The Seasons of My Mother

by Marcia Gay Harden

  My mother is a star navigator

  TRAVEL, CHILDREN, AND A FUR Coat.

  2011 will be a year that is cemented forever in my mind. It is a numerically positive year, a year of new beginnings and completed circles. The number 11 signifies remembrance, light, activation; 2011 is defined as a year of hope and positivity. My mom was even born on an 11, on January 11, 1937, again the repeating 11, again the reminder that 11 is a number that activates memory and light . . . or so the numerologists say. Yet it didn’t seem that way to me as 2011 began the calendar tick of pages. My precious mom had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, my marriage was falling apart, and I was homeschooling my kids because I was running out of money for their private school in New York. New beginnings, indeed. Visiting Mom in Texas in mid-February, having hauled my kids and math books, poetry, art material, and English books to her lovely home in Fort Worth, I was trying to understand where hope and positivity were hiding. I was trying to understand just what the “light” might be activating. I was trying to understand the cruel significance of the number 11, and I was trying to understand the synchronicity of so much disintegration.

  I kept thinking of Tony Kushner’s great American play Angels in America. I had originated the role of Harper on Broadway, and had the privilege to perform one of the most beautiful speeches ever written—Harper’s last speech of the play. In this speech, Harper connects the ragged disintegration of the ozone—which is, of course, the immune system of the earth—with the equally ragged disintegration of the immune system of the human body, as made real with AIDS. She imagines the souls of dead people and hurt people, all people suffering loss, and she imagines them floating over the holes, holding hands to create a web, and repairing the ragged holes of the ozone, thus healing the earth. This speech begins “Night Flight to San Francisco . . . chase the moon across America . . . ,” and as Harper begins it, she is on a plane headed to San Francisco to heal herself.

  My February 2011 night flight had taken me to Texas. I was in shock, just beginning to realize what bad shape my marriage was in, and I was feeling the quicksand terror of lost love. This terror was mixed with another terror, a sinking desperation as I watched my mother’s helpless decline. I busied myself by running errands for her, teaching my kids, talking to a divorce lawyer, researching the unrelenting march of Alzheimer’s, and looking silently out of a window, watching the wind blow the leaves of an oak tree to the ground.

  In a daze one day, I found myself at the Apple store. I was attempting to update/repair/fix my mom’s cell phone. I was trying to save her contacts from her PC computer to her iPhone (an impossible task for anyone who may want to do the same, by the way). I had been there for hours, literally hours, and I just wanted to go back to my mom’s home, see my kids, teach them something about the frigging Alamo and Texas, and integrate it into their daily lessons, then lie down in bed and cover my head with a pillow. The blue-shirted Apple employee told me that there were holes in the computer’s digital information. I stared at him blankly. Then when he asked me if I knew what a browser window was, I stuttered, and burst into tears, in the middle of the store.

  No. I did not know what a window was. I did not understand the digital dots and dashes floating about in the atmosphere that apparently made windows on computers. I did not know why there were holes in the computer’s stored information. And furthermore, I did not know why there were holes in the ozone. I did not know why there were holes in my mother’s brain. I did not know why there were holes in my marriage. I did not know why her memory was ragged. I did not want to understand the day when she wouldn’t know me. I did not want to get Alzheimer’s myself. I did not want to be a single mother. I did not want to be alone. And I did not want to see her alone. Which, by the way, was the only tragic ending of the story of Alzheimer’s, the fact of ultimately being devastatingly alone, without even memory for a companion. Finally, I did not know why Tony Kushner had understood that all things in the world are synchronous, and that the healing of the ozone could only happen with the healing of the immune system of the human body, and that somehow it all had to do with San Francisco and love and acceptance and tolerance, and that that was how we would repair the world.

  All this I told to the shell-shocked Apple employee. He stood very still, blinked twice, and then said with a very pronounced drawl, “Well, gee, I’m sorry, ma’am. Not real sure who Tony Kooshnyer is, but I sure am sorry about your mom. And your, ummm, well, your marriage.” There was a long silence.

  “My mother did my flowers,” I told him. “My mother did my flowers at my wedding.” He gurgled something about how purty that must’ve been. I paused again. I couldn’t help it. The tears started rolling. I looked down and huskily said, “They were beautiful. Just beautiful.”

  As he stuck my credit card into his mobile device and I watched it stutter out a receipt, I thought about windows, and looked up to the ceiling to hide my tears, which were now rolling down my cheeks and filling up the holes in my ears. I imagined the holes in the ozone filling up with flowers, beautiful flowers, just as Tony had imagined them filling up with all the souls of all the people who had ever been at war, or who had ever been hurt, or who had ever suffered loss. I imagined all those same souls holding flowers, like maids of honor in a wedding, and flying up to the sparkling heavens, to the thermosphere, anointing themselves in angel dust, then shooting back down toward earth, speeding with the meteors down through the mesosphere, tumbling past lightning sprites, and then floating downward through the stratosphere until they blanketed the ozone, where they would weave a tapestry of flowers over the holes, patching up loss and sorrow, and restoring immunity.

  A tear escaped the hole of my ear and slowly slid down my neck. I imagined then that some petals, too, would escape being woven into the tapestry; slipping from the angels’ woven grasp, they would fall toward earth. Floating past fluttering gossamer wings, the sacred petals would drift, like snowflakes drifting through a giant window, down, down, toward the earth. Falling toward earth and toward my mother’s outstretched hands. Rose petals and jonquils, anthuriums and birds-of-paradise, althea and hydrangea, petals like a bride steps on as she walks down the aisle, petals before they are crushed, sacred angel petals sprinkled with angel dust. They would fall through all the ozone holes, through these giant sky windows, and rain upon the people below. People, my mother, anyone’s mother who had dementia or Alzheimer’s, anyone’s father or sister or brother or child, people across the earth, with arms raised high to catch the flowers and petals falling through the cloud window, people would soon be covered in petals. Then, in that moment, the holes of memory would be patched, the synapses in the brain would regrow their bridges, the plaque would disintegrate, and the brain would heal. The window would close. My mother would remember her life.

  I snatched my receipt from blue shirt. Yes. I knew what a window was, motherfucker.

  Later that night, sitting at the round table in Mom’s Fort Worth kitchen, watching the Oscars together, we happily remembered when she had accompanied me to those awards in February 2001. I wasn’t ready to dampen the spirits of our little gathering by breaking the news of my failing marriage; I was still depressed about the Apple store and the ozone. I also wanted to be strong and careful with my words in front of my kids, so I hid my sorrow and my rage, and petted Mom’s wiener dog, Emmy. Emmy chinkled her irritating chains while Mom and I sipped champagne and watched the glamorous actresses in their gorgeous gowns suck it in on the red carpet. Which of course only depressed me further.

  I waited till the next morning to step across chinkling Emmy, to ease into bed with my mom, crawling into her warm crawl space, to rest my swollen face on her blue flannel nightie, and to tell her, “I don’t think my marriage is going to make it, Mom.”

  “Oh, honey,” she said softly. “You two seemed so perfect together.”

  She had been such a part of our lives together, throwing us an engagement party, creating the flowers at my wedding, and
the stunning altarpiece, too, helping me with the birthing of all three babies, literally sleeping with me and Thaddaeus when we were so exhausted with my newborn twins and we hadn’t yet hired a baby nurse. She had traveled with us, often under the guise of helping me with the kids when I was on a location shoot, but if you did the math you could see that I usually had a nanny as well on these trip, and I often hired a babysitter at the hotel. Mom had traveled with us because it was fun, and she and Thaddaeus got along, and she loved going to events with me, and she got to spend grandma time with the kids. I knew, for her, my broken marriage would also be a loss, that she would be losing a friend in Thad, too. But mostly, she would be sad, and scared, for me. She smoothed my brown hair in rhythmic strokes, and murmured, “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I never would have dreamt that on your wedding day.”

  Wedding days. Does every mother dream of her children’s wedding day? Does every daughter or son dream of their own wedding day? What does that look like for my children? Will millennials say, “Until death do us part,” when half of them will have grown up in divorced families? Do I teach my own children to believe in the fantasy of marriage? Do I teach them that love is everlasting? Do I even need to teach them that, or does love just take over, like an unstoppable force? And is it even so much love we are talking about, as commitment? Since my divorce, I have a hard time feeling pure about wedding days. My cynicism sets in and I silently sneer, “How long will this last?” With this attitude, I worry about making my children feel jaded. What if they never believe in love or marriage?

  But silly me . . . my children are way ahead of me. They are a product of the times, wise to anthropological history, aware of the influences of Victorian romance, clear about the pros and cons of the sexual revolution, pondering the seeming impossibility of monogamy, and celebrating the shifting power structures, as most homes are now two-parent working homes. After all, Santa Claus is not real. The Easter Bunny is not real. And neither, for them, is the idea of “till death do us part.” And—I think?—they are okay with that. They prefer to excavate the fantasy and come to the truth underneath—just as they did for Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. They are gender-fluid, educated, bound by neither career nor lack of it. They are excited and ready to explore themselves before they commit to marriage or family. They are clear that family will look unlike the structures of 1950s patriarchy, but instead, will look like—well, it will look like love. That’s mostly what we talk about, not wedding days but family, and we’ve been celebrating the many alternative families that surround us in the liberal beachside community of Santa Monica and fast-paced New York.

  My mother dreamed of marriage even in her early teens, and she was just nineteen years old when she tied the knot. Still a girl, really, soft olive skin, big wide smile, and a head of curly brown hair that was thrilled to imagine her new life as a navy wife. Personal exploration hadn’t been part of my mother’s trajectory when she graduated from high school. There had been no conversation with her parents about a Gap Year, or working for a while before heading off to college. Instead she had immediately enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin, and at some point early on she had caught the eye of Ensign Thad Harden, who was a member of the NROTC. He was dashing, and passionate, and she was quickly, deeply in love. Again, there was no talk of “Let’s hold off till a few years after graduation while I go off to war and you start climbing the corporate ladder.” There was no corporate ladder for her to climb. She was to get married, and to follow him around the world.

  In the 1950s sweater-set America, marriage was a sacred union, meant to last through thick and through thin. Pearls and dishwashers and new clothes washers and dryers were promised in the magazine ads for young wives. Sparkling kitchens, cooing babies, and muddy little footprints from the inevitable jump in a puddle on a crisp rainy day. The actual “bride” was a role that lasted only a day, and whatever independence and hope the white-laced hostess enjoyed on her wedding day, she was soon to discover that they would quickly disappear, that they would just as quickly become inseparable from the role of wife and housekeeper and mother.

  So a wedding day, and the white fairy-tale gown, the bride’s dream, the bouquet, the church, the registry, the garter, and the cake, the tradition of that momentous day, was deeply ingrained in my mother—not yet twenty. It was certainly something my mother had imagined as she stared at her reflection first in the mirror and later in the irises of my father’s blue eyes. She dreamed of her wedding day, of the bride she would be, and of the house and home she would eventually make. She was young, and she had never lived on her own but for a brief two years in her college dorm, and she was ready for change. She was ready for a Man, with a capital M.

  She gulped at the exotic adventures surely awaiting her as a military wife. She sparkled as she chose her diamond wedding ring, and she vowed to make her marriage last. She imagined children, happy cozy children in red mittens spinning on a merry-go-round, and she vowed to be the best mother ever, and to teach her children that marriages lasted.

  Divorce, for my mother, in her Dallas circles, was whispered about only behind closed doors, and there was a fair amount of shame attached to it, accompanied by a great deal of pity for children who came from “broken homes.” Working mothers were rare (and often blamed for the incrementally rising divorce rates) and the Nike running shoes and business suits that women would soon wear to work were a curious fashion phenomenon not yet imagined. Indeed, ladies wore low-heeled sandals, and they knitted soft booties for the babies that were soon to come. Mom was taught by her own mother, as so many mothers taught their daughters, to believe in fairy tales and one love. The disappointments of marriage were to be kept quiet, and dealt with privately.

  Yet, years later, tears on a blue flannel nightie: “Mom, my marriage isn’t going to make it.”

  “Hush, now. Shhh. Hush, now.” As if I were a baby again, she smoothed my brown hair and patted my back.

  My mother got married on a Sunday—April 1, 1956. April Fool’s Day, to be exact. I would have thought she would have married in June: June was brides’ month after all! It was the month of flowers and blooms, rain-washed fields gently popping up Queen Anne’s lace and violets. It was the month of blue iris, calla lily, hydrangea, wisteria, bright orange gerbera daisies and luscious peonies, yellow daffodil and purple roses. But no—my beautiful mother married on April Fool’s Day. I have always found that slightly troublesome: hello? Isn’t that bad luck? And though I know all the whys and wherefores of her decision—which mostly had to do with timing and an available Sunday at her Methodist church, and my father having to hurry off to navy flight school—still, it does seem to be tempting fate a bit, if one were superstitious.

  The marriage lasted forty-six years. Punctuated with travel, jazz, learning, and love. The marriage bore five children. And the marriage bore its fair share of thick and thin, as marriages are wont to do.

  My father had one best man, my mother had one maid of honor, and that was the entirety of the wedding party. Elegant, not extravagant. Traditional. Simple. It was a small church wedding, and they used the reception hall of the church for cake and Kool-Aid afterward. Mom’s gown was borrowed from her cousin, satin and lace showing off her twenty-inch waist, and around her neck hung a filigreed gold pendant necklace that her mother Coco had worn, and her grandmother, too. All of my sisters wore that same necklace in their weddings, as did my brother’s bride, and as did I, and that very tradition has made friends with my young nieces, and the brides of my nephews: they too have proudly worn the golden pendant.

  It is wrapped in paper, and sits with a note in a jewelry box in my closet, waiting for more nieces, and of course my own daughters. The note reads, in my grandmother’s loopy writing, “This necklace goes to Beverly Ann Harden. It was given to my mother Lydia on her wedding day by my father Lyle Jackson. I wore it on my wedding day as did Beverly. Courtney Jackson Bushfield.” Then on the other side, in my mother’s slanted writing: “All of my daugh
ters wore this on their wedding day. Beverly H.” And then she lists our names, and the dates of all of our weddings. Leslie, Sheryl, Marcia, and Stephanie.

  The pendant hangs on a gold chain. It is a golden filigreed circle with a diamond in the center, surrounded by a golden four-leaf clover, each leaf in the shape of a heart, which is then surrounded by eight pearls. The pendant takes on greater importance these days, because it is one of the few ways to connect with my mother, to carry on a thread of inheritance and tradition, to say, “Your life matters, and your mother’s before you, and her mother’s before her. The origin of people and things and golden jewelry matters.” We can’t hang our hats on her knowing or remembering or even understanding the meaning of the pendant; she forgets now that she once owned it. It is enough that we know that she would have wanted for us to pass down this cherished tradition. She would be pleased that it matters to us. That we are insistent in the offering to each new bride the possibility of connecting to my mother and other women, connecting to other marriages lived and navigated by other strong women, as each bride takes her vows in her own wedding month.