The Seasons of My Mother

by Marcia Gay Harden

  I cooed to Mom how perfect it was, my budding relationship. Thaddaeus came over, he chopped wood, and I made stew, using the Moosewood Cookbook. You would think I was describing Little House on the Prairie, and looking back now I cringe at my earnestness, but in fact it was an ideal time. Living in the Vermont woods, shooting a movie, doing pottery on the side, taking long walks with Ellen Burstyn while we discussed poetry and dug up wild asparagus, serving my new love dinner and breakfast, and on top of it all welcoming my mother to this rustic setting—it filled me with such happiness and grace that I thought I was about to burst. Mom and I walked the wooded path, stepping over mushrooms and bees, and I told her all about Thad. As she spent time with him on set, he was kind and charming, and I could see the hope arise in her eyes that I just might have a husband, and children, and I would not die an old maid.

  They were very similar, both born in January and both Capricorns, and they shared a wry sense of humor as they discussed events of the day, film, politics, life, or me. They got along superbly! It was funny though, I noted that Mom often took Thad’s side in a discussion. This wasn’t unusual—she did like to flirt with young men, but somehow it always seemed she could see her daughters through the eyes of their beaus especially during a disagreement. I had found she often took the “other” side, in an argument, and she would laugh and tease me and admonish “Now, Marcia . . . that wasn’t very nice!” Or she would roll her eyes at Thad and say, “Oh, my, I don’t know how you take it!” It was her way of dissipating the conflict, of keeping us together, of enforcing “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

  In truth, she was deeply invested in me having a softer smile, a gentler touch, a lasting relationship, and this is where her judgment of me really came from. I think I reminded her of Dad at times, impatient and demanding on a bad day, and she didn’t want me to sully my relationships with the attributes that had caused her pain in her own marriage. She wanted me to be happy, and married, and she didn’t know what that looked like if the woman was in power. Yet she wanted me to be an actress, too. Not that they were mutually exclusive, but I could see her hope churning that perhaps in Thaddaeus, I had found the perfect balance, the hippie knight, the man with whom I could be a wife, mother, lover, actress, and powerful woman. With whom I could just be me.

  Sitting on the lawn of my stone cottage, surrounded by dandelions, Mom and I talked of love and marriage. Walking through the woods with long Vermont walking sticks, we talked of nature and flower arranging, and she carried her pruning shears and cut long dogwood branches to pair with small magnolia flowers. Throwing pots with the local potter with whom I was studying in my off time, we hand-built vases, and we talked of art and self-fulfillment. I made clay teapots for which Thaddaeus wove hemp handles. Mom never seemed to stop smiling, and I never wanted her to leave. I liked my happy threesome—Mom, Thaddaeus, and me.

  The day before we left for our trip to Montreal, Mom came to the set with me and sat next to the script supervisor, a job she always said would suit her if she were ever on a film crew. She huddled near the heater in her cashmere brown cardigan, and beamed with pride when the director told her he would love to use her as an extra in the church scene. I watched her as she chatted with all the extras, and I watched her as she gazed happily through the church window, following the dogwood petals floating to the ground outside the stained glass. I watched her as she ate chicken in the church basement with the crew. I wondered if she perhaps imagined herself an actress, or a member of the crew. She loved learning about each and every job. They all knew her and called her Beverly. They talked to her of their own lives and she talked to them about ikebana and the courses she taught. I watched her shine, delighted to educate a new audience. She explained her flower lessons, mostly pointing out the triangles of heaven, earth, and man in the classic ikebana arrangement. Our vases had just been fired up the road in my pottery teacher’s kiln, and Mom took her vase and decided to give a little demonstration at the end of lunch to some of the crew, using a kenzan she always had tucked in her suitcase and had for some reason brought to set that day, and the ikebana scissors she always had tucked into her purse. She cut crabapple branches for pink line material, and paired them with several wild yellow jonquils that were growing in the ditches, and placed them at proper angles in the burnished brown vase, creating a cloud of pink and yellow softness. Thaddaeus took her arrangement and placed it as a centerpiece on the crew buffet table, and we all admired it as we took snacks off the table. At the end of the day Mom and I hugged Thaddaeus good-bye, and we went back to our stone cottage, lit a fire, packed for our trip, then bedded down together snuggling and giggling under the big down comforter.

  The next morning, I peeked out the window at sunrise, and across the glistening dew saw my white and wood Grand Wagoneer covered with jonquils, bright yellow jonquils, hundreds of them. Thaddaeus had worked late on the film, and he had gotten off much later than I had, and on his way to his home he had very romantically picked bunches and bunches of jonquils growing wild in a field, and had strewn them about on my car as a kind of “Good-bye, I will miss you, and have a great weekend” gesture. Over her black coffee, Mom cooed with delight at his charm. “Well, he obviously left them for me,” she said. “It is, after all, Mother’s Day.” She was sold.

  For our wedding, my mother did, indeed, do the flowers. As my friends and family swam in the river, she lugged white plastic buckets full of sunflowers to her lodge. As nieces and nephews jumped off the enormous plastic blob in the river, or slid down the huge slide in their bathing suits and landed with a cannonball in the Pecos, Mom cut birds-of-paradise and calla lilies underwater to suck up the water into the stem, and she placed them in huge vases in her lodge’s kitchen. She gathered Mason jars and vases and carried them from her car with Dad’s help, and she hefted many kenzan pieces to make sure the main arrangements stood upright and with respect for the lines and values of ikebana. In each and every room, Mom put a little flower arrangement welcoming the guests, and I laid a note on the bed doing the same. They were greeted with mostly sunflowers, Indian paintbrush, blue delphinium, some Queen Anne’s lace, and daisies. She must’ve made over a hundred arrangements, cutting the sprigs underwater, placing them in vases, then placing the vases in boxes, and driving around the ranch and decorating the rooms. She saved about fifteen arrangements for the actual wedding party dinner, and placed them on the rounded tables covered in white linen that were scattered around the exterior of the hunting ranch. The main arrangement of the day however was the altarpiece, and Mom devoted her entire spirit to it.

  There was an altar made of stone; it was a dark golden hue—and it sat in the semicircle at the bottom of the outdoor amphitheater, upon which Mom designed a beautiful natural, driftwood flower arrangement. She simply saw the altar and knew what she needed to do. She didn’t even ask me what I thought about it. She didn’t need to ask. Her designs were sublime, and I was eager to witness her vision, and grateful that that was her gift to me, flowers at my wedding. “There is no need for you to pay for these, Marcia Gay. I can do this!” She had brought a beautiful piece of undulating driftwood, about two feet high and three feet wide, from Fort Worth. It was in the shape of an open hand, its pointed branch fingers cupping the air. Inside the hand, using the perfect alignment principles of ikebana, Mom nestled calla lily and fern among long rust-colored velvet cattails.

  “Marcia,” she began, “I want to tell you about your wedding flowers. I have made white rose boutonnieres. Roses are a symbol of passion. I pray you have lots and lots of that in your marriage! It’s good for a couple. It keeps them strong.

  “And in your altar arrangement, I’ve used flowers with very special meaning. Calla lilies are a symbol of holiness, of faith, and of purity. They signify humility—which I think you need in a marriage, and, Marcia, also in your life. Especially in your life as an actress. They also signify devotion. Devotion to your husband, to your marriage, and to the family
that I am so hopeful you will create. I have been devoted to my family, especially my children, and Marcia, I am, I think, the proudest of that of anything. When we lived in Greece you learned the word kalá. Meaning ‘good,’ or ‘beautiful.’ Well, that’s what these flowers stand for. Calla Lily.

  “And the fern, the fern is a remarkable plant, it is medicinal and used for healing and in many cultures it represents peace, tranquility, and spirituality, as well as new growth or new beginnings. Marriage is a new beginning for you, Marcia, and I wish you great success. But in Japan, the fern is also the symbol of hope and posterity, with the thought that as it branches, so may the family increase and multiply through the generations. I want lots of grandchildren, Marcia! I wish your marriage great posterity!

  “And finally, cattails are a symbol of peace. When you are fighting, giving a cattail to each other promotes your friendship. It’s important to be friends with your husband, Marcia. I don’t want to see you fighting too much. It’s not good for a relationship. Be friends.”

  I wrote her words down. I remember them always. When we bought our Catskill property several years later, I was thrilled to see acres of fern in the fields, and hundreds of velvet cattails surrounding the lake, as if a gift from my mom. Maybe I should have used the cattails more often.

  Emmy the wiener dog chinkles her chain and tries to lick me, and I want to fling her out of the room. Lying on my mother’s bed that wintery Texas morning, hot tears melting into her downy scented flannel nightie, I hate that I am feeling sorry for myself, but I am. I’m feeling sorry for myself and for my children, for my mother and for all people who are suffering loss. But mostly for myself. Emmy chinkles onto the bed. I shove her off. I’m not sharing my mom. I push my body into her body, into her space, where comfort lives warm and generously. Just past her shoulder, I can see out the front window into her lovely yard. Staring blankly, I finally focus on the stone bench her garden club gave her, years before. A stone bench, dedicated to the memory of my brother’s children who died in a fire. Audrey and Sander.

  My brain splits. Shuddering sobs now. For my brother and for his children. For my marriage. For my mom. For everyone, for all of us. Stop! I tell myself. Loss is everywhere Be strong, and humble. I think of my brother, and how he has with such nobility created a new life for himself. Oh, God, I miss my niece and nephew.

  My vision blurs ugly red saltwater tears. My brain splits again. The room gets blurry, it’s as if clouds of hope and sorrow come pouring through the distorted little screen squares outside the window, and the room is suddenly full of cloud squares, and floating windows, and flowers and weeds, and memory and lost threads and blurred tapestries, hot tears and Apple workers in blue and windows of despair, and all that I cherished, all that I loved, is lost, melting into flannel nighties, disappearing like tear stains, with only damp remains on the skin. Mom hugs me tighter, and then the clouds all begin to swirl and disconnect in the room. It’s not like Tony Kushner’s play at all, nor is it one giant ozone cloud in the middle of the sky as in my vision. It’s not clean and white and operatic and smelling of lavender. The future is ugly and splitting, and the clouds come pouring through the screen like poison gas, dropping weeds and flowers together. They are all bumping into each other, and they are getting all mixed up, and they are changing shape, some ominous and dark, some cirrus and wispy, and I feel they are the universe, the universe gathered in my mother’s room, presiding in her ceiling, clouds raining down flowers and weeds upon the bed. Weeds of loss.

  For the second time in my life, I’m not sure how to go forward. Why me? Why loss? What is the message here? What am I supposed to learn? What am I supposed to do? How can I face tomorrow? I can hear the children in my mom’s living room, playing around on the piano. I think of Eulala and say to myself: GET UP, WARRIOR! The room fills with war cries, General Patton yelling NO COWARDS and Churchill crying NEVER GIVE UP! and my dad’s command PULL YOURSELF UP BY THE BOOTSTRAPS, GODDAMNIT! And Norman Vincent Peale preaching “It’s not a problem, it’s a challenge! ”; these all blend together, with my mother’s voice saying “devotion to your children, devotion to your children” as a kind of background murmur. My mother strokes my hair, and as she hears me cry out raw and loud and ugly, I feel her stomach heave in a sob. So that’s what we do for a while, cry together. Time passes. Then I hear her stomach growl, in hunger, and just like that she has brought me back to the moment. “Don’t take tomorrow to bed with you,” I remember Dr. Peale preaching. Or yesterday, either, I think.

  I find her hunger comforting. It’s a necessary jolt back to reality. Chinkling Emmy. The tinkling piano. My children, flattened by my grief, trying to find laughter and meaning for their own lives, sit in the living room waiting for me to come back to them. Mom’s room is dark, no cloud windows, it is just dark inside, with a stone bench outside under a tree. Warrior. My mother strokes my hair. Weave the holes yourself . . . as my brother did. I hear my dad’s voice more clearly now: Pick yourself up and carry on! As each of my sisters did, whenever they suffered distress. My own critical voice says, Don’t lick your wounds! Be strong! And my kinder voice says, Show your kids that there is joy! And Patton: Americans play to win! And Dr. Peale again and again: “Any fact facing us isn’t as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines it’s success or failure,” “learn to like yourself,” “take action!,” “formulate a mental picture of succeeding.” And still my mother’s gentle voice: “Cattails and calla lilies and devotion.” Maybe I need to give myself a cattail? Take action. Get up off the bed. Maybe I need to devote myself to myself first. Travel, children, and a fur coat. I silently vow to take my kids to Yosemite. For some reason, it seems that Yosemite is the place where we will find joy. I will buy down coats, no fur for us. I am of a different generation from my mom’s, but I will devote myself to healing, and to children, and to light, just as she has done her entire life. I will take them in the spring, when my head isn’t dark. Right now, it’s too dark.

  “What is wrong with me, Mom? Why doesn’t anyone love me?”

  And my mom strokes my hair. “Nothing, darling. Nothing is wrong with you.”

  That night was perhaps the loneliest night I have ever spent. I had a punch-in-the-gut realization that though Mom would remember this story for a while, perhaps for a few years, eventually she would forget it, and for the first time in my life I would be truly alone as I patched up the holes in my ozone, watching with despair while my mother’s own tapestry was unraveling.

  And she did forget. And I did repeat the story of the demise of my marriage for a while, until I got bored of it. Then I would just bullet the story, and finally I skipped it altogether. Not important, really. Not anymore. The calendar had ticked on, light had changed, and my numerologist had been right. Much had been activated in 2011. I was ready for 2012. I was ready for the end of the Mayan calendar, or really, the end of life as I knew it, and the beginning of a new life. I was ready.

  My kids and I had taken that trip to Yosemite, and as I was camping under the star-studded sky, I was shocked to find that I was healing, and strong, and single, and using the best parts of my mother to inspire me. As we biked to Vernal Falls past the towering granite rock formations, we sang an old favorite camp song at the top of our lungs. I had learned it years before from my mother at a Bluebird campout around a bonfire: “I love to go . . . awandering along a mountain paaaaath . . . and as I go I love to sing, my knapsack on my back!” We shouted, “Faldereeeeeee, Falderaaaaaaah,” until it echoed through the valley. Of course I was healing! Hadn’t my mom first shown me the way? Hadn’t she been so often alone while we were growing up and Dad was off to sea? Yes. And she had flourished, embacing her children in her crescent moon hug. She had long ago shown me how to be strong, purposeful, and happy. I just needed to follow the example she had set as she traveled the world and exposed her children to sights and wonders unknown to them. Of course. This was a torch she had passed along to me, and now I was to run the marathon, a
nd pass it on to my own beautiful children. She was a woman wearing a gold filigree pendant passing down to her kids and grandkids her strength and tenacity, her ferocity and devotion. She was the original warrior. What a fool I would be to wallow in windowless rooms, when there were angels sitting on the stone bench.

  Rain down upon me, beautiful calla lilies! Rain down upon me through God’s window in the sky, and blanket me and my children and my mom and even old Emmy in healing! My mother is a star navigator, and I will take up her torch. I will fly with her up through the troposphere, through the stratosphere, through the mesosphere, through the thermosphere, and into the exosphere, where we will grasp the cure for her illness by its starlight mystery, and bring it home for all who suffer loss.

  My mother is an Easter Bunny in a white confectioner’s egg

  JESUS RISES. EASTER IS COMING. Anxiety overwhelms me. I’m hoping for a kind of second rising within me, a rebirthing of hope.

  I expected this moment would come. My mother doesn’t remember me. It was a simple conversation—we were on the phone discussing spring break and whether I would be able to make it to Texas or if I would take the kids to Hawaii—and her reply, “I’m sorry, but who are you?,” was surely harder for her than for me. It was just a fleeting moment; I was prepared for it, it’d actually been coming on gradually, slowly, so there wasn’t really a shock, just my verbal reaffirmation: “It’s okay if you don’t remember me, I will always remember you.” These moments come and go, clarity comes and goes, words come and go, recognition comes and goes, and time passes. I listen carefully; one minute she is struggling for a word, and the next minute she is giving Deepak Chopra a run for his money. Her teachings come unexpectedly, and surprisingly. Once, we were discussing parenting and my kids. “Use the word ‘child,’ Marcia Gay; kids are for goats,” and how each child is special. She didn’t search or stumble for a word. This sentence came out quite succinctly. I wrote it down, word for word. Mom had said how important it was that I was impartial with my children.