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

by Claire Fontaine

  “Thank you for being big enough to say that, Mia, I’m sure it wasn’t easy. I don’t want to tell you not to feel guilty or downplay the impact to make you feel better. That would deny what’s true for you, and make it about me, my need to ‘mother,’ to protect you from your own feelings, or mine. I don’t think you need protecting. I don’t see you as fragile. You’re one of the most powerful women I know.”

  I turn to face her.

  “What’s most meaningful to me is more than the acknowledgment of the events, it’s your acknowledgment of me. I feel as if you’re really seeing me, not just as your mom, as a person. That did happen to me. I did get derailed. And rewired. And as Barbara would say, rocks are hard, water is wet—it was what it was, and it was bad.”

  I smile at her and she nods and then rests her head on my shoulder. My old choice would have been to say something now that starts with a “but”: but don’t feel so bad, but look at all the good that came, but look how close we are now. That would be my old pattern of coming from fear, of saying I’m afraid you’re too weak to feel bad or handle any pain, so let’s just give it a drive-by.

  We tell our daughters we don’t trust them in a thousand ways. We don’t consciously mean to, but we steal their confidence in their own strength by stealing their pain. And their confidence in our strength by saying we aren’t strong enough to see them struggle.

  We sit a while longer, on a cool stone bench where monks have sat in quiet reflection for hundreds of years, gazing out on these same fields of lilac-blue. This is new for both of us, not to comfort or avoid what needs to be felt and spoken.

  Time is rarely enough to clean up a painful history in any relationship, especially between moms and daughters. It’s often easier to keep fighting—it’s familiar, and you each get to be right—or to keep silent and let sleeping dogs lie. But why have a dead dog in your relationship?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Avignon

  Pentimento

  Def: A visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer, or layers, of paint on a canvas. From Italian, literally “repentant.”

  If happiness were a landscape, it would have corridors of Italian cypress, lanes of potted lemons, purple tunnels of wisteria, hillsides lush with roses. It would look like the seemingly endless gardens of the Fort Saint André Abbey, which tumble into one another as lyrically and naturally as if they’d been there since time began, rather than having been lovingly cultivated over several centuries. Who would have guessed that all this was behind the towering walls of the giant fort we could see from our bluff across the river?

  We wander through one little paradise after another: hidden bowers with bees and flowers; a sun-bleached crest with the crumbling remains of a chapel; a grove of ancient, twisting olive trees. Outside, the fort is a solid, cold, masculine enclosure of stone that soars into the blue. Inside, however, like Avignon, it’s a lush, feminine embrace.

  I was almost speechless the first time we came (yes, it’s that amazing). It was like finding someplace I never knew I’d been dreaming of all my life: the hilltop silence, the metallic scent of chalky stone, the soft shush of wind through tall, pale reeds, long views through arch after arch of stone, the cool of an ancient grotto. I could set up a desk, chair, and bed and live here for the rest of my life. Everything about this place delights my physical senses.

  My heart and soul, however, came alive in Plovdiv, the verdant, historic hilltop town in Bulgaria. Till now, I wasn’t sure why. As Mia and I sit for lunch against a low stone wall and a cascade of ivy tendrils and the wind blows the little green corkscrews across my cheek, I suddenly understand.

  I close my eyes and I’m three and sitting inside a pergola dripping with grapevines at my tante (great-aunt) Fox’s backyard. In the sweet, heavy heat of August, I squeeze the hard little baby grapes and then tickle the curls of the young vines against my cheek. My mother and tante’s voices float out the kitchen window, speaking Yiddish, rising and falling as they move to and from the windows while they make dinner. Fifty years later I can still feel the happiness of that time, viscerally. I can still hear my mother’s laughter and the buzz of glossy, black-bottomed bees, still see the giant heads of pink peonies lolling on the wet grass, having fallen of their own weight, drunk with morning rain.

  No wonder I responded to Plovdiv as I did. It lies on the same latitude, exactly, as Cleveland Heights, where I was born and spent much of my childhood. It has the same plants and flowers, the same trees, insects, climates and constellations, the same fragrance, light, and colors. One, I hadn’t been surrounded by in decades.

  The landscape of our childhood imprints itself into our very being at the same time and in the same way—primal, umbilical—as our relationship with our mother; they’re inextricably bound. And I think we’re drawn to nature, to the land, so much because it gives us something only our mother does: unconditional love. It’s the only thing in life that gives as much as a mother—sustenance, shelter, delight, solace, wisdom, challenge, company—without asking anything in return. Everyone and everything else needs, expects, or wants something of us, even if it’s just our attention. Also like a mother, however, she can be terrifyingly powerful in an instant.

  I share my thoughts on Plovdiv with Mia as we unpack our lunch and balance it on our laps.

  “I thought it hit you so hard because it reminded you of your mom, because she’s from around there.”

  “Well, there is that,” I agree, because there is always that. “But Plovdiv was also my landscape, identical to the places where I had all my first landmarks. My first kiss in a forest while holding sweaty palms at camp, summers canoeing rivers and chasing blue dragonflies. My body remembers Ohio in a way my mind never will, picking and eating green apples still warm from the sun, or eating my way to school through a ravine of blackberries.”

  Nature made life feel soft and miraculous. I hated to be inside. I still do. If I was anything in a prior life, I’m sure I had leaves, fur, or feathers. I can still barely pass by a lush hedge without itching to crawl inside and sit awhile. The only other person I know who didn’t laugh when I shared this is my friend Maureen, an analyst and author whose passion is nature photography. Her connection to nature is also visceral, tied to motherhood.

  “Nature has held me far more than my own physical mother,” she told me while describing a recent trip to Point Reyes, a national forest in northern California, a place so deeply green and damp it feels primeval. It’s fog-laced and full of fallen trees teeming with life that hums and buzzes as they melt back into the loamy dark soil.

  She was photographing a herd of white deer last week when they began to run. “Claire, I was running with them and feeling so much joy! To be connected to the earth and to these exquisite beings—it made me feel so alive!”

  I could feel Maureen’s joy as she spoke, picturing her beautiful wide smile and big hazel eyes all lit up as she ran across the forest floor behind the herd.

  “You know how I always dream about houses?” I ask Mia. “Well, they’re never complete or regular houses. Never. There are always walls missing, or there’s no ceiling. Nothing separates it from outside—a lot of times they’re tree houses, or a meadow cuts right through it.”

  “The abode of a restless claustrophobic.”

  “I prefer to say environmentally integrated.”

  Mia unwraps the moist chestnut leaf with the cheese, thoughtful. “You know how you always tell me to be careful what I wish for, because a vision is such a powerful thing?”

  “Yeah,” I reply, digging a piece of crust into the warm, soft cheese.

  “Well, you got the house of your dreams.”

  “Like hell I did—what are you talking about?”

  “A huge, bushy green tree is growing right up into it. Hello? And don’t swear.”

  My jaw stops midchew. We look at each other. We both know she’s right. I can’t think of a single thing to say. And she takes full advantage of the silence.

  “Al
l these years you’ve been bitching about that ficus tree, you never saw it as anything but negative, you’ve been a total victim. I mean sometimes it wasn’t even rational. You’ve even said you had nightmares about it.”

  I start to say something in my defense, but she’s on a roll.

  “Did it ever occur to you to see it as something positive? Like nature calling you back, or trying to set you right. If you had seen it in a bigger way, the way you usually do, as a sign from the universe or something woo-woo, you might have sold it before the market tanked.”

  Round two hits just as hard. And there’s a slight irritation in her voice that isn’t helping. It’s certainly warranted, but it feels off, there’s something else. My instinct was correct because she turns to me and asks, pointedly—

  “Mom, are you ever going to tell me about why you really moved to Florida? Why you left L.A. so quickly without saying anything to me?”

  My mom doesn’t respond immediately to my question, just takes a breath and looks to her right at the valley stretched out below.

  “I got scared,” she says simply, still looking out.

  “Of what?”

  She sighs, then spits out, “Well, the proposal for Come Back was rejected fifty-six times and I thought I better come up w—”

  “Wait, wait, back up—the proposal was what?!”

  “Rejected fifty-six times,” she says, avoiding my eyes as she reaches for the baguette. “I never told you.”

  “No shit you never told me! I knew of about twenty rejections, what, you just forgot to mention the other thirty-six? And don’t you dare start eating now.”

  “Honey, you were already so pessimistic and I didn’t see the point in telling you every single time it happened. You’d have been totally depressed.”

  “But every time we talked, you were so certain. Why did you lie to me?”

  “I didn’t exactly lie, Mia, I just . . . withheld some things. Fine, I guess that’s lying. From the moment we started this project I knew in my heart of hearts it’d get published . . . but by the fiftieth rejection, I got nervous. Even our agent said it was a record!”

  “But even then you never said anything to me,” I say, annoyed. “That was really wrong of you, I would’ve had hardly any time to start job hunting if the book didn’t sell. And what, you thought enough of me to want to be colleagues, but it was okay for you to treat me like a kid by keeping me in the dark?”

  “I know, believe me, you’re absolutely right. It was wrong of me, and I was, and am, really sorry.”

  “Okay, fine, but forget about me for now, what does not telling me about the rejections have to do with you moving?”

  “Well, here I was in my late forties, still renting in an apartment. Literally a few hours after Stacey called about our fifty-first rejection, our friends Tom and Kelly called raving about the phenomenal home deals in Florida. We went online, found articles from the New York Times saying our historic area was the hottest in the country. Coincidentally, Paul had just gotten some really big, long-term clients in Florida, it was like the universe was saying, Claire! Move to Florida!”

  “Well, I don’t know what universe that might be,” I tell her, “because the Claire I know lives in a universe in which Florida’s so hot half the year you can hardly leave your house. And you despise being cooped up. And what about screenwriting? If the book didn’t sell, why wouldn’t you have just stayed in L.A. and gone back to film?”

  “What can I say? I panicked, I lost faith in myself as a writer and thought maybe it was time to make a big change. Real estate in Florida was booming, Dad had great connections with some of the biggest developers; I thought, It’ll be great! We’ll move! I’ll change careers!”

  “Mom,” I groan. “Thank God the proposal sold—you’d have been miserable. If someone cooked up every single thing you hate—small talk, all things domestic, stretching the truth—and stirred it into a job, voilà, a real estate agent! Can you picture yourself discussing flower beds and paint trim?”

  “You should have seen me in the licensing course trying to do the math—I was hopeless, even with a calculator. Can we eat now, please? I’m starving.”

  I nod, reach into our bag for the baguette with the neat little chunk chewed out of it, and hand my mom the goat’s-milk Brie and an apricot to slice up. I’m still processing all of this, because it’s the polar opposite of what I had imagined; I saw the move as a healthy, positive decision, not the insecurity-driven result of a panic attack. I guess I should have seen the fixer-upper that never got fixed as a red flag, an indication of my mom’s lack of self-care. And self-awareness. But if I can see how obviously wrong this was, surely Dad and her closest friends must have?

  “What about Dad,” I ask, “or Sarah or Karin? Didn’t they try to talk you out of it?”

  “Maybe they did, I don’t remember,” she sighs, pushing away a clump of hair the wind blew into her face. “It was such a whirlwind of house-hunting and packing and researching real estate courses. And if they did, well, you know how I can be.”

  I know very well. Once my mom gets something in her head, talking sense to her is an exercise in frustration; intelligence and energy make her extremely convincing, to herself especially.

  “And do you think that maybe, just maaaybe, you were avoiding me so you could bypass the whole what-the-hell-are-you-thinking conversation you know damn well we would have had?”

  “Maaaybe,” she says, then sheepishly smiles and offers me the bite of bread, cheese, and fruit she nicely prepared.

  I laugh as I take it from her, though I also can’t help but smile a little ruefully. To think that a woman twice my age—my mother, no less—got scared and ran away. It’s such a simple thing, feeling scared. It’s so human. I guess somewhere in me is still the childhood notion that my mom is superhuman, that nothing truly awful can happen when she’s there because she can do or fix anything. Maybe somewhere in her is that same notion. Maybe most mothers never stop wanting to be our heroes and infallible guides, maybe no matter what age their kids are, they like us to feel that the world’s safe as long as they’re with us.

  The thing ees this,” Chrystelle says, frowning. “Eet must be kept very specifically.”

  Chrystelle is politely putting in her fridge the artisanal tapenades we bought at the outdoor market and bringing out store-bought replacements. She’s still in office clothes, a sable-brown linen shift, pretty flats, and a chunky wooden necklace. Chrystelle’s style is somewhere between Milan and New York. A single signature ring or necklace and well-cut, classic clothes; she never wears makeup and her honey-colored hair is usually pulled back into a ponytail. She’s the only person I’d happily hand over my wallet to buy me a wardrobe and know I’d send nothing back.

  When I met Chrystelle ten years ago, she had long red hair and a bohemian flair. She had just met Jean-Christophe (JC), a chef at the Palais des Papes. She’d studied business and Chinese in college and was marketing wines to China.

  Now she’s happily married to JC and has a son and beautiful stepdaughter, two cats, a tranquil home, and a 9–5. JC is quintessentially French. Dark hair and olive skin, huge brown eyes that turn down at the corners, accomplished in many areas. I had no idea that he’d done the excellent nude charcoal in their bedroom. Or that the languid subject with her back to the viewer was Chrystelle.

  “JC made that for me just after we get married,” she said proudly on my last visit. “Eet made me very ’appy, this. Eet will be nice to ’ave when I don’t look like that anymore!”

  For a long time they lived in an artsy medieval village nearby until they bought this home in a hilly, verdant town across the river from Avignon. The house is typically Provençal, with a terra-cotta roof and big French doors in every room opening to the terrace, which is shaded in vines with tiny white flowers and edged with big pots of rosemary, thyme, and lemon verbena. The yard is bordered with cypress and cedars, with a pool and deck to the side.

  She’s bustling about
the kitchen now making a salad while JC grills steaks on the terrace. “They were on ice, Chrystelle,” I say of our tapenades. “They should be fine.”

  Le finger doesn’t care. “Non,” she says, annoyed. “Eet does not matter, you cannot leave eet in the sun like ’e do.” She obviously knows the merchant. “You can get very sick. That man know this. And ’e knows you do not know. I don’t like ’e do that to you.”

  Mr. Tapenade will definitely be getting a scolding come market day.

  “When I get some days off,” she says, “you weel come ’ome and I make you see my secret places where I get this sort of thing. I show you my Système D.”

  Système D is slang for a Frenchwoman’s system of where to buy what at the best prices. She pours me a glass of wine. “Once I make you see where to go, you can shop like a Frenchwoman. I take you to our friend Ed. ’E ’ave the interesting prices.”

  I love that they call bargains interesting prices. She can’t show us her pal “Ed” (a grocery chain) and her secret weapons fast enough. The market’s a three-mile walk one way, and Les Halles, the covered market in town, is charming but expensive.

  “Now, you sit ’ere and relax,” she says as she sets out a small dish of olives. The French serve very few hors d’oeuvres; it makes no sense to them to eat before dinner. She loads a tray with dishes and walks out to the terrace, framed by a beautiful sunset.

  She leans back inside to call out, “Antoine, montre aux Américaines ton numéro de danse!” winking my way at Antoine’s habit of referring to me and Mia as “les Américaines.”

  Six-year-old Antoine’s a live wire with sun-bronzed skin, big hazel eyes, and a dark blond Julius Caesar haircut. It’s been a joy watching Chrystelle with him. She’s very proud of her son—that he’s assertive, athletic, tough, in a good way, yet tender in an instant. One minute he’s yelling and horsing around on their deck with his friend, the next he’s cooing sadly over an injured insect.