Mother Lover

My mother’s lover won’t talk to the person who is writing a book about her. I wrote to X and said I understand his desire for privacy. I told him about the journals my mother’s friend sent to me after I had published my book. I told him I didn’t know why my mother, a person who burned the journals we’d found in my grandmother’s attic (we teased her about having her “nose to the grindstone” relentlessly—a phrase her high school self had written) in the effort of shutting any windows into her past she couldn’t control, would have given these three notebooks to her friend for safekeeping, and why she’d want the friend to send them to me “when the time was right”. 

These journals were all about a specific time, a time when she was desperate to leave, desperate for another life, but no matter how many times she drew out the numbers, she couldn’t find a way out of this life where she had three children, a house, and a husband who made less money than she did but who expected a clean house and dinner on the table nightly. 

My mother’s unhappiness was my unhappiness because she gave it to me and because I took it. Her problems were my problems because she told me about them, included me in them. Her problems made us a team: us against them. The thing is, it wasn’t just my mother against my brothers and my father: it was my mother against everyone. It was my mother against all the thin women whose pictures were on our refrigerator reminding my mother to smoke more and to eat less. It was my mother against her father who saw her younger sister as the pretty one and my mother as the smart one. It was my mother against her mother for reasons I still don’t know. It was my mother against the patriarchy as was made clear by the Ms. magazine covers that came into our house. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. It was my mother against the mother who gave birth to me, for if I mentioned her, my mother would cry, say You are my child, mine, and leave the room. 

In many ways it is easier to live with unhappiness than it is living with joy, at least in my experience. Unhappiness is like the urge to crawl under the covers and fall asleep while joy is like the desire to go outside and do cartwheels. One is so warm and held and easy—the other involves engaging with the world, a thing that could disappear or disappoint at any moment. 

My job was to make my mother feel better. My idea was that she should leave my brothers and my father and get a place for just the two of us. A place with clean wooden floors and lots of light. This wasn’t something I ever said to her because to hear her say “no” would bring to light the fact that even though I was the one she turned to when she felt unseen by them, at the end of the day, she chose them over me, and I was not special enough to be saved. 

Being special was the thing that was going to save me. 

When I was fifteen, I got an Australian Shepherd puppy as a gift from the woman whose kennels I helped keep clean. My mother came up with the name “Polly” and Polly was both the family’s dog and mine. Polly was an old-fashioned name, the name of a good girl Polly slept with me. 

My freshman year in college my mother called one late afternoon to tell me Polly had been hit by a car while my mother was out front working in the yard and that Polly was dead. 

Now I see this as a before/after moment in my life, but at the time I just knew that when I told people in my dorm my dog was dead, no one responded the way I needed them to, and so I went for a run in the dark by myself, trying to move my body to a place where I could abide being alive with the fact that I now lived in the world without Polly.

I was alone on the back streets of Gambier, Ohio, and I couldn’t run fast enough or into the dark enough to feel that I was okay enough to stop and go on with the day. I didn’t want to be part of a world where I had to be both without Polly and without people who understood just how sad this was. 

Years and years and years later I learned something that helped me to understand why this kind of pain felt like it might kill me. A boyfriend had broken up with me, and I had that feeling the pain was too big for my body. My friend Pam Cordano, a therapist, told me to get into bed, to roll into the fetal position, and to think about my birth mother. “This isn’t about her,” I told Pam. “This is 100% about The Midget.” 

“Just do it,” Pam said. “Let me know how it goes.”

I went to bed fully dressed, rolled into the fetal position, and thought about a woman I had never met as an adult. I thought about coming out of her body, about leaving it, about never seeing her again. I had thought about his before, cried about it before, wrote a book about living without her. I thought I’d cried her out of my bod, but suddenly I was crying harder than I’d cried all day. 

I had lost my mother. Still, years after coming out of the fog, I was rootless, spiritually homeless, not myself. I was still alone in a way that felt terminal. 

I cried and cried and cried and then got out of bed, washed my face, and went for a walk by the beach. I was a grown up now. Baby me had lost my mother. Grown up me could talk about it and move on. I called Pam. “I feel so light,” I said. “It was her. You were right. That’s crazy. I didn’t even really like him, but my brain thought I did. Or my body. Or both, I guess.”

My mother’s lover sent me a link to a site where he had posted some stories. He’d been her editor back when she was a beat reporter for the local newspaper, and so I read his stories eagerly, hoping to find some clues as to what kind of person my mother loved so wildly.

What I found was that he was the kind of writer whose thin curiosity only took him to scraping the surface of things. In hie email he did not ask me any questions about my mom. He did not ask any questions about me. He asked, instead, for me to read his work.

My mother considered tearing apart her family for someone who did not push himself to write powerful endings? She who had set the bar so high, she who sniffed when I discovered my half-sister, discovered she wrote for Cosmopolitan. “Oh, Anna,” my mother had said to me about my half-sister. “You can do better than that.”

It occurred to me today that my dog died on my mother’s watch. It occurred to me that she’d probably had her back turned to the busy street as she worked on the plants lining the side of the house and that my dog had run into the street, unseen, and got hit by a car because my mother was too absorbed in her own life to really take care of what was mine. 

I want to blame my mother, to hate her, to finally stop seeing her face in my face when I look in the mirror. Her hands in my hands as I drive my car. Her depression in my brain as I negotiate a world that feels like her home, not mine.