The Seasons of My Mother

by Marcia Gay Harden

  “Do you know Joni Mitchell?” I say. And while Joni trills, I tell stories of Crete and when I camped there, and the little town of Matala, and I say, “Listen closely now to Joni Mitchell sing ‘Carey, get out your cane.’ Yes, that was in Matala, where I camped one Grecian summer.” They know me, a little, by the music I play and share. Just as I knew my mother by her music. Our households holding hands for a moment.

  I begin to understand the synchronicity of dissolution. It makes perfect sense to me, as I lie on my mom’s big bed in Texas, that we are both going through loss. Tony Kushner was right: all pain, and all healing, is related. The world is connected. Divorce, like Alzheimer’s, creates holes in history, and leaves each person—parents and children—with an unknown future. We define ourselves by our relationships, by our “things”: homes and cars and clothes, by our work, by our health, by our memory. But in the face of loss, we often have to redefine ourselves. Without my husband, who was I? Without her memory, who was my mother? Without their father, what was our family? Defining the self without any attachments or anchors would prove to be our most difficult task. “The uncertainty of tomorrow” was causing me to hold even tighter to traditions and values that I wanted to pass down to my kids. I worried that much would dissipate as I began to accept divorce. Would the kids still want to pick blueberries on our country property in the Catskills and make blueberry jam? Would we still take our annual Christmas picture? Would they rather spend time with me or with their dad, or would it be a—God forbid—competition? Would they still clock the seasons by the loud honk of Canadian geese flying north and south over the lake? Or would those experiences just be holes, empty memories of a time now past?

  Inhale: Mom and Dad loved birding. Assimilate: they passed that on to their children together. Exhale: at the lake home we built, Thaddaeus and I passed on to our kids the love of birds. I worried that the breath of exhalation would become ragged with divorce, that these gifts of how to observe nature, this love of birding and identifying the birdcalls, would be lost. When we had first settled into our stone cottage, we had bought birding books. On nature walks with the children, we had pulled them out and identified the winged creatures. With binoculars focused to the sky, we pointed out the soaring red hawk, the diving osprey, and the great horned owl sitting still in the trees. We had seen swans on the lake, and the common loon, the scarlet tanager and black cormorant. We had watched the eagle build its nest and raise eaglets each spring. I feared that I wouldn’t be strong enough or diligent enough to uphold these customs alone. But I was wrong. Eulala insisted, “You are a warrior, Mom. A warrior.” Me? A warrior?

  And a warrior I became. I still gather my children on the porch during a storm, and we watch the sheets of rain blanket the lake. We pull out the bird books to identify the mallards. We delight in the Canadian geese as they loudly honk and honk in their gliding V preparing to go south for the winter. Tradition is not lost, even when I am a single mom. I am relieved when my children marvel at the great blue heron as he glides in dusky grace across my lake. I laugh that we still shout “eagle” as we see the mother bird, capped in white, soar high above the trees, and on our walks heading to blueberry hill, I smile with pride when I hear my kids point out, “That’s a red-winged blackbird, Mom!” as we pass the marsh and see a glimpse of shocking red and black lift off a cattail and flit to a new spot. Now, I wish my mom could connect this thread to herself. I wish she could connect the fact of her canvas bag filled with flower books, her binoculars and camera to the small values that my children have inherited, ones that enrich their lives. And I wish she could see what a woman can do alone. I wish she could know that I could only have made it alone because of her warrior example. But I felt like no warrior as I was lying on her bed in Texas that cold February in 2011. In the trenches of her covers, I felt embarrassed, and a failure, and somehow stunned that life hadn’t turned out as I had expected it to.

  “Hush, Marcia Gay. Hush, now.” She stroked my brown hair, with no smile in her eyes.

  I had expected my marriage to surmount the rising statistic of the divorce rate. It went from a low 23 percent in the late fifties to almost 50 percent in the eighties and nineties. It has supposedly tilted to over 50 percent today. Whatever. It is high. And as divorce rates rose due to societal changes and attitudes, so rose my certainty that I would not be part of this new statistic. This statistic did not change my thinking on “the wedding day” and vows. Taught by my parents, who stayed together till death did them part, through thick and through thin, through sickness and in health, I knew the same would be true for me. No April Fools were they—a vow was a vow, a promise was a promise, and they made their choices and lived their lives. Travel, children, and a fur coat. For me it would be: travel, children, possibly a fake fur coat, and my work. I believed in the fairy tale, and I believed that marriages would last forever and that there was such a thing as one love. At least I believed that mine would last. No, I wouldn’t be a part of the declining marriage statistic. I would wear virginal white and throw the bouquet; I would even wear the lacy garter at the insistence of my girlfriends, and I would proudly wear the golden pendant, handed down from my great-grandmother.

  When Thaddaeus popped the question on New Year’s Eve in New York one frozen wintery night, we knew we would have a Texas ceremony. My parents and two sisters lived there, and much of my extended family as well, but most importantly, my ninety-year-old grandfather, Tattau, lived in Texas. Tattau was one of my favorite people in the world, and he and Thaddaeus were like two peas in a pod. When I first introduced Thad to the family, Mom had of course loved him. His name was Thaddaeus, after all, the same name as her husband and her son—what were the chances? My typically skeptical dad softened after Thad presented him with a signed Cowboys football at Christmas. And Tattau sized him up positively due to Thad’s mechanical ability that Tattau said was a lost art. They spent hours in Tattau’s “fix it shop,” building things, repairing things, and talking about history.

  I didn’t want a church wedding, I told my mom. I certainly didn’t want anything too traditional. I had waited too many tables at The Pierre hotel in New York City and had seen too many banquet-type weddings and I did not want a banquet-type wedding. I had also catered many events at museums and private homes, and I wanted something simpler, something rustic. Also, I wanted Tattau to attend, and he refused to fly on a plane. And he wasn’t getting any younger, so I knew I had to do it sooner than later. When suddenly I booked two movies that would be shooting back-to-back starting in the summer and well into the fall, that decided our place and timing. We needed to have a wedding no more than two hours from my grandpa’s home in Texas, and it needed to be before I began shooting the movies!

  Mom, my aunt Lynnie, and I began to location scout, and it didn’t take long before we found a Christian ranch in Hunt County that catered to large youth groups at the same time as hosting private events. It was wonderful and rustic and enormous. There was an exterior golden stone amphitheater overlooking a valley and the Pecos River below. Red-tailed hawks soared at sunset. Just above the amphitheater sat a hunting lodge that could sleep the wedding party; it had a rounded bell tower topping the sky, and I could already envision the bell deeply ringing when I would walk down the dusty road in my bridal gown from the hunting lodge to the amphitheater. “Perfect,” my mother murmured. There was a bunkhouse for all twenty of my college chums. They were my second family—the small group of NYU graduate actors with whom I had spent three wonderful, tortuous years of acting prep. There were several other lodges and buildings, perfect to accommodate my extended family, and Thaddaeus’s extended family. Maybe about 150 people were to be invited—and many of them I planned to put up at the ranch. “It’s just perfect, Marcia Gay,” Mom said. “I will do your flowers!”

  We planned a three-day weekend, except that it wasn’t a weekend, really. All dates before July 4 were taken, so we took the next Monday and Tuesday. I wasn’t aware at the time how inconsiderate I
was, asking my friends and family to take off work and travel to Texas on a hot Sunday, in the middle of a drought, to attend my wedding on a Tuesday in July. The fact that I wasn’t aware meant that everyone had been amazingly understanding, because I also wasn’t aware of any gossiping or grumbling, either, and my mother didn’t admonish me to pick another date and my sisters didn’t fuss about missing work—all of which would have been perfectly understandable! I think everyone understood the ticking clock involved in my decision: Tattau’s age and health, coupled with the fact that the movie I had booked, Desperate Measures with Andy Garcia, was now set to begin filming the day after the wedding! I literally had to fly to Los Angeles the next morning. (Of course I was hungover and of course I missed my flight, but that’s another story.) I would be shooting Desperate Measures in tandem with Flubber with the late, great Robin Williams, so things were moving really quickly and I was racing to keep up. It was a fast time, a heady time, and my friends and family completely supported this magical moment: me starring in two movies, and finally getting married.

  My mother was ecstatic. She had, in truth, been worried about me. She wanted love and family and home very badly for me, because she knew how much I wanted them, too. I had wanted children since I was four, and here I was now, thirty-six years old with eggs surely in the “soon-to-be-overripe” category. I wanted a husband—no, I wanted a knight. But he had to be a hippie, a hippie knight. And I wanted children. Beautiful hippie children who were kind and talented and artists.

  My desires seemed simple enough—I mean, weren’t there hordes of hippie knights roaming the cities? But my lack of being in any kind of an enduring relationship was troubling to my mom. She had seen how I picked on my boyfriends; my standards were high and surrender did I not. “You are not the boss of me” was a silent mantra in my head. I was outspoken and loyal and capable, a little wild and often mean, and demanding and critical, to boot. I had gotten into the pattern of picking rather unformed men, men who couldn’t possibly be the boss of me. And I would naturally try to change them, yet be angry at the parts of them that were still undeveloped, and of course such a man couldn’t possibly also be a knight for me. I picked poets, who enjoyed my apartments and my credit cards. I picked other actors who resented my limelight. I picked champagne drinkers with hidden lipstick stains on their collars. I picked hippies in colorful vans who couldn’t settle down, and through it all, Mom watched, and waited. Though happy that I was pursuing my lifelong dreams and on my own journey, she wished I was softer, she was concerned that my no bullshit nature wouldn’t make room for a husband, and thus I would never achieve my other dream, that of domestic bliss.

  Several years after I graduated from NYU and was well into building my film career, my mother visited me in Santa Fe while I was shooting Late for Dinner. I was playing a woman who welcomes back her cryogenically frozen husband, and on the day Mom visited the set, I was in old-age makeup, which I had forgotten to tell her about. My trailer was parked near a little stream, with a view of pine and birch trees, and pine needles covering the ground. Mom was picked up from the airport by our film transpo guys and delivered to base camp, where I could now see her out the window of my trailer as she picked her way across the parking lot, drinking in the crisp mountain air. She was carrying her camera across her shoulder, and in her cloth bag I could see the familiar binoculars and flower books.

  I burst out of my trailer to welcome her, and she gasped when she saw me, then stood still. She stuttered, “Coco . . . you look so much like my mother Coco.” Then she burst into tears. It had been years since her mom had passed away, and she hadn’t really gotten to say good-bye to her. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she had seen her in me. I held her in the parking lot as we both stood on crushed pine needles, her bag limp at her side, and it was odd, me the daughter playing a woman my mother’s age, but looking like her mother, holding her as her mother would have done, while she cried.

  The PA blithely interrupted with “You’re wanted on the set, Ms. Harden,” and we walked arm in arm across the stream, Mom in her rust-colored sweater and Indian print skirt, and flat loafers tapping across the bridge. Once on set, the crew arranged a director’s chair right behind the monitor, and someone brought her a plate of food from craft service. Everyone treated her like a queen! I was so proud. Mom’s visit to set was going exactly as I had imagined.

  I was finding my marks, rehearsing the moment just before my supposedly dead husband reappears after having been frozen for nearly thirty years. My character (Joy) was worried: she was now old and he was much younger coming back to her, and the scene was about how love defied age and how my husband loved me now just as he did thirty years ago when he had been frozen (ummmhmmm). So I was rehearsing this scene, and was imagining Joy’s fear as she was about to reunite with her long lost husband. In the final moments before action was called the set buzzed with last-minute adjustments. I could see Mom was thrilled as she watched intently from the sides, staring raptly into the monitor. As I concentrated on my character Joy, a tear came to my eye, and I looked understandably perplexed and worried while waiting for my husband—played by Brian Wimmer, my super-handsome costar—to knock on the door of my house. Creating my moment before . . . a frown, a tear, anticipation . . . I was now ready!

  They called for quiet on the set. I heard the clapper board clap and sound speed confirmed, and seconds before “Aaannnnd Action!” was called, in the blackened silent room, I heard a soft “Psssst. PSSTTT.” It was coming from somewhere behind the monitors. “Pssst” again, and I looked up to discover my mother hissing at me. She gave me the gesture of “Smile,” moving her two hands into a large grin at her mouth.

  “What?” I whispered, completely flummoxed. “What?” I repeated, a little louder, irritated a bit that Mom was now directing me.

  “Smile,” she whispered back from the dark. “Smile, honey. You look so much prettier when you smile!”

  Oh, my, did I love that lady . . . though at that moment I wanted to say, “Get her OFF the set!” Instead I tried the scene with a little smile, just for her.

  I knew why my mom wanted me to smile so much. I had fallen in love with a local boy in Santa Fe, a coffee-serving, bagpiping poet, and already my mother could sense the teary and tumultuous separation that took two years to come, at the end of which she held me while I sobbed, “What is WRONG with MEEEE? Why won’t anybody love MEEE?”

  Though she soothed me with “Nothing, darling—nothing is wrong with you,” resting my head in her corduroy lap, my tears falling on the brown couch, she did wish I had a softer tongue, a more willing smile, and a greater sense of surrender. She liked that I was bold, but did I have to jaywalk? Did I have to be so tough? She didn’t quite know how to tell me how to hold on to my power and yet be a partner at the same time. Perhaps because she had relinquished her own power so much of the time—though she never relinquished her dignity. So in that moment, in Santa Fe in that scene with my returning husband, Mom needed to see me smile in order to validate the possibility of love in my future.

  She was to be rewarded, as was I, because years later, again on another movie set, I fell in love with a crew guy, a remarkable man named Thaddaeus. A week before Mother’s Day weekend, Mom arrived in Peacham, Vermont, where we were shooting the film The Spitfire Grill. Mom loved to visit me while I was filming on location; it was her way of continuing to travel and explore. Travel, children, and a fur coat. Dad was busy working at an important air communications company in Texas, and he liked for her to get away and have fun—as long as she didn’t expect him to join her.

  The film was a small independent feature starring the phenomenal, mystical Ellen Burstyn, and I was renting an old stone house in the middle of the woods and biking to set along a dusty country road, mooing back at the cows that cheered me up the hill. The house was perhaps four hundred years old, with an enormous walk-in fireplace, and rooms with no closets, just pegs on the wall for hanging clothes. It smelled of lavender that I boiled in littl
e pans on the stove, and wood, and earth, and fresh laundry.

  So this Mother’s Day visit in the beautiful Vermont woods was precious girl time, precious mother-daughter time, and we had planned to drive up to Montreal in my Grand Wagoneer over the weekend. Mom had barely arrived and put down her bag with the flower books and camera before I burst out with my news that I had fallen in love with a prop boy named Thaddaeus. Of course, she was shocked that he had the same name as my father and my brother. We joked that there would be many long hours on a psychiatrist’s couch to figure that one out! (And we were right . . . as it turns out.)

  Thaddaeus was living nearby with the prop boys—they soon rewarded me with the nickname, “Prop-tart”—and we were in the first flush of love, so Mom’s arrival was a kind of intrusion into our very fresh and new affair. But it was Mom, after all. From her point of view, perhaps Thad was an intrusion on her trip? She never said as much, of course, as we had long ago decided on that mother-daughter trip to New Zealand that when we traveled together, we would give each other the freedom to be ourselves, to be adults! I could curse and smoke and have sex if I wanted to, I didn’t have to be her “little girl,” and she didn’t have to be “Mom,” or even “the mom of Marcia Gay,” she could just be Beverly. I could be myself, and she could be herself. So I wasn’t about to ignore Thaddaeus or pretend he didn’t exist, but it was a bit of a balancing act to give my best to both of them. She was so generous, though, as usual. She just wanted to be a part of it all, and she was hopeful and joyful that finally, I was in love. Thaddaeus in kind was very welcoming to Mom, he could see that she was my best friend, and whoever would be with me would have to learn how to share me with her.