morning.

Andrew is living with me again, and cuddles up close, patting my tummy, whispering sweet nothings to the baby. My husband is gone most of the time. Having disappeared emotionally, he’s involved almost constantly in his work. It’s just as well. When he’s home, our struggles return me to my childhood. The darkness, hopelessness, and pain are so familiar. It hasn’t yet occurred to me that not everyone lives on an emotional roller coaster, and that I don’t have to, either.

The baby grows inside me. I’m still convinced that it will be a girl, though there are no sonograms in 1974 to settle the question. Determined to make this a better birth experience than I had with Andrew, my husband and I attend Lamaze classes, where I learn to relax my muscles and practice my breathing. I visualize the birth I want, reading Spiritual Midwifery and learning to think in terms of “rushes” instead of pain.

At four in the morning two days before my due date, my water breaks. We leave Andrew with friends and rush to the hospital, but my contractions lag. The nurses hook up Pitocin to speed up the labor. It’s intense, but thanks to the breathing methods I learned in Lamaze, I feel discomfort rather than excruciating pain. We hum along steadily for several hours. Suddenly I feel the urge to push. Only ten minutes earlier they’d told me it would be a while yet. The urgency I feel, the catch in my throat that makes me bear down, engulfs me. I insist that my husband call the nurse. Laughing, he says it can’t be time to push. I tell him again, as calmly as I can. The third time I scream it out. The nurses rush in to find the baby’s head coming out. In a flurry, they lift me onto a gurney.

Suddenly, my normal perceptions shift. I’m not simply a body, I’m a part of nature. I’m the ocean, the trees, the wind on the plains. In a flash, I understand the unity of all things, my small self dwarfed by the expanse of the world in its spiritual complexity. Then my consciousness blurs, as does my awareness of all the people bustling around me and the bumpy ride to the delivery room. A few pushes later, the doctor lifts a baby girl high into the air. With her first breath her chest expands and turns pink. Her arms make little circles in the air, her cry is lusty and strong. Amanda, my daughter, is born.

She wears a little bow taped to her head for the newborn baby photograph. “I will not leave you,” I murmur to her as she lies in my arms. “I’ll be a good mother, I promise.”

At home, my baby girl lies on one side of me while Andrew cuddles on the other. She nurses contentedly and sleeps like a dream—so different from Andrew at this age. This time I know what I’m doing. I kiss Amanda’s soft cheeks, marveling at her little girl-ness, her femininity, wondering what my mother felt about me right after I was born.

When Amanda is only five months old, we fly to Austin to visit Aunt Helen, who now lives with her sister-in-law, Dot. The two women share a home in old age after being friends all their lives. Uncle Maj died three years earlier, another death I still find it hard to accept. We reminisce about Uncle Maj, his roses, and of course Gram. Aunt Helen knows us all so well, acting as our family historian, much as Blanche used to.

“Land sakes, just look at this beautiful baby. She looks like you, God love her. I can see that you’re a good mother, Linda, not like Jo at all. Your mama, she calls me and wants to charge the phone call. Can you imagine—I’m on a fixed income! Oh, she’s nutty, but she still loves her Aunt Helen.” I consider the possibility that Mother sees Aunt Helen the way I do—as the nurturing mother figure neither of us had.

During our visit we drive down to San Antonio to see the Alamo and the hotel where Gram and Aunt Helen met. She tells me the story again, and then she says, “Darlin’, your Gram was not what you thought she was. She hailed from another era, born at the wrong time, if you ask me. She was just bound and determined to have you be the way she wanted you to be; she’d do anything to make it happen. No child should be put through that.”

Aunt Helen and I weave threads of the past together with the new generation that Amanda represents. When I say good-bye, I have no way of knowing that I’ll never see Aunt Helen again.

Etchings of the Past

I open the door to the art store as if entering a cathedral, filling my lungs with delicious scents—linseed oil, canvas, wood, ink, erasers. And paper: creamy smooth parchment, watercolor pads in four levels of tooth, Bristol board. I’m one of those people who open books to sniff the inside—getting some kind of high from the glue, paper, the printer’s ink. At the art store, I go into sensual ecstasy, musing and dreaming over the delicate fingers of color in oil pastel boxes. Paint brushes are soft against my arms, each with a different texture: sable, Siberian mink, blue squirrel.

Voices war within me: “You are an artist.” Then, “You don’t deserve to follow your desires to paint and draw.” I’ve never forgotten the rave reviews I’d received in fourth grade for my art talent. Visiting university professors loved a painting I did of the wheat mills in Enid, yellow grain sprinkled on the ground amid the speckled gravel, the soaring march of alabaster wheat mills against a dark sky. The painting showed my love of amber crayon and the adoration I’d always felt for golden wheat fields. My teachers told Gram I should become a visual artist, but she insisted I focus only on music.

My daydream of being an artist has never left me, so I decide to take my first painting class. Once a week, we gather with the nubby paper, sable brushes, and paints, learning about the color wheel, how colors bounce and leap. After that, I enroll in a drawing class. I can’t draw anything very well, but as we complete our assignments—sketching bowls, flowers, and eventually human models—I do improve. In art as well as music, practice is the way to learn—developing a new way of seeing, training the hand and eye. I love the silky ooze of oil paints melting across a canvas, and I learn how to build canvases with hammer and wood and stretched linen. Soon, I feel like more than a has-been musician. A few years ago, I gave myself permission never to play music again—unless it was for me. Every time I played, I had terrible flashbacks of Gram’s yardstick, her angry eyes. I’d start shaking and feel sick. It was a huge relief to put it all away for good, but I hungered for artistic expression.

Next, I take an etching class. The smell of chemicals, ink, and acid for three hours once a week sends me into a kind of dream, where I part the curtains of the past and step into memory. For three months I labor over my first etching, savoring the technical aspects of creating an image. A deeply etched line divides the metal plate into several dimensions. Here, a little girl raises her hands to her father who is trying to get through a door made of prison bars. There, a grandmother, tears pouring from her angry eyes, refuses to let the father into the house. A mother figure watches everything in passive sorrow. In another dimension of the etching, the tree of life reaches to the sky, its bare branches stark and leafless, and a quarter moon shines down on a road that leads out of the picture.

Every time I work on the etching, I return home to write in my journal, tears running down my face. For the first time I’m telling the stories I wasn’t supposed to tell, releasing my family secrets, revealing the prison of my childhood. Long-buried images pour out of me in drawings, monoprints, and etchings. Blanche appears in a large painting, with her severe eyes and tight mouth, behind her a clock with no hands. She holds the finger of my grandmother, a baby with large, dark eyes who wears a white dress. Exploring through my art the history of Gram’s life before I was born helps me to understand her better. At Aunt Edith’s we had discovered old photos of Gram in Edith’s photo box. She was once just a small girl with long blonde hair like me. How did she end up being someone who created a prison for a child?