Don't Call Me Mother (48 page)

Amanda and I have been learning how to create this kind of mother-daughter connection over the years, but sometimes the tangled threads of my guilt trip me up. I know how often I was overwhelmed with how much she and the two boys needed. I had to work most evenings in my therapy practice, with the telephone our main connection. Once, she told me, “Do you know how hard it is being a daughter of yours?” Shocked, I realized that I had no idea, and began to think about how she might be right. I was impatient and critical about her clothes, boyfriends, and grades. One day shortly after that, I saw how our arguing was repeating the past—I saw myself being my mother and grandmother. Aghast with this realization, I began to think about how to change a pattern that was so destructive that two generations of mothers died with their daughters bereft from not being acknowledged.
How can I love her even if I don’t agree with her? How can I accept her when I don’t approve?

I struggled with these questions for a while, learning to keep silent, and when I didn’t agree, I would say what I felt, knowing that she had to make her own decisions. I learned to respect her as a being separate from me—a very new possibility of mother-daughter interaction, given my history.

I look at her now, the wind blowing strands of her hair as I drive us through the curves of the Silverado Trail. There’s an ease between us, a shared knowingness that is relaxed, tried and true over time.

When did this deeper ease begin, I wonder. Was it after Zoe Joy was born? She curled out of her mother’s body like a flower opening. For hours, I looked into the eyes of a little girl baby, just as I’d done when Amanda was born, celebrating that she had my middle name, a lineage that was being kept between Zoe and me. Nothing could have made me happier. Amanda has had a long marriage and is a real mother to her children, whereas her father and I were only a few months from separation and divorce when she was born. Amanda began her life with an impending dissolution, and with a mother who was not enough for herself, let alone her children. By the time she was two, I’d begun the therapy that would give us a chance not to repeat the dark past, but changing deeply ingrained unconscious patterns takes decades. She was eighteen when she told me it was hard to be my daughter; it had never occurred to me until then that this could be a challenge for her, though I’d been in therapy for several years to work on these deep patterns. Of course, I had given her a huge challenge by being a motherless daughter and having a daughter. There was so much I didn’t know how to do, how to give.

She has told me many times in her adult life, “Mom, I know your story, I know how important it is for you to be close with the kids, to be Nana, and you’re doing that. Look how many times a year you come down. You are there for us; I have no doubt. When I was little, you had to work hard to take care of us, but I never doubted that you loved us.”

As the car winds its final way to Calistoga and the waiting mud baths, I am amazed that she can be so forgiving—a quality that was tragically absent in previous generations.

Today the ladies in the spa lead us to the tubs of earthy-smelling mud. After we descend as if into a mythic scene of steam and earth and fire, they pat the gritty-smooth mineral mud on our bodies and we sink into bliss side by side, the deep heat working its way into tight muscles. Being here reminds me of thirty years of mud baths—for three decades I’ve come for the healing heat on my body and for the tender care paid by the ladies at the spa, sometimes the only nurturing I’d receive. When Amanda was young, my time away meant I wasn’t with her—though I was a better mother when I got a break from the routine of being a single parent of three. I brought her here a few times in her late teens—those were the challenging years. Coming here became an initiation into the rites of women’s bodies, no matter what age, the mark of the years softened by steam, nakedness inviting you to let go of a day-to-day identity, and sink into some kind of altered consciousness. My daughter’s beside me now, cucumbers over her eyes, murmuring, “Thank you, Mommy, I needed this so much, thank you.”

Sighing as we’re scooped out of the mud bath, we’re led to the showers, where I hear her happy giggles as she smooths away the mud. We are then led to the Jacuzzi, bubbling like soup, the scent of lavender and minerals chasing away what is left of the careworn world. We hold hands for a moment, then sink into our own reveries. At times like these, I remember the little passionate girl who squeezed me hard with hugs, her wild personality, her insistence on always being naked even in winter. She was so different from me, free—I wanted her to be free to express herself and not tied up in knots like I was. She was brave in all things she attempted, and unafraid of her sexuality. How different she was from me and all the women before me. At times I felt jealous of her liberation, and then realized that I’d helped to create it. We are new, we have started a new path, and Zoe gets to have the gift of a mother who squeezes her hard with love.

On her last day, we pick up six-year-old Seth, her nephew and my third grandchild, the curly-haired boy of my eldest son, Andrew. Seth is a bright boy, slightly rambunctious, and curious in all the best ways. He passionately loves my kitties and my garden full of flowers. He leads us around the Academy of Sciences—through the rain forest, toward his favorite lizards, and over to the frogs. He gets testy about where to sit in the planetarium, but Amanda insists that he do what she asks. I watch her being firm, kind, and then even more firm in her demands on him. He reluctantly obeys, and sits stiffly between us. She whispers to me that she thinks he’s mad at her, but she wraps her coat around him and hugs him to her—he forgot his jacket—and after a few minutes he cuddles in. Later, he’s trying to test us, but she smiles and uses her “guiding mother” voice, and he comes back into our orbit, playing Stomp the Insect with other children happily for at least a half hour.

She talks about him and about her own children, and I listen to her thoughts about motherhood and children as if she’s just another woman, another mother I happen to know. “I make my work schedule around the kids—I need to be there for them with their homework, to hear about their day, to swim and go to the beach to draw and tell stories. I love being with them.” My heart contracts a little—I wasn’t there enough, and I regret it, even though she has forgiven me. Her affection and love seem boundless, and I still marvel at it, so different from the tiny spoonsful of what was trying to be love doled out to Gram, Mother, and me.

Over the years, during my visits to San Diego to see Amanda and the children, there have been many times when I’ve been stricken with emotion when I’ve seen her rush into the room and gather up the children in her arms. They kiss her in a flurry of giggles, wiggling, and hugs. “I love you so much; you’re so cute!” It’s like visiting a foreign country where love is like the sun stroking green hillsides, where there is abundance and lush fountains of joy. I grew up in a sparse emotional landscape dotted with weeds, but when there were flowers I embraced them as if they would save my life. I suppose they did. After a sweet scene with my daughter and grandchildren, my chest fills with happiness. She bubbles over with mother love, and it spills onto me.

From the museum, we have to take Amanda to the airport, but the fog has come in and the temperature has fallen to sixty-three degrees. I rush off to get the car and pick them up because it’s too cold for them to walk with just the one jacket between them. I find them huddled at the edge of the park, Seth’s face wreathed in smiles, his eyes the blue blue eyes of his father, pulling color from the sky before fog. They’re giggling and Amanda tells me the story—“I put on my coat and wrapped him inside it, he put his arms around me, and we ran to the corner. He kept kissing my shoulder all the way, sweet little kisses.”

Tears prick the edges of my eyes, and there is a falling-in-love feeling; the upswept sense of the whole visit wraps me in a kind of melting as I feel mothered and loved by my daughter at the same time I’m proud of being her mother. The generations and the years merge as I head the car toward the airport. Too soon we are there, and I have to wrench myself away from this bliss. I always try to manage goodbyes so they don’t hurt—a throwback to my childhood, where there were too many goodbyes at train stations—but today I feel the wrenching in my stomach. When you get close and open your heart, it hurts to leave. Perhaps I still have to learn how to accept that.

For a moment as she throws her arms around me, the layers of six generations of mothers, starting with the first Josephine, whirl around me, all the mothers in a fleeting necklace of time. I feel her strength in her fierce embrace, her passion, that big love she has to give, those wine-dark eyes, the two of us—mother and daughter, daughter and mother, who is who, it doesn’t matter.

“I love you, Mom,” she says, tossing her chestnut hair and giving me a fleeting look, her dark eyes shining, and walks through the airport doors.

As I point the car toward home, the sun outlines the golden California hills against blue sky. Seth says, “Nana, I like Aunt Amanda.”

“I like her, too.”

Appendix

Tips for writing a healing memoir:

• If you feel that call inside you to tell your story, don’t let the critic voice within and without stop you.

• Find your voice; don’t worry about how it sounds. Just write.

• Write vignettes, small pieces that can be quilted together later.

• Know that writing is more about process than product.

• It’s okay to be scared; it’s part of writing true and authentic stories.

• Tell your story; it does not have to be chronological—write where the heat is. Write where the fear is.

• Share carefully with supportive people who care; strangers may be safer than family, especially during early stages.

• The most important thing is to get a first draft completed.

• Don’t tell those who will criticize you and your writing what you are doing.

• Create a protected, sacred space around you and write real.

• Accept that shame and fear are part of the process.

• Writing to heal trauma may mean that you write the same story repeatedly.

• It may help to heal trauma to write in first person, present tense. Write in scenes, using sensual details. Be specific.

• Writing as meditation. Just be with it, then let go.

• Experiment with being a distant narrator rather than in the perspective of the child.

• Realize that your story may take on a life of its own.

• Keep the faith that writing it is important and healing to you.

• Writing for healing is the first step in writing a memoir. Publication comes later.

Please visit my websites:

Blog: www.memoriesandmemoirs.com

National Association of Memoir Writers: www.namw.org

Acknowledgments

Many people have encouraged me on my long and winding path to this healing memoir, particularly Ron Kane, who offered compassion and the tools to help me create a new view of how life can be lived. It takes a village to write a memoir—and I’m happy to be a member of this village with my mentor and colleague Brooke Warner and my writing clan the Bellas: Betsy Fasbinder, Amy Peele, and Christie Nelson. Writing this memoir inspired me to connect with memoir writers all over the world, and led to creating the National Association of Memoir Writers (www.namw.org).