Have Mother, Will Travel

by Claire Fontaine

  “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.

  I watched my mother get wheeled away on a cart by two strangers and, amazingly, it started to rain. A hummingbird flew to me from the window of her bedroom, in the rain, and swept back and forth in front of me. It then flew up to a window she loved with stained glass in the form of edelweiss. It flew back and forth in front of the window and came right back to me again, so close I could hear its wings flapping. The hummingbird went back and forth and back and forth right in front of my eyes, and then flew off to whatever heaven might be. She still sends me signs, in the form of hummingbirds. I only wish she and I had the chance in life.

  It was heartbreaking to hear her story; her pain was so deep. And it made me realize how lucky I was. That my mother is still alive; and that she never resented our youth or our accomplishments—she wanted our success, however we defined it. My friend made me see yet one more thing I never appreciated about my mother, something I have never thanked her for.

  I promise Chrystelle, and Mia, that I will reach out to my mom again, though I don’t promise how. On the one hand, even after two years, I’m afraid a live rejection will devastate me. On the other, I’m not made of sugar, after all.

  Mother.” It’s the Voice again. “That is a definite no, trust me.”

  We’re in the jam-packed outdoor market in Gordes, the premier hilltop village in the Lubéron. I’m holding a long, heavy strand of one-inch oval alabaster beads from a table of necklaces made in Africa.

  “What do you mean? It’s so elegant, and white goes with everything.”

  “Mother, it looks exactly like a tapeworm!” she whispers.

  I drop it immediately. “Thank you, great, now I can’t look at it.” I smile at the tall, turbaned woman, hoping she didn’t hear or understand. “Merci, au revoir,” I say politely before moving off.

  Mia follows on my heels. “I saved you from yourself, trust me.”

  “You’ve saved me from everything I’ve picked up. How am I going to get any souvenirs?”

  I’ve been to this market many times over the last decade; nothing has changed. The same chicken truck, buckets of olives and mounds of brilliant spices, the same tourist-priced Provençal linens and local-priced produce. Nadine still owns the tiny tabac with the giant American flag over the register (“J’adore les Américains!”), and Olivier’s little olive oil shop is still there, where we stock up on the gel douche (shower gel) that smells exactly like the fields here. We buy our favorite Gordes treat, a croissant stuffed with almond paste, honey, and dark chocolate.

  Mia stops at a huge stall in the middle, where stacks of pale, waxy soaps in every shade of pastel are piled up, emitting a choky smell.

  “Why don’t you bring some soap home? It comes in a dozen scents.”

  “No, this soap goes mushy and the scent doesn’t last. I want to look for the family I always buy from.”

  We wiggle through the crowd to a little opening in a wall leading to a lot behind the square where a young father and his shy little daughter always sold fragrant, crescent-shaped bars of soap. She’d pack them up with a handful of dried rose petals and tiny silk flowers, tied with a ribbon. But they’re nowhere to be found today.

  “How sad! They were so special,” I say. From the moment we reached Gordes, something in me knew this would likely be the last time I come here. I wanted to buy them one last time.

  It feels strange to realize that you’re getting old enough to sense that something you’re doing or saying or someone you’re seeing may be for the last time. We pick up water at a little grocery where the woman who owns it remembers me, which also feels bittersweet. I look at the buzzing crowd behind us in the square we have to go through to get to the car. It’s not how I want to remember Gordes. Beyond the lot is a narrow rocky road cut into the hillside.

  “Why don’t we go the long way, Mia? Have I ever shown you this road? Hardly anyone uses it.”

  Soon the entire Lubéron valley is stretching out for miles far below us as we walk, with its checkerboard of farms and hilltop villages.

  “This was the back road I’d take into the village from Fontainille,” I tell her. Fontainille was the mas (farmhouse) that our friends Cristina and Jordana would have every August. It was where I was staying just after Mia went to Morava and I would sing lullabies out the window, wishing them all the way across the ocean to her.

  We stop to peek into the town’s little cemetery in the hillside, with its old tombs and war monuments.

  “There’s a really neat place where we can eat these before they melt,” I tell Mia.

  “Too bad the girls don’t have the house anymore. It would be nice to go back.”

  “I don’t know, it wouldn’t feel the same,” I reply. “Maybe you’re too young for this, but you know how memories can go from the active file to the ‘that part of your life is over’ file? Where you can’t feel the weight and sound and feeling of the moments in your body anymore, and the events finally die and become like an old black-and-white photo?”

  “I do. Certain places in L.A. felt like that the last time I was there. The park where I played soccer. It made me smile to drive by it, but I didn’t feel a connection to the park, I felt connected to the memory of it.”

  “Here we are.” I stop at a little gap in the cypress and pines and turn in. “Come on.”

  We push through bushes and overgrowth to where jutting out from the trees is a wide, flat stone completely hidden from the road. It seems to float over the valley. We sit cross-legged, very far from the edge, and take out the croissants, which are gooey by now. The honey oozes out at first bite.

  “Mmmm,” Mia sighs. “Just as good as I remember.”

  “We’re going to be a mess—I forgot napkins.”

  “What, you, forget something?! You have to walk home!”

  “Fair enough,” I laugh, licking the honey running between my fingers.

  “My goodness, now you’re licking your fingers. Before you know it, you’ll be talking too loud and burping with your mouth open.”

  “Don’t hold your breath, missy. By the way, do you know where we are?”

  “No, should I?”

  “This is where Cristina scattered some of her dad’s ashes.”

  “What?” She stops eating. “And we’re sitting here eating pastries?!”

  “Why not? Bob would have loved that we’re enjoying ourselves here. This was one of his favorite places in the world. I never saw him happier than when he was in Gordes.”

  She thinks a moment, then resumes eating. “Well, I suppose that’s a n
ice way to think about it. Kind of like Pashupatinath, death is just part of everyday life. Probably a healthier attitude.” She pauses. “Hey, Mom, not to be morbid or anything, but, well, aging eventually leads to death—”

  “And I am aging, right, yes, go on . . .”

  “Well, I’ve never told you this, but one thing I want you to do before you die is make me a CD of the songs you sang to me when I was a kid.”

  “Awww, that’s so sweet! Of course I will!”

  “Not just the lullabies, but Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, stuff you sang around the house.”

  “Any other requests? I mean, what with my practically decomposing by the minute and all.”

  “Well,” she says, hesitantly, “actually, yes. We’ve never talked about what you want me to do when you die, if you want to be buried or cremated or whatever.”

  Whatever?

  “If you want to be cremated,” she continues, “please don’t ask me to keep your ashes. I love you to pieces but I refuse to put you in a decorative urn on my mantel.”

  I laugh. “Me, queen of wanting as few things to dust as possible? Never!”

  “I don’t want you in a box in my closet, either,” she adds warily.

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll come up with something very creative and fun by the time I kick the bucket. I don’t want to spend eternity next to your flip-flops, I assure you.”

  This kid.

  Avignon’s newest arrival is Sarah, a family friend of ours whom my mom and I have missed sorely since leaving L.A. The first time I met Sarah I was seven years old and panicked about having been assigned to her second-grade class. I’d just seen Roald Dahl’s The Witches and was positive that this tall lady with long hair, fair skin, black boots, and a black outfit was a witch. Witch or no witch, however, she won me—and the whole class—over in no time, thanks to teaching math in a Dolly Parton accent, turning forest clearings into outdoor classrooms, and singing history lessons on her guitar.

  My mom was the second-grade art docent that year (budget cuts laid off art, music, and P.E. teachers, so parents stepped in lest we become overweight and uncultured), and she befriended Sarah, who quickly became part of the family. Today, Sarah’s a mélange of sister, second mother, and mentor.