Fall 2002 Charles River Review: Not without My Mother

Books I was convinced that my mother was born without a soul. She belonged to the school of thought that children should be outside at all times, regardless of the weather, allowing some good fresh air to circulate in the lungs. On winter days she would wrap me in piles of winter gear and shove me out the door. Being from North Dakota, the eight-foot-high snow drifts did not impress her, and any thermometer with the mercury hovering above zero amused her. "You don't know what snow is, Missy," she would shout to me through the glass storm door as I attempted to negotiate my way back into the house with reports of frostbite and hypothermia. One afternoon, shortly after the harshest ice storm seen in Connecticut, I slid on the ice patch that was my front lawn and broke my arm. I hobbled to the front door and butted the glass with my head. My mother peered from around the corner, the yellow kitchen telephone glued to the side of her head, the long wiggly cord stretched fully to accommodate the distance from the kitchen center. She waved her hand in greeting and disappeared back around the corner, laughing at whatever tidbit her girlfriend had divulged on the other end of the line. I smashed my forehead into the glass again; more forcibly this time, like a crazed ram. Again, the stretch, the look, and then the wave. The pain was quickly setting in and I realized that I was going to have to take drastic measures to communicate my dire situation to my mother, the waver. I stood on the icy cement step and screamed at the top of my lungs, "Help me, I'm dying." My mother peered around the corner again, pulled the phone from her ear, and studied me, convinced that I had finally lost my mind like one of my father's cousins. She set the phone down, marched to the door with her hands on her hips, and gave me a questioning look. "I think I broke my arm, Mom," I whimpered. She glanced at the thermometer that read 2 degrees Fahrenheit, she examined my face for signs of exaggeration, and she unlocked the storm door. Unless blood was spurting from a major artery, my mother was not inclined to treat mishaps with more than a shrug of her shoulders and a snort. "Okay, Sarah Bernhardt, let's get you to the emergency room."

Like the desert tales that monks have used for centuries as a basis for theology and way of life, the tales of small-town gossip are often morally instructive, illustrating the ways ordinary people survive the worst that happens to them.
--Kathleen Norris, Dakota

My mother spoke in code. No one outside the family, most of whom still lived in Kathryn, North Dakota (population 96), had a shot at ever really deciphering her meaning. Mom equated whole sets of characteristics to individuals in an attempt to instill her sense of values in my brother and me. If I didn't bother to finish drying the dinner dishes she would yell upstairs, "Hey, Vicky, do you think it would be too much trouble to finish putting the supper dishes away?" Vicky Iverson embodied laziness. She stood tall as goddess of half-assed jobs. She was actually the cleaning girl that my mother had hired to help with the dusting and vacuuming once a week while she entertained herself selling Avon to the neighborhood mothers. Mom had taken the daughter of her most loyal Avon customer on only to discover that the girl had apparently been absent on the day diligence was handed out. Not only did Vicky casually dust around the bric-a-brac on the shelves and tables, but she had the audacity to run the vacuum cleaner over the rugs without ever plugging it in. If I wore my skirt too short my mother would look up from her paperback and casually comment, "Patsy, when you come home pregnant don't look to me to baby-sit." Patsy Strand sat next to my mother in high school, which was not a feat as there were only three in the graduating class. My mother, as she frequently announced when either my brother or I brought home mediocre grades, was class valedictorian. Patsy, if I remember right, would have beaten out Boyd Frompke for salutatorian had she not gotten herself knocked-up junior year. Apparently old Patsy showed up at all the county dances with her kneecaps showing and wantonness flashing in her eyes.

My mother desecrated the kitchen with her cooking. I grew up believing that spaghetti was pink and came, quite naturally, out of a can. In fact, until the age of 12, I mistook my mother's maiden name for Boy-ar-dee. Convenience foods lined our cabinet shelves: Mary Kitchen's corned-beef hash, Armour's chipped beef, and Campbell's Bean-with-Bacon soup. The freezer overflowed with Swanson's TV dinners, Weaver's frozen fried chicken, and lima beans, the only vegetable ever to find its way onto our table. A two-pound wad of Land-o-Lakes cheese, encased in an ancient Tupperware container, could usually be found drying out behind the long-forgotten leftovers that had gone green with penicillin spores. An unwieldy container of margarine took center stage in the refrigerator and formed the very foundation of my parents' diet. I would often lurk about my friends' kitchens watching their mothers lovingly produce fresh salads and hearty soups. The Italian ones tortured me with the pasta sauces and lasagna. During lunch time these same friends magically produced carefully crafted sandwiches on bulkie rolls, little sprigs of romaine jutting out just over the herb-strewn tuna salad. I glanced down at the peanut butter and butter sandwich my mother had sat on before flinging it into my Partridge Family lunch box and wished my real parents would come back and get me.

Surely I had been switched at birth. By some cruel twist of fate my real mother was out there saddled with some kid who wanted to shoot baskets and eat butter while I had been sent home with a woman who had no sense of appreciation for my interest in jewelry, evening gowns, and home cooking. My fake mother knew that something was amiss as well. She would regard me thoughtfully as I persisted in hammering the basketball into a patch of pole three feet below the dangling net as we dabbled with her suggested game of one-on-one. At 5 feet tall, my mother had proven herself a formidable opponent on the Kathryn High basketball team and she could not imagine why her 5' 2" daughter could be such a miserable shot. She would loose herself in the game and dunk ball after ball into the hoop. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth, wagging back and forth in concentration, as she hurled her tiny self at the basket. "Let's go shopping," I would say to her after she scored her 42nd point, to which she would roll her eyes and mutter something about my father's side of the family.

My mother rarely troubled herself with housework. Our hovel was strewn with half-bagged Avon orders, piles of books, perfume decanters in the shape of Dutch maidens, unwashed dishes, and dead houseplants. My mother did not intentionally set out to create an ambiance that only a full-scale tornado could reproduce; it's just that she was easily distracted. She would drop her house chores in favor of a good tennis match, reminding me that "the dishes will always be there, but the opportunity for a good game of tennis will not." She would arrive home from the match to start up again with the vacuuming; pulling the furniture to the center of the room to allow for a really thorough cleaning, when her eyes would light upon a half-finished novel. She would succumb to its lure, leaving the living room upside down.

The woman read voraciously. She would immerse herself in a book to such a degree that she ceased to be aware of anyone or anything around her. My brother and I quickly learned to take pleasure from her comatose state. "Mom," my brother would bellow, "Ann just gave birth to twins in the bathroom and left a bloody mess on the floor." My mother would mark her place with a trembling finger and drag her eyes to the top of the page, just shy of leaving the book completely. "Mmmm-hmmm, that's nice, dear," she would murmur. We challenged our creativity, developing contests to see who could grab my mother's attention with the most outlandish statement. We confessed to murder, self-mutilation, and incest at our mother's side and were met with blank stares and a distant smile.

We began to realize that our mother was using books to communicate with us in ways that she found difficult to do face to face. We would find volumes of Sex Before Marriage lying about on the coffee table. We delighted at the discovery, convinced that our mother had forgotten to replace the book to its original hiding place, behind the sliding bookshelf doors at the headboard of our parents' bed, where we knew them to keep a collection of racy material. Unaware that we were being given a self-guided tutorial on the birds and the bees, we leafed through the manual, giggling at the pictures and howling at the step by step instructions. Our interest piqued, we took to rummaging through the forbidden stash, reading aloud from The Biography of Marilyn Chambers and The Life and Times of Fanny Farmer. We cackled maniacally at the pornographic details and began to incorporate words like "throbbing" and "pulsating" into our everyday vocabulary. The shift in our speech habits went unnoticed until my mother began receiving telephone calls from the other mothers in the neighborhood who were concerned that we were running a porn ring from our suburban address.

As I grew older, my mother became more and more perplexed by me. While our weekly trips to the library were enormously entertaining to her, they also allowed her to keep tabs on my ever-changing interests without ever once having to ask me, straight out, "What the hell are you thinking?" She would sift through my selections chuckling at the titles: A Modern Guide to Post Feminism, The Vietnam Papers, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I had not totally lost my interest in erotica by the age of 13, but had begun my expansion into social politics and anthropology. Although we did not share the same taste in books (she tended to prefer Jacqueline Susann and Life magazine), she never attempted to influence my choices. On the day I gave my oral presentation on Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, my sixth grade teacher decided that I was being raised by the Manson gang. She called my mother in an intervention attempt, convinced that I had lost my mind and was subconsciously crying out for help.

Books had shown me a whole different take on the world. I was thoroughly unimpressed with my parent's Wonder Bread ways and I longed for a taste of the exotic. Catalyzed by hormones, I began a flaming romance with all things foreign, particularly men. My mother, who had learned enough adolescent psychology to be dangerous, stood by mutely as I brought home an assortment of baffling characters. Although polite by nature, she could not refrain from staring wide eyed at the 45-year-old Chinese immigrant I had adopted as my first boyfriend, casually commenting, "Say, I bet he'll be a real hit at the prom." Within months I had moved into my Che Guevara stage and had found myself a nice Ecuadorian boy who had yet to learn English. My mother was grateful that he was not old enough to collect social security as, she fondly noted, the last one had been. Impassioned by Orianna Fallaci's writings on her tour of Hanoi, I soon found myself a Vietnamese sweetheart. As a chronically depressed political refugee, he made Franz Kafka seem relatively jubilant, thereby curtailing any serious involvement I may have had with him. By this time my mother had abandoned all hope that I would ever hook up with the next door neighbor.

We're all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you've been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there's no right person, just different flavors of wrong.
--Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions

The day I brought home my would-be husband, my mother knew that things had gotten a little out of hand. I introduced her to the fundamentalist Islamic man from Iran and she immediately turned an awful shade of green. Once he announced his intention to return to Iran, accompanied by her daughter, she found her voice. "He's hypnotized you," she angrily whispered, once he had left the supper table. "Do you have any idea how they treat women in Islamic countries? You, who considered yourself a feminist before you wore a bra; have you lost your mind?" She watched me shut her out. I could see that she instantly regretted the mistake she had never made before, opening her mouth before the phase had passed. She seemed to recover herself in the following months and began leaving books on the coffee table. I discovered Not Without My Daughter next to the ceramic pheasant standing guard against water rings.

Ten years later I returned home with two children and four suitcases. I had come from Iran on holiday, intending to stay with my mother a few months to catch my breath. After five years abroad, I had found myself wholly fed up with the exotic. I quietly hoped that my discontent with Iran and with my husband was another of my passing phases. As the time drew nearer for me to return to Iran I began suffering from blinding headaches. I would lie on the floor in my dark room, unable to voice my rising fears, particularly to my mother. I pictured her waving me away as she had done that winter day as I butted the storm door with my head, cradling my broken arm. I wanted to be tough; despite subzero temperatures, the pain of a broken arm, or the realization that my marriage was about to collapse. She had stood back and watched my metamorphosis throughout adolescence, allowing me success or failure, and had never felt the need to intervene until she had met my husband. I was convinced that I would hear her version of the I-told-you-so speech and my pride would not allow it. Worse yet, my whole moral fiber would be summarized by one infamous name. "Okay, Patty Simcox, you just give up on your marriage. It's not like you promised to stay together for better or for worse."

But, my mother surprised me. I had never really understood who my mother was because we were from entirely different worlds. She was the product of a close-knit farming community that prided itself on stoicism and frugality. The town, composed of three or four Norwegian clans, typified homogeneousness. The close interbreeding had produced crops of thin-lipped sullen offspring, who were predisposed to coping with the sub-arctic temperatures of the region but not emotions. Feelings were considered frivolous and self-indulgent. Those who could not handle the weather or put a cap on their passions (more than likely the full-lipped ones) drank themselves to death in Charlie's bar downtown. I expected to be harshly judged and instead found my mother remarkably insightful. She stretched out on the floor beside me one night after a particularly nasty crying jag. "Offtah, but you sure put up a good fight, didn't you? A lesser woman would have crumbled, Sweetie, don't forget that," she said as she rubbed my back.

I think that's why most of us stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull--because when people have seen you at your worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much. And that gives us license to try on that radical hat of liberation, the hat of self-acceptance; we're allowed to escape from underneath one of the fatwas.
--Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies

Soon to be divorced, I decided to remain with my mother. Grateful to be free of a third-world country, I had forgotten what living with the woman was like. I was now an adult with children of my own but, to my mother, I was still her wayward child. She lived alone now, having been divorced from my father for several years, and welcomed the chance to be around the grandchildren of whom she had been cheated. Her anger over my absence and over the countless hours she had spent fretting over my living in the terrorist capital of the world seeped out in its usual subtle way. "You know Marge's daughter married a nice alcoholic from New Jersey," she commented as we pushed the plastic Christmas tree into the corner of the living room. "Every year for the last decade they've managed to make it to Marge's for the holidays," she continued. I was sure that Marge, in her need to needle my mother, had left out the fact that her son-in-law ritually collapsed into her cranberry mold just after grace. "But not you," she went on, "you had to be different." My brother, who was living in Chicago while practicing as a Lutheran minister, remained innocent of sin despite having missed every single holiday since I had flown the coop.

I took over the kitchen from the get go, having learned to cook at a tender age in order to increase my chances of survival into adulthood. I set a bowl of stew down on the dinner table next to a platter of steaming pilaf. My mother shifted in her seat and winced. "What?" I asked. She shrugged her shoulders and gave me one of her little coy smiles. "No. What?" I pressed, sure that she definitely had something to say about the meal I had spent hours preparing. "Well, Sweetie, isn't this a little fancy? I mean, it's not like the Shah of Iran is coming for dinner, or is he?" she giggled. My face dropped and I began grinding my teeth. "I'm just going to get up and make myself a simple little something," she drawled as she began opening a can of tuna. A second later she dipped a spoon into the five-pound jar of mayonnaise, swirled it into the lumpy fish once or twice, and then dropped it onto the nice clean counter. I knew we were in for it.

The Chinese man I had dated once told me, in between slugs of Geritol, that the Chinese character for war was made up of two separate symbols. The first was a roof, the second, two women under it. I could see the honeymoon phase of our family reunion screeching to a halt. My mother began to take umbrage when she found her things in the garbage can. "Why are you throwing my waffle iron away?" she would shout as she shook the evidence in my direction. "Mom, it has no electrical cord attached to it. You haven't used that thing since 1973. It's just taking up space," I lazily replied, too engrossed in my book to take a good look at her. "That doesn't matter. It's my thing and I was saving it," she stormed on. At this point her irrationality sounded far more interesting than the dialogue on the page, so I turned my attention to her. She stood menacingly in the kitchen, her size 5 shoe tapping on the linoleum, her small gray eyes made even smaller by the flames shooting from them. "I would ask that you leave my things be. And stop throwing my leftovers away," she pronounced as she marched back toward the pile of muddy shoes she had set on the clean table.

The children, who were used to playing in closed courtyards, were thrilled to be out and about in the parking lot of our condominium complex. They wandered aimlessly in packs of preschool children, riding their scooters down the grassy inclines or dropping bits of asphalt into the gutters that lined the parking lot. My mother stormed in the house one day, clutching my younger child in her grip. "Ann, my God, are you going to let this child out unattended while you sit in the house reading? Someone almost ran him over." I stared at my mother in amazement. I wondered what alien life-form had taken possession of the same woman who had locked the storm door on me in the dead of winter in order to grab a little down time. She was also home when my daughter fell off her bicycle. The kid stood in the middle of the parking lot screaming about a leg that had fallen off her body. I walked to the door, looked down at the microscopic scrape, and yelled back, "Get in the house, Sarah Bernhardt, and let's get a Band-Aid on that gash before you lose another pint." My mother saw danger lurking for my children behind every corner and was convinced that I had been born without a soul. She began leaving volumes of Dr. Spock on the kitchen counter.

At the age of eight, my son announced his interest in having sex. I looked up from my salad and nonchalantly suggested that he might want to wait on that for another, say, ten or 15 years. My mother stared at me, mouth agape. "You know, Ann, that child watches far too many R-rated movies. I cannot believe that you let him do that. Can't you see how this is affecting him?" I continued to chew on my lettuce as she launched into her tirade. My son studied the pair of us, curious to see where the conversation was heading, convinced that I was biding my time before I slammed it to his grandmother. When my mother had finished her diatribe I looked at her and smiled beatifically. "Mother, having read the autobiographies of half a dozen porn stars by the time I was 12, I hardly think that this child will wind up a pervert after watching Four Weddings and a Funeral. Look at me," I added, "I turned out okay."

Seven years had passed from the day I had returned home from Iran. My mother had long since gotten over the hunger to be with her grandchildren, particularly as they edged towards puberty. My daughter greeted me at the door in tears. "She keeps calling me Vicky Iverson. So I leave one book on the kitchen counter and all of a sudden I'm Vicky Iverson?" she gasped hysterically. "Of course, she can leave mayonnaise knives all over the place, but if I leave just one book, I'm Vicky Iverson?" she continued. I walked into the house that I had left clean that morning to discover that Hurricane Mom had done her worst. I dropped my briefcase on the kitchen floor and found my mother reading in the living room. My son was on his stomach in front of the television. "Hmm, I think someone could use a little fresh air, don't you, Ann?" she hinted, using me as her means of communicating indirectly to her grandson. He continued to ignore her, just as I had always done. "Mom, you've got to watch this; it is so fucking funny," my son called out; turning to make sure I would do as he asked. My mother's lips pursed. "Are you going to let him talk like that?" she asked rhetorically.

In the photo I am looking over at her with enormous gentleness, because I sometimes feel this. Some part of me is Odysseus's dog. But I was only feeling this about half the time that day. The rest of the time I was annoyed. I was annoyed in general because she is not at all whom I would have picked at the Neiman-Marcus Mommy Salon.
--Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies

I lay awake one night thinking of Eskimos. When an Eskimo becomes too old or too cranky to have around, the other family members lead the guilty party to an ice floe, sit him or her down on a stack of seal pelts, and ceremoniously kick the whole kit-and-caboodle right on out to sea. This idea appealed to me; it was the sign that I had overstayed my welcome. One hardly needs Confucius to point out that two women, particularly a mother and daughter, cannot live harmoniously under one roof. The two are designed to get along much better at a distance. I was grateful to her for her help, for she had come through for me when I needed her most. She had not waved me away or accused me of melodrama, but she had given me the permission to trust my better judgment and to move on with the next phase of my life. Okay, so she's not the mother I would have chosen from the Mommy boutique; but I turned out just fine, didn't I? Once I moved into my own home, I thought less about the Eskimos and more about the books I would leave around my mother's condo.