by Laura June
“Because of the nature of your mother’s illness, her heart, kidneys, and liver are not donatable,” the woman agreed. “But her eyes are.”
Even today, I think about the fact that someone somewhere is walking around with one or both of her eyes (or parts of them, anyway: it’s certainly more poetic to think of it as the entire eye). One of those same eyes that witnessed my birth, the birth of my three brothers. Eyes that witnessed all the things in her life that I didn’t see. Eyes that were with her when I was not. It makes me feel something akin to happiness when I think that one or both of those eyes still see just now. Awake, like me, at 5:00 a.m. on a Sunday, one day after the tenth anniversary of her death.
I think too about all the things those eyes did not see. Her daughter getting married, her granddaughter being born. And I realize, when I think about her eyes and the fact that she was missing from those great events, the happiest parts of my life all lived after she was gone, that what I wrote to her in that letter just months before she died wasn’t true at all. I wouldn’t have kept Zelda from her. I just didn’t know that then, before she was dead and before Zelda was born. And like my mother’s boyfriend, I suspect it would never have occurred to Zelda to think of my mother as I did: as less than I wanted her to be.
I want to say that my mother dying wasn’t a surprise, but it was. Even knowing what I knew about her, even knowing how hard on her body she had been, she’d always seemed immortal to me. But she wasn’t, and her death was in many respects a relief to me. I don’t mean that I was happy she was gone. I wasn’t. But her death ended that slow, constant bubbling of worry that I had had for as long as I could remember and answered the question of what I was going to do about our relationship: it was over.
CHAPTER 20
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On a Wednesday in June of 1977, my mother, who was born on a Wednesday in August, gave birth to me, and I became her daughter. She was not quite twenty-five years old when I arrived, just four years after my brother David (who was born on a Tuesday in July). I was named after my father, Lawrence Joseph: Laura June. But I was also named after my mother, Kathleen June.
At the age of twenty-seven, I began to construct a family tree, partly because the bureaucratic, paper trail nature of genealogy appealed to me and partly because I wanted to trace the origin of my middle name, June. I knew that my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother had all been given it by their mothers, but I wanted to find the beginning. I found that most of us Junes were born on Wednesdays.
When I started looking for Junes and building my family tree, I had no relationship with my mother to speak of. I actively avoided her calls, in fact, and a big part of me assumed that I would probably never have children. If I had thought about it further or been asked about it, I think I would have said that I would not give a daughter of mine the middle name June, even though I like the idea of a matrilineal name.
As I sat at my computer, or at the dining room table of our Brooklyn apartment, I didn’t think I was looking for “meaning” in a grand sense. I wasn’t drawing conclusions; I was looking for facts. I found them. Thousands of facts. The secret joy of doing something like a family tree is that the potential number of facts is infinite, and the work is never done. I hunkered down and drowned myself in the details. I forgot about my initial goal—looking for June #1—for months at a time, mired in the muck of searching for lost cousins or a dead and forgotten infant sibling of a long-dead aunt or uncle I had never met. I traveled back six or seven generations, and when the trail dried up, I moved onto constructing a family tree for my husband Josh, satisfied as I linked our trees together with our marriage. It was a warm but lonely place to be: obsessed with my distant origins while my actual relationships with my family were, to be blunt, not good.
“Oh June, because you were born in June,” people have said to me my whole life. To which I have often said, “Well, my mother is a June and she was born in August.” I’m nothing if not an arguer of minute technicalities that matter sometimes only to me.
“Oh,” the people usually say, seeming deflated or confused, as if the answer isn’t satisfactory. And it isn’t, I agree. I’ve been looking for almost fifteen years now for a better answer, but I haven’t found one yet. I don’t know what the point is, and I suspect there isn’t one. Just like everyone else with a family name, it’s just a name passed down.
But when I knew that I was pregnant and that I was going to have a girl, the middle name came to us first; there was barely a discussion of it. Josh and I agreed on that: whoever she was going to be, she would be [insert name] June. My mother was long gone. The name was something I liked so much, in fact, that I had taken to using it as my surname in my writing, partly to distinguish myself from my husband, who was also a writer, and partly because it just sounded so good. My mother always called me by my full name, Laura June. It’s part of me, and now, it’s part of Zelda, too. Carrying around that name draws a line between her and me; she’s the latest link in the chain that reaches back across generations through the meaningless details and calls out to each of us, that we were cared for enough to be given a little piece of everything that preceded ourselves. I’m not a traditional person; I don’t value heirlooms or get sentimental very often. But rather than think of the name as an albatross, I have decided to think of it as a distinction.
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A few weeks ago, Zelda and I were driving back from a morning birthday party, with her strapped in her car seat in the back. It was about 12:30 p.m., and she usually naps at about 1:00 p.m., so I put on Lorde. “I don’t want to sleep!” she wailed, because of course now she knows that Lorde playing quietly in the car means that it’s nap time. The opening of Pure Heroine enrages her, but by track three or four, she’s almost always passed out, her little head slumping over, her now long, thin legs dangling over the edge of her car seat. I don’t know yet if she’ll be tall like her dad or simply average like me, but she seems so large to me already. Only when she’s asleep do the last vestiges of babyhood reveal themselves, her mouth an almost frowning O, her tiny hands balled into fists. She often sweats in her sleep like I do.
She quieted down as Lorde played, got lost in her own thoughts. We have our rules about what we do when we’re driving around, and the goal is for Zelda to sleep. We don’t make eye contact; we don’t talk much, even if she asks a direct question.
Zelda stared out the window and was quiet. Her eyes were almost glazed over, and I thought she was on the road to Sleepy Town. But sometimes, in the weird space between awake and sleep, we are wont to have our most incisive thoughts. Three-and-a-half-year-olds, I have found out, are no different.
“You’re not an orphan . . . ,” she said bluntly, quietly, still looking out the window. “But . . . Nana isn’t your mommy,” she went on. Zelda is obsessed with orphans because of Annie, and Nana is my stepmother. “So . . . ,” she went on, struggling to think. I could see her gears turning in the rearview mirror. “Who is your mama?”
Zelda doesn’t know about death yet. She doesn’t know that people are here and then gone forever. Her concept of “da life cycle,” as she calls it, is that once we live long enough, we get to be babies again. I wanted to answer her truthfully, but in a way that wouldn’t lead to further questions yet.
“Her name was Kathy,” I said.
“That’s a nice name,” she said, still staring out the window. “I liked that birthday party.” She moved on and hasn’t brought it up again. One day, I’ll be ready to tell her everything. I’ll be ready to explain how much my mother would have loved her and how much she loved me. I’m not ready yet.
It’s not easy to know people, to really know them. I’ve worked very hard in the past three and a half years to parent, to mother, in a way that reveals my true self to Zelda without horrifying her too much. I want her to know more about me than I know about my own mother, and I feel like that’s
possible, because I have chosen not to carry secrets with me through life the way that I am certain my own mother did. Secrets can weigh us down. We are all entitled to our private selves, our private thoughts. Even babies, like my mother taught me thirty years ago. But if there is any value to making a chosen family, to my relationship with Josh, it is that he has enabled me to choose honesty, even if only just between ourselves. That alone freed me to begin.
I’ve been talking to myself since before I can remember, holding down a narrative of myself day to day, year to year. I always thought that maybe it was a special feature of just myself, but Zelda has led me to believe otherwise, that we humans are naturally bent toward self-narration. That telling stories about ourselves to ourselves is second nature, that it helps us to understand ourselves and our relationships with other people. Every night at bedtime now, as I said, she wants to hear about the story of her birth.
She wants to hear about when she was born, but she also wants to hear about the day before she was born: one day out of the many days she didn’t exist yet. “I wasn’t here then,” she says. She’s beginning to sense that her existence here hasn’t always been.
“You were born on a Tuesday in February,” I begin.
I have watched Zelda struggle to master the basics, walking and running and hopping on one foot. It reminds me that I once did the same, and that my mother too was just a toddling little girl, adored by her parents, not so long ago. But I marvel to see my daughter working out, mentally and emotionally, a concept of time that doesn’t have her as the center, realizing that there was a time before she existed. I see in her new body and mind a little piece of myself, laying in my bed at night decades ago, sucking my thumb, talking to myself, narrating my day to I wasn’t sure whom. My memory is that I’ve always known I wasn’t the center of my own story; my mother was. I’ve always believed that whatever it was I had to work out in life, somehow, she held the answer. But it’s an answer I can’t find, no matter how hard I struggle to make sense of my mother, her life, and how her story intertwined with mine. I still haven’t figured it out, but in Zelda I have found that being the center of someone else’s life is somewhat inevitable, if you are a mother. My daughter depends on me to tell her her story, to remember the things she loses to time. I hope I do it well.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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My gratitude and love belong to Joshua and Zelda June Topolsky, Valentina Caballero, Carmen Virginia Johns, Dr. Jacques Moritz, Jimmy Miller, Emily Chambers, Vanessa Blyth-Gaeta, Eric Topolsky, Katie Notopoulos, Silvia Killingsworth, Andrew and Darla Childs, Katie Baker, Jen Gann, Paul Ford, Leah Finnegan, Lisa Klimkiewicz, and Maria Bustillos.
Thanks to my coworkers at The Outline and thanks to Andrew’s Couch for the logs.
To the editors of The Awl and The Cut, who helped me to shape my first writings on motherhood—Alex Balk, Choire Sicha, Matt Buchanan, John Herrman, Stella Bugbee, and Izzy Grinspan: thank you.
My agent, Nicole Tourtelot, was the first person to help me begin to mold my work into something larger and louder and for that: thank you.
My editor at Penguin, Sarah Stein, has worked harder on my writing than anyone ever has, and has made it better than it’s ever been in the process: thank you.
Also, to Shannon Kelly at Penguin: thank you for all of your help getting the book through its many, many revisions.
To Carmen Mader and Nicole Mayer, who I met and got to know while writing this, and who gave me something more pressing to think about than myself: thank you.
And finally, to my father, Larry, my brothers, David, Daniel, and John, my stepmother, Donna, and my mother- and father-in-law, Susan and Dave: thank you for your support and kindness and love.
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