The Seasons of My Mother

by Marcia Gay Harden

  “No . . .” Her brow furrowed, her voice tightened, and for a moment we stared at each other, four brown eyes stilled by the imagination of the impossible. Just under the tips of her black lashes, swirling about her jet-black pupils, gleamed all the hopes and dreams she had for me and for this yet-to-be-discovered Eulala. In the reflection of the pooling mist on the brown surface of her eyes, I saw my own hazel eyes reflected, and like the stuttering images of an old projector, saw between us the scenes of Eulala’s birth, and her first day of school, her first tutu, her first talent show, her first bicycle and skateboard, her campouts in sleeping bags and s’mores, her senior prom, her firsts, her firsts, all her firsts, which would begin with her first snuggle in my mother’s arms. The stuttering images began to blur, Mom’s mouth softened, she knew her presence was a gift to me—me, who was so unsure and scared.

  A seagull pierced the air with its wild caw, and Mom blinked. She couldn’t bear the idea that something might go wrong, and she returned to her unflappable self, proclaiming that at least the boys and chatter were making me laugh, and there was nothing to worry about. We scheduled a doctor’s appointment for Friday and walks on the beach every day in between. Picking up trash, waddling and bending, Mom felt sure this activity would get my body and Eulala moving toward the big day. And if the baby didn’t come over the weekend, no problem! Mom could teach the ikebana class to the gaggle of neighbors who were wildly awaiting Eulala’s arrival.

  A pregnant woman’s belly can be ridiculous at first sight. (Especially mine, considering I had gained seventy pounds and my belly was a bubble that entered the room at least a minute before the rest of my body.) This same ridiculous belly is also an invitation. An invitation specifically to women, to reach out and touch, to caress, to bless, to make contact with the unknown and unseen child within. I didn’t mind. Some women did mind, offended at the presumption that their baby was in fact not theirs to privately carry, not theirs alone to protect and nourish, but, rather, that their baby belonged to a world of women, and harkened back to an ancient village time when women as a group birthed and cared for the baby with the mother.

  My belly seemed to invite women in elevators, on the street, in restaurants, grocery stores, and gas stations, to reach out and touch it. Mom was slightly skeptical of this intimacy. She had already witnessed my new two-piece bathing suit that exposed my pregnant belly and the dark brown line running vertically straight up the middle—something that never would have happened in her day. I was nothing like the movie stars she had seen on the pages of People magazine, celebrities in skin-tight dresses with perfectly rounded basketball lumps contouring their soft jersey knits, hard little movie star bellies in which a perfectly small baby resided, actresses with single chins despite being eight months pregnant. The idea of me trying to mimic these movie stars when my lump was not at all a basketball but rather a beach ball, and I was sporting perhaps five chins in the ninth month of pregnancy—this publicness, this waddling welcoming of the women of the world and the cameras to notice me and celebrate with me was, to her, unseemly.

  Her Dallas upbringing was again clashing with the body freedoms of the modern world, the California openness, the raucous laughs of my actor friends, and though she was uncomfortable, I couldn’t help but love the embrace of it all. I loved the warmth and the freedom. I loved it when a woman saw me on the street and smiled at my waddle, saying, “Welcome to the fold.” The fold—I was in the fold! When a stranger’s hand reached out to touch me, they weren’t really wanting to touch me, but to make contact with the unknown, to make contact with “anticipation,” with “potential,” with life before it was seen and known and owned by all eyes. I was simply a conduit, a container, and as their hands felt for a lump of foot or swell of head, I thought, The more the merrier! YES! Please do bless my belly! Bring it! Bring all the wisdom and love and healing energy you have within you. Let it stream down your long arms and through your slender fingers, into this now nine-pound baby, coiled up, sleeping in the trusting waters of the womb. Let her know it’s going to be okay, that there is a web of womankind that will gather for her, that will uphold her during the trials and tribulations of growing up Girl in America, and let her know that no matter what life brings her, there will be a community of women, women fighting for rights and love and family in the middle of balancing corporate jobs or factory jobs—and these women will guide her along her uncharted path. Yes. All this I felt every time I saw a woman’s eyes light up as she saw my advancing belly and her arm would inadvertently begin to outstretch to touch my ridiculous mound. BRING IT !

  Mom understood my inflated yearning. After all, she had felt the same for her daughters and son, and it was just a matter of time before she began to soften to this ritual, to relax into it and enjoy it. I wondered if she even envied it a bit. I was downright jolly, never lonely for encouragement, and in contrast, her pregnancies may have seemed a bit “stiff upper lip,” something to get through, something women bore on their own until the final days of doctor’s checkups and hospital check-ins. She didn’t have sisters to coo and caw like dizzy seagulls at the joyous news of her pregnancy. She didn’t have actor friends to scream across the phones from New York to Los Angeles, “OH, MY F-ING GOD, CONGRATULATIONS!!!” And even the valets of Beverly Hills would look at my belly and say, “God bless you, Mama.” I wondered what girlfriends had been there for my mom, and soon she began to talk about Mrs. Kolarik, her next-door neighbor with the red hair in California to whom she had taught the fine art of flushing the remains of a dirty cloth diaper down the toilet, but not losing the diaper in the process. And her dear friend Bobby Morgan with her cropped brown hair who lived at the end of the cul-de-sac when we were growing up in Garden Grove, and who provided a Band-Aid when I was five and stubbed my toe on the gravel. These women had been there for Mom, in a much more understated and elegant way, but still a web of women passing on their smock tops, sewing elastic-waisted skirts, taking over childcare for my pregnant mom when morning sickness prevented her from walking her kids to the school bus, keeping home life on track and in harmony. “There is no denying community when the business of birthing is at hand,” Mom said.

  Waddle waddle bend Tuesday. Waddle waddle bend Wednesday and showing off playing volleyball at sunset. Waddle waddle bend Thursday and a trip to Ralph’s grocery store to check out the flower supply. It was clear Eulala was going to be late, and so we would be able to have our neighborhood ikebana class over the weekend. We had noted some bright pink azaleas in the neighborhood that we could cut for our class and the green reedy bullrush planted along several beach paths that we could use for line material. Mom loved to cut from the available supply of outdoor plants and flowers. She was always teaching that you could create an ikebana arrangement from your own backyard materials, and unlike Western arrangements of twenty tulips plunked in a vase, or a perfectly rounded sea of roses, you didn’t need a lot of flowers to make an ikebana arrangement. You simply needed line material for the shin and soe, and a third point—the hikae—was usually a flower. Simplicity and balance were the key, creating a scene in a vase as if it had been plucked from nature.

  So we had made special note of what seemed to be “public property” flowers, public property trees and variegated leaves and flowing grasses. Mom carried her cutting scissors in her purse, and she brought an extra pair of scissors as a present to me; those now lived in the glove compartment of my Grand Wagoneer. As we drove through neighborhoods, we would stop while Mom gently cut a purple iris or red caladium, snipping off shapely willow branches or sharp green leaves of pampas grass. As she gathered the flora she would share little secrets of the trade: “April to August is a good time to peel willow and wisteria. Try soaking it in baking soda and hot water first.” Or: “Crush the bottom of long-stemmed mums to help make an angle, and to help water flow up inside the stem.” Or: “Place pampas grass in vinegar and then cold water to preserve it.”

  She wanted to have a variety of flowers for the c
lass; we were expecting at least ten people from the neighborhood, so we were looking to supplement with flowers like roses and lilies from Ralph’s. Pointing to the fragrant Stargazers, some opened and perfuming the air, some flowers still closed (“Not yet dilated!” I thought), she said, “The buds should be highest in an arrangement. In nature they open last.” She then pointed to the lovely anthurium with its white fireworks design, and showed how a simple two leaves of vibrant anthurium could combine beautifully with a single red caladium and a sprig of soft blue hydrangea to create a lively arrangement, perfect for the Fourth of July. We rummaged among the flowers. “Preserve hydrangea in liquor,” she taught. “Split the stems of the calla lily and place them in cold water.” “Run wire up the inside of stems of birds-of-paradise to help them bend.” “Cut the tips of the palm stem and leaves for a different effect.” She saw the white chrysanthemum and said: “The chrysanthemum is called kiku in Japanese, it is the symbol of fall. Perfect for our class!” We picked up a dozen of the chrysanthemum, swaddled tightly in their netting.

  In the fruit section, she showed how pineapple leaves could be used in an arrangement.

  We wandered to the condiment aisle to pick up some olive oil for dinner. There we met an elderly, soulful woman, perhaps eighty years old, wrinkled, elegant, and slender, and as she saw us approaching with the waddle and sway of a mother duck, her eyes lit up and she instinctively reached out her arm to me.

  “Oh, God bleess you,” she said. “May I?” She reached to touch my stomach. “Is it a girl or a boy?”

  “A girl,” I responded proudly.

  She began stroking my belly as Mom watched patiently. “God bleeessss this little girl. Oh, she big! She big!” We agreed, and Mom shared that in her day, the pregnant mother was strongly encouraged by the doctors NOT to allow the baby to get over seven pounds. “Oh, yeeesss,” the lady agreed. “It haarrrd to deliver a big baby! You have stretch marks? You gonna have stretch marks, you so big!”

  I could tell Mom felt this was getting a bit personal, but I was enjoying it. I liked this old world lady who smelled like cinnamon, and I assured her I did not have stretch marks (not yet, anyway), and that I was supposed to rub cream or oil on my belly to make sure my skin stayed soft.

  “Mmmmmhmmmm,” she said. “Well, in my day, the doctor don’t tell me to rub oil on my belly. He tell me to rub it on my vagina!”

  Mom and I stared at her. She pronounced “oil” as “ol.” She must’ve taken our silence for not understanding her meaning, so she more loudly said, “Yes sir! Your vagina!” Again she was met with silence.

  “MMMMMHMMMM. You got to oooolllll your vagina so that baby can come out!” She delivered all of this extremely helpful information in the middle of the grocery store. Among the spices and exotic oils. Fellow grocers passing by and Mom frozen, staring, in the condiment aisle. I loved this lady.

  “MMMHHHMMMM. Yes, SIR!” Now she demonstrated with a gesture, as our dumbstruck lack of response was a sure indication that perhaps we didn’t actually know where the vagina was. So she reached over a pretend belly, and threw her head back, and gestured with a rubbing motion “MMMHMMMM. YOU got to OOooolllllllllllll your VAGINAAAAA. You got to OOooollllll your VAGINNAAA.”

  Mom, not to be outdone in the teachings of motherhood, grabbed a bottle of olive oil from the shelf, and said, “Extra extra virgin, perhaps?”

  The old lady smiled a sparkly smile, and Mom smiled, and I imagined what this lady’s birthings must have been like—surely not in a hospital but likely at home, on the supper table perhaps, just as my father had been born on his family’s dining room table in the Deep South of El Paso, Texas. I wondered if my grandmothers had oiled their vaginas . . . ?

  Friday found us at my doctor’s office. Eulala was demonstrating in the womb what she would again demonstrate in her teenage years: a remarkable ability to sleep for hours at a time. The doctor was concerned. The sonogram monitor showed very little movement, and Eulala was now nine and a half pounds.

  “Are you drinking enough water?” he asked.

  “Probably not,” I admitted guiltily.

  “Are you resting? Have you slowed down?” he questioned.

  “Ummm . . .” I remembered our waddle waddle bend walks on the beach and shopping at Ralph’s for the ikebana class, the volleyball and flurry of friends constantly stopping by. “Probably not . . .”

  He took two little flat metal things, placed them on either side of my stomach, and gently sent the sound of a buzz into the womb. It was supposed to be a wake-up call, but the monitor still showed very little movement as Eulala continued to slumber in her bubble of peace. He looked hard at me, at Thaddaeus, and at Mom. “You need to drink more water. You are dehydrated, and the baby is dehydrated, and that’s why she isn’t moving. And you need to slow down.” We all three shrank with guilt. “I’m going to keep this monitor on your stomach, and we’ll track her movement for thirty minutes. If she doesn’t show more activity, I’m going to admit you to the hospital across the street and we will give you an IV with electrolytes.”

  The second he left, we began discussing the inconvenience of my being admitted to the hospital—we had SO MUCH TO DO! Walks on the beach! Flower classes to teach! Possibly some sightseeing for Mom! I couldn’t be held up with a day of lying around getting electrolytes on an IV drip! I vowed I would drink more water . . . and began patting my belly, hoping Eulala would wake up. Thaddaeus looked at the electric pads, and announced that he knew how they worked. “Just like a door bell,” he said.

  I had no idea what that meant, but after fifteen minutes of waiting around, Mom and I reluctantly agreed to him putting the pads on my belly and giving it a try himself. “Be careful!” Mom pleaded.

  Thaddaeus placed the silver pads near what we thought was Eulala’s head, and gave the contraption a try. A loud buzz jolted through the many layers of skin and muscle and water . . . and BAM! Eulala woke right up! The lines on the monitor began to jump and wiggle, and we watched the paper feed with pride as it spat out peak after peak of activity.

  “Hmmm,” was all the doctor said when he came back in. He stared at the paper feed. He stared at us. “I guess she woke up . . . Well . . . good.” He grinned, relieved. “Okay, Marcia. Drink more water, and slow down. I’ll see you Wednesday if you haven’t had any contractions, and we’ll measure you for dilation.”

  That was Friday. Sunday, we joined my old acting friend George Newbern and his lovely family for a gospel Catholic church service somewhere down on La Brea. As the elders of the church came down the aisle during the “Peace be with you—And also with you” greeting, the lead elder woman saw the rounded tent of my lavender Sunday dress and her arm stretched out palm first and halted midair.

  “Ohhhh, God bless ya!” she said. “May I?” Her hand was already caressing my stomach. “Oh, GOD BLESS this little child—is it a girl or a boy?”

  “A girl,” I church whispered.

  She wasn’t whispering. “OH, GOD BLESS THIS LITTLE GIRL! And may she come unto the LORD JESUS Christ. And may he love and bless and honor this little girl. May she come to know the WAYS of Jesus a-a-and . . . ,” she stuttered, and then she held her other hand up to her ear while still holding my stomach. It was as if she were listening to a message through an earbud. She looked at me in shock. “GOD is tellin’ me to tell you to drink more water! You have got toxins in your system and the Devil has put them there and you need to drink more water to get them out!” She started to move her hand from her ear, but it shot right back up as she received a second message from God. She wasn’t looking at me now, but rather up to the ceiling of the church. Everyone else was looking at me, aisles and aisles of people. Murmuring “Peace be with you . . . ,” but their eyes kept darting to us in our pews, wondering just what the Devil had put in my system. Someone said “Give them space,” and I looked around to make sure the Devil wasn’t actually there. Soon it was silent in the vast church, only the organ music playing a rich hymn, but no more murmuring
.

  Mom was bent over, digging the bottle of water out of her purse in a cold panic. As Mom surfaced with the water, the elder lady continued: “Aaaannnnnd GOD is tellin’ me to tell you to SLOW DOWN!” She looked at me deeply; she seemed to radiate with light. “There’s a time to go, and there’s a time to slow, and this is your time to slow!”

  Mom, Thaddaeus, and I were in shock. Verbatim—almost—what the doctor had said! Her hand hovered over her ear, waiting for any more messages, and a second later she dropped her hand and smiled. “Well, God tellin’ me to tell you that!” she declared, and the “Peace be with you” resumed, while I eyed the water in the baptismal font, wanting to drink and drink and drink these toxins out of my body. Mom handed me the water from her purse, and then she rummaged around for a scented towelette to cool my fearful forehead. Then she fished out a bobby pin for my errant strand of hair, and finally presented me with a Life Saver breath mint wrapped in plastic for my now acid mouth. All that was missing was the olive oil. While the elder lady may have been receiving messages from God’s shortwave radio, Mom clearly had God’s first aid kit: her purse contained everything.

  Despite the admonishment to “Slow down” from the doctor, the elder, and even the Being on High, we decided to hold the ikebana class. Mom told each student to bring a flat bowl or deep dish-type container, and if they didn’t have that, then tin cans or coffee cans were okay. She also told each of us to bring a small piece of driftwood. We had gathered azaleas, pyracantha, and long strands of wheat grass, and we planned to combine these with brilliant white spider mums and driftwood.

  Our class gathered, noisy and excited. This wasn’t at all like Mom’s garden club or ikebana classes in Fort Worth. Those classes were made up mostly of talented women in their forties through sixties, many of whom had been studying for quite a while, and who were all well aware of the etiquette of flower class. They sat quietly and listened to the instructor, they used the class as a sort of meditation, contemplating the beauty of the flowers and containers, contemplating nature, and in the stillness of the moment allowed their unconscious to deepen creatively and reveal itself in a balanced, harmonious, and surprising arrangement. These classes were full of Mom’s friends. It was her web of women, and they supported each other’s efforts and sat with hands folded while the instructor complimented and critiqued the work. They shared stories over coffee and tea only after the arrangements were made. The arranging part of the class was a quiet, almost spiritual moment.