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

by Claire Fontaine

  None of us do. Only now do I think about how lonely her life must have been for twenty-five years. Only in the last year have I gone over the whole of my mother’s life in my mind, over and over again. It has taken me a lifetime to finally, fully see my mother. Not as I wanted her to be, but as she was. And she was pretty amazing.

  I want desperately to say all these things to my mother, to apologize for unintentionally, and occasionally intentionally, hurting her when I was younger, for not really acknowledging or appreciating her when she was older. I want to tell her how sorry I am for not slowing down to walk at her turtle’s pace the last time I was with her. I’d crawl at a snail’s pace to walk beside her now.

  Walking through the empty hallways of Morava, my old boot-camp school, feels like wandering through the watery remains of a sunken ship; the rooms and furnishings are just as they were but it’s eerily silent and still, all signs of life long having floated away. I suppose the life left Morava ten years ago, when sixty American teens packed their bags to return to the States.

  After I opened up to my mom in Sénanque about still feeling badly about my teenage years, she suggested that while we’re in Budapest I take a side trip to visit Morava. I arrived in Brno, the city on whose outskirts Morava sits, earlier this morning and was met by Peter, an old staff member who hadn’t changed one iota; the same bold blue eyes, cropped blond hair, and boyishly handsome face. We toured the city that morning, which I’d never actually seen despite having lived there for six months (you had to reach a certain level to go off-grounds, and considering I was scraping leaded paint from the walls to snort it for the buzz, I didn’t exactly qualify). Brno is an ancient bustling city, and it was nice meandering with Peter through its charming historic center, updating each other about the whereabouts, careers, and family lives of the students and staff we’ve kept in touch with.

  It’s late afternoon now and as Peter drives toward Morava I’m surprised by the beautiful homes and gardens interspersed with small farm plots and big black sheep. I have zero recollection of any of this. The last time I drove by I was furious, beginning to withdraw from drugs, and trying to memorize the street signs so I could run away. It’s strange driving past and seeing it as any tourist would: beautiful.

  Morava Academy, boot-camp school for troubled teens, is now Hotel Jelenice, a pension whose sole current occupant is Francesca, the raven-haired Gypsy cook who’s been there forever. She bundles me in a great big hug, kissing me on both cheeks, while Peter translates that ten or so former students have visited Morava over the years, and how much she loves seeing us.

  She takes us inside, talking to Peter and smiling at me while she leads us through the dining room, to the room we used as a classroom, to the space where we exercised. As she does, it’s like the rooms re-create themselves, textbooks pop back up on shelves, seats rearrange themselves into schoolgirl rows. The air feels heavy, almost like it still carries the suppressed shouts and laughs of teenage girls not permitted to speak.

  It’s well past dark by now, and Peter and Francesca both have to get home to their families, but they agree to meet me in the lobby tomorrow morning. I’m the only person in the entire hotel, something that would normally unnerve me, but this used to be my home and I’m actually glad for the solitude. It’s easier to imagine how it once was.

  I start at the bar near the entrance, sitting on the same stool where I had my intake done, glowering at my mom while a staff member took me away to go over items I was and wasn’t allowed to keep from my suitcase. Two liquor plaques stand where hand-decorated motivational quotes used to be, but other than that it looks exactly the same. Earlier, Francesca beckoned for me to walk behind the bar and opened the cupboard where our medications were stored (the bar used to serve as the nurse’s station). Still on the shelves’ sides are pieces of tape with students’ names written on them; she never had the heart to take them down.

  I open the cupboard now and take a photo; I know the other girls I’ve stayed in touch with will get a kick out of seeing their names still taped up. I walk down the hallway toward the bedrooms, remembering standing in perfect lines and doing head counts before leaving the area, remembering the smiles, nudges, scowls—there was a language spoken even in the silence.

  In my room, it’s the details that bring it all back, the brick-colored tiles in the shower and bathroom floor, the mottled brown-and-cream fuzzy fabric, the lace curtains. I get down on my hands and knees to remember picking up lint without a vacuum, which we were only allowed to use on Sundays. Getting ready in the bathroom and slipping under the covers still feels like a familiar routine even after all these years.

  I remember what my mom said back in Bulgaria, about people tending to be motivated by going toward pleasure or away from pain. It’s true, I’m very much a go-to person—I’m inspired to act when I think about the future, about what things I want to do or have, what places I want to see. I have never liked looking back and I’ve always had trouble with endings. Even as a kid, I’d rarely finish books or movies that seemed sentimental to me, like A River Runs Through It or Where the Red Fern Grows, for the same reason it’s easier to slip out the door than say a tearful good-bye.

  But sitting here on my old bed I’m realizing how much is lost by not doing that. Looking forward carries with it a sense of urgency and movement that almost creates an adrenaline rush, but remembrance has a certain warmth; I never realized how cozy nostalgia can be. Yes, there’s a tinge of sadness, but it’s not the kind of sadness associated with pain or suffering. It’s a wonderful kind of sadness that I have no desire to avoid or escape.

  Lying here in my old room, the same place where I first learned to be silent and find myself, I feel as though I’m watching a movie called Morava through to the end. Quiet exits may be easier, but some moments in life are best experienced in full.

  There’s a chill in the air when I wake and I nestle into the covers, looking at the pale gray shadows cast on the wall by morning light filtering through lace curtains. I trace my finger along the patterns, enjoying the minute-long vignettes of my old life here that are coming to mind.

  I hear the faint clanking of pots and pans, and after a quick shower, I walk into the dining room and I laugh out loud. Whether it’s for my benefit or because it has and will always be the usual fare, the breakfast laid out by a smiling Francesca hasn’t changed. Thin slices of salami, triangular wedges of La Vache Qui Rit cheese, and six-inch-long, cylindrical bread rolls dubbed by incarcerated teenagers das penis brot.

  How history repeats itself in families. In Mia’s case it skipped a generation. In many ways she’s more like my mom than I am. Both have the same blue-gray eyes and an impulsive nature that had them running away and landing themselves at fifteen in Brno and Budapest, cities four hours apart. Both are extremely smart and love to read, but neither cared much for school the way I did.

  Mia’s always understood my mom in a way my sisters and I haven’t. My mom used to stay in Mia’s room whenever she visited, and the two of them could talk and play cards for hours. My mother talking to anyone for hours is a rarity, but she’s happy and relaxed around Mia.

  During one visit when Mia was seven, as we were about to head out for a Saturday outing, my mom announced that we couldn’t leave till Mia made her bed. Mia took my mom’s hand and patted it gently, saying sweetly, “It’s okay if I don’t make the bed today, Bubbie. Really, it is. It can stay like that all day and everything is going to be juuuuust fine.” Completely disarmed and charmed the Bubster. Nothing’s changed between them.

  Mia has that talent with everyone. She’s always been wise beyond her years about people; she sees right through to who you are and speaks to that person, intuiting almost immediately the right thing to say or do. I am sometimes concerned that she puts others before herself more than is good for her. Mia rarely asks for anything for herself, never has, materially or otherwise; she can be content in almost any situation. It can be a healthy attitude and approach to life. />
  It can also be a way to settle for less, from others and from yourself. I’ve often expressed this to her, and she listens, but I know it doesn’t have much impact; she’s always been one to insist on finding out things on her own, often the hard way. I’ll have to simply trust that she’ll create whatever life experiences she needs to get whatever lessons she needs to grow.

  I’m excited that she’s gone back to Morava; it was such an important part of her life. And I’m glad she went alone; the experience was entirely hers then and should be now. And what an experience. We’ve heard from countless others who’ve graduated from schools like hers to thank us for writing about something that’s impossible to explain or understand unless you’ve lived it.

  What emotional fortitude it must have taken, even in her then-drugged-up state, to be locked up across the planet, with strangers, in near silence, forced to look at herself in a way very few adults ever do. It wasn’t until I spent three weeks with the kids at the school she was transferred to in Montana that I had even an inkling of what it must have been like; doing everything but school and therapy in silence (on the lower levels), walking in lines to go anywhere, the complete and utter lack of freedom, month after month (it took quite a while to earn privileges).

  I remember walking in line with a group on a gorgeous winter day with the snow falling lightly, surrounded by pines and mountains. It was the kind of day that makes kids want to throw snowballs and cavort in the snow. And they couldn’t, at least not spontaneously. And I knew it was like this every day, all day. It felt like an actual weight on me, a lead suit. Yes, they did fun things, they earned trips home, but how she got through twenty months there, I’ll never know. Neither Mia nor I regret my sending her, but I’ve always been aware of the price she paid, of the downsides.

  I hope she’s enjoying Brno with Peter; it’s not as big or spiffed up as Prague but equally beautiful. I don’t know how I survived the time I spent there after leaving her at the school. I’d stayed a week thinking I’d be able to visit her, only to learn they wouldn’t allow it; too many kids manipulate and guilt their parents into taking them home, where they’d get into even worse trouble. I wandered around bereft and lost, in a sleep- and food-deprived haze, both on foot and, miraculously, in a rental car, which always seemed to elicit terrible yelling in other drivers. On my last day I learned that what I thought were stop signs were NO STOPPING HERE signs on what I thought was a two-lane road but was really a freeway. And those friendly police officers standing on the shoulder waving at me every time I passed weren’t being friendly—that’s how they tell you to pull over to be ticketed. I was a complete mess for a long time, in every way. I ultimately came out a better mother and human being, but initially the terrible sorrow, anger, fear, and self-recrimination just about did me in.

  I’m strolling along the Danube, which is not particularly beautiful today, just a wide, brown, muddy river. I’m at roughly the same spot where my mother used to see Jews and intellectuals shot and dumped in the river during the war. “You had to just keep walking along. You couldn’t show any fear—the Nazis could smell fear.”

  Most of what she’s shared about Budapest over the years has been positive, however. How sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and lively it was, how beautiful the architecture and museums were.

  I step onto the Liberty Bridge to walk to Margaret Island, another place she loved. The Liberty is, in my opinion, the most beautiful of Budapest’s famous seven bridges (all of which were blown up by the retreating Germans in World War II, since restored)—a grand and graceful Art Nouveau chain bridge, painted a pale jade, with huge bronze falcons atop ornate pinnacles.

  Just as it must for my mother, this part of the world holds both beauty and suffering for me. For her, the happiness of her youth in a city she loved and the horror of war. For me, there is the shadow of that history, and coming here to leave behind my only child when I couldn’t save her myself. Thinking of this as I leave the bridge to wander up the stairs to the hilltop on Margaret Island, I’m struck by something so obvious I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.

  When I first read of Vigee Le Brun’s history I was captivated, by the woman herself and by her talent. I read her memoir, all the biographies on her, visited any museum I could that exhibited her work. It only now strikes me that she resonated with me for another reason. As drastically different as our lives are, they’re almost exactly alike in one significant way—as mothers. Both of us devoted our lives to our only children, who were both daughters who chose to self-destruct before our eyes, both in extreme ways; and we both left our girls in this part of the world when we could do no more, with our hearts completely shattered.

  After fleeing the revolution, Le Brun and Julie lived all over Europe, and Le Brun wasted no expense to develop her daughter’s talents. Both because she wanted Julie to know the pleasure of her own accomplishments—something Le Brun deeply understood—and because she herself was proof that a poor match could lead to financial and social ruin. But Le Brun was truly one in a million in her talent and ability to generate great wealth of her own in an era when women of her class depended upon men or inheritance to survive.

  Though Julie did show literary inclination, which Le Brun encouraged, she lacked her mother’s talent and ambition. Given that so did 99 percent of the female population in the eighteenth century, Le Brun was probably unfair, and certainly unrealistic, in her disappointment. I have to think that Julie must have felt that keenly, because she began to rebel against her mother. At twenty, she took up with a partying, reputation-ruining crowd that included Gaétan Nigris; secretary to a Russian nobleman, Nigris was a handsome aesthete with no money, no title, and little ambition.

  Le Brun was understandably distressed; herself aside, in that era a reputation and prospects were all a woman had. She also saw what her love-struck daughter was blind to: he was arrogant, petty, and selfish. But, because reverse psychology is so hard for a mother, she did what so many mothers do, and God knows I certainly did—protest and forbid. And the more she denounced, the more Julie defied, soon becoming engaged to Nigris.

  One has to wonder if this was Julie’s power play, her way of stepping out of Le Brun’s shadow, of gaining freedom from her. Le Brun begged and wept, but Julie held her ground. Le Brun attended (and paid for) the wedding, then waited for the train wreck.

  I have to admit, I know the anguish and anger she felt. It’s the kind of fury only a mother helpless against her own child’s self-destruction can understand, even if she is partially to blame for it, perhaps especially so. Le Brun’s spirit was so badly broken she fell into a profound depression:

  The whole charm of my life seemed to be irretrievably destroyed. I even felt no joy in loving my daughter, though God knows how much I still did love her, in spite of all her wrongdoing. Only mothers will fully understand me.

  During a visit to her daughter soon after the marriage, Le Brun could see that Julie was already becoming disaffected with Nigris. She also saw Julie wouldn’t leave him, so she bit her tongue and soon left Russia. A few years later, Nigris dumped Julie after a move to Paris, leaving her in great debt. Le Brun continually rescued Julie financially, but despite repeated invitations, and the fact that they saw each other almost daily, Julie refused to live with her mother, preferring an increasingly wanton life with a very low crowd (to use the parlance of the day). How well I know how Le Brun felt; I wanted to pull my hair out and scream to the heavens when Mia ran away to live in a truck with druggies; it was beyond comprehension to me then. I can still feel the frustration behind Le Brun’s words:

  Whether it is through my fault or not, her power over my mind was great, and I had none over hers; it is therefore understandable that she so often made me shed bitter tears.

  Sadly, Julie died of pneumonia at forty-two, with her mother at her side.

  Le Brun’s life parallels those of so many modern mothers, it’s uncanny: working, successful, single mom, overparenting—and overshadowing�
��her daughter. But while it would be easy to see Julie’s behavior as simply rebelling against a powerful mother, and it may well have been true, that is seeing her through modern eyes. It can’t have been the only reason. For a young woman to be a party animal now is hardly unusual; it’s practically a rite of passage at college. Back then, however, there were only two sides of the tracks—and once you were on the wrong side, you could never go back. You didn’t go on Oprah with your tale of triumph; you didn’t get a second chance at a good life. Your teeth rotted, you had no heat, you got third-world diseases, you almost never bathed, you went hungry, you were scorned, seen as a disgrace. Life at court wasn’t just about eating bonbons; it gave a woman literal, physical safety and health. What Julie did was extreme in a way we can’t even imagine.

  I have to wonder if her lifelong impulsiveness and wild behavior were also biologically driven; it certainly is typical behavior for a young person with depression or bipolar disorder. Or perhaps she suffered some kind of trauma or abuse as a child; it was no less common then than now, one in three girls, and, again, her behavior is so typical it’s almost textbook. How sad that we have no record from Julie, no journal or diary to understand her unhappy, too-short life.

  I cannot even imagine the pain of mothers whose daughters don’t recover the way Mia did, mothers whose children continue to self-destruct into adulthood. This is where I struggle with the advice given mothers of addicts, as does my friend Maureen, who’s written extensively and eloquently about her struggle with her adult son’s debilitating, decades-long drug addiction. Mothers are told not to give their adult children money or assistance when they’re in the gutter, to let them hit rock bottom. As if hitting rock bottom always does the trick. Often we’re the only thing standing between life and the rock bottom a mother fears most: death. It’s true the addict needs to make the choice to change. I think it’s our job as mothers to keep them alive till they do, no matter how old they get. We’re not their drug counselor, or probation officer, or shrink. Le Brun did what I and most other moms I know would do: use our instincts, our hearts, our resources, everything we’ve got, to save our children.