The Hallmark Horror of Mother’s Day

It was just a few weeks before Mother’s Day last year when the realization finally dawned on my 14-year-old son that as eldest heir to the Buchholz Empire he would be lucky to come into twenty bucks and a nice used set of dishes upon reaching the age of majority. Raised to be a free-thinker and to weigh in with his opinion where and when he sees fit, he shared his belief without malice that perhaps my time as a Mother would nowadays be better spent in taking a job outside the home so I could more easily pay for his eventual car, college education and some extra video games along the way. He believes in planning ahead.

It was something of a ding to the Mommy-Ego, though, much as I tried not to take it personally. The truth is I’m pretty content to be a mother and very little else. I’m at peace with the fact that it often involves a great deal of thankless cleaning up after other human beings, that it means being at beck and call whether it be night or noon, and treating most everyone’s needs as superior to mine in every way. I don’t often feel the need to play the Guilt or Martyr cards that are so tempting for a person in my position at times. Mostly because I do feel appreciated on the average day and I know how lucky I am to be here. I also know what my husband and I have chosen to sacrifice in order to live our lives this way. I figure I signed up for this job, and it wasn’t just for the fame, fortune and glamor that goes with it.

And when I lose track of myself, I remember how Sidney Poitier turned the way I looked at the parent/child dynamic upside down and gave me my parenting motto twenty years ago when I watched his character in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner say to his father,

“You tell me what rights I’ve got or haven’t got, and what I owe to you for what you’ve done for me. Let me tell you something. I owe you nothing! If you carried that bag a million miles, you did what you were supposed to do! Because you brought me into this world. And from that day you owed me everything you could ever do for me like I will owe my son if I ever have another.”

Epiphany. In fact, I can honestly say that I’ve spent every day of motherhood at least trying to live to that ideal.

But then comes Mother’s Day.

With strong difficulties pervading the relationship with my own mother, the dreaded walk down the card aisle every year sifting through “I’m so lucky!” and “I’m proud to be just like you!” sentiments was always something of a painful experience already. In trying with little success to actually buy something for a woman who would weigh, examine and pore over my eventual selection with a magnifying glass checking for proof of love and other hidden meanings in color choice and scent, the joy of giving was long ago lost.

And the skeptic, alive and well inside of me, was always a little inclined to think of Mother’s Day as just another fascist scam. Well, really, I know it is. Perpetrated on mothers and the mothered alike, Hallmark rings in and raises the stakes on our natural inclinations toward self-imposed guilt and imaginary obligation. The Evil Coalition of Florists and Greeting Card Overlords, making us believe that we need that bouquet in order to feel appreciated, that we have to call or send a card on just this one particular day or else be damned to hell for an ungrateful child or a thoughtless spouse. I know this like I know that Christmas has turned in to an obscene holiday of excess and greed, but I still insist upon believing that Santa and I can use it’s powers for good, that I can bend it’s perversions to my own use.

But in years past, truly, once my mother was dealt with and I would once again remember that “Mother” meant “Me, Too,” I have always loved the homemade cards, the half cooked breakfasts and the pink sparkly pig necklaces that I’ve received from my progeny each year on this day. I embrace the beauty of their love in translation, with no magnifying glass or scales needed to tell me its worth, or what any of it says about mine.

Last year, though, turned out a little bit differently. The kids were older, collectively, and we’d been trying something new by giving them quite a bit of money for their allowances each month but also making them responsible for certain “necessities” that might come up for themselves. In this way they can blow all of the proverbial rent money on video games if they choose and not wind up homeless; the hope is that they can find their own balance in the world of material wants and needs, one that suits them specifically – before it’s real rent that’s on the line. So far for them it’s just meant making due with holey jeans and too tight shorts from last summer in favor of the newest Xbox 360 game, but that’s cool. They’re also responsible for their own gift-buying, though, and while I dropped a few hints and reminders on the way to Mother’s Day, I was pretty confident they were in favor of blowing it off.

I also thought I was probably okay with that. I was wrong. When I walked out of my bedroom that morning and into what appeared to be Just Another Day, I was a little crushed. Suddenly leaving them to their own devices or ignoring the commercial tyranny of the holiday didn’t seem like such a great idea. I wanted my freaking bouquet. Hadn’t I earned it?

The truth is that we all know that we should be celebrating and appreciating our mothers – and everyone else that we love – on a daily basis instead of once a year. But we’re human. We forget. We get busy, we get tired. So it’s not wrong to have a Mother’s Day to remind us to celebrate someone important. Where something like a Hallmark holiday damages us, though, is when we let it tell us what shape our love should take and what we can expect it to look like when it’s given to us. When we start relying on someone else’s shorthand for love and appreciation, we start missing the real love being offered to us, raw and true.

Love almost never comes in the shape, color, or scent that we were expecting. And in a household where no one has ever been expected to prove or quantify their love, sometimes it looks like just another day.

Addendum – This year – Mother’s Day 2010 – we hit our stride, I think. The kids kept their money and instead we spent a family day exploring some of the local countryside, adventuring and playing. With camera in hand and a new rule in place – on Mother’s Day I get to take as many pictures of my kids as I want and they don’t get to complain – I couldn’t have been happier. So this is the other thing I learned – while its important to be able to recognize and accept the love that’s offered to us in the shape and form in which it’s offered, it’s our right and our responsibility to teach the people around us how best to love us, too. – KB

For the strong and beautiful women in my life – the old friends and the new, the mothers and mothered and the motherless.

But especially for my Mom, the strongest woman I ever knew.

For Strong Women
by Marge Piercy

A strong woman is a woman who is straining
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing “Boris Godunov.”
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn’t mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.
A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren’t you feminine, why aren’t
you soft, why aren’t you quiet, why aren’t you dead?
A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you’re so strong.
A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.
A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.
What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

Probably, at 37 years old, I shouldn’t still be getting such a kick out of having a brand new purple notebook and a pen with green ink, but I am. It’s part of this thing that I’m doing now. My friend Kristy was in town recently, filled with inspiration and determination that she was kind enough to extend in my direction. She’s my bold, brave friend, every time she comes to town I nod my head and say “Yes, Kristy, you totally should quit your job and then just see what comes” and then she actually does it and it’s kind of terrifying and I expect her mother to come to my house and beat me up but it always turns out amazing in the end. Because it’s Kristy, and it’s what she does. So this time she’s decided that its time for both of us to take this whole writing thing seriously, and I shrugged and said, “‘kay.” Because that’s what I do, when it’s Kristy. And then I bought a new notebook, I suppose in case it’s longhand that’s been the one missing ingredient between me and total Stephen King-dom.

And every day from 10AM until noon I shall sit in my bedroom with the door locked and a sign taped up as a reminder to my children that whatever it is, they’ll survive 2 hours to tell me about it. And I’ll sit and sit and mostly think about how cool it would be to write stuff. But, baby steps.

So today, as I was writing my name and date on the inside of the front cover of the notebook I had no specific plans for, I realized that it’s my half birthday. So I’m actually 37 and a HALF, then. We always said the word HALF just like that when we were kids, remember? With that extra emphasis, because it mattered. It meant you weren’t merely 10 anymore, 10 was so far in the dust of your aging memory at this point that you might as well be 11. Practically 11. So today I am 37 and a HALF, which could almost be 38, but isn’t.

Obviously I’ve had quite a few half birthdays by now, passing without notice and mention, as have we all. But when I was a kid, it was part of a tradition started by my mother when I was probably 7 or 8. (And a HALF.) She would keep me home from school that day and take me shopping, buy me something special. Partly because my birthday always fell during summer break – which I always thought was a ripoff – but mostly because we had just moved again and being the new girl never got any easier.

So it was a really nice thing she did, there, one of my favorites. I like to imagine that between that and her wont to occasionally blast Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, I might begin to trace the real roots of my unschooling proclivities. And today I will remember my mother as the woman who bought me a 3ft tall Barbie doll because she saw the Lonely Other in my eyes and understood it. She didn’t always get me, but just that once, she really did.

Ironically, my daughter isn’t speaking to me today, for reasons that are still shrouded in mystery. I think I was kind of a jackass when I went to talk with her about it, though, trying to force a make-up because its what I wanted. So now I’m giving her space and using my patience, but nothing feels quite right without her. She’s one of those people whose displeasure can be felt even when she isn’t in the room, it seeps into the air and travels outward in widening circles. I’m like that, too, and so was my Dad. I think it came with the brown eyes.

Pieces from emails written in December of 2008.

My daughter’s hamster died in my hands at 2:30 this morning.

I really hate Christmas. Admitting that I hated Thanksgiving seemed to go a long way toward enabling me to finally embrace that holiday, but I think Christmas is just too big for reverse psychology. I’ve been wallowing, truthfully. And trying to deny it and act like nothing’s wrong, and getting frustrated when I make all the right moves and do everything correctly and it still can’t make this holiday feel good.

Maybe you’re right, about Christmas being melancholy to anyone over 15. It sure sounds right. But I’d really convinced myself otherwise for a few years, there, I thought it was stressful and overly full but a good time, I thought I’d made it my own. This year my heart just hasn’t been in it, though, it’s all been one long stretch of going through the motions and even the thought of having to sit through two movies tomorrow seems more then I have in me.

It’s been a long fucking year and I think I’m just kind of over it, you know?

But then I made the real fatal error of the conversation and mentioned how negative she’s gotten, how she’s isolated out there on the river and she has way too much time on her hands to pick over things (yes, as a matter of fact I was speaking from experience) and make things seem worse than they are and I knew it couldn’t be good for her health. It’s all true, and she ate it up, glommed onto it like a lifeline, the one thing she thought she could do to win me or something, and then in true mother fashion twisted and perverted it. The last two times I’ve seen her she’s been aggressively, psychotically cheerful, she’s been trying so hard to prove to me that she’s turned over a new leaf and is never negative about ANYTHING that it makes my teeth hurt. It’s so fucking fake, I can’t stomach it. I don’t even know how to interact with it. It brings back nightmares of my childhood where she would pull this whole Jekyll/Hyde act, transforming in an instant whenever company came over into this sort of Mom-bot, this perfect hostess that I guess people bought into but to me it was just so very not real, and scarily so.

If you ask me, when it comes to Jekyll and Hyde, Jekyll is far more evil and terrifying to me because he’s hiding the bad stuff, he knows it exists and he just thinks he can pretend it away and not be sullied by it. Hyde might be loathsome and evil but at least he’s honest about what he is. I preferred my mother negative, at least it was real.

Is it bad that I’ve single-handedly drank an entire bottle of Dark Rum this holiday season? And bought more?

Well I’ve felt trapped in a loop of questioning years for ages now, easily since my Dad died but possibly even before that when my life path changed drastically from student and theatre major to married mother-cum-housewife. There have been answers in places, growth and movement but just in pieces, in moments, and so often not the kind of lessons that stick. Usually the kind that come in the form of a realization that you’ve struggled toward and suffered into and finally reached that golden “Aha! Now I get it!” And six months down the road you’ve panted and struggled some more on something that is certainly altogether different only to reach the end and discover it’s the same damn golden Aha that you’ve already handled, still has your fingerprints, you thought it had changed your whole life view but you forgot it and had to live toward it all over again from another goddamn angle. Those are the answers I was mostly getting, the one step forward two steps back variety. So this year has been really different for me, there have been shifts inside of me, really profound, solid shifts. Those realizations haven’t just been dried leaves on the wind, they’ve been marble, carved to fit inside me and stay.

And most of them have been positive, they’ve been necessary, they’ve been answers I’ve been waiting a very long time for, and I can feel them settling into me and assuming my shape, I can feel how real they are. And that’s good, right? It’s nice to have some answers finally, it’s nice to feel all of these sudden strides. But on the other hand, I’ve just been pummeled. It’s been never ending. And I am just exhausted.

It’s been a long fucking year.

The sun is judging me today, with its unexpected presence and its generally cheerful outlook. It says I shouldn’t be such a Gloomy Gus, that I should come outside and play. (The sun says annoying things like that sometimes, if you’re listening.) Defiant, me, after my shower I put on another set of pajamas and called it a sick day. Mental health, we’ll say. I’m learning to not let the sun’s opinion of me matter so very much.

I carry recurring themes in my dreams, and last night it was the one where I go to stay at my cousin’s house. Except this time, sometimes it was my cousin’s house and sometimes it was my friend Jacqui’s. This will all make sense in the unfolding – my cousin was the closest extended family that I had growing up, and Jacqui and her family are the closest thing I have to extended family now. In my dream, though, I would place my age at around the college years – old enough to be making my own decisions but young enough that I was still living at home with my parents. I had the sense that I’d gone to stay with cousin and/or Jacqui because of a fight with my parents, and that I’d already petulantly stayed days beyond the time they’d been expecting me home. And as the dream stretched on and on with nothing much happening in the day to day scheme of it (I helped fold some laundry, I think, and returned some CDs to their cases), I began to wonder why my parents weren’t calling me concerned or angry, wondering why I hadn’t at least bothered to check in. I think it was probably finally in that in-between time of waking – as the brain begins to let go of the dreamworld it had inhabited and reality seeps in to color the walls as they dissolve – that I remembered/realized the reason. My parents are both dead. That’s why they hadn’t called to check on me.

The holidays were every bit as good and as bad as I had any right to expect. Meltdown occurred on schedule, about two days before festivities. Usually I always grieve the holidays in anticipation so the actual day generally isn’t so bad, but this time I still found myself crying over granny angel memories on Christmas Eve. It’s okay. In a way I’m glad to have my mother back – the memory of the one who came before – the one who was crazy and at times terrifyingly unpredictable, but still always managed to put a note in my lunch bag and tuck me in at night. Now that she’s dead I can reclaim my mother, I have the power to fashion my memory of her as I choose, and today I choose to remember the smiley faces she drew on every note.

Christmas Day was busy and filled with watching – I loved (loved, loved) Sherlock Holmes, I view the coming end of the 10th Doctor with dread and sadness, and I didn’t mind the blue people of Avatar as much as I’d expected. (Their sad faces tended to throw me out of the moment, CGI grief still has a ways to go, but in the long run that meant I didn’t come out of the theater sobbing which is actually a win for me.) The thing that I loved most about Avatar, though, was The People’s greeting.

“I see you.”

Pieces from the emails I wrote and sent in October of 2008.

Well, I’m finally clawing back up from oblivion and able to take a few moments to chat. Honestly I don’t know why I’m having such a problem resurfacing – it feels like September was a ride down a really steep crazy slide and October is the deep ball pit I landed in and sank all the way to the bottom.

I’m not sure where any of that came from and you’re sweet to pretend it was relevant. Did I mention I’ve taken cold medicine?

Right now I’m finishing up Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein so I can read Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. And this was after reading Spook by Mary Roach and 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill, so I guess you can see where my head has been lately. I think I’ve been trying to rediscover God in some strange and dark places, honestly.

So James concert (where I could have been) in San Francisco was October 1, Shane’ work (where I will probably be) in San Francisco on October 19, Neil Gaiman (where I wanted to be) reading chapter 6 of the Graveyard Book in San Francisco October 5. Oh well, if I had been there it might have turned out to be one of those “And now I can die” moments, and really, I’m only 36. I’d like to keep going a little longer, really.

So, really, the whole thing with my mother was largely a mild bump on the trauma scale – I think at this point I’m still finding myself surprised to be surprised by the depths of her selfishness, but I’m also much faster at bouncing back from the hits. I mean, let’s face it, no one really thought that seeing my psychotic mother once a bloody week was going to be easy, or was even necessarily in my best interest, but I had to try, I suppose.

And of course it’s a complicated story to relate, like most family stories probably are, because what sounds on the surface like a mildly trying conversation generally has incredible amounts of back-story and conditioning and button installations and ritual sacrifices along the way that sort of build, layer upon layer, into something much bigger and uglier than one remark.

First little bit of silliness – when we were out at my mother’s house yesterday I noticed that it was finally our one week of fall here in Oregon, so I went out in her yard to try to grab some pictures. And I very literally walked right into a fairy ring. You know how they say that in places where the toadstools grow in a circle the fairies meet? I’ve looked for them all my life (the rings, not the fairies. Well, okay fine, both) and never seen one, and yesterday I just happened to look down and I was in the center of one. It was very, very cool.

My favorite thing about San Francisco is that you can turn a corner into magic at any time. And my kids want to know what’s coming. They want a plan. They want predictable. They are me, in any other city, at any other time in my life, basically. But in SF I want to wander, I want to take 50 pictures of the same damn building, I want to sit and contemplate the Jackson Pollack, I want to enjoy the freaking view! I really didn’t get any of that on this last trip, or if I did it was in tiny little snatches in between pep talking and keeping track of everything.

It’s like how you can’t really see your own kids grow because you’re with them every day, but someone who only sees them every few months will notice humongous changes. Seeing my kids through the eyes of San Francisco I can see the giant changes for myself, comparing from trip to trip. Khy and Stormy have very clearly crossed that blessed line of reason and compromise where they have some awareness of needs that exist beyond their own. They understand time constraints. Khy worked nearly as hard as I did to keep everyone cheered and upbeat. And Nicky – well, he sees the line. He dances along it now, which is a big improvement. There were still some days when he would moan and complain that he had to walk more than a block to find a McDonald’s, insist that he was about to starve to death any second, and then refuse to eat anywhere else that we passed. But there were also days like the trip to the Museum of Modern Art, where he was a genuinely fun companion.

So I let the kids play, Khy happy to stay out of the water but Storm and Nicky rolling up their pants legs to wade in. To be fair, I knew what I was risking, letting them play in sand and surf with no towels or changes of clothing and a bus ride, train ride and car ride away from both, but it was one of the few moments of serenity on that trip where I felt like I would make it work, whatever happened, and I just needed to say yes to something. And making it work was pretty much what I had to do, because while I managed to squeeze in a little oohing and ahhing and picture snapping and ashes spreading and sunset enjoying while watching out for my kids and taking stressed out calls on the cell from Shane who had taken the wrong bus 30 and I had the bus map, I wasn’t watching quite close enough and Nicky got covered in sand and wet.

So we trudged up to the spray off place by the bathrooms. It had a button for a low one just for feet and legs, and a higher one for whole body. I got to work spraying off the kids and Storm wasn’t too bad but Nicky was a problem. He’s wearing wet, sand covered jeans that are beginning to feel like sand paper and in that moment I KNOW he isn’t going to last dinner, a bus ride and a train ride in that condition. (Did I mention he was also having an eczema flare up? Not a great time for sand rubbing against skin.) So I looked him seriously in the eyes and said, “Can you just pretend for me tonight that your boxers are real shorts so I can take these jeans off of you?” He, thankfully, agreed. So I stripped off his jeans, sent him back over to rinse his legs a little better. He pushed the top button accidentally and soaked his t-shirt. At that point all I could do was laugh, really, which stopped his freak out in it’s tracks and soon we were all laughing. Good news – I actually DID have a change of shirt for him. That plus his hoodie because the sun had set and it was getting a little cooler, and later he walked nonchalantly into the Hard Rock Cafe wearing his boxers and Khy’s socks pulled up to his knees.

Anyway, ages later, after I had finally gotten Nicky squared away, I started helping Storm dry off and reshoe. We were sitting on benches that are right next to the spray, so the next people who come up to use the spray are just right next to us, basically, we’re just out of range of the water and barely. And the next people are two very French, very loud and boisterous, very buff and attractive young men. Probably in their early twenties. And they step up to those water sprays, and they strip right down to their tight little boxer briefs and they pull soap out of nowhere and they start to shower for real, basically. And they take their time, too.

And this isn’t me being prudish, it was just so surreal! And you should have seen the mortified looks on my children’s faces. I just kept thinking, God I love San Francisco.

Sorting through old emails sent and culling out a few bits and bobs that seemed to best represent my year. I try to be a little bit more relevant and timely with this project, but life happens, and this is actually the 2008 selection…

April sucked so bad over here. And not in any real exterior definable way, it was all this messy interior yucky stuff and I’m not sure I’m over it yet so much as choosing to be Over It because now it’s May.

[on Mother's Day] My family woke me up this morning and presented me with two Gordon Ramsay books – one about his life and one his latest cookbook. Apparently Shane had some trouble with the saleswoman at the bookstore who seemed convinced that his wife would rather have a Rachael Ray cookbook. Rachael Ray isn’t sexy at all.

Egad, they didn’t think I actually wanted it for cooking, did they?

And my mother and my sister just started in with the stories and about what a drama queen I was and how funny and… I laughed at first. And then it got worse and worse and my sister was telling stories I don’t even remember from things I supposedly did when I was a teenager that don’t sound at all like me and how she would know anyway, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe it was all true. Maybe it was from the summer when my mother flew out to Arizona to extract my sister from another one of her stupid moves that we never pick on her about, and then came home to pack her things and run off with the man she’d met on that trip. Maybe it was after Mom came home from that, when she expected that everything would immediately revert to normal and we would all pretend that she hadn’t just left my father and I for months. I was a real drama queen then, let me tell you, I even had a box – hand stitched in home ec with the initials of the members of Duran Duran – that I carried around in my backpack at school full of a razor blade and all of the aspirin I could get my hands on, not because I wanted to die but because I just wanted someone to acknowledge my pain, or maybe just that I had a right to feel pain. My Mom sure didn’t think so. Or maybe it was the summer when my father and I were almost killed by a drunk driver, and we had no money and my mother had to get a job while I stayed home and nursed my father back to health, even helping him shower and use the bathroom. Or it could have been one of a number of summers when my Dad was drinking and my mother was crazy and I learned to run across the street to my grandmother’s house whenever they started to fight because while Grandma wasn’t very affectionate, at least she was close by.

I’m not asking for pity, I never have, especially not from them. Everyone has stories, everyone has it hard sometimes, we all have crosses to bear. But I’m sick to death of them acting as though my childhood was some kind of fairytale and I was the undeserving fucking princess. And they still do, and maybe that’s what drives me the craziest about spending time with my family. Because not only do they not know the first thing about me, they don’t want to know. They don’t want anything that doesn’t fit with their own stories, the ones in their head about me. Which is why the old stories, the ones from when I was 3 are so convenient, I guess. I sat there and listened and laughed along for as long as I could this time, and it was Cliff of all people that started clearly making comments trying to deflect them, growing increasingly uncomfortable with my mother and my sister and what they were saying. It was wild, and so very pathetic, sitting there realizing that in that moment, Cliff could read how incredibly unhappy I was, he was picking up my signals loud and clear while my mother and my sister went on obliviously, and in that moment he knew me better than they did AND seemed to care more. Because he made the effort to do both.

[Wedding anniversary] True, I spent the better part of anniversary day in bed having a complete freak out, but the next day we all went for a beautiful hike at Silver Falls. And of course by “all” I mean “kids, too” which let’s face it, isn’t ideal for anniversaries. But we did what we had to do. Frankly, I’ve lived my life so perversely that I never in a million years expected the 13th anniversary to be UNLUCKY. That feels so mainstream and embarrassingly predictable.

Today, among other things, I cleaned up mouse diarrhea, found my incredibly indecisive daughter with an in-betweenie body size the PERFECT swimsuit, and cleared 30 GB of space from my laptop so that my 12-year-old can install World of Warcraft on it for the funshop this weekend.

I love my family, but sometimes I think these people seriously don’t deserve me.

[LIG Unschooling Conference] Here safely. Exhausted, seeing as how between last minute to-dos and stress I got about three hours of sleep last night. MET MARY. And several other people I’d never heard of who seemed to know me. Now I’ve faded back into obscurity, enjoyed a talk by Diana Jenner called “Change Your Perspective Change Your Life” and then we high-tailed it out of there because my people, we are not high-stimulus-for-long-duration people. It was an early night anyway, and now we’re back at our hotel. Five people. Crammed into one little bitty hotel room for the evening. Glad to be here at the conference, but slightly claustrophobic, currently.

Sometimes miracles come wrapped in pink diamond patterned bubble mailers carried priority mail and watched over eagerly by the nine year old who knows that it’s addressed to me and will be boring but still can’t quite stop himself from wishing for the newest Mario game or a PS3 to magically be inside. The journal is gorgeous and perfect, the note included even more so, written for me by someone who has been in the trenches and knows that the only thing harder than death is how quiet it is two months later. Who knows that the one thing I need most right now, aside from feeling that my pain is not forgotten, is to be allowed to be broken and to be loved even so.

I sobbed with the abandon of a child because I knew it was safe to let go, that someone had my back.

It’s been a problem for me, trying to fall back into old habits. Brave face, stiff upper lip, best foot forward. Nothing to see here, folks. Most people buy it, not because I’m that good but because it’s easier for us both. Even my husband, who is in it with me, who has never not had my back – in September he would sit with me and let me crumble, rail, or quake, but on a bad day in November he tries to cheer me up, tries to kiss it better, wants to fix it. Fix me. Of course, it’s what he does, it’s what you do when your person is sad.

But I’m not just sad, not yet. I’m still shattered. I’ve tried to forget that, tried to pretend it isn’t true – no one is more impatient with me than me – but most of my pieces are still lying on the floor at my feet. I can feel them digging in between my toes even now.

And I still need to be broken. I just need to be loved even so.

You might be familiar with our recent adventures in Centralia, how our minivan died a non-violent but still sudden and unexpected death on the side of I-5, splooshing and sploshing to its demise. My dead mother left me her minivan. I’d been in no hurry to claim it and now, through a strange vehicular twist, it’s become our only form of transportation. It’s even older than our last vehicle but kept pristine, it has cubbies and secrets and CDs from when my father drove it. It moves like an old lady’s car and wheezes and moans, it creaks like a ghost ship.

But I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. Mom did like to be the hero, and it has, quite honestly, saved our asses. But I think it might also be what made it real for me, the fact that she isn’t coming back.

Or maybe it’s that I can’t say thank you.

Or maybe it’s that I can’t say sorry for the inward eye-rolling whenever she mentioned the van would be mine and what did I need with that old thing anyway can’t we talk about something else for a fucking change?

Or maybe it’s just that it feels a bit like I’m dressing up in her old clothing, carrying her purse and about to start a cat collection any minute.

My father’s death was a complete shock. Until that happened I didn’t believe that parents could die, not really. Sure, I heard the stories growing up, lived with the fear and fact like anyone. I just didn’t really believe it until it happened to me. After that, I never forgave my mother for her mortality. Never trusted her not to die and leave me. Of course it didn’t help much that she considered her mortality to be the only thing she still had going for her, in a way. It’s all she wanted to talk about. I listened with the ears of a hurt child, still related as a teenager who resents that her needs are no longer parental priority, I went to her house and I sat with her week after week, patted myself on the back dutiful daughter and held myself in so close and so closed. Terrified to love her or lose her and both.

It wouldn’t have mattered, of course. Even if I’d been able to pry myself open, able to see beyond my own heartbreak, she was just as incapable of trusting as I. She was just as frightened and betrayed and broken. Never did two women need each other more and have less common language for bridging the expanse. I told myself (absolved myself) that there was no use, I couldn’t save her, and it was true.

It’s just…

Knowing that I was doomed to fail, does that really absolve me from ever trying? Because isn’t that what love is? Showing up and trying to save each other even when we’re all beyond hopeless? Even when there’s nothing left to fix? Even when the break is beyond repair? Didn’t she, like me, just want someone to see her pain and say it out loud?

Because she never stopped being sad.

She never stopped being broken.

And she just wanted to be loved even so.



I tried, though. Didn’t I?

I hide in the bathroom to cry. Not because I’m ashamed. Not because I don’t think my kids can handle knowing that Mom is sad. In fact the opposite is true; I’ve always believed that it was my job to let them see that it’s okay for adults to cry, to get frustrated, to screw up (and apologize for it) and how to fight constructively with a spouse, while we’re at it. I raise my kids to be human – flawed and frantic – not android. The reason I hide is because if the process is going to be sincere, it has to be uninterrupted, unobserved. I hide because with my daughter away, it is mostly testosterone roiling through the place, and the boys – tenderhearted and nurturing as they might be – want to fix it. Distract me, hug me, make jokes, do anything, anything at all to get me to stop crying. But I need to cry.

And it’s harder when people are watching, because then I feel compelled to explain things, like why I pulled out the sewing machine I borrowed from my mother over a year ago, the one that’s been collecting dust in a corner of my dining room ever since, unobtrusive, not causing anyone trouble or drawing attention to itself. I would have to put into words why it had to be today of all days, when I’m already feeling cranky and raw, when my patience is sadly lacking, when my whole being is weary and sad, when I haven’t touched a sewing machine since I was 13 years old – and, as it happens, it’s nothing like riding a bike. Why I needed to attempt to cover pillows for the boys’ room – pillows that, being boys, they don’t even know that they want – decorative pillows, for God’s sake, for a 9 and 14 year old! Not exactly an emergency, is it? On this day and on that machine, when it physically hurt me to know that my mother was the one who threaded that bobbin with red?

She hated red.

I would have to try to explain why I went ahead with it, knowing that it was a foregone conclusion that it would end with tears and thread so tangled up and knotted that I would put the machine away in pieces, defeated. I would have to try to explain, to them and to me, how it can feel like your self destruct button got pushed and you just can’t find the right wire to cut, not in time. Not today. It’s easier just to let it explode all over you and then clean it up quietly and sob in the bathroom.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
- T.S. Eliot

I’ve started to miss her now. Her ghost follows me around town, past the lake where we used to meet for walks sometimes. Hunting through the local stores for bits and bobs for Halloween costumes, I feel the weight of 30 Halloweens past, trailing behind me through the aisles, wearing my old costumes. Tweetie and Spiderman Me, holding hands with hobo and movie star and witch. They giggle, they whisper, they remind me of things that were better forgotten for a time, when things were hard and I had to protect myself from my mother and her pain. Things like how she took me to see that awful first Star Trek movie when I was 7, or how she used to bring out and have me open some of my Christmas presents early because she would get too excited to wait. Things like how she taught me how to write my name, one letter every day, until I was writing Kelly all over the house on everything, even furniture, and my normally perfectionist mother with her normally impeccable house didn’t even get angry. Things like how when she saw how miserable I was, new girl again in another new town, she kept me home from school and invented a half birthday celebration, taking me out and buying me toys to cheer me up. Things like daily packed lunches that always, without fail, for ten years held notes that said a variety of things but always I Love You, and usually with a smiley face.

Things that let me miss her now and mourn her.

Right before my father died we moved into this place with its high maintenance yard and it’s eleven rose bushes. He was excited about the garden area, the possibilities, and I was excited to learn from him. After he died I couldn’t hold a rake without feeling inadequate and sad. For seven years the weeds won the battles. My husband and I would trudge out half-heartedly, guiltily, weighed down by the imagined glaring of the neighbors that we’ve hardly exchanged a word with in all this time. Once or twice a year we would weed and trim and dig until we dropped, and always do just enough to make it worse. Make more room for the weeds. Then this year, a miracle. We bought perennial bulbs, we planted Dahlias and lilies and other things whose names I’ve forgotten. We worked and we cleaned and while it’s still far from the Better Homes and Gardens that my father was capable of, it’s respectable. And when this was happening, this strange rebirth, each and every time I approached a yard tool my brain would still identify it as alien to me. I would have only the vaguest idea of how to hold and use the thing. But once it was in my hands it would feel right and natural. My hands knew how to do things with it that I’d never imagined. Things my father never taught me, but I absorbed, I guess, from endless childhood days of following him around the yard while he worked.

I have muscle memory from muscles that were never mine.

So who knows? Maybe in seven years I’ll suddenly discover that I can knit and crochet. Maybe I’ll macramé a lamp. Maybe I’ll have recipes in my head that I’ve never made, and I’ll start liking to cook. And maybe I’ll finally finish those pillows.

and I am all that’s left.

It’s sunny again lately and the autumn chill can’t quite catch hold. The colors, usually so quick to drop from the trees in this part of the country, are staying and stunning and everything backed by the bluest of sky. Spiders in festive colors decorate my front porch for the holiday. (I am the Disney princess that no one talks about.) Last week the air was heavy with unspoken things and undelivered rain, it was an effort just to walk through it. I chose to be buoyant. I danced through Fry’s and Best Buy. I twirled through Target and Freddy’s. I made IKEA my new god. It was fun. But this week my pretensions are showing. I am lagging and sagging despite the sparkle of sunlight. I wake up sad, missing something I can’t completely remember.

I’m not so very okay as I pretend. I was so happy to be released from sick bed that I’ve been running ever since. Swallowing projects whole. Filling up the empty spaces with things bought and paid for. (Things that won’t love me but won’t leave me or let me down in a crisis, either.) In fact, I am mourning my mother in her own best style: track shoes, a bank card and denial.

Mourning my father’s death was complicated by the equal grief I felt at the loss of a mother I recognized, and the stress of the madwoman left behind to wear her face. Mourning the ragged pieces of what was left of my mother is, at least, a simpler thing. Straightforward. Without my father, my foundations were crumbs, I had to cobble my whole world back together with duct tape and chewing gum and papier mache. Without my mother it is a subtler collapse. Interior, like the cotton batting of an old stuffed bear. I am a little floppier than before. Worn and weary. It occurs to me that my mother took up so much space inside me for the last 7 years that I will have to be very careful and watchful about what I allow to fill me back up now.

But on the other side is an interesting truth – I have no more obligations left that I did not choose for myself. I am truly my very own woman. Most days I feel lighter.

Halloween is bearing down with Christmas as a caboose. NaNo next month, and before that, another bloggy move to my very own domain. Pillows to sew to match the changes in the boys’ room, a turn toward manlier style and something a little more sophisticated than mattresses on a floor. My amazing new camera comes at the end of the week. I had so much I wanted to say but my brain keeps resolving into static and nonsense. Maybe I’ll take my daughter shopping instead.