by Meghan Daum
In our family, being good children did not have to do with table manners or doing well in school but with going along with my mother’s various ideas about herself and the rest of us. Mostly they amounted to white lies, little exaggerations that only made us look petty if we called her out on them so we usually didn’t. Or at least we didn’t anymore. There was a period of at least fifteen years, from approximately age eighteen to age thirty-four, when every interaction I had with my mother entailed some attempt on my part to cut through what I perceived as a set of intolerable affectations. The way I saw it, she had a way of talking about things as though she wasn’t really interested in them but rather imitating the kind of person who was. What I always felt was that she simply didn’t know how to be. She reminded me a bit of the kind of college student who’s constantly trying on new personalities, who’s a radical feminist one day and a party girl the next, who goes vegan for a month and doesn’t let anyone forget it, who comes back from a semester in Europe with a foreign accent. Not that she actually was or did any of these things. It was more that she always felt to me like an outline of a person, a pen-and-ink drawing with nothing colored in. Sometimes I got the feeling she sort of knew this about herself but was powerless to do anything about it. She wanted to be a connoisseur of things, an expert. She wanted to believe she was an intellectual. Once, among a group of semistrangers, I heard her refer to herself as an academic. Later, when I asked her about it, she told me she appreciated college towns and academic-type people and therefore was one herself. When I asked her what she thought an intellectual was, she said it was someone who “valued education” and preferred reading to sports.
What was my problem? Why couldn’t I just let it go, laugh it off, chalk it up to quirkiness rather than grant it status as a legitimate source of my barely contained rage? For starters, her need for praise was insatiable. And around the time of her emancipation from her old self, when she moved out of the house and seemingly took up permanent residence in the high school theater, that need redoubled. We never gave her any credit, she said. We always put her down, didn’t take her seriously. And now that she “felt really good” about herself (for dressing better, for going blond, for losing weight, for having a career), we couldn’t bring ourselves to be happy for her. That she was completely right about all of this only added to my rage. We couldn’t give her any credit, at least not enough. She just wanted it too badly. She’d ask for it outright. In heated moments, she’d practically order me to praise her as though I were a child being told to clean my room. “It would be nice if just once you’d just say, ‘Hey, Mom, you’re really good at what you do,’” she’d tell me. “If you’d say, ‘You do that so very well.’”
If you asked me what my central grievance with my mother was, I would tell you that I had a hard time not seeing her as a fraud. I would tell you that her transformation, at around age forty-five, from a slightly frumpy, slightly depressed, slightly angry but mostly unassuming wife, mother, and occasional private piano teacher into a flashy, imperious, hyperbolic theater person had ignited in her a phoniness that I was allergic to on every level. I might try to explain how the theater in question was the one at my very high school, a place she’d essentially followed me to from the day I matriculated and then proceeded to use as the training ground and later backdrop for her new self. I might throw in the fact that she was deeply concerned with what kind of person I was in high school because it would surely be a direct reflection of the kind of person she was.
Thanks to my own need to please others and draw praise, my life in high school became a performance in response to my mother’s performance. When I saw her approaching in the hall I’d grab a friend by the elbow and throw my head back in laughter so she’d perceive me as being popular and bubbly. When I did poorly on a test I followed her advice and didn’t let on to anyone. Meanwhile she copied my clothes, my hair, my taste in jewelry, so much so that I started borrowing her things (they were exaggerated versions of my things: skirts that were a little too short, blazers with massive shoulder pads, dangling, Art Deco–inspired earrings) because it seemed easier than trying to pull together my own stuff. In the years to come, my mother would become the go-to teacher for the sexually confused and the suddenly pregnant. But in the nascent stages of her coolness, I wasn’t allowed out past ten o’clock. She found it embarrassing that I had a boyfriend. This was beneath me, an unserious pursuit, especially since he wasn’t involved in the arts. She didn’t want to be known as someone whose daughter would have a boyfriend in high school. She liked when I waited for her at the end of the day so she could drive me home, even (perhaps especially) if it meant my having to pace around the theater while she finished up her business.
Kids whose parents are teachers in their schools are members of a special club. They have to build invisible fences. They have to learn to appear to take it in earnest when their classmates tell them how cool the parent is. They have to learn not to take it personally when they aren’t privy to the pot smoking in the boiler room. I never considered myself a member of that club. In those years, my mother seemed to have just slipped through the door as I walked through it on the first day of school. It was never entirely clear what she was doing. She had no theater experience; her background was in music. It made sense that she was volunteering as a piano accompanist, playing in the pit orchestra, coaching singers. It made less sense that she always seemed to be there even after the musicians went home. Hanging out with the set builders, feigning disapproval when kids banged out pop songs instead of the assigned show tunes on the piano, giving more and more orders until everyone just assumed she was in charge.
In all the years that came before, when I was three and six and ten and fourteen, my mother had cautioned me not to be dramatic, not to overaccessorize, not to be “the kind of kid who’s always on.” “That doesn’t show a lot of substance,” she’d say. Substance was one of her all-time most used words; in both of her incarnations she used it liberally, though her powers of appraisal were questionable. A man we knew who was brilliantly insightful, well-read and well-spoken—a true intellectual—came across to her as lacking in substance because he told hilarious stories about what a screwup he’d been in college. She believed Barbara Walters showed substance on The View when she hushed the other ladies up and spoke her mind.
In the last twenty years of my mother’s life, I think I can count on one hand the times when she did not have a delicate, artisan-woven scarf tossed around her neck. In her entire lifetime I don’t think I ever once heard her laugh out loud.
There was no more clothes sharing after I left for college. During that time my mother moved out of our house and into her own place and I came home as infrequently as possible, staying with my father when I did. Her career in full throttle, she was usually too busy for family time anyway. She was out late rehearsing summer stock productions of Sweeney Todd. She had close friends whose names I didn’t know and would never learn. Still, my assignment from there on out was clear. For the rest of her life, what I was supposed to do was celebrate how little my mother resembled her own mother. I was supposed to accept that her old personality had been nothing more than a manifestation of various sources of oppression (her mother, her husband, the legacy of 1950s Southern Illinois) and that what we had on our hands now (the fan club of gay men, the dramatic hand gestures, the unsettling way she seemed to have taken on the preening, clucking qualities of a teenage girl, almost as if to make up for skipping over that phase the first time) was the real deal.
I could not, however, manage to do those things. Even more cruelly, I couldn’t even fake it. She had a habit of picking up the phone in her office inside the high school theater and letting the receiver hang in the air for several seconds as she continued whatever in-person conversation she was already having. When she did this to me I usually just hung up. On the occasions when I visited the theater, I smiled silently when her students gushed about her superfabulousness. Several times I told her flat out
that if I, as a kid (who had been instructed at the age of six to answer the phone, “Hello, this is Meghan Daum,” and then “professionally” field the call to the appropriate parent), had for even one second exhibited the traits of her new personality, her former personality would have sent me to my room for three months.
“I wish you’d been raised by the new me,” she said more than once.
* * *
The last time I saw my grandmother was almost ten years before she died. I visited her with my mother. Arriving at her apartment, which was in a sterile two-story complex near the main highway of the town she’d never left, my mother and I were immediately taken into her bedroom and shown her latest collection of teddy bears. They were dressed in clothing that said things like “God Bless America” and “I Hate Fridays.” My grandmother’s speech had the thick, Ozarks-influenced twang endemic to Southern Illinois—a “hillbilly” accent, my mother always called it—and as she cooed over the bears and pronounced this one “real purdy” and another one “cute as can be,” I saw my mother’s hands curling into tight, livid little fists. They were the same fists I made whenever I heard the outgoing message on my mother’s answering machine, which for the nearly twenty years she lived alone had somehow rubbed me as the most overarticulated and high-handed version of “leave a message after the tone” in the history of human speech.
(My mother told me that when she was a girl she secretly unwrapped her Christmas presents ahead of time and then rewrapped them and placed them back under the tree. The reason for this was that she didn’t trust herself to react appropriately to them. She had to plan in advance what she was going to say.)
My grandmother’s infractions went deeper than stuffed animals, of course; and while I might be able to cite my mother’s central grievance—that her mother didn’t recognize her accomplishments, didn’t appreciate the person she was, didn’t, in fact, see her at all—I’d be a fool to think I had any real grasp of the terrain of their relationship. During that last visit, while my mother was describing in detail the complexities of her latest theater production, my grandmother interrupted her mid-sentence and asked, “Honey, do you ever wish you’d been a career gal?”
You’d think something like that maps out the terrain pretty well—“Jesus Christ, what do you think she’s been talking about?” I snapped as my mother fumed silently—but no one can ever truly read that map, maybe especially not even those occupying its territories. A lot of people knew my grandmother to be as nice as pie, just as a lot of people knew my mother as an incredibly talented theater arts administrator and overall fun person to be around. Neither of those observations was objectively wrong, they just weren’t the whole story. But there again, what can you say to that? In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told. At my grandmother’s burial site, my mother broke away from the crowd and stood alone at the headstone looking mournful and pensive. I recognized my cue and walked over and put my arm around her, knowing this would create a picture she wanted people to see and would therefore console her. Not that anyone could see the real source of our grief, which was not my grandmother’s absence but the limited time my mother now had to enjoy that absence. My mother would die nine months later, and what most people don’t know is that of all the sad things about this fact, the saddest by far is that she did not have one day on this earth in which she was both healthy and free of her mother. All her life she’d waited to be relieved of the burden of being unseen, only to have that relief perfectly timed with her own death sentence.
* * *
My father understood this cruel twist, though at times he seemed to understand little else. He did not, at least to my knowledge, bother to look up gallbladder cancer on the Internet when it first entered our family lexicon and see that the average life expectancy after diagnosis is five months and that fewer than 2 percent of patients make it to the five-year mark. Since he lived a twenty-minute cab ride away and since their relationship, for all its animus, still extended to things like hospital visits and accompaniment to chemotherapy appointments, he did do his share of emptying buckets when she vomited and showing up at the emergency room when she had a crisis of pain or hydration. Our family was not one to shirk its duties, even if we did not always perform them warmly.
Curiously, though, my father did not seem particularly affected when, after eight months of aggressive chemotherapy at a major cancer center that prided itself on beating the odds, the news was delivered that the treatment was no longer working—“longer” referring to the three months beyond the average my mother had survived. She would likely die within half a year’s time (it turned out to be two months). There were many ways my mother could have chosen to tell my father she was dying and there were many ways he could have chosen to respond. Their choices, as my mother lay in her hospital bed and I sat nearby in my usual visitor’s chair, playing around on my laptop computer as usual, were these:
“The timeline has been moved up,” my mother said.
“I see,” said my father.
“So they’re talking months at this point.”
“Hmm. Okay.”
“So what else is going on?” my mother finally asked when it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything more.
“Well, actually, I have done something to my foot,” my father said. “I somehow stumbled when I got out of bed and stepped down on it the wrong way. And it’s been killing me.”
My mother said maybe he should have it looked at.
“He’s happy,” she hissed after my father left the hospital on his aching foot. I told her that wasn’t true, that he was scared. I said this not because I believed it but because it seemed like the kind of thing you should say.
I could try to go into the reasons why my parents never got divorced but I suspect that would fall into the category of trying to explain fully how things were between my mother and my grandmother or even my mother and myself, and that would be overreaching, moot, a fool’s errand. I could try to explain all the ways that my father is a good person who behaved the way he did partly because he lacked the “emotional vocabulary” to face the situation and partly because my mother, who’d hired a van and moved out of the house on a humid summer day in the early ’90s, could never make up her mind about what she wanted from him. For years, she’d summoned him when she needed him—to mark holidays, to suggest to out-of-town guests that their marriage was not exactly over but simply had “a different style”—and shunned him pretty much the rest of the time. When she got sick, a few ferociously loyal friends from her old personality came in from New Jersey whenever they could, though no one would have held it against them if they hadn’t. But the gay man posse, not to mention the friends my mother had claimed to have made since moving into the city (“a costume designer who has many inroads to theater producers,” “a very interesting museum curator,” “so many former students who live here now but still want my advice”), were largely absent and so it was that she was forced to call on my father for help and he obliged, though not as graciously as she would have liked. When I hopped on a red-eye flight at a moment’s notice because it was clear she needed to go to the famous cancer center’s urgent care unit but didn’t want my father to take her, my presence was tacitly understood as a polarizing force. My mother felt grateful and vindicated. My father felt snubbed.
“You didn’t have to come out here, you know,” he told me as we loitered around the vending machines. “I’ve taken her before. I’m capable of it.”
He wasn’t capable of it. He didn’t know the code. Or, if he did, he refused to abide by it. I can’t blame him. The code had to do with not just showing up but actually being there, which was no longer really a part of their social contract. My mother didn’t want my father to be her husband but she still wanted him to impersonate one when the occasion arose. All around us were family members of other patients, people who sobbed in the hallways or set up camp at bedsides or emerged from the elevators carrying piles of blankets and nee
dlepoint pillows and framed photos from home. One afternoon, en route to the visitors’ kitchenette to get coffee, I passed a man clutching the door handle of a utility closet and crying. He looked to be in his sixties. He looked weathered and hammered down, as if he’d spent his life doing manual labor. I assumed he was crying over his wife, though I had no idea. No one was crying like that for my mother. Occasionally I’d overhear family members of other patients using words like gift and blessing, words they seemed to be able to use without apologizing for sounding sentimental. Our family had a significantly different style. We weren’t bringing anything up in the elevator except our own lunch. Occasionally I brought up flowers or a book I knew she’d never read, which is to say I understood the code enough to fake it.
* * *
The best line in this whole saga goes to my mother’s oncologist, who broke the bad news like this:
“Our hope for this treatment was that it would give you more time. Some of that time has now passed.”
One day some months earlier I had entertained a passing fantasy that my mother would get hit by a bus. The oncologist had just delivered the news that the chemotherapy was working. This came as a surprise, since an earlier therapy had failed and this was plan B, which I’d assumed stood even less chance. My mother was elated and shifted at once into one of her more dramatic gears, calling friends and telling them she was on the road to recovery, that it appeared she was a special case, that the doctors “were so pleased.” She was so happy that day that she actually ventured outside the apartment on her own to buy a Frappuccino and I remember thinking to myself how great it would be if she were hit by, say, the M7 express on Columbus Avenue and killed instantly and painlessly. I knew from the Internet that chemotherapy for gallbladder cancer works (when it works at all) for about one cycle before the body develops immunity and the disease resumes the process of ravaging it. She would never have a better day than this day. She would never again walk down the street feeling as hopeful and relieved and exceptional as she had when she strode out of the doctor’s office that morning, past the throngs of chemo patients and their families sprawled out in the lounge like stranded airline passengers, past the ever-friendly lobby personnel (trained, no doubt, to greet each visitor as if it were the last greeting they’d ever receive), and on to the street, where for the first time in weeks she actually hailed a cab herself and announced her desire for a Frappuccino.