I don’t know why I should be surprised at how interested Mia is in something that seems insignificant to me. What daughter doesn’t love learning just about anything about her mother’s past? For many of us, it’s a curiosity that’s never sated.
Some mothers are happy to share, and some don’t like talking about their youth, for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, a woman has the right to keep her past private, even from her kids. On the other, as her kid, you feel territorial, as if it’s your right to know.
My sisters and I were always dying to know about my mom’s life in “the Old Country,” but she wasn’t often forthcoming about her past. Like many Europeans, she’s not in the American habit of going on about herself. Part of it is no doubt also because her past was such a painful one. So few in her family survived the Holocaust, a few cousins. Asking her about her childhood was like playing the lottery; you never knew when you’d hit the jackpot and get an answer, or more than one or two.
We were greedy for any bit of history, an anecdote, a fact or memory. When one of us would find something out, we’d share it like a golden nugget. Photos were like hitting pay dirt, not that there were many. Over the years, we’ve fought over them like they were diamonds.
Sometimes my mom would offer up something out of the blue. Several years ago, she was shopping with my youngest sister and pointed to a man’s blue-and-white pinstriped shirt and said her father used to wear those. Even something like that is dear to us, it fills in blanks, helps us complete the image of the man in the sepia photo with the aquiline nose, gaunt Lincoln-esque cheeks, and big, haunted-looking pale eyes. Our grandfather.
He was smart, and usually won at cards, which he played more often than his wife liked. He was often gone, taking work as a carpenter and had the long beard typical of Eastern European Jewish men, though they weren’t what you’d call committed orthodox. My grandmother wore a bob and a short flapper dress when they married. We have one photo of her as a three-year-old, standing on a stool in a photo studio, holding my great-grandmother’s hand. We would have given anything to see a photo of her grown up. Close to six feet tall, with black hair and violet eyes, she was such a great beauty that people would come from other villages to watch her walk from the synagogue.
She died at thirty-two, it’s believed of kidney failure, before the Nazis got to their small town in Czechoslovakia. It was a comfort to me that the school I sent Mia to for healing and safety halfway round the world just happened to be a day’s drive from my mother’s village. I mean, what are the odds? It was as if the spirit of the women in my family there wanted to watch over her.
I know what it is to long to know more about your mother, and her mother before her. I never wanted my daughter to feel that way about me. And yet she does feel this way. She says I’ve brushed her off, but I don’t remember not answering questions or being evasive. It’s possible all daughters feel this way to a degree. Or maybe I’m projecting, or repeating, my own experience. One that I paid a dear price to learn is not uncommon.
It was a blog post on that subject that created the break between my mother and me. I wrote that I was going to Budapest to see the places my mother lived or hid in, as a way to connect emotionally to her. Growing up, my mother wasn’t as demonstrative as my friends’ American mothers were, she didn’t say “I love you” and hug me all the time the way I saw them do. “She loved me, took excellent care of us, she was dutiful but emotionally unavailable,” was what I wrote, in the therapeutic jargon that’s become part of boomers’ vernacular. Like babies in a nursery, when one cries, they all chime in. Encouraged by Alice Miller, Freud, Philip Roth, Woody Allen, and so on, “emotionally unavailable mother” became the collective battle cry of millions of baby boomers looking to blame someone for their unhappiness, warranted or not.
Of course I see now what I didn’t then—that my mother’s background made her doubly unable to do that; she was not only of a generation that valued more hands-off mothering, she was from a culture with fundamentally different values and approaches to parenting.
What I saw as expressing how much I loved my mother, as evidenced by my traveling so far to feel closer to her, she saw as a critique of her as a mother. Which is, of course, understandable. I was so focused on expressing myself, I hadn’t considered how she might take what I wrote, how it could be misread. If I’m fully accountable, I did wish she had been more physically demonstrative. So what? Who says it’s a daughter’s job to insist a mother be exactly the way she wants her to be? Who gets to decide? I’m sure she wishes I’d been or done things differently. And now that I’ve cleaned house for a family of three, I’d say you can’t get much more physically demonstrative than cleaning house for a family of seven.
For immigrant mothers, it’s even harder. The very things that Americans see as good mothering in the last forty years—lots of attention, praise, and self-esteem boosting, constant verbal validation—is what moms from Eastern Europe see as raising kids who will be insecure and self-absorbed. Self-esteem isn’t externally generated in my mother’s world, you earn it internally, by your own actions. I can’t say that our way has been better, to be honest.
It’s disturbing to me that I may have missed signals from Mia, or dismissed her desire to know me better. I know she can ask obliquely sometimes when it comes to something she feels I may be sensitive to, but if I’d been truly listening to her, I would have heard her yearning.
I know I’m not listening to Mia as deeply as I used to, at least if I want to strengthen our relationship. I was so pleased that she shared with me why she left New York, and I listened closely. I was also aware of when to be quiet, to allow her to express herself without my input. But looking back I can see that as she was talking, part of my mind was working out how best to respond. I told her why I thought she felt that way rather than let her continue to explore it on her own. I answered instead of asked. What else might I have learned in listening and questioning for her experience, and more important, what else might she have learned?
Listening was an important factor in bringing us back together and keeping us close when she first came home. In the year before she went off to college, our ability to hear each other was critical—apart from the past, apart from doubt, filters, fear, hurt, anger, worldview, expectation, all things inevitably bound up in all mother-daughter relationships. It’s a skill and an art, one that requires genuine commitment and a lot of practice.
I learned active listening from Barbara Fagan, a master coach who facilitated a leadership workshop in which I took a vow of silence several years ago. As part of it, we were to take on our biggest challenge. Mine was authenticity, doing whatever it took to get my head connected with my heart. I knew there was no way I’d ever deeply connect with Mia until I did. So, while my peers were jumping out of airplanes, losing fifty pounds, or starting businesses, I took a vow of silence. Not in some monastery or quiet retreat center, in my own home during a regular work-week. None of my other ideas scared me as much as that did, always a good sign in the personal development arena if you ask me.
The first day was disorienting and unpleasant. I was home working on a script; Paul was also working at home. He found it disconcerting—for about two hours. After that it was pretty peaceful in his world. Not in mine, because I had a running commentary going on in my head all day long. I suddenly knew exactly how Mia must have felt at Morava, where kids weren’t allowed to speak until they got to a certain level. My dreams that night were so noisy I woke up all night long. I talked out of the mouths of everyone in my dreams, even our cat Fluffy.
I lived my life as usual, running errands and so on. If someone spoke to me, I just tapped my throat and they immediately assumed I had laryngitis and stopped talking to me. Probably without realizing it, they also stopped acknowledging my presence. I learned fast that the inability to speak renders one invisible and irrelevant in our culture.
I’m a verbal perso
n in a verbal profession. Being unable to talk was frustrating, but feeling invisible was dreadful. By the end of the day I felt invisible to myself, which was worse; I wondered if that was what insanity felt like.
But halfway through the second day, my mind, and nerves, quieted down. There was just silence, and an awareness of my own awareness. By evening I began to feel more visible than I’d ever felt before. I didn’t have to “access” any part of myself, or my “true” feelings, as if they resided in some special file in the Department of Me. There was a harmony to my actions, feelings, thoughts, and an inner contentment I’d never felt before.
But the most valuable part of the experience by far was that everyone else became more visible. My silence allowed other people to fill up all the space in the room. They became so dimensional and rich it was almost cubist; like aspects of them kept unfolding and opening out and I could experience every angle of them without moving an inch.
And one very big part of Mia that is unfolding right now before me is the part of her that has nothing to do with our relationship, the part of her that belongs only to herself, and to the world. That’s a part of her I want to tune in to and experience. I want her to feel comfortable being all of who she is when she’s with me. I suppose all daughters censor parts of themselves around their mothers, but it should be a want to for her, not a have to, because of some way that I’m being.
If our daughters aren’t open with us, we have to be accountable. How am I being with Mia such that she hasn’t opened up to me? If she feels she may not be fully heard, or heard as a prelude to advise, control, or judge, even if well-intentioned, why would she, why would any daughter?
They don’t want us to co-opt their dilemma—it steals their power. Or they do, which is worse, because it means they hear our voice over their own, that they’ve learned from us not to trust themselves. Either way, she’ll be distorting herself somehow. As mothers we have the power to stunt our daughters’ authenticity in deep, often hidden, ways that the culture or men can never do.
Ten stamps, please,” I ask the post office clerk in French.
My mom waits for me off to the side, gazing at a poster. I pay and walk toward the door.
“You ready?”
“One sec,” she murmurs.
I turn to see what she’s studying so intently and my heart sinks when I see it’s pictures of missing children. She spends several seconds on each face, committing them to memory as she undoubtedly hoped people would when it was my missing face on posters all over Los Angeles.
“I’ll meet you outside,” I mumble, and walk out in a daze.
She still does that. She still studies missing posters.
I remember her taking time to read them when I lived at home during community college. But everything was much fresher then; I was only seventeen. I had no idea she still did this.
“It’s beautiful out!” my mom exclaims, smiling brightly as she steps out into the sun. “Should we head over to the Musée Calvet?”
I nod a yes but it’s all I can do not to cry. Most people take a quick glance at those posters or deliberately avoid looking at them because it’s so sad. Ten years after I ran away, she’s still on autopilot to pay attention to other mothers’ missing children. Such a nonchalant act on her part—she’s hardly upset right now—is such a powerful message of the ways in which I permanently changed her life.
I opened her eyes to a side of life she was happily oblivious to before, and on some level, some part of her is still the mother of a missing child.
The last several weeks we spent like two girlfriends, overdosing on chocolate and marveling at medieval wonders. But in seconds we’re back to being mother and daughter and the thought of being friends like any two women is laughable. History sometimes feels like a vain and spiteful God, lashing out if you go too long without stopping at memory’s altar.
I spend the rest of the day irritable and do my best to talk as little as possible. Times like this I don’t want to be around her; I feel guilty and agitated and I know if she says something kind or does anything nice for me I’ll snap at her, which is the last thing I want to do. I’m glad for the chance to stay in tonight when Chrystelle calls for an impromptu get–together, which my mom accepts and I decline.
As I walk home, it’s as though Avignon’s sensed my mood. The skies are darkening early and the wind has begun to blow. The buildings here are neutral in tone, they change color depending on the sky; tonight the whole city feels dark and brooding.
My mind is a split screen. On one side is my mother in profile, hands behind her back as she bends slightly to study the missing poster. On the other side she’s in Kathmandu, eyes wide and terrified as she scans for me amid a moving sea of people.
I never told her that I saw her the night we got separated in Durbar Square. When that black Land Rover pulled out between us, she didn’t see that I got stuck behind it so that when it finally passed we were completely separated. Given she was the one with the phone, money, and hotel information, I was worried but not panicked. I would have figured out a way back to the hotel and I assumed my mom would figure similarly. Until I saw her.
She had scrambled up a mound of rubble and garbage, and I waved and waved at her but she didn’t see me. She was so disproportionately panicked, her eyes wide, the muscles in her jaw and forehead tensed, her fear made all the more dramatic by the garish yellow light.
I’d never seen her face like this but I’d imagined it countless times falling asleep during the nights I ran away or in my more sober moments. I know my mom thinks that I never thought about her or Paul when I ran away or when I was living with my aunt several states away, because I so rarely called them. She once told me they were worried that I had lost all ability to have empathy or remorse, which scared them more than the drug use.
They didn’t know I only acted like that because I felt those things too acutely. I was too far gone to stop what I was doing, but I was always painfully aware of the effect it had on my parents. That’s why I hated talking to them; the longer we spoke, the longer the guilt would linger after hanging up. That night in Durbar it was like putting a missing piece of my past under UV light, an image of my mother’s face showing up like invisible ink. It was an image I’d never had to see or face.
When I think about things like this, part of me wants to comfort her and part of me can’t stand the sight of her, I’m so ashamed. I know what’s done is done, I know I was young and having issues coming up from being abused, but I still wish I could take it all back sometimes. Everyone is always so positive—look at how well things turned out in the end, look at how much was ultimately gained! People always say to live without regrets, but I have enormous regret and not everything “turned out for the best.” My parents never bought a house in L.A. and had more children. My mom still looks at posters of missing children and panics disproportionately because of what I did.
I don’t want to put a positive spin on things. It’s not a “yes it was horrible but look at all the good that ultimately resulted,” it’s a “yes it was horrible and good also came from it.” One doesn’t negate the other, and believing it does can alleviate the kind of guilt or regret that’s healthy to feel.
I don’t want to tell her any of this because she’ll end up comforting me, and that feels wrong because the whole point is the pain I caused her. I want her to say Yes, you shattered my life. I’m fixing it now but you definitely screwed it up. At least that’s honest. You can’t move on from a lie, or heal from something you refuse to even acknowledge exists.
As a writer, my mother weaves plots and creates intrigue and develops characters. In her own life, though, she seems more player than playwright; in some ways I feel like the one who wrote the story line and dictated the plot. What happened to her always had to do with me, directly or indirectly. When I was abused, her life was shattered, and when I was a dumb teen without a clue or a car
e, it got turned upside down again.
We so rarely think about the true, long-term impact we have on other people. Some of it’s self-worth, how easy it is to underestimate yourself and your ability to affect other people. But I think there’s another, more selfish, aspect to it. I think if we were to stay aware of it we would have to act more accountably, more thoughtfully. Forgetting our potential impact enables us to feel guiltless. But to a great degree it’s gutless, too.
When I reach our apartment I curl into a ball on the bed and cry until a bone-deep physical exhaustion sinks in and I fall asleep. I don’t know how much time has passed when I wake, but my mom’s still gone. I feel calmer now, but in the drained way that follows sadness. The wind is still blowing outside, banging shutters against building walls, causing the trees outside our window to sway slowly back and forth, their leaves shivering as the wind whips through them.
I get up and walk to the window, catching the reflection of a puffy-eyed young woman before swinging the shutters open. Wind and cold rush into the apartment, and I’m chilled but I feel very present and alive. I feel cleansed. I stand there a few more minutes, inhaling deeply, and then tightly close them shut. I need to talk to my mom about this. I want to let this go.
The only thing scarier than French drivers on country roads in a thunderstorm is circling with fifty of them in a huge two-lane roundabout—with seven exits. One of them is ours.
“What do you mean you don’t know which one? You’re the navigator!”
“I told you to just go straight,” Mia yells back.
“There is no straight, are you blind!?”
We’re whizzing around and around the outside lane in the pouring rain. The inside lane is honking and yelling as they shoot right across me to exit.
“Mom, you’re going to get us killed!”
“I’m supposed to be exiting, that’s why! You were supposed to know which exit! I bet you don’t even know the name of the road we were on, or which direction we’re heading, do you?”
Have Mother, Will Travel Page 20