But we can’t do what we want all the time without a thought for others. Yes, I resent that sometimes. I resent my life being dictated by the endless duties of mothering. And I resent that you managed to get away—“by hook or by crook.” You walked away because you weren’t strong enough to handle the responsibility of family—and the messy, maddening beauty of it.
It amazes me that some of the answers have been lying all these years in this dusty folder at the back of a filing cabinet. As I read through her final letters, I see how blind I’ve been to her attempts to express her love and interest in me. Her letters show me now that she was reaching out to me, trying to see who I was and who I was becoming. She writes in a letter never sent:
Now, darlin’—you must write me. I want to hear about school and your friends and the animals at home. I will find it difficult to believe you aren’t considering “beaus” so I want to hear about any special fellows. And please, please, let me know how you feel—I mean really feel—about my going away so suddenly and about things in general. Are you lonely or depressed, high or happy, worried, frightened, confident, pleased—all that about everything. It’s “real” important.
In her letters, I feel her presence—the beautiful, complex, and full human being she was. Her words are tangible evidence that her life mattered, that she had a voice. There are no concrete answers in her letters. There isn’t really anywhere where she says “I’m sorry.” But her words here are something that I can hold onto. Here is her voice—the one I yearned to hear, to understand for so many years. This is the window I can look through to glimpse her complicated, confused, bright, mindful, and longing self.
Yes, perhaps a mother is supposed to make the commitment to stick around and raise her children, and yes, that is the commitment I have made. But not my mother. She was always pulled into her own desperate soul-searching journey. And if she couldn’t figure out who she was, even if she had stayed and stuck it out with my dad and with us through thick and thin, in the end how could she ever have helped us figure out who we are? And I know from another letter never sent that she must have passed her fierce desire to write on to me.
My mother says it this way:
There is such a need, a compulsion to write. I am trying so very hard to release all that is in me—to spill my very guts so they can fall loose and be observed. What is in this body and mind of mine? This disintegration of all my self—a gurgling mass in a gutter of vomited dreams flowing silently, sinfully into oblivion. So yearning to be strong that I made a mockery of strength. So foolish, this mind of mine that must bend to the heart. Jelly, pulpy mass with no integrity. To what? If my mind cannot overcome my heart, then what good is it?
Like my mom, I write to understand myself and lure the voice inside me out of hiding. I write because of my brother Jamie, who always reached for pen and paper because he needed to draw. His voice lived inside of those drawings. Where is all his beautiful artwork now? And I write because of my grandmother Joan’s journals, which sit in the drawer of my desk at home like heavy lumps of clay that longed for a shape but never got formed. I write because of my brother Eden, who once told me, “I’ve got a suitcase underneath my bed and it’s packed, filled with story ideas, movie scripts and stuff producers are just dying to get a hold of—it’s all pure gold,” I don’t want to die with a suitcase full of ideas underneath my bed or a hundred spiral notebooks full of stories beneath my desk. I want to set the words free, unearth what has been buried for too long. I have to believe that a leap of faith was better than standing still. I had to get the memories and stories down on paper, and if I didn’t, this history would be lost or—an even worse thought—repeated. Sometimes all I have is this instinctual, obsessive need to put pen to paper—to set fire to something inside me that may or may not save me.
I pull the covers around me and settle into the slope of the mattress. It occurs to me that I’ve come here for the wrong reasons. I am the pitiful daughter who waited too long to reach out to my mom for answers. I got on a plane Christmas Day believing that I would come home a different person. But my mom is still alive, and I am still her longing daughter. My very presence must remind her of her failures and poor decisions. I curl into a small shape by drawing my knees to my chest. It’s true: through all these years, I’ve yearned for that acknowledgment, but she has never been able to look at my face and say “I’m sorry,” or “I’m so sorry for leaving you,” or “I’m so sorry for not being there for you.” Is that really all I’ve needed?
NOW
a few small repairs
It’s my last day here in Olympia. Outside the window, Kim is loading the truck with crates of pink and green apples to take to the farmers market.
There is so much more I need to say and fix before my mom dies. But words can only come when I have everything inside me under control. Maybe now is one of those moments when I can put on a courageous face and keep my emotions in order.
She is lying on her back, half-awake with her mouth partially open and her coarse hair damp and matted. I rest my hand on her arm, and her parched lips almost stretch into a smile. She can tell it’s me.
“Mom?”
She nods.
I hold onto the edge of the blanket covering her. “Mom, I’m scared.”
She keeps her eyes closed, waiting for me to continue.
I don’t know what to say next. I’m waiting for her to say something to me but she doesn’t, so I come up with the first thing that springs to mind, “When you’re gone Mom, I’m going to plant a garden for you. With purple dahlias and mums and blue forget-me-nots.”
“Oh yeah,” she says. “That would be real nice.”
And then there’s nothing more to say. She keeps her eyes closed. I wipe mine with the back of my hand. I’m glad she doesn’t open her eyes and look up at me, because having to really look at each other, eye to eye, would violate the distance we have maintained for so long. There is a loss and love so great between us that we have forbidden ourselves from truly connecting. It is simply too painful.
When Bella asked me, “What did your mom do when you were scared?” I stared up at the yellow stars on the ceiling and could not tell her the truth of who I was. How could I tell my daughter that my mom left when I was a little girl? I thought if I told Bella that, she would become afraid that I was that kind of mother too and would always be watching or waiting for me to leave. And I feared this myself. What if that leaving gene lay dormant inside me? What if something inside me snapped one day and I walked out the front door? No mother is fully immune from the possibility of leaving her children.
These thoughts are unbearable. But it is my history and I have no choice but to embrace it. I come from this circle of mothers who left their children. Grandma Rita was dropped off at a convent to be raised by Catholic nuns. Her mother couldn’t take care of her. My grandmother Joan drank herself to death in her forties when her daughters still needed her. My mom’s sister gave up her firstborn for adoption. By choice, my mom did not raise her three children.
My mom didn’t pass a “leaving gene” on to me. I know this now. While I feared a genetic marker could sneak up on me, I know I could not endure leaving my children. I would never be able to stitch myself back up and could never, ever forgive myself. I could never be whole again, because my children are pieces of me and I of them. Just like I am a piece of my mother, and she is a part of me—even if she couldn’t recognize that.
A piece of her sorrow will always lie within me, like a shard of broken glass. There are times I feel just like her—“a dandelion blowing in a thousand directions all at once” with no idea which way to go.
I feel her when I carry my children’s bodies, heavy with sleep, up the stairs. It’s not always thankfulness that I feel, but resentment for the simple and relentless things she never had to do. I feel her when a glass of wine hits my bloodstream and I get that brief sensation of warmth, euphoria, and lim
itless possibilities. I feel her when I sit on a horse and know that she gave me my natural rider’s seat and strong hands.
Kim’s truck rumbles down the driveway. My time is up here. I arrived believing that I would bear witness to my mom’s death, and through that, I would experience some kind of cathartic shift—an aha moment of truth. A release of all I have been holding inside me.
I know now that I’m not going to have that moment I hoped for with my mom. She’s hanging on, and I’m going to keep my promise to Bella and Dominic and be back for New Year’s.
I run upstairs and grab the whole file of letters never sent and stuff them into my suitcase. I will steal her letters because they are the most intimate pieces I will ever have of her.
My flight leaves this afternoon. I will travel through the turbulent sky 960 miles to my family where I belong.
NOW
leaving olympia
Thirty-six years have passed since I watched my mom drive away in her baby-blue Dodge Dart. I’ve played that memory over in my head a thousand times, wondering: if I only had called out to her, was there any way she might have stayed? In the end she always drives away and I am left standing at the windowsill—waiting.
This time, my mom has gathered the last of her strength and come to the window. She is standing on the other side looking out at me, her hand against the glass, open like a pale starfish. I am sitting in a red rental car outside her house in the rain, staring straight at her. She is searching for my face through the heavy downpour.
I know this is the last image I will have of her. Ever. I will not see her again in this lifetime.
She balances herself against the edge of a table cluttered with a collection of treasures—ceramic frogs, seashells, and clay figures from Mexico. Her hand presses against the window glass and I lift mine against the window of the car. The outside world wobbles in the rain, and it seems like we can almost reach each other.
I hold on to every bit of her—her blue eyes; the wavy hair surrounding her angular face; the texture of her sweater, dark and bumpy like the skin of a ripe avocado. Rivulets of rain run down the window in front of her, making her appear like an Impressionist painting. A Pissarro or Cézanne in later years. The palette is yellow, cerulean blue, and deep umber. She is still alive, standing to wave good-bye to me. But her body is shutting down, a firefly flickering in the distant woods.
I wrap my fingers around the door handle. I’m so close. I could reach her in six or seven seconds. But I can’t run back in one more time. I have a plane to catch. A rental car that’s on empty and needs returning. My family is counting on me coming home tonight. We will ring in the new year with our tradition of banging kitchen pots and pans and lighting sparklers in the backyard.
I turn the key. My mom is still at the window, her hand still against the glass. Underwater, everything is quiet and full of ripples. There is so much more than sawdust inside Bun-Bun and me. There always was.
I am the one driving away this time.
Her letters offer me comfort now.
My darlin’, my Lou,
May it never be too painful for you to look inside and to share all that you find within. There is so much beauty in you that it would be selfish to lock it away. And beauty includes any pain or anger—all things must have balance.
I wouldn’t trade my mom for any other in the world.
My hands clutch the top of the steering wheel too tightly, and blue-green veins spread out like a map under my pale skin. I look in the rearview mirror. My mom is still waiting at the window.
As my hand touches the turn signal to bear right, I feel my mouth break open like a fish gasping for air, opening and closing. I push my foot against the pedal and feel the car surge forward. There is the strong scent of evergreen and wet earth all around me. Olympia is a beautiful place to die.
epilogue
I was between errands, after dropping the kids off at school, when the call came that my mom had died in the night. Though I already knew it was coming, there was nothing to ease the impact. I felt raw and skinned. Exhausted from waiting.
I tried to imagine her departure. Strangers pushing her out of the house. White sheets surrounding her like a cocoon. Could she grow wings and transform herself into a butterfly or a blue-winged teal?
I imagined the gurney clunking over the floorboards as they wheeled her out of the bedroom and past the carving of the flying owl in the living room. Or maybe they took her out by way of the back patio and past the dying apple tree instead. I will never know because these are not the questions I will ever ask Kim. He was the one who belonged with her on the day she died.
Kim asked me if I could call my dad and brothers. But I couldn’t do it right away. I felt an intense need to run—fast and uphill. Before calling anyone with the news, I drove to the base of a steep grade in Los Angeles and sprinted up the wide path like a seasoned runner. I sprinted as if I could outrun the truth. As my feet scrambled over gravel and dirt, I believed that I could still reach my mom. She might still be somewhere in the transition between the dark soil and the flat, gray sky. After all, she had always been like that, a wandering soul.
When I reached the top of the hill, my throat burned like I had swallowed a fistful of salt. I focused on the gray sky overhead.
“Can you hear me, Mom? I’m here. Goddamn it, I’m here. Please give me a sign, anything.”
I stood on the top of that wet green hill waiting for something in the universe to shift. A breeze, a subtle change of light, a snap of a branch, a rustle in the grass. But nothing moved. The sky held its gray, cold and hard like river rock.
I sat on the ground and pounded my fists against the dirt. I pleaded one last time, “Can you just tell me that everything is going to be okay?”
Silence and stillness. She was gone.
As soon as I got back to the bottom of the hill, I called my dad and brothers. When I reached Eden with the news, his voice was gentle and resigned. Then he relayed a story I had never heard before about his last visit with Mom.
“Mom and me, we did our fifth step together before she died. We made a list of all our wrongdoings so we could make amends to all the people we have hurt. I sat at the foot of her bed and made a list, and she made hers. It was the AA step that both of us had been avoiding for a long time. Even though she had kind of given up on AA and could never really give up the drinking, she knew that she had to do this step.”
Eden said they confessed all their regrets and wrongdoings in one sitting. They wrote them out on paper and then burned them in a stainless-steel cooking pot out on the deck. I tried to imagine the two of them watching the fire that could burn up all their mistakes so quickly.
I was glad that my brother felt this sense of closure with her, but I had to say what I thought.
“That’s great that you got to have that experience with Mom, but I have to tell you that she didn’t make amends with me. She never really said she was sorry for things that truly hurt.”
“That’s not true,” he said. Then he turned his words carefully, tuning them like he was reading them from a sacred text or giving an intimate lecture.
“You don’t know how people make their amends. You may think you do. You may believe that it’s by saying words like ‘sorry’ or ‘I wish I could have been a different person.’ But sometimes amends comes in other ways—ways you never expect. Think about it. Her amends might somehow be tied to the fact that you have a great family and two healthy kids. There are no rules when it comes to forgiveness. Her amends might be in something that you don’t even know about yet—something huge that’s coming.”
I looked back at the hillside I had climbed up. There was no sign of her whatsoever. All I had were my brother’s words. I took them and tucked them away. Because what did any of us really know anyway. Who’s to say how these things work in the world?
• • •
&nbs
p; In the weeks after she died I found myself unable to identify a single emotion. Unmoored, I drifted through the days, unaware of what was shifting inside me. Grief was charting its own course.
Within the space of fourteen days, cells began dividing rapidly inside me. And dividing again. And then news that seemed impossible—huge. A tiny heart, smaller than a flower seed, was beginning to form. I was pregnant.
I cried. I wailed like I never had before. This cannot be happening, I thought. I cannot have a baby. Aren’t I finally supposed to have the time to pursue the dreams I put on hold throughout the years of parenting my first two children?
My mind retreated to the conversation I had with the stranger on the plane on Christmas Day, who had asked me if I was going to have any more kids. “God, no. My kids are big now, nine and twelve,” I’d told him smugly. This I was certain of. There was no way I was going to start all over again. There was no way I was going to be the mother of three children.
But when I saw the black and white heart beating in the ultrasound image, I felt my mom skipping around inside me. I felt her blue eyes open wide. There were no more questions. No sign could have knocked me off my feet harder.
I often go back to that morning on the hilltop—when the sky seemed unyielding and I asked for something, anything to shift in the universe. And I see now that some kind of magic occurred between the earth and the sky that day. Maybe I chose it. Maybe she chose it. Maybe neither of us did. All I know for sure is that eight months and seventeen days after my mom died, I was holding a baby in my arms. This was the unexpected miracle, the sign that swept me off my feet.
Do I see my mom when I look at my young son’s bright blue eyes and unfurl his tiny fingers? Yes, sometimes I do.
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