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

by Claire Fontaine

  The first day was disorienting and unpleasant. I was home working on a script; Paul was also working at home. He found it disconcerting—for about two hours. After that it was pretty peaceful in his world. Not in mine, because I had a running commentary going on in my head all day long. I suddenly knew exactly how Mia must have felt at Morava, where kids weren’t allowed to speak until they got to a certain level. My dreams that night were so noisy I woke up all night long. I talked out of the mouths of everyone in my dreams, even our cat Fluffy.

  I lived my life as usual, running errands and so on. If someone spoke to me, I just tapped my throat and they immediately assumed I had laryngitis and stopped talking to me. Probably without realizing it, they also stopped acknowledging my presence. I learned fast that the inability to speak renders one invisible and irrelevant in our culture.

  I’m a verbal person in a verbal profession. Being unable to talk was frustrating, but feeling invisible was dreadful. By the end of the day I felt invisible to myself, which was worse; I wondered if that was what insanity felt like.

  But halfway through the second day, my mind, and nerves, quieted down. There was just silence, and an awareness of my own awareness. By evening I began to feel more visible than I’d ever felt before. I didn’t have to “access” any part of myself, or my “true” feelings, as if they resided in some special file in the Department of Me. There was a harmony to my actions, feelings, thoughts, and an inner contentment I’d never felt before.

  But the most valuable part of the experience by far was that everyone else became more visible. My silence allowed other people to fill up all the space in the room. They became so dimensional and rich it was almost cubist; like aspects of them kept unfolding and opening out and I could experience every angle of them without moving an inch.

  And one very big part of Mia that is unfolding right now before me is the part of her that has nothing to do with our relationship, the part of her that belongs only to herself, and to the world. That’s a part of her I want to tune in to and experience. I want her to feel comfortable being all of who she is when she’s with me. I suppose all daughters censor parts of themselves around their mothers, but it should be a want to for her, not a have to, because of some way that I’m being.

  If our daughters aren’t open with us, we have to be accountable. How am I being with Mia such that she hasn’t opened up to me? If she feels she may not be fully heard, or heard as a prelude to advise, control, or judge, even if well-intentioned, why would she, why would any daughter?

  They don’t want us to co-opt their dilemma—it steals their power. Or they do, which is worse, because it means they hear our voice over their own, that they’ve learned from us not to trust themselves. Either way, she’ll be distorting herself somehow. As mothers we have the power to stunt our daughters’ authenticity in deep, often hidden, ways that the culture or men can never do.

  Ten stamps, please,” I ask the post office clerk in French.

  My mom waits for me off to the side, gazing at a poster. I pay and walk toward the door.

  “You ready?”

  “One sec,” she murmurs.

  I turn to see what she’s studying so intently and my heart sinks when I see it’s pictures of missing children. She spends several seconds on each face, committing them to memory as she undoubtedly hoped people would when it was my missing face on posters all over Los Angeles.

  “I’ll meet you outside,” I mumble, and walk out in a daze.

  She still does that. She still studies missing posters.

  I remember her taking time to read them when I lived at home during community college. But everything was much fresher then; I was only seventeen. I had no idea she still did this.

  “It’s beautiful out!” my mom exclaims, smiling brightly as she steps out into the sun. “Should we head over to the Musée Calvet?”

  I nod a yes but it’s all I can do not to cry. Most people take a quick glance at those posters or deliberately avoid looking at them because it’s so sad. Ten years after I ran away, she’s still on autopilot to pay attention to other mothers’ missing children. Such a nonchalant act on her part—she’s hardly upset right now—is such a powerful message of the ways in which I permanently changed her life.

  I opened her eyes to a side of life she was happily oblivious to before, and on some level, some part of her is still the mother of a missing child.

  The last several weeks we spent like two girlfriends, overdosing on chocolate and marveling at medieval wonders. But in seconds we’re back to being mother and daughter and the thought of being friends like any two women is laughable. History sometimes feels like a vain and spiteful God, lashing out if you go too long without stopping at memory’s altar.

  I spend the rest of the day irritable and do my best to talk as little as possible. Times like this I don’t want to be around her; I feel guilty and agitated and I know if she says something kind or does anything nice for me I’ll snap at her, which is the last thing I want to do. I’m glad for the chance to stay in tonight when Chrystelle calls for an impromptu get–together, which my mom accepts and I decline.

  As I walk home, it’s as though Avignon’s sensed my mood. The skies are darkening early and the wind has begun to blow. The buildings here are neutral in tone, they change color depending on the sky; tonight the whole city feels dark and brooding.

  My mind is a split screen. On one side is my mother in profile, hands behind her back as she bends slightly to study the missing poster. On the other side she’s in Kathmandu, eyes wide and terrified as she scans for me amid a moving sea of people.

  I never told her that I saw her the night we got separated in Durbar Square. When that black Land Rover pulled out between us, she didn’t see that I got stuck behind it so that when it finally passed we were completely separated. Given she was the one with the phone, money, and hotel information, I was worried but not panicked. I would have figured out a way back to the hotel and I assumed my mom would figure similarly. Until I saw her.

  She had scrambled up a mound of rubble and garbage, and I waved and waved at her but she didn’t see me. She was so disproportionately panicked, her eyes wide, the muscles in her jaw and forehead tensed, her fear made all the more dramatic by the garish yellow light.

  I’d never seen her face like this but I’d imagined it countless times falling asleep during the nights I ran away or in my more sober moments. I know my mom thinks that I never thought about her or Paul when I ran away or when I was living with my aunt several states away, because I so rarely called them. She once told me they were worried that I had lost all ability to have empathy or remorse, which scared them more than the drug use.

  They didn’t know I only acted like that because I felt those things too acutely. I was too far gone to stop what I was doing, but I was always painfully aware of the effect it had on my parents. That’s why I hated talking to them; the longer we spoke, the longer the guilt would linger after hanging up. That night in Durbar it was like putting a missing piece of my past under UV light, an image of my mother’s face showing up like invisible ink. It was an image I’d never had to see or face.

  When I think about things like this, part of me wants to comfort her and part of me can’t stand the sight of her, I’m so ashamed. I know what’s done is done, I know I was young and having issues coming up from being abused, but I still wish I could take it all back sometimes. Everyone is always so positive—look at how well things turned out in the end, look at how much was ultimately gained! People always say to live without regrets, but I have enormous regret and not everything “turned out for the best.” My parents never bought a house in L.A. and had more children. My mom still looks at posters of missing children and panics disproportionately because of what I did.

  I don’t want to put a positive spin on things. It’s not a “yes it was horrible but look at all the good that ultimately resulted,” it’s a “yes it was horrible and good also came from it.” One doesn’t negate the
other, and believing it does can alleviate the kind of guilt or regret that’s healthy to feel.

  I don’t want to tell her any of this because she’ll end up comforting me, and that feels wrong because the whole point is the pain I caused her. I want her to say Yes, you shattered my life. I’m fixing it now but you definitely screwed it up. At least that’s honest. You can’t move on from a lie, or heal from something you refuse to even acknowledge exists.

  As a writer, my mother weaves plots and creates intrigue and develops characters. In her own life, though, she seems more player than playwright; in some ways I feel like the one who wrote the story line and dictated the plot. What happened to her always had to do with me, directly or indirectly. When I was abused, her life was shattered, and when I was a dumb teen without a clue or a care, it got turned upside down again.

  We so rarely think about the true, long-term impact we have on other people. Some of it’s self-worth, how easy it is to underestimate yourself and your ability to affect other people. But I think there’s another, more selfish, aspect to it. I think if we were to stay aware of it we would have to act more accountably, more thoughtfully. Forgetting our potential impact enables us to feel guiltless. But to a great degree it’s gutless, too.

  When I reach our apartment I curl into a ball on the bed and cry until a bone-deep physical exhaustion sinks in and I fall asleep. I don’t know how much time has passed when I wake, but my mom’s still gone. I feel calmer now, but in the drained way that follows sadness. The wind is still blowing outside, banging shutters against building walls, causing the trees outside our window to sway slowly back and forth, their leaves shivering as the wind whips through them.

  I get up and walk to the window, catching the reflection of a puffy-eyed young woman before swinging the shutters open. Wind and cold rush into the apartment, and I’m chilled but I feel very present and alive. I feel cleansed. I stand there a few more minutes, inhaling deeply, and then tightly close them shut. I need to talk to my mom about this. I want to let this go.

  The only thing scarier than French drivers on country roads in a thunderstorm is circling with fifty of them in a huge two-lane roundabout—with seven exits. One of them is ours.

  “What do you mean you don’t know which one? You’re the navigator!”

  “I told you to just go straight,” Mia yells back.

  “There is no straight, are you blind!?”

  We’re whizzing around and around the outside lane in the pouring rain. The inside lane is honking and yelling as they shoot right across me to exit.

  “Mom, you’re going to get us killed!”

  “I’m supposed to be exiting, that’s why! You were supposed to know which exit! I bet you don’t even know the name of the road we were on, or which direction we’re heading, do you?”

  “It doesn’t matter, stop yelling!”

  “Oh, my God, you don’t, you forgot to mark the route, didn’t you?”

  No answer. I whip into the inner lane. “I can’t believe it. Get out the map!”

  “I’ll get carsick, no!”

  “You’ll get a lot sicker if we circle here for an hour! Or if I make you walk!”

  “I forgot, okay! I’m sorry! You forget things, too, all the time!”

  “Not when it’s directions in the boondocks in a thunderstorm!”

  “Oh, no, you’re perfect! Pocahontas can’t even find her way to the apartment after five weeks!”

  “Great, I’m going to have to cut through the line of death over and over until we find a human being stupid enough to be out in this rain, Godbloodydammit!”

  Silence.

  “Where’s the sun when you need it?” comes a little squeak.

  We’ve been driving in a huffy silence for a while when my mom suddenly bursts out laughing.

  “Do you remember Horti?”

  “The road trip with her daughter!” I answer.

  Horti is a beautiful and feisty Cuban woman in her nineties that we met one day at the beach in Florida. Sharks had been seen and whistles were blown but she kept swimming laps nonstop so we had to literally block her path to get her attention. Up popped a raisin of a woman in giant goggles, and when we told her about the sharks she just laughed.

  “They don want notheen with an old woman like me. Keep blowing the whistles, I no gonna leave.”

  We’d have felt terrible leaving her, so we stayed and made a new friend. Horti had gone to Chile to meet her daughter, with whom she’s very close, for a road trip through the vineyards there. The trip was going fantaaasteeco until the second they got in the car, put the top down, and started driving.

  “I don know how we didn’t keel each other . . . never again . . . I’d rather go to Baghdad.”

  After a good laugh, my mom and I relax into a contented silence as we drive into the Provençal countryside, a landscape that’s a patchwork of rolling hills, fields of crops, green pastures, olive groves, and lavender fields.

  Unless you’re at just the right angle, lavender fields are pretty but unimpressive, a smattering of violet amid green. But when you continue driving and see them from another angle, it’s as though the plants leaped to attention and scurried into perfect formation, forming row after row of what look like fat, happy purple caterpillars. Something about them feels childlike, they’re so unabashedly vibrant and puffed with pride.

  We drive deeper into the mountains, passing only the occasional farmhouse surrounded by well-tended fields, or herds of sheep and goats grazing beside a stone cottage. Before long we crest a hill and in a diamond-shaped valley below is the Sénanque Abbey in full panorama.

  Like two halves of an oyster opening to reveal a pearl, this small, spare abbey is nestled between two olive-colored mountains. The valley floor around it’s a sea of purple, row after row of lavender in full bloom. From above it looks like the amethyst center of a geode.

  Sénanque is a Cistercian monastery, a Catholic order that emphasizes manual labor and self-sufficiency, and the monks here grow lavender and keep honeybees to support themselves. We spend an hour or so touring the monastery, which dates back to 1148 and is beautiful in its simplicity and austerity.

  I’ve wanted to talk to my mom about what came up for me that day at the post office, but there never seemed to be a good time. Now may not be either; we’ve finally stopped arguing and I’m not sure if bringing this up would darken our day. We’ve got a great day planned out and Provence is one of her favorite places in the world. But now I understand why this area means so much to her; the parts of me that feel nurtured and stimulated here were the parts of her needing to be brought back to life after what I put her through. I understand her more fully now and I want her to know that.

  “Mom,” I blurt out before I have a chance to change my mind. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  She looks at me, sees I’m serious, and points to a stone bench off to the side of the lavender fields behind the monastery.

  “I’m no good at this kind of thing and if you don’t want to talk about it now we don’t have to but I’ve been feeling really bad since—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she says, laughing. “Just read the map before we get in the car next time!”

  “Not this morning, Mom, I’m talking about feeling bad about everything, like my whole teenage fiasco and everything. I never expected it to come up, but first there was Durbar and then the post office and—”

  “Durbar and the post office? Do you mean Durbar Square in Kathmandu?”

  I take a deep breath, think about what I’m trying to say and how to phrase it. I don’t necessarily want to apologize; we’re past apologies and this is so much bigger than that. It’s more of an acknowledgment. Apologizing or asking for forgiveness inserts yourself in there, your own ego is catered to as well.

  “Let me just start at the beginning. My understanding of what I put you through as a teen sort of came in stages. I apologized to you in the program—and I genuinely meant it—but my understandi
ng of my actions was pretty limited then. It wasn’t really until I read your parts in Come Back that I got on a broader, deeper scale what I put you through. And what you went through with my dad, too.”

  “I wondered about that,” she says, nodding. “I’d never told you face-to-face a lot of what I wrote. After you read it you never brought it up, other than editing, of course. I didn’t want to press you. I figured you’d bring it up when you were ready to. After all this time, I just assumed you processed it and moved on.”

  She knows well that until I process things I’m usually uncomfortable talking to anyone about them.

  “Yeah, well, some things happened on this trip that made me realize I’d never processed it, period. That I still hold on to a lot of guilt and regret.”

  I recount how I saw her on that pile of garbage, totally panicked, and I watch as the understanding of how I found her that night sinks in. I wonder if she wishes I hadn’t seen her in so vulnerable a state.

  “The other day at the post office, something just clicked when I saw you looking at those missing posters. I got on such a deep level what I did to you. It didn’t just change your life, it changed your whole identity as a mom, as a woman, and I am so, so sorry.”

  “That’s why you wanted to stay home that night, isn’t it?”

  I nod.

  She takes my hand but doesn’t say anything further. I wonder what she’s thinking but in a way I’m glad she’s quiet. The sun is behind the clouds now and the lavender has turned a silvery periwinkle, a more hushed version of what was just seconds ago a brilliant violet glow.

  I’m often asked if writing Come Back gave me closure. It did, but mostly in terms of myself as I put my history with my dad to rest. It generated a new set of issues with my mother, however, and that’s something I haven’t felt closure about until now. Side by side, sitting in a silent understanding, it feels like this last piece of the puzzle that is my past is slowly, gracefully clicking into place.

  Mia doesn’t cry easily. Tears aren’t falling now, but her eyes are shiny with them. Such vulnerability, and accountability, takes courage, even between mother and daughter, perhaps especially between them. I turn to face her as she worries a thread on the hem of her sundress.