Have Mother, Will Travel

by Claire Fontaine

  It was total immersion training, but now I can walk by any construction site without breaking a sweat.

  I absolutely love this dress!” Mia exclaims.

  We’re in a shop on the crowded Rue de La République and she’s tried on a long sea-green sundress with pieces of fabric across the bust that create flower petals. It’s a beautiful dress but it doesn’t really flatter her.

  She turns for me to see it all around and says, “What do you think? Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “Well . . . it’s not the most flattering weave.”

  “Really? I love the fabric, what’s wrong with it?”

  “Well, it kind of clings in the behind.”

  “Oh,” she says, disappointed, then brightens. “That’s just the back, who cares? How about the rest of it?”

  “Well, to be honest, it kind of clings all over. It’s just not the greatest fit, honey.”

  “But the color looks so good on me, and these flower petals are so cute!”

  She’s so excited about the dress, but she did ask my opinion and it isn’t very flattering even in this dim light. I know Mia, once she has it on outside, she won’t be happy that her tummy is completely outlined.

  An American woman dressing next to us has been watching. She joins in Mia’s enthusiasm, saying, “I think it looks fabulous on you, and it’s perfect for your coloring.”

  “Really?” Mia lights up. “Thank you!”

  “It’s so clever how they did the petals. I think you should get it,” the woman says, giving her a big smile before leaving.

  Mia is ecstatic. I don’t say anything else as we gather our things and head for the register. I’m too stunned—at what a complete idiot I am.

  A total stranger was a better mother to my daughter than I was. She made Mia feel like a million bucks. All she saw was how happy Mia was wearing that dress. All I saw was the flaws, what wasn’t “perfect.”

  What if perfect is wearing something that makes you feel fabulous and beautiful? Anyone who’s more focused on how a dress clings to Mia’s hips than seeing her glowing, happy self isn’t worth her time anyway. Today, that anyone would be her own mother.

  My perfectionism reared its ugly head again, and I’ve never felt it so viscerally. Seeing my own child’s face light up when another woman saw her, not a dress, a stupid dress, was like a kick in my gut. A very well-deserved one.

  And not just today, over a dress. It’s been a lot of days in her life, over a lot of things. How awful that must feel to Mia! To always be seen with such a critical eye. Yes, sometimes our girls need the unvarnished truth. Sometimes Mia insists on it. But now wasn’t one of them. I lost sight of what was truly important.

  I follow Mia out into the heat and noise of the crowded, merde-y rue. We duck quickly into one of the tiny passages leading home.

  “Oooh, what a relief!” she says of the dim coolness.

  “Mia, I’m really sorry about the dress.”

  “Sorry? About what?”

  Which makes me feel worse—is she so used to it that it doesn’t register?

  “You look radiant in it, really, the color, the design, but most of all you love it, it makes you feel good. All I was focused on was one stupid little thing that didn’t matter at all.”

  “I asked your opinion and you gave it, that’s okay.”

  “No it isn’t. I saw the dress, I didn’t see you. I think I do that about a lot of things.”

  She’s quiet for a second. “Not as much as you used to.”

  “I’m so, so sorry. I feel really horrible. There’s always something that could be better, everything has to be perfect. What you wear, what classes you choose, how you do or say something.”

  “I know your intentions are good, Mom. You want the best for me.”

  We reach the other end of the passage and turn toward our plaza, which seems like another world, tourist-free and quiet. I stop her.

  “Don’t make excuses for me, Mia. You must feel like nothing’s ever good enough, or worse, like you’re never good enough. It must feel like shit.”

  “Oooo, now I know you’re sorry,” she says, amused but clearly pleased I’m acknowledging it. “Well, yeah, sometimes it does feel really lousy, but I usually just ignore it. It bothered me before, because I took it personally, but it’s really not about me. You’re almost never satisfied with yourself, you’re always thinking about how things could be different or better. At the end of the day that’s a lot harder on you than it is on me.”

  “It is, and yes, I’m much more aware of it now. But this isn’t about me. I’ve always known, in my head, that I’m hard on you sometimes. But seeing how you responded to that woman in the dressing room . . .” I feel my throat get tight. “You had the same happiness in your face that you did as a little kid. Ohhhh, man—I can’t even think how to express what it felt like. I feel like I could apologize to you every day for the next year and it wouldn’t be enough.”

  “Awwww, Mom.” She puts her bag down and hugs me.

  “I’m so sorry, Mia,” I whisper, hugging her tight.

  I arrive at our bluff at my favorite time, just as the pale gold stones of the city begin to gray, as if to better turn your attention to the sky. Before sitting on the low cavalry step, I glance over the wall, a hundred feet below. Mia said she’d meet me later in the plaza by the puppet show and she’s there already, sitting cross-legged on the ground behind some children.

  As usual, the bluff isn’t crowded, just a scattering of a dozen or so people. Farther down the wall, a young man with a felt fedora plays guitar softly. Also as usual, everyone’s silent or whispering, out of respect for where they are—sandwiched between Christ, Mary, and a predictably beautiful sunset. This evening the sun has melted into a bowl of red-orange between two low mountains on the horizon. The sky deepens into indigo above it.

  Suddenly the heavens do something I’ve never seen before. Sunbeams are normally rays of light radiating out from darker clouds. Today the reverse occurs—dark blue-violet rays shoot out of that molten nectarine glow. A sky full of inky sunbeams.

  After a few moments I hear some high whispery twittering I recognize instantly. Only young girls make that lovely noise. I turn slightly to see three little girls in flared dresses, each its own shade of pink. They’re gripping the wrought-iron railing around Mary’s feet, staring up at her as they whisper urgently, as if discussing some expected miracle they’d been talking about all week on the playground, Is it true, about the Virgin and miracles and resurrections and pestilence and angels and sins, will she share secrets, see how special I am, hear my wish?

  The girls then rush to the wall in front of me, with their prayers still fresh in their mouths, twirling to sit cross-legged with their dresses spread around them. They gaze up in excitement, lips pressed tight against their smiles (they’re really pushing for somber piety here). They close their eyes and press their hands together in unison to mumble silent prayers. And then, in unison again, they bend at the waist over their crossed legs, until their foreheads touch the ground in front of them. Three little devotees arranged like petals of a rose, waiting.

  Their mothers are far off to the side, oblivious to this little drama, one holding an infant who burps up. Without a break in conversation, one woman wipes baby puke from the mother’s dress, the other wipes the baby’s face.

  I hear a murmur from the little girls’ bowed heads and they suddenly lift their heads to stare at the statue with a look of both absolute faith that whatever they were expecting to happen was really going to happen—and the beginnings of the kind of doubt that every mother would recognize: you see your daughter has begun to know something about the world, something that she knows you always knew and never told her.

  Of course, you didn’t. There are so many things we never tell our young daughters. Most of them things we’ll never end up telling them, we
don’t need to, we know the world will tell them. The world is always telling them, and each moment that they’re first able to hear is a moment we mourn in a small way; because it’s one moment closer to them being us. And for us, one moment farther from who we once were. For we will no longer have our girls in which to see our own young, innocent selves. We know that when she leaves the girl she is behind, she takes the girl we once were with her. A part of both of you is lost to the world.

  This is both the joy and the heartbreak of raising a daughter. Your heart melts at the sight of their absolute innocence, but your mind knows they have to live in the world, and that the most precious thing about them is also the most dangerous.

  The longer we’re here, the more obvious it is that two women in search of themselves and each other could not be in a better place to do it. For Avignon is a woman if ever a city was. More than that, a Frenchwoman, as much a coquette as any that beguiled a king. For, like a true coquette, she reveals herself only slowly—you must work to get to know her. But she rewards your efforts; her streets reveal hidden gems.

  I’ve been happy to trail behind The Navigator all summer, letting my gaze dance from one visual treat to another: above a luggage shop sits an ancient stone carving of a cow’s head mounted on cleavers, axe, and bellows; farther down a sheep’s head and a giant stone fish, each creature surrounded by the various tools of their demise, all evidence of the sixteenth-century guilds once housed here; in a dim breezeway beneath them is a sad little plaque commemorating the Jews in this area who also met their demise, during World War II. Three eras in one eyeful.

  At knee level, a painted Mickey Mouse peers above an architectural detail. Below our feet, small stenciled messages on the stone pavers: FAITES COMME CHEZ TOI (Make yourself at home), ET SI DEMAIN RIEN? (What if tomorrow nothing?). Scrawled on the wall in beautiful cursive writing: LA CULTURE C’EST LA MORT DE LA SUBVERSION (Culture is the death of subversion—apropos in one of the world’s capitals of culture); another bit of graffiti adapts a faded Art Deco–era ad forbidding the parking of airplanes. And we must have passed these red words on a wall dozens of times before I noticed them:

  BE HAPPY*

  *Free game, no purchase necessary

  Even the massive buildings themselves hide layers of history easily missed when passing. There’s a charming little park at the end of our block behind an amusing costume ball of a complex that covers several blocks. We were here weeks before I noticed it was one structure, the semi-ruins of a huge fourteenth-century Benedictine monastery, with a different era’s façade on each block. The front sits on the grand Rue de La République, which Mr. Bonaparte III’s designer obscured with a smooth-stoned nineteenth-century affair. I dunno, maybe just to show it who was boss, which was just, you know, so Napoleonic.

  At certain angles it looks like the face of a young girl pasted onto Aunt Hilda’s ancient pockmarked mug. As if you wouldn’t notice those gigantic crumbling buttresses poking out all over her medieval hind-end in the park, like Madame Pompadour’s wooden panniers when she lifted her skirts for the king. And just pay nooo attention to that tall pointy hat sticking up with all those gothicky pinnacles and ribs.

  In 1700, an architect slapped a snooty neoclassical façade on the far end of the monastery’s side. There was no attempt at integration—seen from the side, it just sits there like a rococo Venetian mask.

  Avignon constantly surprises with such things-behind-things, little mysteries, and always the suggestion of more. For me it is the light that most enchants. As the afternoon sun lowers, it’s hard to look at anything other than the air here. The intense Provence sunlight bounces off this sea of stone from a thousand angles, rendering it into a kaleidoscope of dove, mushroom, beige, chalk, and honey that gives the very air itself substance, a creamy velvet density that makes your lids want to lower. It feels like you’re walking through a laundry line of an Edwardian lady’s filmy lingerie.

  Only when you find yourself in the open plazas or on our bluff does the sunlight look like her usual golden self again, deepening as she leaves for the day, giving us sunsets on our bluff that are as luscious and rosy as a ripe fig, one more feminine visual that adds a sweetness to our life here. And, of course, the graceful madonnas always above our heads.

  Avignon’s feeling of feminine mystery and invitation is even reflected in the women’s style here. They take layering to another level, often wearing a few days at a time: an apron-type dress over a longer dress over loose linen pants, or a slip dress over another dress over jeans, a sexy bra strap peeking out. Top all that with a long, wispy cardigan and a flowing scarf and voilà, le style Avignon. The near-constant wind seems to conspire in the whole effect, blowing aside one gossamer layer to reveal another.

  It would appear unstudied, but everything about a Frenchwoman’s appearance is studied; girls here are taught style with their ABCs. What they call déshabillér, the sexy, artfully disheveled look Frenchmen love, can take hours to achieve. Not unlike the city herself, an enchanting déshabillér that’s taken centuries to achieve.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Budapest

  Dark Shadows

  I would always know when it was coming on. I’d come home from school and the shades would all be drawn and the Platters would be singing,” my friend Melissa shared. “She’d play that album over and over. I knew not to disturb her.”

  That’s how my girlfriend Melissa knew her mother had sunk into one of the depressions that so frightened her as a child. She was afraid to say anything, afraid she may be the reason for it. Until Melissa shared this with me, it never occurred to me that Mia suspected my depression, or if she did, how it affected her. She never even told me how much it used to frighten her until I wrote about it while we worked together on Come Back. Our daughters learn young to tiptoe around our darkness.

  Mia and I are in Budapest, where we’ve come for a couple of weeks both so I can show Mia where my mother lived and was in hiding, and to escape the increasing crowds of the festival. As you travel east in Europe, the forests literally grow darker and denser and the rational, linear lines of Western architecture swell and darken into mercurial bloodred onion domes. Even the colors of the buildings are moody here, with their saddened pinks, jaded greens, and yellows that purr rather than sing. There’s a melancholy to Central Europe that I settle into like a warm bath.

  I wish that I’d been more honest with Mia about my depression when she was young, been able to tell her that Mommy was going through a sad time that had nothing to do with her, that it would pass. Not just to ease her fears or to model emotional honesty for her, though those are significant reasons, but so that she might learn to feel okay with, and learn from, her own shadows, to whatever degree they may show up. To teach her to acknowledge and integrate negative emotions, not fear or deny them.

  One of my biggest lessons as a mother has been that it’s not what we do or say that has lasting impact on our children. It’s our very essence. We are their instruction manual on how to be a human being. And who we are stems from our core beliefs about ourselves, programmed into us from our own childhood. Our kids, especially our daughters, internalize our beliefs about ourselves and about life from the moment they arrive, the limiting beliefs most of all, because they’re unconscious.

  My very way of being taught her that to be a person is to be fragile; the programming was that denial and suppression are what we do with negative emotions. No wonder she ran away when her shadows loomed large at fifteen—in a very real sense she’d watched me do it long before that.

  Apart from that, Mia seems to have broken the mold. She occasionally gets anxious, a trait she shares with my mother, but aside from those few years as a teen, there’s no darkness to her. She’s always been a bright spirit, with a vibrant, loving quality that everyone responds to and that makes her a joy to be around.

  As for my own shadows, though much has been written about depression
and children of the Holocaust, I’m not sure mine has its roots there, or not entirely. While I suspect a genetic component, on both sides of my family, I believe part of it is rooted in geography and ancestry. Hungary, for example, has long had one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Sabrina, a young Hungarian-American acquaintance who was raised in both countries, reflected on this with me recently, sharing how the temperament is echoed even in their sayings. “Don’t worry,” you tell someone who’s just had some really bad luck, “tomorrow it’ll be worse.”

  France enlivens me, but this part of the world stills me, it fits the darker parts I have learned to value. I liked Dark Shadows as much as Gilligan’s Island and that’s never going to change. I no longer fear the sadness I sometimes fall prey to, or feel it needs to be fixed. I like being able to fish around at the bottom of my dark pond for a while, scan for items of interest.

  And one thing is certain: for better or worse, depression is authentic, true and honest to the bone. I have to wonder sometimes if it’s my body’s way of shoving my ego and illusions out of the way to let me empty the reservoir of emotion that’s dammed up.

  The Eastern European landscape is dark and dramatic and intense and beautiful, and it reminds me of my mother. Not of my mother now, but of a side of her that I still see from time to time. For the most part, my mom is bright and lively and on some days she’s so upbeat and optimistic I want to smack her. But she also has a very dark side and I can see from her relaxed energy and tone that she feels very much in her element here.

  When I was eight and nine, my mother went through a terrible depression. It was only when we were working together years later that she honestly talked to me about it. She described waking up with a pillow wet with tears from crying in her sleep, crying all day long while I was away at school, and feeling peaceful only when deciding how to best kill herself. I have to wonder if she’d have succeeded if Paul hadn’t worked at home so she wasn’t alone. She told me how she forced a happy face on for me when I came home because she didn’t want me to see her in pain—she thought it would frighten me.