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

by Claire Fontaine

  I’ve also realized that there isn’t ever going to be a “post-motherhood” me. Being a mother will always be central to who I am—and central to my relationship with Mia. As close as we may feel as friends, I will always have a more critical eye, even if I don’t voice it. While respecting her as an independent woman is essential, I will no doubt also sometimes say things to her only a mother can say and get away with. And because I am her mother, I do expect a degree of respect and deference from her that I don’t from anyone else. And she’ll get things from me she won’t get from another human being, ever, because a mother’s love is unique—among all of our relationships it’s our most primal, unconditional, and eternal.

  I also understand more clearly that being a daughter is central to who I am. Among myriad things I’ve learned from Mia this summer, one of the most important is how to be a good daughter. Mia’s taught me that the same kind of unconditional love I give her, I also get from her. I could not possibly have the beautiful relationship I do with Mia if she wasn’t as accepting and nonjudgmental as she is. I have not been the same way with my mother, I judge her, I have expectations, I want her to be the way I want, rather than love and accept her just the way she is. I owe my mother the same degree of respect and deference I expect from Mia for no other reason than because she is my mother.

  So today I’ve marched myself to the only public phone nearby that’s working this week. Yes, that one, Frelon d’Asie! After making sure there are no hornets the size of sparrows, I punch in the Telecarte’s requisite sixty-seven numbers and wait, very anxiously.

  “Hello?” she says in the mildly surprised way she always does when answering the phone.

  “Mom?” I say nervously.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s die Grösse,” I say, using the Yiddish name she called me when I was little and she didn’t want me to understand what she was saying (I was die Grösse, the big one; my younger sisters were die Mittleste and die Kleine, the middle one and the little one).

  “Oh,” she says blandly.

  A painful pause.

  “I wanted to tell you I love you,” I add quickly before she hangs up on me.

  “Well, I don’t want to talk to you,” she says before hanging up.

  Yes! This is promising! Because she just did talk to me, for the first time in ages. Till now she just hung up without speaking.

  It’s a start.

  I usually learn things the hard way (being court-ordered into a boot-camp school comes to mind) and, if I’m honest, it’s something I’ve taken pride in. Learning from other people seemed unadventurous, cowardly even. If I want your advice, I’ll ask for it! It’s my life, and mine to make a mess of! I’ve made all sorts of immature proclamations over the years, mostly when I know I’m making a mistake but want to avoid facing the facts (or the repercussions).

  Granted, when lessons come with a price they do tend to stick, but one thing this trip has taught me about myself is that there are prices I’m not willing to pay. I never want to feel how my mom undoubtedly felt that day when she broke down and cried in the alley about all the years she feels she wasted. And, as she pointed out, I’m creating my “should haves” right now.

  It’s hard to imagine truly lost opportunities at my age, because it seems we have tons of time to regain them. But dreams do die and ships do sail, and sometimes calling them back only sinks you. Part of me had been waiting for adulthood to click into place, for me to get “it” (whatever that elusive “it” is) before turning my attention to the bigger questions. But the only thing clicking is the days going by. Adulthood isn’t something that just gels, as I had always told myself. Things don’t just fall into place, they just fall, and most people then learn to live with an arbitrary arrangement.

  Last week, when my mom and I were finishing the vision maps we started a month ago, it felt very different. I thought seriously about my professional and financial future, because I want to be conscious of, and intentional about, what I’m doing or not doing. I don’t have concrete answers yet. I have no idea how I’m going to combine, or make a living from, everything I’ve cut out this time around—research libraries, airplanes headed overseas, kathe kids, writing desks, podiums and microphones, personal role models like Jane Goodall or Christiane Amanpour—but they’re on my radar now. And if images are as powerful as people say they are, maybe looking at this every day will somehow help me knit them into a career and a life.

  It’s rare to have someone totally, messily, open themselves up to you—especially when that person is the one person that you’ve looked up to every day of your life. I haven’t told my mom how powerful that day was for me, nor do I want to. Talk is cheap. I’d rather show her the impact she’s had by going home and taking steps toward creating a life I love.

  I don’t know how we missed this area!” I marvel.

  We’re on our last meandering walk together in Avignon. We’ve just stumbled upon a serene, enchanting little corner inside the walls we’ve never been to, a few residential streets of stately old town houses and lush foliage.

  “Oh, Mom.” Mia rolls her eyes. “There isn’t a street here we haven’t been on a dozen times.”

  “Don’t give me that look. First, listen—” I tell her.

  “To what?”

  “Nothing, that’s the point. It’s dead quiet. Avignon isn’t quiet any time of day or night. We’ve never been here.”

  As soon as we clear the overhanging leaves of a thick hedge, a huge ghost of a weathered, neoclassical church dominates the street, made of stone that’s so pale it’s almost white, like clouds with no honey.

  “Oh, wow, even I’ve never seen that,” exclaims The Navigator.

  The gate is open and the courtyard empty. We enter and turn down a long, vaulted portico with a row of two-story arches and big doorways eight feet above the ground that have been walled in over the centuries. It’s like walking back through time.

  “Mother, look! Extases, it’s here—this is the church!”

  There’s a tall poster with the charcoal images of women we saw on the brochure we picked up our first week here at the tourist bureau. Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s exhibit of female saints and mystics lost in ecstatic reverie. We look at each other with the kind of excitement usually reserved for a shoe sale or free chocolate and scurry inside before it closes.

  At the end of the long, dark nave, in a large, shallow pool of water where the altar would have been, seven female saints and mystics, breathtakingly executed in charcoal, seem to literally rise from the water, on ten-foot-tall white panels that undulate and interlace. Lit from below, the women are much larger than life, sensuously draped in white cloth, breasts bared, eyes closed in ecstasy. I recognize Teresa of Ávila, Hildegard von Bingen, Mary Magdalene, and Catherine of Siena, Madame Guyon (an imprisoned mystic who has fascinated Kristin of late). Monumental goddesses, magnificent in their self-possession.

  Mia and I are so surprised and awed by their grandeur and beauty, by the unexpected and commanding way they’re presented, that we spend a magical hour with them, and the artist’s preliminary sketches along the walls, without speaking a word. It’s such an exceptional synthesis of style, format, and subject that in my mind it trumps anything in last month’s festival. How like Avignon to surprise and delight us like this a day before I fly home—to save the best for last.

  After we leave, we realize that the lone woman at the door had let us stay well past closing time, something we’ve found typical here. Avignon has been so sweet to us; we’ve made all manner of linguistic and social gaffes and they’ve treated us with great goodwill and generosity. They’ve nursed, educated, and advised us, they’ve lowered prices for us, brought us jams, candies, the fruits of their own gardens. They’ve refrained from laughing every time I held up four fingers and said cinq (five). (Mia neglected to tell me this till yesterday. “I’m sorry, it was just too much fun.”)

  Mia’s become very friendly with Steven; he’s joining her at Sara
h’s for a dinner after I leave. Yesterday we ran into him in the park, where the two of them were off and running in French. All I could understand of their excited conversation was “Atatürk,” the “defensive walls of Marseilles,” and “there are times when cow brains are sympathetic.” Time for old Mom to go home.

  As we exit the church courtyard to the street, the capricious wind sends eddies of tiny leaves around the chin and outstretched arms of a small stone madonna mounted on a town house and a bar of sun angles an irregular path down the length of the street.

  A woman passes in and out of the light, carrying a baguette and a tote of groceries, the neck of a wine bottle poking from the top. She’s so utterly Avignonaise, tanned, fine-boned, with a pretty mess of brown hair in a loose chignon. From another street comes a man about thirty in a black T-shirt with a skeleton on it over skintight jeans, motorcycle boots, with a face right out of a medieval painting, with big, dark eyes, flat cheeks, a long face, and sharply angled jaw and nose. Behind him walks a young couple, she a neo-’ippy, he looking like a festival leftover in a Mad Hatter hat and magician outfit. In a moment the street is empty but for the wind and sun and ancient stones.

  When we first arrived, the city seemed to confuse and intimidate. She’s still a marvelous mystery, but now we feel ourselves enfolded rather than intimidated, we feel woven into the tapestry of Avignon.

  Till now, I’d suspected that choosing it wasn’t just because it’s in Provence, near Chrystelle, and affordable. Like clearing the studio walls, I think there was a deeper instinct at work that I wasn’t conscious of. I turn and look up at our bluff, high above my left shoulder. How fitting, how perfect that the place I came to cleave more closely to my daughter is watched over by a gleaming, gilded woman, her serene face the first thing to shine in the morning and the last thing alit at twilight. A mother.

  Mia and I wind our way to our bluff for our last sunset together and find the entire palace area under heavy guard in preparation for an EU summit meeting. As the sun begins to sink, Mia grabs my hand and we run for the closest wall portal to watch the sun set from the bank of the Rhône.

  Mia stands a few feet in front of me, gazing into the fiery Provençal sky with the summer-bleached tips of her hair sparkling in the light. Silhouetted by the sun, she’s as majestic and awe-inspiring to me as the women Pignon-Ernest painted, as sweet and tender as the three little girls on the bluff, as courageous and compassionate as any woman I’ve ever known. I don’t know what I was in a prior life, but whatever it was, I must have done something right.

  I know that for every mother, there is always the possibility of three in your relationship with your daughter. You, your daughter the way she is, and your daughter the way you want her to be. I learned the hard way ten years ago that that kind of control is an illusion and a barrier. You can’t even control the inner life of your daughter when she’s a toddler; you can only control her environment, and not always even that.

  Once she’s an adult, the only environment you can offer her is you. I am, and always will be, the place called Mother for Mia, the river we navigate together for a time, never long enough, riding the waves and plumbing the depths, a river that will carry her for all of her days.

  Only in France would you see someone swearing as they unsuccessfully try to light a cigarette while bouncing up and down on a galloping horse (sans helmet, to boot). Said someone is Margot, a heavyset woman whose large chest isn’t helping matters, and considering the wind is frizzing and blowing her hair every which way, it’s amazing she hasn’t set herself ablaze with her lighter.

  Margot lives in the building where Sarah had stayed, and when she heard I loved riding, she offered to take me to a riding ranch nearby. She’s a riot, extremely funny, very animated, and with a penchant for flooring her car while swearing and honking at any driver blocking her path.

  Either because Margot knows the owners, or because the French thumb their noses at rules and regulations, the ranch is surprisingly laissez-faire. There’s no liability waiver to sign, nary a helmet in sight, and our guide didn’t bother asking what level rider anyone was before kicking his horse into a full gallop, sending the rest of us thundering in tow.

  There’s an element of surrender to galloping that I love. When your horse takes off and you tuck yourself down into its mane, it’s a completely sensory experience: rhythmically pounding hooves, rushing wind, surroundings flying by so fast they’re just abstractions of shape and color. It’s a rare combination of soothing and exhilarating—and when you’re doing it through vineyards and châteaus, it’s pure heaven.

  By the time I’m back in Avignon and waving good-bye to Margot, I’m still on cloud nine, and decide on dessert for dinner. I stop by the apartment for the last of my Gourmandize candies, buy a triple-scoop gelato for the main course, and climb upstairs to the bluff to sit for a while.

  My mom left last week and I’ve enjoyed having some days to myself before stepping back into my life. This summer was about bonding with my mom, but considering I’ve learned just as much from her as I have about her, it seems fitting to spend my final days more quietly and reflectively.

  I walk back to the apartment slowly, enjoying how the air cools and silhouettes blur in the moments between dusk and dark. My gaze skips along the landmarks now so familiar to me, the sweeping plaza of the palais, the clothing boutiques in the zone piétonne, the bell tower of St. Pierre. I walk past the boucherie at St. Didier until I see the glowing neon outline of Bar les Célestins come into sight, followed by our very first landmark, Le Petit House of Condoms, and, finally, turn into our little alley with its massive stone wall. I walk upstairs, let myself into the room, and then it hits me.

  Ever since we first moved into the studio, I’ve had a strong sense of déjà vu. It would spring up randomly, when I was turning on the shower, sweeping the floor, making the bed. Sometimes it was more of a sad, nostalgic feeling, other times it would make me smile and feel comforted. I didn’t say anything to my mom because I had absolutely no explanation for it.

  Now I understand. The naked white walls, the lack of furniture, the large window filled with green. It’s just like my old room at Morava. Even the dark orange curtains echo the brown carpet. A medieval city is infinitely nicer than a Soviet-era hotel, not to mention the food’s better, but here I’ve had a regular routine, been completely removed from my life, lacked television and radio, had little time online.

  The circumstances are extraordinarily different, of course, but the outcomes are quite similar. I’ve come away from each feeling calmer and more confident. I have a deeper understanding of how I operate, what is missing from my life, and what I want for myself. I’m leaving with a more compassionate attitude toward people in general.

  When you open yourself up to the world, she opens herself up back and you step into a space that’s wider and brighter than you imagined it to be. People are hospitable in countless ways, and our common humanity often overshadows even radical differences in circumstance or culture. I’ve found you can often rely on the kindness of strangers, and I’m pretty sure that I could be plunked down almost anywhere, and find a way to create a life I like there.

  I feel at home in the world, undoubtedly because I feel at home with myself. At two critical points in my life I’ve been lucky to have been able to hit the pause button and withdraw for a period of reflection and examination, both opportunities that were created by the person who best knew I needed them: my mother.

  All relationships happen in stages, with varying depths, multiple layers. You invariably reach a point where you hit the ceiling of a certain level of intimacy and then have the option of staying there—which risks the relationship becoming predictable or stale—or you can take it to the next level. We did that this summer.

  There are, and will always be, roles and boundaries, but room’s been carved out for a mature friendship. The footing feels more equal, the connection more solid, and our understanding of each other much deeper. And it’s
nice knowing that, as I go through stages of life like motherhood or menopause, we’ll continue connecting on new and different levels. My mother will pass one day, but our relationship will continue well past that, evolving and deepening until I myself go. And then, if I’m lucky enough to have one, it will live on through my own daughter.

  fin

  EPILOGUE

  Two weeks before leaving for China, I was having dinner with Soraya at Thai Eatery in Brooklyn. When the bill came, we reached for our fortune cookies and I cracked mine open to find this: You are about to embark on a most delightful journey. Followed, of course, by what lotto numbers to play.

  It’s not often that our expectations are met, and even rarer that they’re surpassed, and while the lotto numbers didn’t pan out, the fortune did tenfold. It’s been a delightful journey in every aspect imaginable, one that continues.

  Because structuring and writing a tandem memoir is best done when both writers are in the same physical space, following the trip I moved from Brooklyn to West Palm Beach to work on this book with my mom. Within a few months the walls of our office were a kaleidoscope of chapter outlines, Post-it notes for various scenes or emotional beats, and pictures (we re-created Avignon photographically to help keep it alive as we wrote).

  As the book took shape, I grew along with it; some might even say I grew up. After cracking open Financial Planning for Dummies, I opened a ROTH IRA, and have worked part-time as a publicist to actually contribute to it. I’ve taken advantage of coastal living by becoming a certified scuba diver, and I go to museums, lectures, and concerts regularly. My television watching has been whittled down to about four hours a week, and I’ve ditched reality TV entirely. I’ve also become a proud vegetarian (you try eating meat after listening to the entire audiotape of Eating Animals on a road trip with my dad) and am s-l-o-w-l-y learning to cook.