The Mama Sutra
Page 23
There didn’t seem to be anything that I could do right now to help from California. So I carried on with the retreat schedule. That evening, Teja and I led a closing ritual, in which the participants lit candles and proclaimed their intentions to return to their lives more mindful, more present, more connected to their families.
The next morning, just before going into the final session, I checked the message thread again, and finally grasped that this was not just another nick that needed to be patched up. My sister Connie had talked with my mother about her end-of-life wishes. Then they had both conferred with my father and with the doctors. Together, they made the decision to move her to palliative care. They would not continue any medication designed to make her “get better”—discontinuing not only the antibiotics but also all her blood pressure medications and anticoagulants. She was going to leave the hospital and go back home to her apartment, with twenty-four-hour care in place.
My sister Mary wrote, “Mom knows that all of us are planning to come visit one or two at a time in the next few weeks. She said to be sure to say that she would be equally happy to hear from her family by phone. She feels she always says goodbye to us each visit knowing that it might be final, blessed that she has had ninety-one years in this world, and hasn’t wanted to linger forever in poor health. She has often said to me that if I hear that she didn’t wake up one morning, I should know that she was happy to go home to heaven.”
I reached for my cell phone to call my sister Kathleen, who was in California helping her daughter with a newborn baby. Just as I picked it up, it rang.
“I’m on the BART on the way to the airport,” Kathleen told me.
“I have a ticket for next Friday. Is that soon enough?” I paced around my cabin, a little cottage in the redwoods, with a triangular window over the foot of the bed framing a vista of red trunks and dark green branches. I’m so far away from Washington.
There was a pause. “Anne,” she said. “I don’t think either of us are ever going to see her alive again.”
* * *
—
When I was a child, my mother always carried an enormous purse she referred to as “the Blue Monstrosity.” “Never travel without food and water,” she used to say. She could reach into this purse at any time and produce a foil-wrapped stack of stale saltines, a baby bottle full of tap water, a carton of raisins, a soft and browning banana. Like Mary Poppins’ magic bag, her purse always contained whatever a child might need: a bandage, a book for a boring car ride, crayons and construction paper, a ball of yarn and a crochet hook.
Decades after all of us were grown up, I was on a train with her, and a mother in the next seat was trying to calm a fussy toddler. Mom reached into her purse and pulled out a small toy—a little black-and-white plastic cow with jointed legs mounted on a pedestal that could be pushed up and released down to make the cow dance. That was a toy from my own childhood! Mom’s purse was a time portal to 1965. And just as I once had, the cranky child in the next seat stopped crying and started to laugh.
My mom had a magic touch with small children. I was her seventh baby, and she always said that she would have had seven more, if her doctor hadn’t insisted on a hysterectomy when she turned forty. She breastfed us in an era when doctors recommended formula. She sang us to sleep and read us aloud the rhymes and stories of A. A. Milne and E. B. White. On my third birthday, she put a paper crown on my head and told me I was Queen for the Day.
Whenever I was sick in bed and had to miss school, she brought me ginger ale and saltines and produced from some hidden stash wonderful books to distract me—The Phoenix and the Carpet; Half Magic. On frigid Christmas mornings in Kansas, she drove me to the stables at dawn to bring my horse, Kentucky Lady, a hot bran mash with apples and brown sugar.
And it wasn’t just her own children she was devoted to. When I was a teenager and we were stationed in Korea with my father, my mother was horrified to learn that Ani, the Korean woman the Army employed as our family’s housekeeper, was leaving her five-year-old son at home when she came to work for us. Insisting that Ani bring her child with her, my mother watched the little boy all day herself.
But she basically stopped understanding her children when we hit puberty. Born in 1924, she’d led a sheltered childhood even for that era. When my father met her, she was a nineteen-year-old at Connecticut College, and he was astonished to learn that she’d never had an ice cream soda. Her fashion advice to me and my four older sisters was always to look “sweet, simple, and girlish.” Based on the media recommendations of the Catholic Church, she deemed The Sound of Music too risqué for us to watch. In 1976, when my father was commander of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, she forbade me to wear jeans or shorts to Patton Junior High School—I was the only girl at my eighth-grade dance trying to do “the Bump” in a polyester pantsuit. After a lifetime as a military daughter and wife, she saw potential disasters everywhere: when my friends came over to spend the night, my mother would greet them with instructions on how to escape out the bedroom window in case a fire were to occur in the night.
The summer before my freshman year in college, when STDs made the cover of Time magazine, my mother told me, “Dear, you may have read that herpes is epidemic now. So always wash your hands after handling money.” This was the first conversation we’d had about sex since I was five years old, when she told me about the little hole that babies come out of—a conversation that had left me with the impression that the little hole was somewhere in the region of my belly button.
As I grew up, I didn’t want to hurt her by revealing who I was becoming. After I went off to college, I hid all traces of my actual life—the one in which I was having sex, and experimenting with hallucinogens, and trading in weekly Mass for yoga satsangs and Zen sesshins. I called every month or so, made brief visits at holidays, and rarely wrote letters. I moved to Santa Fe, then to California. I left the regular family visits to my older brothers and sisters—all married, with several children apiece, and living on the East Coast within a few hours’ drive or train ride of my parents. I created an edited version of myself I could trot out at family gatherings a few times a year. I loved my mother. But I assumed that she couldn’t handle knowing who I really was. Whenever I visited, the unspoken rule seemed to be “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
But as I dived into my practice of meditation and yoga, I also came to understand that I hadn’t left her behind. Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body.” My mother was always with me—in my awkwardness at parties and the warmth of my smile; in my poetic word choices and my starkly sensible shoes; in the precise way I sighed in exasperation as I rummaged in my battered, voluminous purse for my keys. Her voice echoed in my throat; her anxiety woke me up in the middle of the night; her sensitivity made me bolt from noisy restaurants, violent movies, and people who mispronounced the word nuclear. (Her only commentary on President George W. Bush: “I think the leader of the free world should be able to correctly pronounce the name of the bomb.”) In my mind, her cheery sayings narrated my life. After a setback: “Onward and upward!” In a messy house: “If everyone picks up ten things…” When it’s necessary to go to a party or a parade you don’t want to attend: “It’s a command performance.”
When Forest was a toddler, I read aloud to him in her exact inflection: “Oh, poor little kittens! You’ve lost your mittens!” And when he was a teenager, telling me about his adventures, he’d look at my face—which I thought I was keeping carefully neutral—and say, “Mom. You look really worried. There’s no need for your death face.”
I guarded myself, constantly, against judgments from her, but they rarely materialized aloud. When I announced that I was pregnant at age thirty-five—several months before my wedding—my mother expressed nothing but delight: “I was afraid it wo
uld be too late,” she said, as she beamed at me over her crocheting. (She was always crocheting—mainly baby blankets and soft yarn balls for her ever-expanding brood of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.) For my wedding at Green Gulch Zen Center, she gamely slipped off her shoes before entering the zendo—the very same shoes, my older sister Celia pointed out, that she had worn to Celia’s wedding thirty years earlier.
When my baby daughter Sierra died at birth, my mother was the only one who understood both the immensity of my pain and the way that my love for Sierra would endure past the heartbreak. “Sierra will nestle down into permanent remembrance,” she wrote me. When Forest wouldn’t sleep through the night as a baby, or didn’t know how to make friends in preschool, she didn’t sound the alarm bells. She took the long view, instinctively echoing the wisdom that a traditional Persian story gives as the magic incantation that will make you sad when you’re happy, and happy when you’re sad: “This too will pass.”
And when I’d last visited home, as I prepared to walk out the door, my mother had grabbed me by my hands. She had looked urgently in my eyes. She had said: “I want you to know this: I have no criticism of you.”
* * *
—
I finished that final morning of the meditation retreat in a daze, giving the instructions I myself needed to hear: Everything is changing, moment to moment—your breath, your emotions, your thoughts, your world. All slipping through your fingers like water. So be gentle with yourself.
Teja and I packed up the car with our zafus, yoga mats, Tibetan singing bowls, suitcases. While Teja stopped in at Peet’s Coffee Shop for some caffeine, I sat in the car and called my sister Connie.
“Mom is adamant that you should not come out here,” she told me. “She feels that she said goodbye to you on your last visit, and she wants you to stay home and take care of Forest.”
“Can I talk to her on the phone?”
“She’s asleep. I’ll call you when she wakes up.”
The call came as Teja was driving us through the heavy Friday traffic clogging 19th Avenue in San Francisco. We were stopped at a stoplight with cars and trucks rushing by on the cross street.
“I love you, Mom…” I began, as my sister held the phone to my mom’s ear, three thousand miles away. But she was already pouring out a torrent of words, her voice a hoarse, windy whisper as she gasped and wheezed for breath.
“You are my precious baby girl. I love you. I have always loved you. Trust yourself. You know what is right for you. You are so far away. Why did you move so far away?”
I could barely hear her over the engine and traffic noise. Teja put his hand on my knee as the car moved forward. Was I really saying goodbye to my mother like this, with a cell phone pressed to my ear as we drove past a Juice Box Vapes store? I thought of climbers trapped on Everest in a blizzard, knowing there is no hope of rescue, who call home to say goodbye.
“I love you, Mom,” I said again. “I’m right there with you. Every time I look at Forest’s face, I see your smile.”
She was saying something about California, about how far away it was, about how she didn’t know why—something. Something. Something. “Can you hear me? Do you understand?” she whispered.
“I hear every word you are saying. I understand everything,” I lied.
Her voice flickered out, then came in strong and urgent, a breath at a time. “I have not—[gasp]—always—[gasp]—understood you. But I have always—[gasp]—loved you.”
* * *
—
This is a central teaching of dharma: This is like this, because that is like that. The older I get, the more I understand how my mother’s story has shaped my own.
Like my father, my mother, Nancy, was born into an Army family. Black-and-white home movies from the 1920s show a radiant, short-haired, athletic little girl who looks just like my childhood photos—hula dancing in a grass skirt in Hawaii, riding a horse through the hills, playing jacks with her little brother. But the movies don’t show the sadness that was already laced through that family’s joy. When my mother was three years old, her five-year-old sister Anita Jane died of spina bifida. Her picture still laughs from the pages of the family album—a bright-eyed little girl in a wool sweater and a white beret. For years, a torn piece of sheet music sat on my grandfather’s piano, never to be thrown away: “Anita Jane ripped that,” he’d say.
Determined to protect his other beloved daughter, my grandfather refused to consent to her marriage when my father first proposed. World War II was still underway, and he’d seen too many friends’ daughters become pregnant widows. So for two years my father wrote daily letters home to my mother from the Philippines, where he was building an airstrip with the Army Corps of Engineers. My mother lived with her parents and worked as a nurse’s aide, then as a typist in a signal corps office in San Antonio. Years later, she said to me, “I did what my parents wanted. But I thought that if he were killed before I could have his baby, life would not be worth living.”
When the war ended, my father came home on leave with two weeks’ notice, and my parents got married. My mother began her life as an Army wife. She had baby after baby while traveling the world with my father from post to post—Japan, New Mexico, Germany, Kansas.
When I was six weeks old, my father left for the first of three tours in Vietnam. Home alone with seven children, my mother comforted friends whose husbands came home in body bags. One day when I was six months old, my mother got a call, crackling and hissing over long-distance wires. The operator told her it was a call from my father’s battalion commander. Then the line went dead. My mother could never remember exactly what happened over the next few minutes, as she waited for the call to come again—a call she was sure would tell her that her husband had been killed. When the call came through again, the battalion commander gave her the news that her husband had been promoted to full colonel. She hung up the phone and looked around the room to find that she had pushed all the furniture away from her to the walls, like an animal, clearing a place where she could fall down to die.
On my brother’s tenth birthday, when I was five years old and my father was on his second tour in Vietnam, my mother took us ice-skating before the planned birthday party. My mother fell and shattered her hip. That week, I would learn years later, my father was fighting in one of the deadliest campaigns of the war. The rivers in the Delta were running red with blood. When my grandmother tried to get through to my father in Vietnam to tell him my mother was in the hospital, she was told that he was flying a helicopter in battle and that they could only contact him if my mother died. So my oldest sisters came home from college to take care of the kids who were still at home.
My father finally got permission to cut his tour short and come home to take care of his family while also escorting back the coffin of a young soldier in his battalion. My father arrived in our front hall at night in a swirl of cold air, with shrapnel in his leg and a Raggedy Ann doll for me in his camouflage trunk. My mother’s hip was badly mended, wasn’t healing properly, and the hip joint began to rot away. The doctors gave her barbiturates and told her that in a few years technology would be available to replace her hip with an artificial one.
My mother was still on crutches when my father went back to Vietnam for a final, two-year tour, and we moved to the Philippines to be closer to him. She took painkillers for her hips, tranquilizers for her nerves, sleeping pills to get her through the night. Every month or two my father came home from the war for a weekend visit. Then my father’s helicopter was shot down behind enemy lines, and for three days—before he was rescued—no one knew if he would come back. My mother’s hands began to tremble. The military doctors theorized that it might be Parkinson’s and prescribed dopamine pills, which made her wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Pouring my orange juice one morning, she spilled it across the counter and burst into ragged sobs that wouldn’t stop.
Years later, one of my sisters would refer to those periodic collapses into grief, pain, and hospitalization: “We sometimes call them Mom’s ‘nervous breakdowns,’ as if they were abnormal responses to a normal situation. But they were really normal responses to an abnormal situation.”
When I was in my twenties, I went to a retreat for Vietnam veterans and their families, led by Thich Nhat Hanh, who is Vietnamese. “You are the flame at the tip of the candle,” he told them. “You hold the fire and pain for the whole country.” At one point in the retreat, someone raised his hand and asked, “Was the Vietnam War just part of the karma of the Vietnamese people?” Thich Nhat Hanh took a deep breath and answered, “The Vietnam War did not just happen to the Vietnamese people. It happened to everyone who was involved. And America is still feeling the pain of its participation.”
Through decades of yoga, meditation, and therapy, I’ve found my mother’s terror during that war stored in my bones, my breath, my heart. But we never talked about it. In my late twenties I read a book called Military Brats—part autobiography, part sociological study—written by the daughter of an officer who had served with my father in Germany. It outlined the three characteristics of a military family’s constellation: stoicism, secrecy, and denial. I recommended the book to my mother. But she responded, “I loved being an Army wife. It’s the best life in the world.”