Moms Don't Have Time To

by Zibby Owens

  Coincidentally, as I’ve been ruminating on “object worship,” what to keep and what must go, my daily meditation from Melody Beattie’s Journey to the Heart was this:

  [Fill] your life and your world with the colors, textures, scents, and objects that are beautiful to you, that have meaning to you. . . . Carefully and thoughtfully choose the items you place in your home. Objects have energy, when we obtain them, and the energy and meaning we attribute to them. . . . they tell a story all day long.

  Turns out my memoir teacher was the wise one after all.

  While our friends are shedding family homes and downsizing, I’m caught between generations, in a weird state of limbo, the steward of family treasures that I don’t necessarily have a link to, but nonetheless, feel responsible for. The thing is, I want to be less like the custodian of a family museum and more like Beattie: the curator of my life’s surroundings.

  I asked Ali Wenzke, author of The Art of Happy Moving, for help. She reinforced what I have begun to sense. “As we get older,” she told me, “we begin to accumulate generations’ worth of items from our parents and from our children. Keep the items that mean the most to you or that meant the most to your parents, but let go of the rest. They would want you to move forward and to not be encumbered by the past. You can hold your loved ones in your memory without being surrounded by their belongings.”

  Despite having craved a measure of sentimentality from my own parents, I grew up to mock it in others. I actually snickered upon learning my husband’s parents had saved all his report cards. Now, in midlife, I get it.

  Besides listening to Ali, I should take a lesson from my children who so deftly resist the gifts I try to bequeath. As always, I suspect my current struggle goes back to a childhood wound (doesn’t it always?). You see, when I left California for Massachusetts to attend college eons ago, my parents also moved to Texas and discarded all I’d left in my room, the detritus of my life to that point. They were mostly silly objects, I know, in their eyes not worth shipping, but what stung was the fact that I never gave my permission or had a chance to say goodbye.

  The irony is that despite having craved a measure of sentimentality from my own parents, I grew up to mock it in others. I actually snickered upon learning my husband’s parents had saved all his report cards. Now, in midlife, I get it.

  They say being self-aware is the first step toward recovery. I think that’s why I was fascinated by Marie Kondo early on, and found her advice to assess an object’s ability to “spark joy” illuminating. Incidentally, while perusing a bookstore this past weekend, I stumbled upon a book called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson. It describes a Swedish phenomenon called döstädning, whereby you cull your possessions so your loved ones don’t have to do it after you pass. I was like: okay, Universe, I hear you!

  These days, I’m trying to channel my younger self, the one who delighted in recycling, donating, and dropping full trash bags on the curb while being mindful of the setting I aim to create. I may not have had the time or the foresight to curate before, but I’m adopting an intentional collector’s eye going forward. And I’m finding döstädning to be like any practice—writing, meditation, yoga—doing a little every day makes a big difference.

  Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg is a travel writer and author of the novels Eden and The Nine.

  My Mother and Me: An Unrequited Love Story

  DEBORAH BURNS

  She always seemed to be forever beyond my grasp.

  Breathing was difficult when I was a child. It wasn’t asthma, or a wheeze, or any other respiratory ailment. Quite simply, there was no air left in the room for me; my mother had inhaled it all.

  I was the only child of a preternaturally beautiful, larger-than-life mother, and the spell that she cast upon me (and everyone else) remains vivid twenty-five years after her death. I worshipped her—idolized her, really—and merrily danced around the pedestal of a goddess no mere mortal like myself could ever hope to become. When she was alive, I was always in chasing mode, a longing pursuit of something fleeting. She seemed to forever be just beyond my grasp, and her elusiveness stoked my deepest, darkest fear: my mother doesn’t really love me.

  “You look nothing like your mother, Debbie.” This oft-repeated line haunted my childhood, especially because I wanted nothing more than to embody my mother’s movie star gorgeousness.

  My inner voice taunted me: If only I looked more like her, maybe she would be with me more. The appeal of my own soulful brown eyes versus her piercing blues; of my bittersweet chocolate hair versus her seductive red mane didn’t matter much then. How easily love and beauty can get tangled for a sensitive child trying to make sense of the way things were. Even if I had heard of narcissism then, I was far too young to understand it.

  My mother blew in and out like a VIP guest walking the red carpet between her bedroom and the front door.

  Once, decked out in a dazzling lime-green suit with a silver fox fur collar, my mother and I went to the Central Park Zoo. An enormous gorilla soon caught sight of her and began to wildly pace and pant and issue the most guttural, rolling grunts as he pulled at his bars in a frenzy. Onlookers cheered as she walked by his cage again and again. I stood back as this primal scene unfolded, a silent witness to the undeniable truth of my mother’s power.

  My fears were fed by my mother’s outside-the-lines unconventionality. Her abandonment of domesticity—and day-to-day mothering—went completely against the grain of the conservative 1950s. Defying her era’s constraints, my mother designed a life that suited her needs. She planted her two spinster sisters-in-law—my short, plump, fairy godmother aunts—into our tiny Queens apartment and quickly turned my daily care over to them. She fully owned her rebel persona, dismissing fussing schoolyard moms who knitted sweaters and made heart-shaped sandwiches. Instead, my mother blew in and out like a VIP guest walking the red carpet between her bedroom and the front door.

  “My darling girl! How are you today? Come! Follow me and help me change.”

  As I scampered alongside in that tight squeeze of an apartment, I wondered what other excitement had flushed her cheeks.

  “Why are your bangs so short?”

  Suddenly under her gaze, I could tell my mother was displeased.

  “Lilly,” she called out to the aunt responsible for my grooming. “Did you cut her hair with a bowl around her head?”

  “It’s humid today, so it curled up a bit,” Lilly responded, eyes down.

  “We all know her hair does that,” my mother pronounced. “You have to take that into account.”

  Ahead of her time, she was the only mother in our circle who worked. In truth, she didn’t want to and hated the office manager ordinariness, but our teetering finances required her income. She made up for her disappointment, however, by going out four to five nights each week with admirers who jockeyed for their spot in her orbit. It was an admirable independence a generation ago that would probably be applauded by many women today. But it left a wake of not feeling like her priority.

  Back then, I dreamed that I would one day be the perfect mother. Where she was absent and removed from my day-to-day, I vowed to be present and in the weeds. My children would feel fully loved and get every single ounce of attention they deserved.

  I soon became part of the boomer generation of women who had careers en masse and bought into the myth of “having it all.” But after I married and birthed the first of my trio, a tug-of-war began as I struggled to balance my budding magazine career with the nurturing mother I wanted to become.

  I dreamed that I would one day be the perfect mother. Where she was absent and removed from my day-to-day, I vowed to be present and in the weeds.

  When my eldest was two, I chased a flexible schedule and crafted a (then unheard-of) three-day workweek. That schedule lasted for twelve years, and I kept my promise to parent differently. When I was home, I tended to mundane (but meaningful) tasks, to every bruise and ballet class, every
tear and triumph.

  But as the years went on, work beckoned, and when my youngest was eight, I found myself thirty thousand feet in the air more often than I had ever imagined. I was struck with a new kind of breathlessness. Even though I had started with clear intentions, I’d slowly evolved into someone who was as absent as my mother was. That notion threatened me to the core.

  These days, it’s so much easier to view my lifelong conundrum from on high. And the good news? Every hand-wringing worry I ever had was for naught. If you injected any of my three adult children with truth serum and asked, “Does your mother love you?” they’d laugh.

  And for that, I have my mother to thank. Her detachment spurred me toward connection with my own children. Her distance inspired me to dive deeper, even when it stretched me to the brink.

  Deborah Burns is media consultant, speaker, and author of the memoir Saturday’s Child: A Daughter’s Memoir.

  White Noise

  LEA CARPENTER

  Some thoughts on loss.

  I opened Instagram this morning to find a post from a close friend whose father died yesterday. Here were the images she had chosen: her father holding her and her sisters on his lap (gentle); her father as a young man in swim trunks (handsome); her father by her side on her wedding day (traditional). She wrote about how he was her rock, how he quoted poetry, and also how he knew success in life didn’t come from money or power. The post wasn’t about her pain, though she must have woken up in pain. The post was about gratitude.

  It takes a long time to get to gratitude in my experience. It takes a long time to even get to grief. In my experience the first phase of loss isn’t grief at all—it’s shock. It’s white noise. All you really want in the hours after loss is to, as Auden put it, “stop all the clocks.”

  My father died before Instagram. I remember those early days as ones of retreating into a very small cell of family. There was lots of cooking and denial. Rage came later. I have written so much about my father since he died that it’s almost embarrassing. What am I hoping to achieve? I wrote my first novel about him. On the surface, the story was about a mother whose son goes missing, but I was channeling my experience of a father who had, it felt, gone missing, too. I kept thinking I could bring him back by writing about him, that maybe the act of telling, and retelling who he was would open a path for his return. Magical thinking—right.

  In my experience, magical thinking can become an addiction.

  In my experience the first phase of loss isn’t grief at all—it’s shock. It’s white noise.

  As I wrote about the anger my character felt about her son, I was describing my own anger, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Of course writing didn’t bring him back. My second novel was about a girl who loses her father too soon. I had done it again. I had tried to take my loss and reverse it on the page. Maybe one day my boys will read these books, I thought, and understand something they can’t by looking at a photograph.

  I helped my son with his book report on Operation Market Garden, an Allied airborne assault against the Germans. “It was the largest airborne assault, like, ever,” my son explained, carefully articulating the word “assault,” assuming that word might be foreign to me. He showed me maps that Churchill and Roosevelt had used. My son doesn’t know that my father planned and executed “operations,” too, though it didn’t feel like the right moment to get into it. My father to my boys is an idea, a chimera. Would it matter to them that he had wanted to be a pilot? Would it matter that, due to poor eyesight, he instead was sent to do something different, something that might be described as “dangerous”? Dangerous is a word my boys love; if you’re twelve, dangerous is slang for cool.

  Before wanting to be a pilot, my father had wanted to be a cowboy. Early on in his time in the military he wrote to his mother that, “so far, I believe I am going to like my new job tremendously, all of it is outdoors, and not unlike my Western experiences. Couldn’t help remembering the days when my idea of a perfect life was to ride through the hills packing a .45 and carrying a carbine, and now I’m paid to do it.”

  My father spent the last decade of his life working to overturn the mandatory-minimum sentencing laws in his home state, Delaware. When, eventually, the governor signed a bill into law ensuring the end of the “man mins,” it was nicknamed “Ned’s Bill” after my father. My mother and I went to the courthouse and sat at an enormous oblong table as the governor spoke about the importance of these laws and their place in a larger, urgent, national challenge: criminal justice reform, and a path to better race relations. That larger challenge was what my father felt was the critical issue facing this country.

  I never saw my father rageful, but he must have had anger at times. He tried to channel his anger into action.

  Two days before he died, I received a letter, FedEx. I was on my way to the train station because my mother had called and said, “it’s time,” which meant, time to come home. Which meant, he’s dying. I stood in the small hallway of my building and read the letter, which detailed why my father had decided I was the child to carry on his work with the “man-mins.” Before I had finished reading it, my phone rang. It was my brother, calling to tell me he had received a letter, FedEx, from our father, and that his letter explained why he was the child to carry on the work.

  Had my father written the exact same letter to all of his children? I never found out the answer. Soon I was on the train, then by his bed, and then my baby boy was crying and I was holding my sister’s hand and then he was gone. Later someone said, “no one will ever love you like he did,” an idea at the time that I received as an insult. Later, I understood it as a very high compliment.

  Auden knew that rage must be attended to, a lesson we are learning as a nation now. I never saw my father rageful, but he must have had anger at times. He tried to channel his anger into action. Into the cases he litigated. Into his work with criminal justice reform. He channeled it away from the people he loved.

  At his memorial, a federal judge gave a eulogy in which he talked about Atticus Finch, Harper Lee’s fictional lawyer from To Kill a Mockingbird. He referenced the final courtroom scene in the book, when Atticus exits and a man tells Atticus’s daughter Scout to “stand up, young lady; a great man is passing by.”

  The judge looked out into the crowd and ended his remarks with a nearly identical refrain: “Stand up, everyone. A great man is passing.”

  Lea Carpenter is a screenwriter and the author of two novels: Eleven Days and Red, White, Blue.

  In Vietnam, a Glimpse of a New Life

  GEORGIA CLARK

  A chance meeting with a girl at a bar changed everything.

  I was sitting in a small, open-air bar in Sapa, Vietnam, wondering if I should go and talk to that girl. The American, with the loud laugh and long red hair. I assumed we were both waiting for the bus that would take us to the train that would take us back to Hanoi. Around me, tiered rice paddies cascaded down the mountainous landscape, green and lush and dramatic. Sapa is in the magnificent Northwestern region of Vietnam, a country I’d been in for about ten days. Alone. The night before I was flying here to meet up with my friend, Bec, I got an email: “So I met this guy and we’re kind of in love and I’m in Mongolia. Meet us in Mongolia!”

  Bec and I had been planning our trip to Vietnam and Cambodia ever since I’d decided to quit my job as the editor of a music magazine in an effort to become a writer. I was stunned and angry but, to be honest, unsurprised. Bec was fun but chronically unreliable. (Didn’t we all have those friends in our twenties?) But I didn’t have time to wallow. I still was going to Vietnam—but I was going alone.

  I’d never traveled solo. At first, it felt strange to make every decision, from when to eat to where to sleep, on my own. But soon, it felt liberating—even decadent. I hadn’t even felt lonely: the culture shock of steamy, busy Hanoi, where one crossed the street by walking into oncoming traffic with the hope it flowed around you like a waterfall of motorbikes, had
been a wonderful distraction. But here in the quiet mountains, I was starting to feel like company.

  I’d never traveled solo. At first, it felt strange to make every decision, from when to eat to where to sleep, on my own. But soon, it felt liberating—even decadent.

  Star Black—her real name—was warm and easy to talk to. She was from Brooklyn, which to me seemed as foreign and glamorous as the moon. Back in Hanoi, she took me to a hotel rooftop bar, fancier than any of the places I’d frequented in my hometown of Sydney. We were the only ones on the plush velvet couches that offered 360-degree views of the glittery, muggy city. I ordered a Tiger beer. She ordered a Johnny Walker Blue. I’d never heard of Johnny Walker Blue. It was the most expensive thing on their menu, and it was five American dollars. “This is fifty dollars a glass back home,” she said, swirling the scotch appreciatively. She wasn’t pretentious: she was a sensual-ist. She wrote her email address in my travel journal, and we parted ways. My attention turned to getting to the next town, and the next, and eventually back to Australia. Star Black and her expensive whiskey faded from my mind.

  Two years later, my roommate Risha was planning a trip to New York with a couple of girlfriends. To most Sydneysiders, including myself, New York was a faraway fairytale of skyscrapers and celebrities. I was in. I emailed Star Black. I’d never forgotten meeting someone from Brooklyn and thought of her every time I drank whiskey, swirling it in my glass. She wrote me back: of course she remembered me and better yet, she’d be away for most of my trip: would I like to cat-sit her apartment in the lovely-sounding neighborhood of Greenpoint in Brooklyn? I would.