I think we were at the kitchen table when my mom told us about a car accident she had when she was in high school. She didn’t even get to tell us in her own time and in her own way because we found out first from a comment made by one of the Texas Department of Public Safety officers on my parents’ detail. She had run a stop sign in the dark and had killed the driver of the other car. The driver happened to be a boy her age, a friend. Before I knew about what had happened, I was often irritated by her constant questions and demands as we left the house: Who is driving? Don’t forget a seat belt. I never suspected that her worries stemmed from an accident that still pained her more deeply than we could know. We didn’t talk about it often, but the story explained a lot, and the older I got, the more I understood my mom’s protective nature. She was the person who would wake each night, and ask my dad, “George, are the girls home?” Years later, she told us that she never really slept until she knew that we were back safe and in our beds.
Mother-daughter relationships can be complicated and fraught with the effects of moments from the past. My mom knew this and wanted me to know it too. On one visit home, I found an essay from the Washington Post by the linguistics professor Deborah Tannen that had been cut out and left on my desk. My mom, and her mom before her, loved clipping newspaper articles and cartoons from the paper to send to Barbara and me. This article was different. Above it, my mom had written a note: “Dear Benny”—I was “Benny” from the time I was a toddler; the family folklore was that when we were babies, a man approached my parents, commenting on their cute baby boys, and my parents played along, pretending our names were Benjamin and Beauregard, later shortened to Benny and Bo.
In her note, my mom confessed to doing many things that the writer of this piece had done: checking my hair, my appearance. As a teenager, I was continually annoyed by some of her requests: comb your hair; pull up your jeans (remember when low-rise jeans were a thing? It was not a good look, I can assure you!). “Your mother may assume it goes without saying that she is proud of you,” Deborah Tannen wrote. “Everyone knows that. And everyone probably also notices that your bangs are obscuring your vision—and their view of your eyes. Because others won’t say anything, your mother may feel it’s her obligation to tell you.” In leaving her note and the clipping, my mom was reminding me that she accepted me and loved me—and that there is no perfect way to be a mother. While we might have questioned some of the things our mother said, we never questioned her love.
Many times, though, my mom says the most without saying anything at all. When Barbara and I went off to college, she gave us each a photograph of her and my father as a young, newly married couple, before they had children. But it was not just any photograph. The snapshot, taken in their backyard, was given to an adoption agency after they had tried for years to conceive and had not succeeded in having a baby to love. When she handed the photo to me, my mother said, “Doesn’t this just look like two people who desperately want to be parents?” I still keep the framed picture by my bed. It was her way of reminding us that we were wanted long before we were born; that to her, we came first.
My mother has never taken us for granted, and there were times when she very much wanted us to know it. The night of my wedding rehearsal dinner, she broke with tradition. Typically, the bride’s mother does not speak, but my mother wanted to stand and give a toast:
When Barbara and Jenna were first born, I remember standing in the garden one night in the last few hours of light after the babies were asleep and thinking, “This is the life!” Jenna and Henry are beginning their lives together. Whatever the future holds, Jenna and Henry will continue to bring happiness and laughter into each other’s lives—into all of our lives.
Twenty-six years after I stood in the garden that happy night thinking of my baby girls, I stand here with you. Tomorrow, my Jenna will stand at a beautiful altar made of the same Texas limestone that is the foundation of our home, and I will feel once more what I felt that night, many years ago: This is the life.
The backyard snapshot our parents submitted with their paperwork to an adoption agency in Texas.
Let Sleeping Vipers Lie
BARBARA
As thirteen-year-olds, we were full of angst and at times unconscionably mean to our mom. We were like so many girls that age, sharp-tongued and headstrong, and she was our most accessible target. Not to mention it was the early ’90s, when teen angst was cool, worsening our mom’s cause.
On the weekends, my mom would start toward our bedrooms to wake us, and my dad would shake his head and say, “No, let sleeping vipers lie.” We were the vipers. And we were, to a certain degree, equal opportunity. When Ganny came for our eighth-grade graduation, she was shocked to discover that the class at our small Episcopal school’s favorite movie (and ours—we saw it in the theater nine times!) was Pulp Fiction. Ganny loved John Travolta and sent us photos of herself and John, grinning and dancing cheek-to-cheek at the White House. Over dinner, she started to talk about the brutal violence in the film, until Jenna interrupted, “Ganny, obviously you don’t understand satire.” I’m sure both our parents were mortified, but Ganny was horrified. I cringe to think of what she would have said if she had seen our seventh-grade class photo, where I flipped off the photographer. (Yes, this happened.)
It all started with a small group of us standing around as we lined up by height to file into the shoot. We all decided to raise our middle fingers in unison. Classic seventh-grade mob mentality. Except I was the only one who actually did it. Some other girls held up their hands in preparation, but mine was the only one with the middle digit fully visible. It was a complete impulse and an exercise in cognitive dissonance. I never considered the consequences, but when the school enlarged the photo, made enough copies for the class, and then noticed the floating hand to my right, I had to confess. I had to march into the Episcopalian headmaster’s office and apologize. My finger was airbrushed out of every photo, and I did my own penance. In the afternoons, I scraped every piece of gum off all the sidewalks around the school.
Jenna and I were not always forgiving as adolescents, but our mom forgave us for everything—well, everything except the Pearl Jam concert Jenna and I went to in Austin in eighth grade. We were allowed to go—that was not the problem. But my friend Molly and I had the inspired idea to stage dive into the mosh pit. We were sure that crowd surfing must be for us. We belonged there. Instead, it was absolutely miserable. Floating as a scrawny preteen with hundreds of sweaty hands pushing me around hurt. I’m not sure how my mom found out; I’ve always thought that Jenna told her. My three minutes of crowd surfing have haunted me for years. Every time my neck hurt after a long flight or when my muscles were sore at age thirty-five after running a half marathon, my mom chimed in: Are you sure it was from running or from the flight? Or do you think it’s from the time you went crowd surfing at Pearl Jam?
Maybe it’s my mom’s way of saying that she had different aspirations for my musical tastes. When I was nine years old and away at summer camp, I wrote home asking for music. My friends had cassettes of New Kids on the Block. My mom sent me what could loosely be called a boy with a band: It was the box set of Bob Dylan’s At Budokan. So while other girls were singing “Step by Step” on repeat all summer long, I was lightly humming “Simple Twist of Fate” to myself.
Lucky for us, our mom was endlessly patient. When our dad was governor, Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) agents drove our mom around. One day, we were riding along with our mom on some now-forgotten occasion or errand. We were giving our mom a hard time almost from the moment the engine turned on. When we arrived at our destination, Jenna and I flatly refused to get out and go in with our mother. Defeated, she walked in alone. We smugly sat in the back—two vipers coiled together. The DPS agent in the driver’s seat turned around. He laid into us, telling us to get out of the car that instant and go inside, adding that he expected us to apologize to her for our awful behavior. He was right. Humiliated, we did as
we were told. And, of course, our sweet mama forgave us. For months afterward, Jenna and I were embarrassed and averted our eyes whenever we saw him on the detail. He’d seen us at our worst. Today, I am ashamed even to tell this story, ashamed of the way we treated our mom, who hardly ever raised her voice to us. Luckily, our thirteen-year-old attitude was short-lived.
What my mom hated most, though, was to miss any of our events or milestones, like the time when I was crowned homecoming queen at Austin High. She knew in advance, but she had a campaign event for my dad, so she couldn’t be at the football stadium that evening. Those are her regrets.
Whether in the governor’s mansion or later in the White House, Mom was singularly determined to normalize our lives. Each year, she moved us into college housing and moved us out when the year ended. She bought storage bins and bed risers, and she had her own ingenious means of packing clothes. We would throw them into heavy-duty trash bags and toss them out my second-floor dorm window to the grass below. Efficient, avoiding stairs, and taking all of ten minutes to clear out a room. (I highly recommend it as a packing method.)
She doesn’t use trash bags anymore, but whenever I have moved, she has been there to roll up her sleeves and help make my new apartment a home. Most of all, though, she is there, always.
On a trip to the Galápagos, my mom and I stopped to watch a baby seal roaming the beach. We realized she was searching for her missing mother, her lost love. When a pup is motherless, other seals will not take it in. This seal was calling out loudly, in a painful screech that sounded to us like, “Mother! Mother!” As I listened, I imagined just how that baby felt and so must’ve my mom. As she reached for my hand, our eyes welled up, and not wanting to show our tears, both of us slid on our sunglasses.
Stargazing
BARBARA
I grew up staring at the stars. On summer nights as little girls in Midland, Texas, after we had showered, my mother would hustle us into the car with our damp hair soaking the backs of our cotton nightgowns, and drive to her parents’ house a few blocks away. My Grammee would be waiting for us. She would spread out a thick pink-and-baby-blue-plaid blanket on the hard, crisp grass. The air above us was hot—desert hot—even after the sun set, and the blanket below us was hot, a flannel or a brushed wool, something perfect for a winter bed. The four of us would lie side by side looking up at the clear sky, excited to be out after dark, feeling the prick of the sharp, scorched grass along our backs, listening to it crackle and break when we shifted a shoulder or stretched out a leg.
Slowly our eyes would grow accustomed to the sky and the trails of stars. And Grammee, the high school–educated, constantly learning astronomer, would point out the different constellations, the clusters of shapes made by their light. Each star was part of a story. No two stars were exactly the same. And no two continents saw the same arrangement of stars each night. Grammee would show us the closer and brighter stars and those that were older and more distant, always encouraging us to pick them out one by one. Jenna and I never learned all the constellations, but we loved the quiet beauty, the glittery magic above us as we snuggled up beside our warm and comforting mama and our grandma, who smelled of Shalimar perfume.
In eleventh grade, I secretly loved the star of the high school baseball team. Kyle was the ace pitcher for Austin High—a big deal, at least among our friends. He was handsome, unlike most awkward high school boys, and mischievous. He wasn’t loud or attention-seeking, but he could make everyone laugh. We started hanging out, which for an early high school love story was the equivalent of dating. It was new and unsure, one of those shy, wobbly relationships you have when you’re young. But it felt exactly like love, like a future with plans.
If you told me then that one of my friends was going to take his own life, I never would have thought to call Kyle, to ask if he was okay, to check on him.
As the school year was winding down I got mono. It was the beginning of the summer, and I was desperate to get well. I had gone from being a high schooler bursting with excitement about the promise of the vacation ahead to an ill hermit, quarantined in my over-air-conditioned bedroom. Mono made me feel exhausted, like I was living in a half-awake/half-dream state. At one point my phone rang and Kyle’s name popped up on the caller ID, but, in my fogginess, I couldn’t tell if he was really calling or if my mind was playing tricks on me. Either way, I knew I couldn’t be cute and funny and—using awkward teenage reasoning—I didn’t want the boy I liked to hear me when I wasn’t at my best, so I just listened to it ring.
I went back to sleep until Jenna came to tuck me in and tell me that our friend Sammie was having a birthday barbecue the next day. I perked up and asked, “Is Kyle going to be there?” The answer was yes. So I dozed off, sure I’d feel better by the morning. I had butterflies in my stomach in anticipation of the day to come.
The next morning, my mom woke me after I slept in. As I opened my eyes, she gently shared that Kyle had hanged himself. She didn’t say that he had died. I was shocked, but I thought, Thank God he’s still alive. He must’ve been found just in time; he must just be in the hospital somewhere. And so, for a minute, I believed he was still here, and I couldn’t wait to get to him. And then, a few long seconds later, another devastation hit when I realized he was actually gone. Complete shock, complete confusion—how could I not have known?—followed by a complete and overwhelming sadness.
Death, particularly death when someone is so young, feels like everything is unfinished. You lose the person; you lose all your plans. I had so many daydreams, young, high school daydreams, but very real to me. We would go to prom together; we would spend the summer together. I don’t daydream like that anymore.
Afterward, I tried to keep Kyle alive in my mind. Over and over, I’d listen to a voicemail from him I’d saved on my Nokia phone. He and our friend Stephen were heading out to water-ski on Lake Austin and they had invited me to come; a time when he was alive and making plans. I listened to that message until the phone’s storage time expired and the voicemails were erased. For weeks, late at night when I couldn’t sleep, I’d call his number to see if he’d answer, as if this were all a huge mistake. Kyle’s sister wore my prom dress to prom. It mattered to me that she wore it, because it kept me connected to him.
I went to Kyle’s funeral and then to his house and afterward into his bedroom. I had never been in his bedroom before, and now there I was standing in it, but Kyle wasn’t there. I looked for signs everywhere, trying to understand the boy I liked, see what I could learn about him from his belongings. To find out if we had anything else in common, if there was anything to tease him about. The same way I would have looked around if he had still been living. But he wasn’t. He had hanged himself in the closet just inside that room.
After the funeral, I heard that according to the Catholic faith, if you die by suicide, you are forbidden from entering heaven. How could that be? I was so upset. Not just then, but for years after.
I am superstitious. Until I was thirty-four, every wish that I ever made, on the flame of a birthday candle or on a star, was a wish that Kyle would go to heaven. I didn’t think about him every day, not the way I did in the beginning. Especially that first year, I looked up quickly in the school hallway and someone wearing the same hat he wore would walk by, and for a second I would think, Oh, that’s Kyle. And then I would once again remember that he’d died and be devastated all over again.
The night before Easter I dreamed of Kyle. I was with him. He told me he hadn’t died, that he’d just been away and that he’d “written me love letters all summer.” I awoke, put on my Easter dress, and cried and cried, squeezing my abs as tight as I could—my trick to stop tears. I struggled to stay composed at church, feeling like I’d just found out the news all over again, wondering why my mind would play a trick like that, allowing me to wake and in those first few dreamy seconds believe life had been different. Gradually, those bursts of hope and devastation receded, in every way but with the stars.
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nbsp; Now I travel for work, often to rural places in Rwanda and Zambia where there’s little electricity. From the moment the sun sets, there are stars, as bright or brighter than those Grammee and I gazed at when I was a child in Midland. When I wish on those stars, or any stars—your rare New York City star, or a star out the window of a nighttime plane—I never wish for anything other than for Kyle to go to heaven. Every birthday wish, or eyelash, or dandelion has been for Kyle. He died when I was seventeen, so by now I’ve made half a lifetime of wishes. But just in case it is that one additional time, that one additional wish, that makes all the others come true, I will continue to make my wishes for Kyle.
With suicide, there is no control, so I found little ways to have control. Like wishing and wishing and wishing. It began as something self-soothing—a need to believe I would see Kyle again. His place in heaven was my only chance—the only way to change the finality of his loss, a loss with no explanation. What hurt so much was that he believed he had no alternative. I longed for Kyle to be embraced in some way to somehow ease his hopelessness.
As high schoolers, my friends and I didn’t know how to speak about his death. We thought we were mature, but it didn’t occur to us to ask one another “How are you doing?” Too naive perhaps, too worried that compassion would cause each of us to break down, too scared to know the real answer. There was no one to talk to, no guidance counselors, not even family. Even though we were so close and I always relied on Jenna for comfort, this was the one time when I didn’t know how to reach out to the ones I loved.
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