Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World

by Claire Fontaine

  And three, I started spending long periods of time with young children for the first time. As an only child who never babysat, I’d rarely interacted with two- and three-year-olds, but about a year ago I befriended a family in Brooklyn, and spending time with their two toddlers was eye-opening. I saw just how developmentally critical an age it is; they’re little people that soak up and interpret absolutely everything around them as they unconsciously form a view of the world. No wonder experiencing all of that through a layer of fear and pain alters you long-term. Imagining one of them being abused made me see my own history very differently.

  Maybe I shouldn’t need neuroscience or other people’s stories to validate my feelings, but it’s helped me nonetheless. If anything, being with these girls in Alexandria and seeing their excitement and enthusiasm for life makes me a little nostalgic.

  They remind me of myself, not when I was their age but when I was eighteen. My first year home was mostly forward-moving but it was still rocky at times; I was aware I could still go back to the way I was. But by the time I left for college, that fear had left me completely, and every day I woke up feeling much the way I imagine a child does: free and powerful and completely confident in myself and my abilities. I felt wise and childlike, a combination that left me feeling on top of the world.

  Most people assume you learn about the world by losing your innocence. For those of us who lost our innocence very young, we come of age in reverse, becoming wiser as we become less jaded. Some of us have to grow down to truly grow up.

  Cairo’s historic Mena Hotel is set amid jasmine-scented grounds in the shadow of the Great Pyramid. With its Victorian maze of marbled, scrolled, and gilded passages, it is a stark contrast to the bracing bright feel of Alexandria. Today, with the sun and scent of the sea still with us, and some time before visiting the ancient Coptic area of Cairo, Mia and I meander through the nooks and crannies on the ground floor, where plush velvet seats in golds and reds beckon the weary at every turn. The nature and pace of the scavenger hunt has meant almost no time to relax and reflect with Mia, which is, of course, fine; we’ll have a whole summer for that in France. Still, it’s nice to have even thirty minutes of leisure with Mia right now.

  We find a quiet corner where Mia twists her hair into a knot, secures it with a ballpoint pen, sinks into a love seat, and relaxes into what looks like nap position. She gives me a knowing look and says, “Don’t worry,” as I sit down beside her. How well she knows how well I know her.

  “Mom, this was an absolutely fabulous day,” she sighs. She swings her legs up onto my lap and smiles like a well-satisfied cat. “Alexandria reminded me of how much I miss history, college, writing papers. I’m glad I had no clue what I wanted to do the first three years; I took a lot of courses I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. My only regret is not having taken more writing classes.”

  “Why, as far as writing professionally goes, I don’t think it matters what you take. I never took lit courses and the one creative writing class I took, I hated.”

  “Why would you? You never planned on being an author.”

  “Oh, yes, I did.”

  “No, you didn’t, you went to design school, then film school.”

  “Are you telling me my own life? I wanted to be an author the very second I knew there was such a thing, in first grade. I taught myself to read when I was four.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  I have no idea how I learned, but one morning when I was four, the words Chinese Butterfly came on after a cartoon and I knew exactly what they said. I can still see the words in my mind as clear as day, because even then I knew that it was a very big deal. I fell in love with words right then and there. Before long I was blitzing through the Golden Books and reading everything I could get my hands on.

  “Obviously my comprehension was limited to words I knew the meaning of at that age, but yeah, I did. Sometimes I’d sneak up to the attic where it was nice and quiet and read the stacks of old newspapers up there.”

  Which made for a bewildering ride to a four-year-old: Negroes couldn’t eat at lunch counters even when they wore nice suits, hats were called pillboxes, somebody was strangling Boston, and princesses didn’t rule countries but did do a lot of skiing for some reason.

  Kids have such literal minds; they’re all members of the Flat Earth Society. It never occurred to me that anything I read in the papers was real, that there was any other world beyond what I could actually see. All the crazy stuff I was reading was just Golden Books for grown-ups.

  Till that moment on the train, when I looked out on that prairie and had the miraculous realization that there was a world. An endless one, where a million other people like me were doing a million things in a million places beyond what I could see. Which meant that it was someplace you could go and march your actual self around in. Which I intended to do as soon as I was old enough. If those were real princesses in hot pink ski pants (with stirrups!) drinking real hot cocoa by a toasty fire right where Heidi of the Mountains grew up, I was so there. It was like God had revealed the secret of life to me. I read even more fanatically after that, preparing myself for The World.

  Of course I still didn’t have a full grasp on reality. I’d always assumed books were the same as anything else in the world, just there, like the trees or sky, like, you know, God made them up or something. The day I found out from Mrs. Webster in first grade that an actual person thought up the stories and then wrote them down, I was on a cloud for weeks. I just couldn’t believe my luck. Because it meant that one day I could be one of those people.

  “Why’d you wait so long to write?”

  “Well . . . because I was fed the same twentieth-century canon you got, I had it in my head that there were only two kinds of writers: men who drank and whored, and genteel older women who wrote in country manors or big-city penthouses, like Virginia Woolf and Muriel Spark, which sounded just ducky to me.”

  “I can totally see you with Woolf’s life, minus the suicide, of course. The clothes, the house, the subservient husband.”

  “Very funny. So when I got to my senior year of high school, here was my plan: I was gonna become a doctor and earn enough to retire wealthy in my forties, buy a house on the moors, and write novels. Shouldn’t be too hard, I thought—I was a science and math geek.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “I started to. I registered for anatomy my senior year of high school. I got to class, the only girl in a sea of boys. A few boys had to stand in the back of the room. Mr. Di Antonio made me stand and explained that I had to give up my seat for a boy. Girls didn’t become doctors, they had families—perhaps I’d enjoy typing class or shorthand?”

  “What an asshole! What did you do?”

  What I did was burst into tears on the spot and go to the principal, who supported the idiot. I was so devastated that I left school. With a four-point average. I waitressed, bought a better car, then went to live with a family in the most exclusive part of town so I could go to the high school that turned out more National Merit Scholars than almost any other school in the nation.

  “Then I was stupid enough to pass on a scholarship to Emory to go to college at an expensive, mediocre party school because my then-boyfriend went there.”

  Her jaw drops. “You followed a guy? You?”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. I hated that school. By then, I’d forgotten who I was, what my dreams were. It was about finding work, then finding a husband. I finally went to fashion design school because it was the one other thing I did well and that paid well. Then I met your old dad, had you, and the rest is history.”

  She sits processing all this a moment. “Okay, so here’s what I’m really not getting now,” she says. “I was going to find a nice quiet moment to ask you why the hell you haven’t written anything in the last three years. Now that I know just how much you always wanted to be an author—I mean, hello??”

  “Okay, fair question. As soon as we find another nice qui
et moment you can ask it again. And don’t swear.”

  My mom and I have been in Cairo’s Coptic quarters for the last couple of hours popping in and out of mosques, churches, and one synagogue, but I’ve paid little attention. My mom’s past life seems more alien and interesting to me now than any buildings.

  I thought I understood my mom better than almost anyone, in part because she’s often told me I did. Now I’m questioning that; never in a million years would I have thought she’d give up being a doctor or pick a college based on her boyfriend. She’s so headstrong and independent that I assumed she’d always been that way. I wonder if she evolved past that self-doubt and insecurity (encouraging, because it means I’ll probably grow out of mine), or if she still feels that way but hides it really well (utterly discouraging).

  And, not to overanalyze things, but why is she telling me now? Is it because I’m older and she’s not worried that I’ll use her mistakes to justify my own, i.e., “You did X, Y, and Z, and turned out okay”? Or is she no longer closing herself off because she trusts me not to hurt her?

  It’s one thing for your mom to trust you while you’re growing up, that pretty much revolves around her believing that you are where you say you are, and you’ll come home when you say you will. It’s something else entirely for her to trust you with herself, the way any two friends learn to.

  And if I want the latter to occur, I need to honestly examine how I’ve treated her for the first time in a long time. Like most daughters, I’ve done things to her I’d never in a million years do to a friend, most notably when I insisted on bringing my college boyfriend, Graham, home with me for Christmas break, despite the fact that my mom was still mourning the death of her father, who’d passed away a few weeks earlier.

  Lest I seem like a complete jerk, I should add that I’d never met my grandfather, nor had he been much of a presence in any of his kids’ lives. My mom rarely spoke of him, so when she called to tell me that she was in West Virginia taking care of her dying father I was baffled. And when he passed away, I didn’t expect her to grieve much for someone she’d hardly seen in several years, and whom she didn’t seem that close to. If I had been more mature I would have understood that that gave her even more to grieve about; she wasn’t just mourning the loss of what was, she was mourning the loss of what wasn’t and now would never be.

  In the absence of understanding her feelings I still should have respected them, and she was understandably angry with me for failing to do so. If my head hadn’t been filled with passing my final exams and planning where to take Graham, my first real boyfriend, when he came to visit, I would have thought more about her. Hardly behavior that would make me want to befriend someone.

  It was only several months later that I realized how incredibly selfish I’d been, but I was too ashamed to apologize to her. I was afraid to find out if she was still angry with me or if she harbored resentment, and it was easier to just move on, to do nice things for her or call her more often as a silent apology.

  On the flip side, I’ve done things for her that I’d never do for a friend. I had the opportunity to study abroad at the American University in Cairo and when I called my mom, excited to tell her I’d been accepted for the spring semester, I was crushed that she didn’t want me to go. It was only a year after 9/11, and as someone both American and Jewish, she didn’t understand why out of every country available to study in, I insisted on a Middle Eastern one.

  She never asked me outright to decline but I could hear the nervousness in her voice when we spoke. I initially had every intention of going, but I started to really think about what those months would be like for my mom—that, regardless of whether her fears were warranted or not, she’d worry every day. After all the sleepless nights I caused her as a runaway teen (and with Graham’s untimely visit still fresh), I thought putting her wants before my own would be a nice gesture, both out of a sense of filial duty and also just as a kind thing to do for someone I cared about.

  It’s ironic that I’m thinking about this now, not just because Cairo is where I was supposed to study but because Egyptian families are often extremely close, and putting your mother’s needs before your own is a given for many girls my age here. Would they have had an easier time, or made that same decision more quickly? And would they, too, have felt a slight resentment simmering, even though a bigger part of me was glad I did that for her?

  Because of how primal the mother-daughter relationship seems, I’ve assumed it was more or less universal, driven by biology. And it’s true, no matter the language or cultural barrier in a country, you can almost always recognize a mother and daughter based on gestures, mannerisms, a certain tone of voice. But the similarities often end there.

  In traditional Egyptian households, for example, most girls are extremely close with their mothers; socializing outside your family is often frowned upon and a girl’s mother is her primary source of information about education, relationships, child-rearing, and so on. To my grandmother and a lot of European cultures, however, it’s considered strange to be or want to be best friends with your mother, even as an adult. And the question of duty, of what and how much we “owe” our parents, is one I find particularly troubling. My friend Yoomie, whose parents fled Vietnam and settled in Iowa, said that in Vietnamese families talking back to your parents is unheard of. And judging by the interaction between the Malaysian mother and daughter we saw, Vietnam is hardly alone in this.

  The world is full of instructions and advice on how to mother, in bookstores, in academia, on the playgrounds, in the media. Mothers are always examining how they treat their children, but aside from the occasional “Don’t talk to your mother that way,” or “You shouldn’t have listened to your mother,” there’s not much guidance out there for daughters. Obviously, you can’t quite compare good mothering to good daughtering; as the person who bears and raises you, mothers have incomparable developmental and emotional impact. But while perhaps never equal, the playing field is certainly more level once you’re an adult.

  When you see something as a given, it’s human nature not to question or examine it. Seeing the degree to which it varies from culture to culture has made me realize that it is not a given, and that our assumption that the mother-daughter dynamic is biological and universal gives us a get-out-of-jail-free card from accountably examining how we treat our mothers.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Greece and the Balkans

  Weight, Weight, Don’t Tell Me!

  Returning to the West after weeks in modest Muslim and Hindu countries feels like being around a teenage boy; everything is about sex. The moment I step foot in the Athens terminal I’m greeted by a poster of a nearly naked waif of a girl writhing in the sand with a well-oiled shirtless hunk. Then a woman walks by in five-inch stilettos with nipples threatening to pop out of a low-cut tank top, followed by another Jessica Rabbit–esque lady. I’ve never batted an eye at tight or revealing clothing before, so I have no idea why I suddenly want to drape my pashmina over their chests.

  Outside the airport, billboards with women’s bodies are as much a part of the scenery as the yellow wildflowers and cypress trees lining the highway. My favorite is of a woman wearing a fishnet body stocking, her checkered cheeks in full view as she hugs a long, cylindrical object. I can’t read Greek but I’m assuming the text would clarify whether it’s a vibrator, a man’s electric hair trimmer, or a Jedi lightsaber.

  While heavily polluted, Athens is greener than I expected, and the dry Mediterranean vegetation so common in this region spills out from the buildings and homes in the rocky hillsides. We won’t be here long; we have four days to get from Athens to Bucharest, and eleven cities throughout Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Romania to scavenge in between. Because it’ll be such a crazy leg, Bill’s given us the afternoon off, and I want nothing more than to relax in a hot bath.

  The hotel bathroom is filled with gleaming marble and a glass shower door directly across from a huge mirror. Perfect. The f
irst hotel where I have to stare at myself naked comes after days of pigging out in Cairo.

  I take a few moments to study myself. My cheeks are sunburned and chubbier, I need to bleach my mustache and condition my hair. And then I spy the scale. Knowing it’s a bad idea even as I step on, I wince as the dial continues ten pounds past where it normally reads. Ten pounds isn’t the end of the world, though being short and small-boned means it shows more. But rather than fattening me up proportionally, incoming calories seem to have beelined to my belly and thighs.

  Argh! Why am I suddenly thinking about this?! A few sets of boobs, some airbrushed models, and insecurity is already setting in? What’s wrong with me? I’ve just come from countries with malnourished children playing in streets filled with sewage. Now feeling fat and ungrateful, I do my best to deep-breathe my way to a more Zen-like place while soaking.

  It halfway works, and by the time we leave I’m only mildly dispirited. I perk up as my mom and I reach the Plaka, a charming historic quarter where narrow streets and colorful buildings clump together beneath Athens’s famed Acropolis. We stroll down Adrianou Street, named after the Emperor Hadrian, who ruled around 117 A.D. Hadrian was a peaceful emperor, a great patron of the arts and a lover of Greek culture. He built libraries, theaters, and aqueducts, and he humanized the legal code and forbade torture. He also massacred over half a million Jews; when Jewish documents mention Hadrian, his name is followed by “may his bones be crushed.”

  “You know that’s one of your best colors,” my mom says, pointing to an aqua shirt in a store window.

  “Mom, that shirt could be poop-colored and you’d say the same thing. You just want me to buy it so I’ll stop borrowing yours!”

  “Well, yes!” she says, laughing as she steers me inside. “But it’ll also flatter you.”

  That shirt, five pairs of pants, and several tops later, I feel like crying. The only thing that actually flatters me is cute but looks like a maternity top, and no amount of wriggling, writhing, and hopping up and down will make me fit into the jeans I’m trying on. My mom sweetly offers to buy me the maternity top—either out of pity or self-preservation; I’m not much fun when I’m cranky.