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

by Claire Fontaine

  The longer we’re here, the more obvious it is that two women in search of themselves and each other could not be in a better place to do it. For Avignon is a woman if ever a city was. More than that, a Frenchwoman, as much a coquette as any that beguiled a king. For, like a true coquette, she reveals herself only slowly—you must work to get to know her. But she rewards your efforts; her streets reveal hidden gems.

  I’ve been happy to trail behind The Navigator all summer, letting my gaze dance from one visual treat to another: above a luggage shop sits an ancient stone carving of a cow’s head mounted on cleavers, axe, and bellows; farther down a sheep’s head and a giant stone fish, each creature surrounded by the various tools of their demise, all evidence of the sixteenth-century guilds once housed here; in a dim breezeway beneath them is a sad little plaque commemorating the Jews in this area who also met their demise, during World War II. Three eras in one eyeful.

  At knee level, a painted Mickey Mouse peers above an architectural detail. Below our feet, small stenciled messages on the stone pavers: FAITES COMME CHEZ TOI (Make yourself at home), ET SI DEMAIN RIEN? (What if tomorrow nothing?). Scrawled on the wall in beautiful cursive writing: LA CULTURE C’EST LA MORT DE LA SUBVERSION (Culture is the death of subversion—apropos in one of the world’s capitals of culture); another bit of graffiti adapts a faded Art Deco–era ad forbidding the parking of airplanes. And we must have passed these red words on a wall dozens of times before I noticed them:

  BE HAPPY*

  *Free game, no purchase necessary

  Even the massive buildings themselves hide layers of history easily missed when passing. There’s a charming little park at the end of our block behind an amusing costume ball of a complex that covers several blocks. We were here weeks before I noticed it was one structure, the semi-ruins of a huge fourteenth-century Benedictine monastery, with a different era’s façade on each block. The front sits on the grand Rue de La République, which Mr. Bonaparte III’s designer obscured with a smooth-stoned nineteenth-century affair. I dunno, maybe just to show it who was boss, which was just, you know, so Napoleonic.

  At certain angles it looks like the face of a young girl pasted onto Aunt Hilda’s ancient pockmarked mug. As if you wouldn’t notice those gigantic crumbling buttresses poking out all over her medieval hind-end in the park, like Madame Pompadour’s wooden panniers when she lifted her skirts for the king. And just pay nooo attention to that tall pointy hat sticking up with all those gothicky pinnacles and ribs.

  In 1700, an architect slapped a snooty neoclassical façade on the far end of the monastery’s side. There was no attempt at integration—seen from the side, it just sits there like a rococo Venetian mask.

  Avignon constantly surprises with such things-behind-things, little mysteries, and always the suggestion of more. For me it is the light that most enchants. As the afternoon sun lowers, it’s hard to look at anything other than the air here. The intense Provence sunlight bounces off this sea of stone from a thousand angles, rendering it into a kaleidoscope of dove, mushroom, beige, chalk, and honey that gives the very air itself substance, a creamy velvet density that makes your lids want to lower. It feels like you’re walking through a laundry line of an Edwardian lady’s filmy lingerie.

  Only when you find yourself in the open plazas or on our bluff does the sunlight look like her usual golden self again, deepening as she leaves for the day, giving us sunsets on our bluff that are as luscious and rosy as a ripe fig, one more feminine visual that adds a sweetness to our life here. And, of course, the graceful madonnas always above our heads.

  Avignon’s feeling of feminine mystery and invitation is even reflected in the women’s style here. They take layering to another level, often wearing a few days at a time: an apron-type dress over a longer dress over loose linen pants, or a slip dress over another dress over jeans, a sexy bra strap peeking out. Top all that with a long, wispy cardigan and a flowing scarf and voilà, le style Avignon. The near-constant wind seems to conspire in the whole effect, blowing aside one gossamer layer to reveal another.

  It would appear unstudied, but everything about a Frenchwoman’s appearance is studied; girls here are taught style with their ABCs. What they call déshabillér, the sexy, artfully disheveled look Frenchmen love, can take hours to achieve. Not unlike the city herself, an enchanting déshabillér that’s taken centuries to achieve.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Budapest

  Dark Shadows

  I would always know when it was coming on. I’d come home from school and the shades would all be drawn and the Platters would be singing,” my friend Melissa shared. “She’d play that album over and over. I knew not to disturb her.”

  That’s how my girlfriend Melissa knew her mother had sunk into one of the depressions that so frightened her as a child. She was afraid to say anything, afraid she may be the reason for it. Until Melissa shared this with me, it never occurred to me that Mia suspected my depression, or if she did, how it affected her. She never even told me how much it used to frighten her until I wrote about it while we worked together on Come Back. Our daughters learn young to tiptoe around our darkness.

  Mia and I are in Budapest, where we’ve come for a couple of weeks both so I can show Mia where my mother lived and was in hiding, and to escape the increasing crowds of the festival. As you travel east in Europe, the forests literally grow darker and denser and the rational, linear lines of Western architecture swell and darken into mercurial bloodred onion domes. Even the colors of the buildings are moody here, with their saddened pinks, jaded greens, and yellows that purr rather than sing. There’s a melancholy to Central Europe that I settle into like a warm bath.

  I wish that I’d been more honest with Mia about my depression when she was young, been able to tell her that Mommy was going through a sad time that had nothing to do with her, that it would pass. Not just to ease her fears or to model emotional honesty for her, though those are significant reasons, but so that she might learn to feel okay with, and learn from, her own shadows, to whatever degree they may show up. To teach her to acknowledge and integrate negative emotions, not fear or deny them.

  One of my biggest lessons as a mother has been that it’s not what we do or say that has lasting impact on our children. It’s our very essence. We are their instruction manual on how to be a human being. And who we are stems from our core beliefs about ourselves, programmed into us from our own childhood. Our kids, especially our daughters, internalize our beliefs about ourselves and about life from the moment they arrive, the limiting beliefs most of all, because they’re unconscious.

  My very way of being taught her that to be a person is to be fragile; the programming was that denial and suppression are what we do with negative emotions. No wonder she ran away when her shadows loomed large at fifteen—in a very real sense she’d watched me do it long before that.

  Apart from that, Mia seems to have broken the mold. She occasionally gets anxious, a trait she shares with my mother, but aside from those few years as a teen, there’s no darkness to her. She’s always been a bright spirit, with a vibrant, loving quality that everyone responds to and that makes her a joy to be around.

  As for my own shadows, though much has been written about depression and children of the Holocaust, I’m not sure mine has its roots there, or not entirely. While I suspect a genetic component, on both sides of my family, I believe part of it is rooted in geography and ancestry. Hungary, for example, has long had one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Sabrina, a young Hungarian-American acquaintance who was raised in both countries, reflected on this with me recently, sharing how the temperament is echoed even in their sayings. “Don’t worry,” you tell someone who’s just had some really bad luck, “tomorrow it’ll be worse.”

  France enlivens me, but this part of the world stills me, it fits the darker parts I have learned to value. I liked Dark Shadows as much as Gilligan’s Island and that’s never going to change. I no longer fear the sadness I s
ometimes fall prey to, or feel it needs to be fixed. I like being able to fish around at the bottom of my dark pond for a while, scan for items of interest.

  And one thing is certain: for better or worse, depression is authentic, true and honest to the bone. I have to wonder sometimes if it’s my body’s way of shoving my ego and illusions out of the way to let me empty the reservoir of emotion that’s dammed up.

  The Eastern European landscape is dark and dramatic and intense and beautiful, and it reminds me of my mother. Not of my mother now, but of a side of her that I still see from time to time. For the most part, my mom is bright and lively and on some days she’s so upbeat and optimistic I want to smack her. But she also has a very dark side and I can see from her relaxed energy and tone that she feels very much in her element here.

  When I was eight and nine, my mother went through a terrible depression. It was only when we were working together years later that she honestly talked to me about it. She described waking up with a pillow wet with tears from crying in her sleep, crying all day long while I was away at school, and feeling peaceful only when deciding how to best kill herself. I have to wonder if she’d have succeeded if Paul hadn’t worked at home so she wasn’t alone. She told me how she forced a happy face on for me when I came home because she didn’t want me to see her in pain—she thought it would frighten me.

  I finally told her that I always knew, and that her silence about it was worse; I assumed whatever was going on was too terrible to even speak of. The intensity of her sadness terrified me, living in our home like a silent sibling, consuming as much of her time and energy as I did. I remember coming home from school those years and hearing Michael Nyman’s sound track to the film The Piano. It’s beautiful music, but it’s very dark, and even after it was turned off, the chords and melodies lingered in our home like smoke. I didn’t understand the term “clinical depression” then, but I knew my mother saw the world through a dark veil, and I didn’t know what I could do to push it aside.

  She eventually got help and normal life resumed, but childhood has a way of magnifying events in your mind’s eye and I’ve always been very sensitive to any sign of sadness in her. I remember reading what my mother had written: “I knew a hole has opened up in the terrain. And that if I wasn’t careful, I could fall in.” She didn’t realize that I knew that hole was there, too. And that I was afraid that if she fell in I’d be pulled down with her.

  It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college that I finally saw The Piano. Stumbling across it in my campus library felt like finding an invitation into my mother’s world, to that missing piece of the puzzle.

  I took the film back to my dorm room, turned off my phone, and watched it. Afterward I sat motionless and silent for a long time. In my mind’s eye was an aerial view of our old apartment, a pale woman curled in the fetal position on a yellow bedspread, a listless expression on a tearstained face. I felt the heavy tiredness, the indifferent acceptance of death, the dread of having to hide what she was feeling from the ones she loved. It was the first time I fully saw my mother.

  When we are children, seeing our mothers upset is as frightening as it is confusing. When we become adults, while we may understand what’s going on, it’s no less disturbing. I think back to a few weeks ago, when my mom sat down in the middle of an alley and started crying about lost children and other big regrets of hers. I’ve very rarely seen her that raw and unraveled, and when the person who’s always been your rock drifts out to sea, life suddenly feels unstable and uncertain.

  Like a lot of daughters, I imagine, I have a complex relationship to my mom’s emotional state, particularly to her level of happiness. On the plane here I read A Woman’s Story, by French writer Annie Ernaux, about her relationship with her mother, and I was struck when she wrote: “I was both certain of her love for me and aware of one blatant injustice: she spent all day selling milk and potatoes so that I could sit in a lecture hall and learn about Plato.”

  That sentence helped me see that it’s hard for me to separate how much my mother loves me from how much she’s sacrificed for me. Now, when I picture my mom lying listless and depressed on her bed, I can’t help but think about the bed itself. At that point we were living in a one-bedroom apartment. My mom wanted me to have the bedroom, and she and Paul turned the living room into their bedroom. The sacrifices my parents made for me, how much of themselves, both emotionally and financially, they invested in me. It makes me feel like they deserve a return on their investment, that they know all those sacrifices weren’t in vain.

  I think kids often feel that their parents’ happiness hinges on their own, and that they judge themselves based on how you’re doing. Our failings are their failings, our successes their triumphs. Knowing that someone determines whether they were a success or failure as a human being based on how you turned out can be really stressful.

  My mom and I have talked to hundreds of women about their moms in the last few years and one thing we all seem to have in common, no matter what age we are, is a genuine and unselfish desire to see our moms happy. I have to wonder, though, if some of our wanting them to be happy is needing to see them happy, for selfish reasons—the happier and more fulfilled our mothers are in their own lives, the less likely they are to be impacted by—or scrutinize—ours.

  Menjen már onnan, illetlen külföldi! Ha még egyet megfogdos, lecsapom a mocskos kezét! Honnan jön, Amerikából? Miért nyomogatja meg egyenként mindegyiket! Állatok ezek!”

  (Get away from there, you rude foreigner! If she touches one more, I’ll slap her filthy hands! Where did she come from, America? Why is she pushing each one individually! Animals, they are!)

  It’s always produce.

  First in Provence, where I was publicly scolded for picking out my own tomatoes (the merchant picks your produce for you), and now a six-foot-tall peasant woman in Ma Clampett getup wants to smack me upside the head for touching her enormous, gorgeous, homegrown tomatoes. I was just feeling, very gently, for ripeness when she blew a gasketbekek.

  She and her amazing tomatoes aren’t the only giants in Nagycsarnok, the soaring, Eiffel-style, glass-and-metal-covered market in Budapest. Everything here is bigger. The people, the produce, the volume. There are squash bigger than my thighs, cherries the size of apricots, apricots the size of apples, and poppy-seed strudel as big and heavy as shot puts. All of it so delicious, we’re going to be bigger by the time we leave.

  Architecturally, Budapest is an elegant city largely patterned after Paris, but where France is neoclassically delicate, Hungary is voluptuous; a sort of baroqueified Eiffel, by way of the Ottoman, the Byzantine, and an embarrassment of fabulous Art Nouveau. The occasional blocky Soviet hulk actually serves to throw the beauty of everything else into sharper relief.

  A highlight of our trip thus far is the Hungarian National Museum. Because the artifacts and artwork are displayed not by type (paintings, sculpture, costume) but chronologically, Mia and I have just moved era by era from the dawn of the Magyar culture to the current day.

  My favorite space is on the grounds of the museum, in a serene, shady patch of the gardens. Actually, it’s my favorite place in the entire city, because it’s where my mother used to while away her free hours as a young teen, before the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944.

  While Mia wanders about shooting photos, I’m sitting on the same wood-and–wrought-iron bench my mom sat on as she knitted the striped sweater she wears in a beautiful photo of her at sixteen. She’s smiling and happy, with her thick, wavy blond hair styled into the big swoop of bangs popularized by Betty Grable. It makes me smile to think of my mom as a typical teen, a girl who loved movies, singing along with the Andrews Sisters and mooning over Gary Cooper (who, of course, spoke fluent Hungarian; movies have always been dubbed here).

  The feeling of sitting exactly where she sat before the bombs fell, where she laughed with friends and clacked needles, is so big in me that I hardly know what to do with it. Sadness, delight, fascination
, but mostly longing, a deep, knotted ache. For my mother.

  The sad or clouded look I was anticipating on my mom’s face is notably absent when I approach her. If anything, she’s in a pleasant mood, reaching for my hand as I sit on the bench beside her.

  “Being here isn’t strange for you?” I ask. “Or hard?”

  “It’s comforting,” she answers softly. “In a way, it’s the closest I’ve been to my mom in three years. I wish I’d brought some yarn with me; it’d be nice to sit and knit here, or teach you to.”

  “I know how to knit. Or maybe it’s crochet . . . what’s the one where you only use one needle?”

  “Crocheting—but since when do you crochet?”

  “I don’t, but I know how—a girl from the psych ward taught me [I had a two week stint there during my wayward years]. They didn’t allow knitting, but I don’t exactly have warm and fuzzy associations with either one!”

  We both start laughing and my mom shakes her head. “Yeah, I don’t suppose they’d give you two pointy objects there.”

  “No. Good grief, that place was abysmal. To this day if I hear that Paula Cole song about cowboys I want to run screaming—it played on the radio all the time then. And remember how beige everything was?”

  “I more remember that you were a total snot to me and Paul, and couldn’t fathom why it wasn’t okay for you to live on the streets with Cloud,” she says, rolling her eyes.

  “Yeah, that wasn’t my finest hour.”

  “Are you looking forward to visiting Morava?” my mom asks after a moment’s pause.

  After our conversation at the Sénanque Abbey, my mom and I talked about my going back to see Morava, which is a few hours from Budapest, as a way of gaining further closure.

  “I am. I’m a little nervous, maybe even sad, but it’s more that excited-nervous feeling, you know?”