Have Mother, Will Travel

by Claire Fontaine

  “It doesn’t matter, stop yelling!”

  “Oh, my God, you don’t, you forgot to mark the route, didn’t you?”

  No answer. I whip into the inner lane. “I can’t believe it. Get out the map!”

  “I’ll get carsick, no!”

  “You’ll get a lot sicker if we circle here for an hour! Or if I make you walk!”

  “I forgot, okay! I’m sorry! You forget things, too, all the time!”

  “Not when it’s directions in the boondocks in a thunderstorm!”

  “Oh, no, you’re perfect! Pocahontas can’t even find her way to the apartment after five weeks!”

  “Great, I’m going to have to cut through the line of death over and over until we find a human being stupid enough to be out in this rain, Godbloodydammit!”

  Silence.

  “Where’s the sun when you need it?” comes a little squeak.

  We’ve been driving in a huffy silence for a while when my mom suddenly bursts out laughing.

  “Do you remember Horti?”

  “The road trip with her daughter!” I answer.

  Horti is a beautiful and feisty Cuban woman in her nineties that we met one day at the beach in Florida. Sharks had been seen and whistles were blown but she kept swimming laps nonstop so we had to literally block her path to get her attention. Up popped a raisin of a woman in giant goggles, and when we told her about the sharks she just laughed.

  “They don want notheen with an old woman like me. Keep blowing the whistles, I no gonna leave.”

  We’d have felt terrible leaving her, so we stayed and made a new friend. Horti had gone to Chile to meet her daughter, with whom she’s very close, for a road trip through the vineyards there. The trip was going fantaaasteeco until the second they got in the car, put the top down, and started driving.

  “I don know how we didn’t keel each other . . . never again . . . I’d rather go to Baghdad.”

  After a good laugh, my mom and I relax into a contented silence as we drive into the Provençal countryside, a landscape that’s a patchwork of rolling hills, fields of crops, green pastures, olive groves, and lavender fields.

  Unless you’re at just the right angle, lavender fields are pretty but unimpressive, a smattering of violet amid green. But when you continue driving and see them from another angle, it’s as though the plants leaped to attention and scurried into perfect formation, forming row after row of what look like fat, happy purple caterpillars. Something about them feels childlike, they’re so unabashedly vibrant and puffed with pride.

  We drive deeper into the mountains, passing only the occasional farmhouse surrounded by well-tended fields, or herds of sheep and goats grazing beside a stone cottage. Before long we crest a hill and in a diamond-shaped valley below is the Sénanque Abbey in full panorama.

  Like two halves of an oyster opening to reveal a pearl, this small, spare abbey is nestled between two olive-colored mountains. The valley floor around it’s a sea of purple, row after row of lavender in full bloom. From above it looks like the amethyst center of a geode.

  Sénanque is a Cistercian monastery, a Catholic order that emphasizes manual labor and self-sufficiency, and the monks here grow lavender and keep honeybees to support themselves. We spend an hour or so touring the monastery, which dates back to 1148 and is beautiful in its simplicity and austerity.

  I’ve wanted to talk to my mom about what came up for me that day at the post office, but there never seemed to be a good time. Now may not be either; we’ve finally stopped arguing and I’m not sure if bringing this up would darken our day. We’ve got a great day planned out and Provence is one of her favorite places in the world. But now I understand why this area means so much to her; the parts of me that feel nurtured and stimulated here were the parts of her needing to be brought back to life after what I put her through. I understand her more fully now and I want her to know that.

  “Mom,” I blurt out before I have a chance to change my mind. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  She looks at me, sees I’m serious, and points to a stone bench off to the side of the lavender fields behind the monastery.

  “I’m no good at this kind of thing and if you don’t want to talk about it now we don’t have to but I’ve been feeling really bad since—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she says, laughing. “Just read the map before we get in the car next time!”

  “Not this morning, Mom, I’m talking about feeling bad about everything, like my whole teenage fiasco and everything. I never expected it to come up, but first there was Durbar and then the post office and—”

  “Durbar and the post office? Do you mean Durbar Square in Kathmandu?”

  I take a deep breath, think about what I’m trying to say and how to phrase it. I don’t necessarily want to apologize; we’re past apologies and this is so much bigger than that. It’s more of an acknowledgment. Apologizing or asking for forgiveness inserts yourself in there, your own ego is catered to as well.

  “Let me just start at the beginning. My understanding of what I put you through as a teen sort of came in stages. I apologized to you in the program—and I genuinely meant it—but my understanding of my actions was pretty limited then. It wasn’t really until I read your parts in Come Back that I got on a broader, deeper scale what I put you through. And what you went through with my dad, too.”

  “I wondered about that,” she says, nodding. “I’d never told you face-to-face a lot of what I wrote. After you read it you never brought it up, other than editing, of course. I didn’t want to press you. I figured you’d bring it up when you were ready to. After all this time, I just assumed you processed it and moved on.”

  She knows well that until I process things I’m usually uncomfortable talking to anyone about them.

  “Yeah, well, some things happened on this trip that made me realize I’d never processed it, period. That I still hold on to a lot of guilt and regret.”

  I recount how I saw her on that pile of garbage, totally panicked, and I watch as the understanding of how I found her that night sinks in. I wonder if she wishes I hadn’t seen her in so vulnerable a state.

  “The other day at the post office, something just clicked when I saw you looking at those missing posters. I got on such a deep level what I did to you. It didn’t just change your life, it changed your whole identity as a mom, as a woman, and I am so, so sorry.”

  “That’s why you wanted to stay home that night, isn’t it?”

  I nod.

  She takes my hand but doesn’t say anything further. I wonder what she’s thinking but in a way I’m glad she’s quiet. The sun is behind the clouds now and the lavender has turned a silvery periwinkle, a more hushed version of what was just seconds ago a brilliant violet glow.

  I’m often asked if writing Come Back gave me closure. It did, but mostly in terms of myself as I put my history with my dad to rest. It generated a new set of issues with my mother, however, and that’s something I haven’t felt closure about until now. Side by side, sitting in a silent understanding, it feels like this last piece of the puzzle that is my past is slowly, gracefully clicking into place.

  Mia doesn’t cry easily. Tears aren’t falling now, but her eyes are shiny with them. Such vulnerability, and accountability, takes courage, even between mother and daughter, perhaps especially between them. I turn to face her as she worries a thread on the hem of her sundress.

  “Thank you for being big enough to say that, Mia, I’m sure it wasn’t easy. I don’t want to tell you not to feel guilty or downplay the impact to make you feel better. That would deny what’s true for you, and make it about me, my need to ‘mother,’ to protect you from your own feelings, or mine. I don’t think you need protecting. I don’t see you as fragile. You’re one of the most powerful women I know.”

  I turn to face her.

 
“What’s most meaningful to me is more than the acknowledgment of the events, it’s your acknowledgment of me. I feel as if you’re really seeing me, not just as your mom, as a person. That did happen to me. I did get derailed. And rewired. And as Barbara would say, rocks are hard, water is wet—it was what it was, and it was bad.”

  I smile at her and she nods and then rests her head on my shoulder. My old choice would have been to say something now that starts with a “but”: but don’t feel so bad, but look at all the good that came, but look how close we are now. That would be my old pattern of coming from fear, of saying I’m afraid you’re too weak to feel bad or handle any pain, so let’s just give it a drive-by.

  We tell our daughters we don’t trust them in a thousand ways. We don’t consciously mean to, but we steal their confidence in their own strength by stealing their pain. And their confidence in our strength by saying we aren’t strong enough to see them struggle.

  We sit a while longer, on a cool stone bench where monks have sat in quiet reflection for hundreds of years, gazing out on these same fields of lilac-blue. This is new for both of us, not to comfort or avoid what needs to be felt and spoken.

  Time is rarely enough to clean up a painful history in any relationship, especially between moms and daughters. It’s often easier to keep fighting—it’s familiar, and you each get to be right—or to keep silent and let sleeping dogs lie. But why have a dead dog in your relationship?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Avignon

  Pentimento

  Def: A visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer, or layers, of paint on a canvas. From Italian, literally “repentant.”

  If happiness were a landscape, it would have corridors of Italian cypress, lanes of potted lemons, purple tunnels of wisteria, hillsides lush with roses. It would look like the seemingly endless gardens of the Fort Saint André Abbey, which tumble into one another as lyrically and naturally as if they’d been there since time began, rather than having been lovingly cultivated over several centuries. Who would have guessed that all this was behind the towering walls of the giant fort we could see from our bluff across the river?

  We wander through one little paradise after another: hidden bowers with bees and flowers; a sun-bleached crest with the crumbling remains of a chapel; a grove of ancient, twisting olive trees. Outside, the fort is a solid, cold, masculine enclosure of stone that soars into the blue. Inside, however, like Avignon, it’s a lush, feminine embrace.

  I was almost speechless the first time we came (yes, it’s that amazing). It was like finding someplace I never knew I’d been dreaming of all my life: the hilltop silence, the metallic scent of chalky stone, the soft shush of wind through tall, pale reeds, long views through arch after arch of stone, the cool of an ancient grotto. I could set up a desk, chair, and bed and live here for the rest of my life. Everything about this place delights my physical senses.

  My heart and soul, however, came alive in Plovdiv, the verdant, historic hilltop town in Bulgaria. Till now, I wasn’t sure why. As Mia and I sit for lunch against a low stone wall and a cascade of ivy tendrils and the wind blows the little green corkscrews across my cheek, I suddenly understand.

  I close my eyes and I’m three and sitting inside a pergola dripping with grapevines at my tante (great-aunt) Fox’s backyard. In the sweet, heavy heat of August, I squeeze the hard little baby grapes and then tickle the curls of the young vines against my cheek. My mother and tante’s voices float out the kitchen window, speaking Yiddish, rising and falling as they move to and from the windows while they make dinner. Fifty years later I can still feel the happiness of that time, viscerally. I can still hear my mother’s laughter and the buzz of glossy, black-bottomed bees, still see the giant heads of pink peonies lolling on the wet grass, having fallen of their own weight, drunk with morning rain.

  No wonder I responded to Plovdiv as I did. It lies on the same latitude, exactly, as Cleveland Heights, where I was born and spent much of my childhood. It has the same plants and flowers, the same trees, insects, climates and constellations, the same fragrance, light, and colors. One, I hadn’t been surrounded by in decades.

  The landscape of our childhood imprints itself into our very being at the same time and in the same way—primal, umbilical—as our relationship with our mother; they’re inextricably bound. And I think we’re drawn to nature, to the land, so much because it gives us something only our mother does: unconditional love. It’s the only thing in life that gives as much as a mother—sustenance, shelter, delight, solace, wisdom, challenge, company—without asking anything in return. Everyone and everything else needs, expects, or wants something of us, even if it’s just our attention. Also like a mother, however, she can be terrifyingly powerful in an instant.

  I share my thoughts on Plovdiv with Mia as we unpack our lunch and balance it on our laps.

  “I thought it hit you so hard because it reminded you of your mom, because she’s from around there.”

  “Well, there is that,” I agree, because there is always that. “But Plovdiv was also my landscape, identical to the places where I had all my first landmarks. My first kiss in a forest while holding sweaty palms at camp, summers canoeing rivers and chasing blue dragonflies. My body remembers Ohio in a way my mind never will, picking and eating green apples still warm from the sun, or eating my way to school through a ravine of blackberries.”

  Nature made life feel soft and miraculous. I hated to be inside. I still do. If I was anything in a prior life, I’m sure I had leaves, fur, or feathers. I can still barely pass by a lush hedge without itching to crawl inside and sit awhile. The only other person I know who didn’t laugh when I shared this is my friend Maureen, an analyst and author whose passion is nature photography. Her connection to nature is also visceral, tied to motherhood.

  “Nature has held me far more than my own physical mother,” she told me while describing a recent trip to Point Reyes, a national forest in northern California, a place so deeply green and damp it feels primeval. It’s fog-laced and full of fallen trees teeming with life that hums and buzzes as they melt back into the loamy dark soil.

  She was photographing a herd of white deer last week when they began to run. “Claire, I was running with them and feeling so much joy! To be connected to the earth and to these exquisite beings—it made me feel so alive!”

  I could feel Maureen’s joy as she spoke, picturing her beautiful wide smile and big hazel eyes all lit up as she ran across the forest floor behind the herd.

  “You know how I always dream about houses?” I ask Mia. “Well, they’re never complete or regular houses. Never. There are always walls missing, or there’s no ceiling. Nothing separates it from outside—a lot of times they’re tree houses, or a meadow cuts right through it.”

  “The abode of a restless claustrophobic.”

  “I prefer to say environmentally integrated.”

  Mia unwraps the moist chestnut leaf with the cheese, thoughtful. “You know how you always tell me to be careful what I wish for, because a vision is such a powerful thing?”

  “Yeah,” I reply, digging a piece of crust into the warm, soft cheese.

  “Well, you got the house of your dreams.”

  “Like hell I did—what are you talking about?”

  “A huge, bushy green tree is growing right up into it. Hello? And don’t swear.”

  My jaw stops midchew. We look at each other. We both know she’s right. I can’t think of a single thing to say. And she takes full advantage of the silence.

  “All these years you’ve been bitching about that ficus tree, you never saw it as anything but negative, you’ve been a total victim. I mean sometimes it wasn’t even rational. You’ve even said you had nightmares about it.”

  I start to say something in my defense, but she’s on a roll.

  “Did it ever occur to you to see it as something positive? Like nature callin
g you back, or trying to set you right. If you had seen it in a bigger way, the way you usually do, as a sign from the universe or something woo-woo, you might have sold it before the market tanked.”

  Round two hits just as hard. And there’s a slight irritation in her voice that isn’t helping. It’s certainly warranted, but it feels off, there’s something else. My instinct was correct because she turns to me and asks, pointedly—

  “Mom, are you ever going to tell me about why you really moved to Florida? Why you left L.A. so quickly without saying anything to me?”

  My mom doesn’t respond immediately to my question, just takes a breath and looks to her right at the valley stretched out below.

  “I got scared,” she says simply, still looking out.

  “Of what?”

  She sighs, then spits out, “Well, the proposal for Come Back was rejected fifty-six times and I thought I better come up w—”

  “Wait, wait, back up—the proposal was what?!”

  “Rejected fifty-six times,” she says, avoiding my eyes as she reaches for the baguette. “I never told you.”

  “No shit you never told me! I knew of about twenty rejections, what, you just forgot to mention the other thirty-six? And don’t you dare start eating now.”

  “Honey, you were already so pessimistic and I didn’t see the point in telling you every single time it happened. You’d have been totally depressed.”

  “But every time we talked, you were so certain. Why did you lie to me?”

  “I didn’t exactly lie, Mia, I just . . . withheld some things. Fine, I guess that’s lying. From the moment we started this project I knew in my heart of hearts it’d get published . . . but by the fiftieth rejection, I got nervous. Even our agent said it was a record!”

  “But even then you never said anything to me,” I say, annoyed. “That was really wrong of you, I would’ve had hardly any time to start job hunting if the book didn’t sell. And what, you thought enough of me to want to be colleagues, but it was okay for you to treat me like a kid by keeping me in the dark?”