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

by Claire Fontaine

  Our daughters can break our hearts a hundred different ways. One of the most memorable e-mails I received from a reader was one that contained a haunting, uncredited quote: “A daughter cuts her teeth on her mother’s bones.” That may be true, but, as Chrystelle would say, the thing of eet ees this—a mother doesn’t much care. We would give up none of it, no pain our daughters cause us, to have our bones whole again.

  The train carrying me back to Budapest hums and squeaks as it chugs along through the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and eventually Hungary. I watch the land fly by, soil from the same region of the world that my grandmother and her family are from.

  There’s a strange symbiosis between life and death, crisis and opportunity, death and rebirth. In nature, death and destruction nourish new life; one animal eats the dead flesh of another, and what’s not consumed by fauna is consumed by flora as carcasses sink into the earth. Decaying and moss-covered trunks of fallen trees are where new seedlings grow quickest.

  My family’s ashes are scattered throughout this part of the world, the same area that, metaphorically and perhaps literally, gave me new life. Sometimes I still can’t believe how callously I treated what so many people tried, and failed, to cling to. I’m not sure I’d say I was ever suicidal but I was reckless enough not to care that I was playing Russian roulette.

  Until about thirteen, I was happy and vibrant, and it’s remarkable how quickly that vivacity was leeched away and replaced with a violent self-destruction. Child abuse isn’t child abuse; it’s people abuse, because children grow up. No matter how many years pass, or how much or little you consciously remember, history like that is akin to a forgotten landmine that sends shrapnel tearing from within once triggered.

  I’ve never told my mother or grandmother this, but Bubbie actually helped me through it. My grandmother endured a hell that only genocide survivors can truly understand, and, strange as it may sound, I took comfort in her experiences. It would be wrong and disrespectful to compare our situations, because the scope was vastly different; I was a single person, she was part of a mass extermination that was far more brutal, bloody, and devastating.

  A similarity, however, is that we both experienced a very dark side of humanity unusually young. My biological father taught me that people you trusted could turn on you, that the world could be dangerous and illogical and cruel. And because I didn’t realize how many other kids had been abused, I often felt different and emotionally isolated from my friends. Knowing what happened to my grandmother made me feel less alone, and I must have seen her as a guide of sorts, because she used to show up in my dreams.

  Growing up, I had terrible nightmares of being chased and hunted, sometimes by my dad, sometimes by Nazis, other times by someone I couldn’t see or name but knew wanted to hurt me. Perhaps because in real life Bubbie successfully navigated dangerous and frightening territory, she often appeared in my dreams, pulling me behind an alley or revealing a secret hiding place just in the nick of time. Sometimes she’d wait with me until the danger passed, other times she’d appear long enough to stash me away someplace safe, and then vanish.

  There was always a subtle defiance in her eyes, and she was watchful and calm, never nervous or scared. In real life my grandmother is often worried and anxious, yet growing up I only ever saw her as a fighter as wise and brave as Minerva.

  Hát nézzenek ide, csak ötig tud számolni! Ha egyenként adnánk a szilvát akkor Amerikával is tudnánk üzletelni. Mennyi eszük van ezeknek a buziknak . . .” (Well, lookie here, she can only count to five! If we sold the plums one by one we could make business with America! How “smart” these cretins are . . .)

  If it’s not tomatoes, it’s plums. How was I to know you can’t buy five plums because he’d rather sell you half a kilo. Or it’s train tickets. When I gently pointed out to the guy who sold us Mia’s ticket that he was overcharging us double, he stood up to his full six-foot-six height and shrieked at us to leave, GO! GO!! GET OUT!!! because he was the best ticket-seller in Budapest!! I thought Mia would faint dead away.

  Although of course there are kind, helpful clerks in Budapest, there are so many who aren’t that I’ve gotten used to anything involving purchases as being hit or miss. I just think of it like opera—getting yelled at with no idea why. I’ve also gotten used to being followed in stores, because they think I’m a Gypsy. I mean, they don’t even try to hide it—no, they want me to know they’re watching me, no doubt because they think it’ll prevent me from stealing. Sometimes I mess with them and try to look shifty.

  But I’ll be damned if I’ll get yelled at while I’m stark naked. So before we get in line in the famous Gellert Baths, we study the long menu very carefully. The less you say the better. It ain’t easy. We’re contending with a menu that wishes us a pleasant relaxation to this fundamentally refreshing service of Swedish. I see the word therapeutic and assume it’ll be deep-tissue and Mia chooses refreshing massage, hoping for a light touch.

  We line up behind a bunch of tourists. It’s not looking good. Each one in the group of tall, handsome Australian fellows in front of us leaves the cashier looking more stricken than the last. When I reach the counter, I point, say two words, hold out exact change, and get blasted anyway, for no reason I can see. This time I just mutter along with her, yeah yeah yeah right sure yeah sure. I don’t even care if she understands me.

  Once in the women’s spa, it’s another world. Soft robes and white fluffy towels, hushed voices, sweet smiles, madame this madame that, follow me to massage place madame, smile smile, sweet sweet. They escort us to a big room of white subway-tiled walls from the Gilded Age and blessed silence, then they help us lay our naked selves down in separate, partitioned-off massage areas. Ahhhhhhh . . .

  Then Prince’s “1999” BLASTS out of speakers above us. Très relaxing! A huge woman walks into Mia’s area and a teeny one walks into mine. Therapeutic must mean “hothouse orchid” here, because she proceeds to do nothing more than press me lightly hither and thither like she’s testing me for doneness.

  Then comes the sound of a water hose blasting from Mia’s area, followed by loud clapping sounds, more fire-hose sounds, then wet, whacking sounds, flopping sounds, more blasts, and cupping sounds. No sounds from Mia at all, which is alarming.

  This goes on for half an hour. I’m ready to jump out of my skin and Mia must have grown fins by now. Incredibly (well, maybe not), the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Torture Me” comes on as I’m led out. Mia’s standing there, bright red, wide-eyed, swaddled in a wet white sheet, and shaking her head to say, Don’t even ask.

  Thank God the bathing pools make up for it all. Two pools under a dome of ornate Nouveau tiling and dim, twinkly light create an almost magical feel. The water is scorching in one, just pretty damn hot in the other, but after you sink in slowly, it’s heavenly.

  There’s a beautiful blue-tiled fountain against one wall, with water cascading down from the ceiling above it feeding the pool. A nude, Rubenesque young woman with long, blond hair and big, pendulous breasts hikes herself up on the edge of the fountain. She leans her head back to let the water fall onto her head and run down her body. She’s magnificent, utterly at home in her body, letting the hot water take her cares away.

  Women of all ages talk and laugh softly. All are nude, most are Hungarians. Some are obviously mothers and daughters, displaying the same figures thirty years apart. There is an ease and closeness between generations here that’s really wonderful. Mothers have never been seen as “uncool” in this part of the world. Even when I dropped Mia off in the Czech Republic ten years ago, pink-haired, pierced teens held their mother’s hand and Sunday is held sacred as family day in Eastern and Western Europe. Your role as the matriarch and emotional rock of the family endures until you die and forms what is hopefully the core of a close relationship with your adult daughter; however, being “best friends” with her is neither common nor desired. There’s a sanctity to the mother-daughter relationship that precludes it.


  It’s seen as equally inappropriate in France, according to my French friend, the photographer Nathalie.

  “If you were trying to be your daughter’s best friend, you would be seen as quite off track. Your job is to be her mother. I don’t want to know about my daughter’s dating life—she has her peers for that. Nor would I talk to her about mine. And I certainly don’t want to know about my own mum’s private life.”

  She thinks that’s part of why American kids aren’t as respectful to their parents—a line is crossed. I turn to talk about this to Mia. Her head is back, resting on the lip of the pool, her eyes closed, her limbs relaxed and floating.

  “Hey, Mia, I’ve been thinking.”

  “Thinking is good,” she mumbles without opening her eyes.

  “I wonder if the reason so many American moms and daughters strive to be best friends is because it’s a way to bridge the gap in the relationship that our culture creates when you’re eighteen and leave home. I don’t think it’s all that natural. Mothers and daughters want to feel close even when they grow up—not that moms should dictate their lives—”

  “They shouldn’t?”

  “Well, I know you want me to dictate yours.”

  “Of course.”

  “I think in the absence of the kind of relevance you once had when your kids were young, you hope friendship takes its place, fills in the gap. A way of making sure you’re wanted after you’re no longer needed.”

  “So we don’t put you out to pasture like an old horse?”

  “Exactly. Where you’d punish me for dictating your life.”

  We giggle and let our limbs float lazily in the water. Till this trip, I assumed our strongest ties would always be the iron bonds we forged through shared trauma and triumph. But the silk threads we are weaving into our relationship now, through sensual things like food, this spa, sunsets, art, are bringing us just as close as any tragedy could. It makes sense, really; our first bonds with our daughters are inextricably linked to the physical, the sensory.

  They go from our wombs to our arms, our breast, we bathe them, tickle and nuzzle and whisper to them. They throw their little arms up to be held the moment they see us, they puke on us, bite us, wipe their noses on us.

  Sharing these kinds of pleasurable sensory experiences, the “girlfriend” thing, is a big part of the charm of having a daughter. And yet, it never occurred to me how much this was missing from our relationship. I used to find it kind of frivolous. How could the very first feeling that tells us “life is a good place”—pleasure—be frivolous?

  To respond with pleasure, as an infant does when it nurses, is one of our first experiences in the world. A baby shrieks so horribly when it’s hungry because it doesn’t yet know it’ll ever eat again, it doesn’t know it won’t die if it doesn’t eat right away. Our first knowledge of the world is that pleasure is life.

  Physical pleasure is so linked to the feeling of unconditional love, our first and most basic experience of being human, that not to respect it is a kind of self-denial that is almost a violence to oneself. I never realized it before, but to allow ourselves pleasure is literally the way we continue to mother ourselves—to love ourselves unconditionally.

  Yet it’s the first thing so many of us give away, whether through lack of time, stress, or putting our family first. We give up the “guilty” pleasures; we decide self-care is an indulgence. I have heard from those close to me, for years, that I don’t take time for myself; it’s true, I rarely relax. As I am to myself, so I have been with Mia. We’ve traveled together, but we rarely indulged ourselves together or had fun just for fun’s sake. The fact that your relationship with yourself reflects in all of your relationships is never more true than in your relationship with your daughter. We play out so much of our own unconscious in our relationship with them.

  I’m so glad Mia never took on this trait. She doesn’t deny herself the things she enjoys, whether naps or ice cream or turning her phone off to read a novel. When she and her cousin Rose were eight and six, we asked them what they wanted to do when they grew up. Rose said in her somber little voice, I want to be the boss. Mia laughed and said she wanted to have a good time.

  Nothing’s changed. Rose now assists neurosurgeons and sees patients as a physician’s assistant, and while Mia works hard as an author, she sees writing as a way to do her favorite things: read, eat, and travel. She’d actually settled on her philosophy of life at five. I fed her such healthy food that one day Paul finally insisted, “She’s five years old and doesn’t know what hot fudge is. That’s pathetic!” So we took her out for a hot fudge sundae.

  We were watching her eat this huge sundae, and she had hot fudge all over her mouth. She was beyond euphoric—I mean, her eyes were just about rolling back in her head as she savored every mouthful like it was her last. Given that she’d just figured out what I’d been keeping from her all this time, she probably thought it was.

  She was just so over the top with joy that we couldn’t help asking her things like, “What part do you like best?”

  “That it’s so GOOD!!” she practically hollered like we were nuts for asking.

  Do you like the chocolate or the strawberry better?

  “Yes!”

  Better than the cherries?

  “No! Yes! What?”

  It’s like she was drunk on the stuff. Do you like the hot fudge all by itself?

  She gave a great, fed-up sigh and said loudly and sternly through a mouthful, “Lithen (spraying chocolate), you two. It’s jutht a— Wait a thecond . . .”

  She shoved in another mouthful—“Jutht a matter of, of”—swallowing and gesturing broadly like get this you idiots and then shut up—

  “It’s just a matter of GOOD!!”

  I’d say her take on life was and is as wise as any: “It’s just a matter of good.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Avignon

  Always Coming of Age

  The thing of eet ees thees,” Chrystelle says, turning to put her feet on the rungs of my chair and leaning close enough to look me in the eye. “You must be able to say I ’ave done everysing I can, I can do nussing more. And right now you cannot say that,” she adds, raising le finger and an eyebrow.

  The three of us are having lunch in a darkened Asian restaurant and Mia’s mentioned an upcoming trip she’s taking to visit her Bubbie. Chrystelle asked why I wasn’t going, too.

  “My mother won’t even talk to me on the phone,” I replied. “She’s hardly going to want to see me in person.”

  “You don’t know thees for sure. ’Ere’s what you must do,” she says with the finality and firmness of a French best friend with the answer to your troubles. The French want and expect unsolicited advice or assistance from a close friend; a friend who waits for permission to set you right or provide a solution is no friend—what, I have to ask?

  “Yes, you ’ave called ’er, but you ’ave not gone to see ’er, so she can see your face again.” She adds kindly, “Eet ees not so easy to close a door as eet ees to ’ang up a phone.”

  “I don’t think she’d have any trouble at all.”

  “Maybe eet’s true, but eef she were to die tomorrow, you will always weesh you ’ave try. You ’ave to know you do all you could or you weel ’ave no peace. So”—she raises the commanding finger again—“you weel arrange the treep with Mia and when you are there you or Mia say to your mother that you are close by een the ’otel. And then she can choose. And then you weel know in your ’eart that you do everysing possible.”

  She makes me promise to consider it. I know she’s right; I’d never forgive myself if my mother died before we ever spoke again. I know far too many daughters who live regretting they didn’t do more.

  One lovely woman I know struggled her entire life with a mother whose bitter anger and darkness shrouded the light she longed for in her company. She shared with me:

  I never understood how she had so little love to share with her children. It was only after her
death that I truly understood the darkness she felt in my company.

  I was responsible for my mother’s effects after her death and among them were her writings. I came across one paragraph in a journal I almost think she wanted me to see. In it she talked about not liking me because every time she saw me I reminded her of the man she married and no longer loved. That was a moment of absolute clarity for me. I also saw that she was bitter about the loss of her youth and the choices she made in her younger years.

  I understood for the first time that a mother can feel competitive with a daughter and resent her youth and career. I realized that she resented the fact that we were free from the choices that defined her life, and that we could choose to be happy. I was relieved to find out that my suspicions about my mother waging a battle both darker and bigger than me was really nothing I could do anything about, except forgive her for it.

  I wish I could talk to my mother again and let her know that in spite of it all, I loved her. That in spite of her inability to love her own children, we loved her dearly. She was the smartest, funniest, most beautiful woman in the world to me and all I ever wanted was for her to be happy.

  The day I heard she died, I hadn’t seen her for a long time. When I drove down her driveway I hoped I would wake from this terrible dream, but I saw the police cars and I knew it was true: she died before we had a chance to speak again.

  I asked the police to let me see my mother, alone, and there she was, crouched in her bathroom with one hand up, almost in retaliation. I sat in front of my dead mother and asked her to hear me.

  I told her I loved her and that I wished she had loved me back. I told her I was sorry we hadn’t spoken in so long and that I stayed away because the story she had created was wrong. I asked her to let me know that she finally understood what the real truth was. It was the first time I could actually talk in her company and perhaps one of the only times she ever heard me.