And Steve, during those first months, seemed somewhat peripheral to our tight circle. The thought came to me one morning that she was my blood relative and he wasn’t, and that while there were things that he could do to make me stop loving him and stop being his wife, there was no way Audrey would ever not be my daughter.
My worst fears—that she would be too much with me— seemed to have come true. Steve was devoted to her, and she loved it when he played with her. But when she was tired or hungry, it was her mother she wanted. She didn’t know, I read, that she and I were two separate people. Not for her, yet, adolescent rebellion or the devastating announcement a five-year-old I know delivered to his mother once, “I hate you, but you still love me.” To Audrey, I was perfect.
At Thanksgiving we went to Steve’s parents’ house in Ohio and spent an evening viewing family slides. My father-in-law looking like Steve, in a T-shirt, standing outside a tiny rented house with a very pretty young woman who is now my mother-in-law and the three-week-old baby who is now their thirty-two-year-old son. More babies: getting teeth, losing them, getting them again, standing in front of a succession of larger and grander Christmas trees. Charley, Steve’s father, still handsome, but losing some of his hair; Anne, Steve’s mother, still pretty, but more lined. Then one by one, the children going off to college, until the slides show just the parents again, except at moments like Thanksgiving, when the children come to visit.
Now Audrey—I am both saddened and relieved to say—has already begun preparing for her departure. At the age of one, her declarations of independence are, like her, small. But when, on a day that registers five below zero, she pulls off the mittens I’ve put on her (three times in a row) and in spite of the cold, smiles defiantly at me, when she wriggles from my lap and heads for her own room and her xylophone, I am reminded that she is no longer what I used to call her, jokingly: my protégé. And that, though Steve may never give me the looks of total adoration Audrey sometimes gives, neither is he likely ever to throw a piece of scrambled egg in my face. He was here first and will, I hope, stay longest.
Already there are parts of my daughter’s life I don’t know about. On weekdays, from nine to five, she goes to her babysitter Irma’s house, where she plays with other children, hears Spanish spoken, listens to Irma’s husband, José, play songs on the guitar that I have never heard. The top of her head, that used to smell like me, smells like Irma’s kitchen now. Audrey knows some secrets. We no longer own her, if we ever did.
We go back and forth like dancers, my children and I. Two steps apart, one step back together. They need me utterly, they need me not at all. They want me to help, they want to do it all themselves. And luckily, they do still want me, need me, and I hope (for moments, anyway) they always will.
We were in our car, driving to the movies—my friend Ellen with her three children and me and my two older children. Steve had been away on a trip for two nights and I was finding every opportunity to be somewhere besides home. (So much so, that I was taking my seven-year-old and three-year-old to see Fred Astaire in Top Hat, at a theater some thirty miles away from our home.) Ellen is divorced, so for her, single parenthood is familiar and holds no new terrors. But I had been feeling lonely. Nights, especially, seemed long.
It was dark. Our older children were giggling and whispering in the back seat, recounting adventures and making future plans. Charlie (who was permitted to come along, instead of staying with Willy and the babysitter, only after taking a solemn vow that he would not cry or whine or spill his refreshments during the movie), sat very quiet and bolt upright in his car seat, sucking his thumb, listening to the others, looking out at the night. Suddenly his voice piped up from the back seat, “I want you, Mom. I want you.”
I was at the wheel. The movie was due to start in fifteen minutes, and we still had a good thirteen minutes of driving to get there. “Remember your promise,” I told Charlie. “You said if I let you come to the movies with us, you’d be a big boy.”
“I want you,” he said again. Not crying, not whining. Just a statement of fact, but delivered with some urgency, the way a child might say he needed to go to the bathroom or that he just remembered he left his science project on the kitchen counter.
“When we get to the movie you can sit on my lap,” I said. “You’ll get popcorn. Maybe a drink.”
Audrey joined in, “You’re lucky to be here, Charlie. Think of Willy. He didn’t get to come at all.”
“There’s going to be dancing in the movie,” said one of the other children helpfully. “Do you like to dance, Charlie?”
Charlie loves to dance. When I put on our Michael Jackson album for him and he starts moving to the beat, I think he forgets where he is entirely. He jumps off furniture, he twirls, he poses, he gets down on the floor and spins. When the song ends, he freezes in position, with one hand raised, and one finger pointed. His face registers something that sure looks like passion to me. And then he wants to hear the song all over again.
But right now all he wanted was me. “I want you,” he said again.
“Shall I sing you a song, Charlie?” I said soothingly. “Would you like ‘Hush, Little Baby’ or ‘Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night’?”
You. I want you.
Ellen laughed softly in the seat next to me. She’s been on her own for a couple of years now. A young, attractive woman, living in a small New Hampshire town with not a whole lot of single men over age nineteen around. “I’d love to hear those words,” she said. And the truth is, you don’t even have to be divorced for those words to have a strong effect. Husbands and wives, married a few years, paying bills, raising children, putting up and taking down storm windows, don’t always get around to saying those words to each other.
My son was saying them again. Over and over, like a chant. Like the little engine that could, going over the mountain. Like a mother comforting a child who’s just fallen down the stairs (“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay”). Like a medicine man, dancing around the bonfire, pounding a drum.
“Tell me what you want, Charlie,” I said.
“I want you to hold me.” That simple.
Now, there are lots of ways I try to be a good mother. I tell my children every day how wonderful they are, and how much I love them. I read them lots of books, I play games, I seek out interesting, stimulating “quality time” experiences at museums and concerts. I take them to old Fred Astaire movies, at which, if the truth be told, they will be politely attentive, but a little less than enthralled. I read about child development, and I debate, with my friends, ways to approach discipline, the importance of bedtimes, whether it’s a good idea to perpetuate the notion of Santa Claus.
But the truth is, there is not much that’s more important, I sometimes think, than just putting your arms around your child, tight. They want me. I want them. With all of our new, heightened consciousness about child sexual abuse—all those sensible and necessary reminders for children, in between the Saturday morning cartoons, to the effect that their bodies are their own, and private, and not to be violated—I have to insert the assurance, here, that what I’m talking about here isn’t incest or sex abuse. But sometimes I like my children to be in bed with me. Sometimes I can’t keep my hands off them. I want to nuzzle my face in their bellies, take a bite out of their ears, kiss every one of their toes.
So on the way to the movie, with three minutes left, and the older children groaning faintly, “Come on, we’ll miss the beginning.” I pulled over alongside the highway, put on my parking brake and my warning lights. Got out, came around to Charlie’s side of the car, opened the door and unbuckled his seat belt, picked him up and gave him the number of kisses he asked for, which was ten. Buckled him back in again. Got back in the driver’s seat. Headed off to see the show. Fred Astaire got Ginger Rogers too.
Steve and I had been away on a trip for three days, leaving our children home with Vicky, and amazingly, everything had gone well. Then the plane touched down and the flight a
ttendant made her announcement about checking under the seat for carry-on bags. And when I did I realized my purse was missing.
I could have left it in North Carolina, when we changed planes there. I could have left it in Savannah, at the airport waiting room where we sat for a half hour before boarding the plane. I could even have left it in the ladies’ room, or in the cab we took to the airport. All I knew was, the purse was gone.
When we got off the plane I rushed, first thing, to the baggage office and had a man there call those other airports. All lines were busy, so he told me he’d take my name and let me know if anything turned up. I could tell from his expression (hearing the long list of places where the purse might be) that he didn’t hold out much hope of reuniting me with my bag. I could feel an awful headache coming on as I began tallying my losses.
Naturally, my wallet and credit cards were in my purse, but that wasn’t the half of it. There were my glasses. My driver’s license. My checkbook. It had taken me weeks to get my account in order, and now I wouldn’t have a clue where I stood.
Standing at the baggage carousel waiting for our suitcases to emerge, images of other items in that purse kept coming to mind: a pair of screw-on earrings in the shape of fruit baskets, that I’d bought at a flea market. (They always hurt, so I’d often end up taking them off and sticking them in my purse. But I loved those earrings.) A favorite toy of Charlie’s. A long letter I hadn’t got around to mailing.
Well, we found our suitcases, and Steve went to bring the car over to the door just outside the baggage claim. We buckled ourselves into our seats, shivering in the winter weather, still dressed for Georgia. Here in Boston it had begun to snow, and we had a hundred-mile drive ahead of us. I could tell from the way Steve held the wheel and the look on his face that the roads were very slick.
It usually takes us an hour and a half to make that drive from the airport, but that night we took twice as long. Three times we started to go into a skid, and we passed half a dozen cars that had turned around completely, or spun off the highway and landed in a ditch. I gripped the seat covers and pictured Steve and me killed in a crash, our children orphaned.
I also thought about my purse. I’m not sure whether it was the loss of the purse that made me feel more vulnerable in the storm or the storm that made me feel more vulnerable without my purse, but whatever it was I know I felt as if the ground had slipped out from under my feet. I was without my children. Our car was skidding. And my purse was in some strange southern city, where I wasn’t.
About twenty miles from home I remembered my address book was in my purse, and in it were the names and addresses of everyone I knew and care about on the face of the earth, including at least thirty people I hadn’t seen in years—old acquaintances I’d never be able to find without that address book. Never mind that I hadn’t written or called them in years. As long as I had my address book I knew I could. And now they had all disappeared forever.
Well, we made it home safely, got the report from Vicky on how things had gone, tiptoed upstairs to take a look at the children, asleep in their beds. No disasters had taken place in our absence: the house was immaculate. There was no bad news in our four days’ accumulation of mail. Still I felt unsettled, and lay awake a couple of hours, running over and over in my head the places where I might have left my purse. I pictured it hanging from the hook against a ladies’ room door in Savannah. Propped on the floor next to a water fountain in North Carolina where I’d stopped to take a drink. I drifted into an uneasy sleep (dreams full of car wrecks) and woke with a gasp. I had just remembered one more thing that was in my purse.
A set of photographs (and negatives) taken one weekend in early fall. There were half a dozen shots taken on top of a mountain we’d climbed with the children: Audrey had just lost a tooth; Willy was bundled up in three layers of sweaters—the only time in his life, Audrey pointed out, when he actually looked chubby. There were pictures of a play the children had put on: Willy in a rhinestone-trimmed hat and an orange silk gown that trailed along the floor; Charlie as a cowboy; Audrey, as always, the queen. There was a really goofy bunch of pictures—my favorites—taken at a place we’d stopped at, on a Sunday drive, where they sold garden sculptures. The children loved that place, would’ve happily stayed there all day. We took Charlie’s picture on the back of a nearly life-size ceramic deer, and Audrey’s embracing a statue of a Greek goddess she’d begged to buy.
The day after we got home, when the man from the airline called back to say my purse hadn’t been found, I began sorting my losses. There hadn’t been much money in my wallet. Canceling those credit cards was a nuisance, but I could bear that too. Glasses were replaceable. About the names in the address book, I told myself that at least those old acquaintances could always find me.
Losing the pictures was the worst. I understood, for the first time, what it must be like for people who get wiped out in a fire and end up (the lucky ones, who survive) with no record of their children’s babyhood. Family history wiped out. All I’d lost was the record of one good weekend, and still I felt devastated.
I spent most of the next day and a half on the phone to airports—New York, Charlotte, Atlanta—trying to trace the route that plane had taken after we got off. I thought, crazily, of taking a drive up to that mountaintop again, to retake those pictures, of stopping again at the place with the garden sculptures and repositioning our children on the backs of those elves and deer. Of course I was glad to be home with my real, flesh and blood children. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about that roll of film. I imagined the stranger in whose hands my purse must have ended up—pictured him flipping through the pictures of our family, thinking about us briefly (filling in the pieces of our life), and then tossing the envelope in some trash can. I wept.
Three days after I lost my purse, I got a call from the airline, telling me the purse had turned up in Miami. When the woman who called with the news began running down the list of credit cards she’d found in my wallet I interrupted her. What about those pictures, I asked.
“They’re here,” she said. “I figured you’d only want to hear about the valuables. We’ll send everything up to you this afternoon.”
So now I have my pictures back, and today I’m sticking them in our album and thinking about what it is that makes me so compulsive about my children’s photographs. (Also an envelope full of hair from Willy’s first barbershop haircut. A pair of binoculars Charlie made out of two taped-together toilet-paper rolls. A pebble Audrey once gave me, with the instruction that I hold onto it forever—which I’m attempting to do.)
And here’s what I think: So much of raising children is about letting go. No wonder I’m always trying to hold on to whatever I can.
I can still remember the struggles I went through over my hair and clothes when I was growing up. I remember what it felt like, being made to wear an outfit I hated. I remember the naked feeling of too-short bangs. Practical brown shoes, when what I wanted were red ones. Undershirts, cardigan sweaters, snowpants. I vowed I’d never make a child of mine endure those indignities.
And later, when the choice of what to wear was finally up to me, I remember the daily indecision. Changing three times, four times, five … laying pools of clothes on the floor of my room as I tried on one outfit after another, searching for the one that looked and felt right on that particular day. The practice of those endless changes carried on into my twenties. The tears at the mirror. The impulsive visits to beauty parlors. (Let me be a redhead. Give me curls. Take them away.)
Then I was married, and, right away, pregnant. There’s the ultimate humbling experience, for someone who’s spent twenty years examining her reflection from all angles for the least indication that she might look fat. Suddenly—no doubt about it—I was, and not just in the belly either, but round-faced and thick-ankled too. I gained fifty pounds with that first pregnancy (thinking, innocently, that I was simply eating for two). The day after giving birth to my seven-and-a-half-pound baby gi
rl, I stepped on the scale and found I still weighed forty-two pounds more than I used to. I cried and cried and cried.
Well, I lost the weight eventually. The time came when I once again fit my jeans. But though I still get dressed up now and then, and still put on my eyeliner every morning, without fail, motherhood signaled the end, for me, of a particular sort of vanity. These days I have no time to spend agonizing over which blouse, which stockings, which pair of earrings. I step into the same pair of jeans every morning, and one of the same three tops. I, who used to spend sixty dollars on a city haircut and perm, now cut my own hair, and I don’t even check a mirror when I do the back.
But the end of one kind of vanity brought with it the beginning of another sort. It began the day Audrey was born, the first time I put her in a dress. Of course I would’ve loved her if she’d looked like a monkey, but from the first she was beautiful, with dark skin and black eyes, lots of dark-brown hair, and eyelashes so long a woman once bent over her stroller and pulled at them to see if they were real. A friend of mine says that in the early days after the birth of her first child, she once spent twenty minutes dressing her son, then walked out of the house with him in his new outfit and herself stark naked. Heading out the door to a party, a few weeks after Audrey’s birth, I once found myself saying to Steve, “I’ll be right with you as soon as I put her eyeliner on.” For a moment there, I had forgotten who was who.
Having a child is part birth, part death. It means stepping back, leaving the younger generation to join the older, being no longer the newest, most precious. You look in the mirror, and it tells you someone else is fairest in the land.
I never minded that. I have always reveled in my daughter’s strange, exotic beauty. But it’s dangerous too. I am not her. She isn’t me. Brushing her hair won’t make mine shiny.
In my mind I know that. But mornings, lately, getting her ready for school, I have had to keep reminding myself of our separateness, and how dangerous it is to invest one’s self too deeply in one’s child. In her looks, especially.
Domestic Affairs Page 23