where's ann richards when I need her?

11.

11.4.77 “Around 6 p.m.: the apartment is warm, clean, well-lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever I am my own mother.” — Roland Barthes

How many Mother’s Day cards? she asks, then waits for my answer, when I suggest we make a card for her grandmother. Softly she begins crying. Why did she have to have cancer? Why couldn’t she have had a cough? I want her here. I miss her. The more I think about her, the more I cry. Is her stone in Centerville, yet? Where is she? Where are her ashes? What if Popa moves? Will he take her with him?

Back in February, when my son’s preschool class was studying shadows for Groundhog Day, my nearly four-year-old child hopped out of the car and said, “Hey! That’s my shadow.” These days he is full of questions and very literal. His sister, not so much. Generally, she is full of answers. In addition to wanting to know where my mother is, my son wants to know, “What makes the day and night?” and “Does Santa change the world?” and “How do they get the baby out of your tummy? and “What is a long time ago?” and “Who is Jesus?” and “Who made me? If you’re born, then someone makes you. Did a worker make me?” and so I try to explain c-sections, and that the earth rotates on its axis—but he says, “I still don’t understand,”—so my husband depicts the earth rotating around the sun for him with nerf balls, moving the smaller ball around the big sun ball and asking him where his shadow would be “if the sun is here? now here? now here? now here?”

My first favorite recent scientific discovery is that a woman is born with all her eggs intact in her womb. This means that the egg that created me was once inside my grandmother and that my mother once held my children inside her. My second favorite new science fact is that table salt doesn’t lead to high blood pressure. My third favorite is that one can, in fact, catch up on sleep.

It shouldn’t be surprising, but it is, to realize that death changes life as irrevocably as birth; death is a similar sort of shock to the system, except now we are permanently one less instead of one more. But within the double flip of grief and parenting, I’m no longer the protagonist in this story. I am the shadow of my mother, shadow to my children. The suffering renders me neither day nor night, neither womb nor egg. Of necessity and biology, I am a distant third to everything, because now, the little boy can’t sleep either. He wakes at 9 and again at 11. Tummy ache? leg cramps (“buy bars of soap to put at the foot of the bed”)? night terrors? At 3:30 A.M. he’s in our bed pushing his back into my side, his thick little fingers groping at the bedsheets, or my arm, or the pillow, whatever he can grasp.

I try to be vigilant, try to pay close attention to the ways in which they are growing, dutifully record their new shoe sizes: Sadie (13), Jesse (6), Charlie (10w). But without my mother my backboard, springboard, structure, and foundation vanish. I lack spine and skeleton. I’m aware that my mother is not the only one missing my children’s childhoods—for weeks at a time, these fleeting and exquisite days of their early wonder barely register. I crash. I’m missing much of the joy that is the children becoming themselves. The baby begins talking. The little boy outgrows his pants. My daughter’s self-consciousness expands. I am sometimes encased in glass.

I try for the umpteenth time to collect all of her sayings: Waste not, want not. Blind in one eye, can’t see with the other. One of you lies and the other one swears to it.

Sometimes grief incapacitates, exacerbates the simplest of situations. No clean dishtowels, forgot the child’s lunch at home: scream with rage at the ceiling. Can’t find the art smocks: collapse weeping onto the kitchen floor. Forgot the child’s homework? Can’t find the baby’s new pair of shoes? Lost the top to the toothpaste? Nothing will ever be right. I will never do anything right. I cannot get out the door and into the car to pick up my child after school. How will I attend to any of the responsibilities stretching out before me into the next forty years? I cannot move from this spot. Even someone asking how I am or how is my dad doing can send me into hysterics, trigger overwhelming despair, render me helpless and despondent.

Self-preservation and thus the preservation of my maternal self vis-à-vis my family requires a degree of emotion blocking, some purposeful forgetting, which means, I make myself stop remembering my mother, stop remembering myself with her. Then, I am not only missing some of what is happening with the children, the children grow—go to school, to dance lessons, to play violin, learn to walk, to read, to talk, to throw—they have birthdays, but I am also missing missing my mother.

In so many ways, we are lucky, and we are grateful for this luck. We cultivate gratitude. We have had a good spring. Our sorrows continue, we will always miss Uncle John, but we are, unarguably, blessed. The children thrive in their schools. Their schools are not just good enough, they are wonderful. Their teachers are professional, compassionate, and smart. Charlie’s class planted a tree in the playground and he takes great joy in watering it every day. And there’s water. In Texas. For the first time since we arrived, Central Texas has been enjoying a relatively rainy spring. Up in Iowa, Dad is recovered from the pneumonia he contracted last month. He has the support of a strong, kind community. We were so, so glad to see Amanda, Maggie, JC, Oak, Len, and the kids at the beach, despite the stomach bug we passed around. There’s nothing, really, like true old friends to ease the heartache. Jeff’s mother and father visited for a week, the weather was terrific, and we had a restorative Easter holiday being together with them. Friends in Chicago received very good, long-awaited and long-sought, health news. After a year-long struggle, it looks as though our house sale will finally go through at the end of the month. Jeff received good news on his manuscript and is done teaching for the semester. I’m in a wonderful book club, with women I respect and adore, and research is progressing on my own manuscript. The kids dance, play music, and go to art classes, and are now into recital season. Sadie played a violin solo and was immensely brave about it. The baby picks up and puts away his own toys when he’s done playing with them. We’ve dyed eggs, had late nights, long afternoons, and rollicking bouncy birthday parties, been camping, to cookouts and concerts, and baptized (finally) in the San Marcos River with our great group of Texas friends, friends we never imagined we’d find when we decided two years ago to move here. This is all to say, I miss having the chance to tell you all the whys and hows of what’s been going on with us, Mommy. I just want her to pick up the phone.

We watch The Lion King with the kids one night and oddly, it helps them, helps me, too. The movie demonstrates in very simplified relational terms how someone is dead, gone, but sometimes still with us—in memory, thought, dreams, language, belongings—still in our hearts and our stars. And as my son and I talk about it later he nods quietly, seeming to understand at least a little bit. He is very literal these days and I think he likes believing bodies become stars. As we go over what happened to Simba’s father and conversely to Grammie he is sad, but somewhat more contented. Then he tells me reassuringly, “But Simba’s mama not die.” After that, he stops asking questions about my mother’s whereabouts.

I feel as though I’ve many shadows these days—my mother, my small children, my grief. I hear myself more than ever before inadvertently intoning my mother’s phrases to my children and to myself, insisting we shape up, get cracking, get it together, stop running our mouths so much, gut it out.

Recently, a woman on my listserv remarked that, “grief doesn’t end, you just get used to it.” She’s right. The suffering may appear to subside, but it’s always there, just below the next breath, waiting, within every moment, for a song, for a look, to receive you at a place you’ve been before, but together, or in a new thought, like this is the first time in my life that I am not making a Valentine for my mother. Or realizing that in the same way in which I never knew my mother’s father, (how she must have missed him), who died before I was born, it is very likely that my kids won’t remember, and so won’t know, my mother. My mother. They will not know her. Not really. What they will know of her will be through me. Like the way my grandmother carried my fetal mother with the egg that would become me inside of her, I now carry my mother forward into my children. Intrinsically. She’ll be an absence to them, not someone who was there and then gone, but someone who was never there in the first place except in shadow.

I carry my mother, am my own mother, and, too, am mother to my children. They want. They need. They rumble. They have forms to be signed, grapes to be cut. They soil their diapers. They must be lifted to the sink. Learn how to count and clap and question. Like the ghost of my mother they clamber somewhere just behind or in front of me exhorting me and them toward all manner of chore and action: Mind your manners. You can’t take it with you. Be a member of the clean plate club. Skin a rabbit. Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. You pay your money and you take your chances. I love you. Listen to your old mother for once in your life. And in that moment, I do.