Motherless Daughters (48 page)

She wanted so much to get across to me the importance of being independent. The way she put it in her day was, “Be a lady.” By that, she meant don’t get yourself in trouble and get your life ruined by it.

From the time I was thirteen until she died, she was in and out of the hospital. I would go from my high school classes, take the subway to the hospital, meet my father there, have dinner someplace in the hospital neighborhood, come back home, get up and go to school the next morning. The routine carried me along. Plus, she was so determined that I make something of myself. She thought that being independent and being able to fend for myself was important. I think my father came to realize that he didn’t do her any favor by supporting her so that she wouldn’t work. In those days, it was considered improper for a man to have a wife who worked. She would work only if it was essential to the family’s economic well-being. I think he came to realize that she would have been more fulfilled, happier, if she had worked outside the home.

One thing my mother taught me was to do everything the best way I possibly could. Of course, she didn’t have very much of a chance to do that herself, but she certainly got that message across to me, that everything I did, whether it was my piano lessons or whatever I wanted to take, I should spend the time it took to do it as well as I could.

I chose to go to law school, thinking it was something I could do well, to the encouragement of one of my teachers at Cornell. So I took the LSAT before my husband did, even though he was a year ahead of me at Cornell. And then my mother’s sister and my father’s brother, who were the ones I visited on school vacations, decided it was acceptable for me to go to law school because I wouldn’t have to support myself, so I could do this crazy thing. In fact, my aunt recently died and my daughter found a letter I had written in college saying something about just taking the Law School Aptitude Test, and saying I did fine on the English but I don’t think I did well on the math, and maybe if I get a low grade that will end this crazy idea of mine about going to law school. Sometimes I’ll reflect on
what my mother might have counseled me if she had lived longer and seen the way my interests developed, and I think that she would have been with me.

My view is that I am what she would have wanted me to be, in fact far beyond any of her wildest dreams of what I could be, not because of my limitations but because of the limitations of society. I have her picture on the wall in my chambers, and it’s where I can see her every day when I leave. I kind of smile when I look at it and say, “She would have been proud of me.”

I remember being in an acting class where people couldn’t be emotional. We had to do an exercise where you came through a door with a circumstance. That was easy for me to do—to pretend there had been an accident, to pretend I’d just lost someone. But I remember sitting in the class, thinking that the other people weren’t emotionally available [in their scenes]. My boyfriend at the time still had his parents, and he could never imagine what it would be like if someone told him there had been an accident and someone died. But I’d already experienced so many of these deep, profound emotions that I didn’t have to learn them. I could imagine anything. And I think that’s one of the reasons I can be so emotionally available as an actor. I understand pain and drama. I understand that it only takes one second for a life to change. I think children who experience that have a different understanding than children who don’t.

I really feel my mother’s death is the dividing line between the self I am and the self I became. That was probably the time in my life when that dividing line would have existed anyhow,
but it’s difficult for me to adequately communicate the difference in the person I feel like I became after she died. I was quite immature, very self-centered, and kind of frivolous in many ways before this happened, and it just changed me radically in ways that only became clear to me later on. When I was doing [the syndicated column] “Life in the 30s,” people would always say to me, “I don’t understand how somebody your age has these kinds of insights into everyday life.” What became clear to me after a while was that one of the reasons I did was because the unexamined life became impossible for me to have after that year.

My mother’s death made me a much happier and more optimistic person. People are always a little incredulous when I say that. I really felt that from this experience, you could take away one of two things. One is you could just think, “What’s the point? It’s all over so quickly.” But the other is that you can look at life and think, “My god. Every day that you have is so precious and so important.” When somebody dies you realize that if they had it to do all over again they wouldn’t want to win the Pulitzer Prize or make the bestseller list. If they had to do it all over again, they’d just want one more day at the beach, or to sit with their kids quietly on a blanket somewhere and talk about something one more time. I think the experience of my mother’s death made me treasure those little things in a way I never would have before, and I think that’s a real element of my writing that comes out. I’m not interested in writing about the inauguration or the hostage releases. I’m interested in looking at the little moments in people’s lives. I think those are the most illuminating, and the most dear.

In graduate school, I found my niche. I thought, “This is it. This is what I do, and I do it well.” Then I had sort of an attack of feeling like if my mother were alive, I wouldn’t be getting such praise from respected members of my field or starting this career. It dawned on me at a certain point that although the thing I wanted most was to have my mother back, I wasn’t willing to give up what I’d gotten since she died. A few years ago, I finally admitted to my dad, “I think if Mommy had lived, I wouldn’t have achieved the things I’ve achieved.” It took me eleven years to say that because I’d been so overcome by the guilt of enjoying
the life I had. He told me, “You’d still be doing what you’re doing, because you are who you are. You’ve always been a person who was going to get what she wanted to get.” It took me a long time to realize my father is probably right. My life would have been different if my mother were here, but I think I’d still be somewhere I wanted to be, doing something I wanted to do.