by Ruth Reichl
Reading that brought back another memory. The night before the wedding, Mom came to my room to watch me try on my dress. She gulped when she saw the many layers of color, but managed to say “It’s lovely,” in a voice that sounded sincere. Then she cleared her throat and added, “I know you don’t need any advice on birds and bees. But you do know that you’re going to become a new person, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Once you’re married,” she replied, “you will stop being Ruth Reichl and start being Mrs. Douglas Hollis.”
Now I realize that she was being provocative, mischievously throwing out a lure. She knew how much I hated the idea of losing both my names, of disappearing into someone else’s identity. Oblivious, I took the hook.
“I don’t want to be a new person!” I shouted. “Don’t you ever call me by that name! I’m still me. If you ever send a letter addressed to Mrs. Douglas Hollis I swear I will return it unopened.”
It was a challenge that Mom was incapable of resisting. And there, in the bottom of the box, was the envelope with “return to sender” scrawled across the front. It was still sealed.
Curious, I slit it open.
Mom had known I wouldn’t read it: She had written the letter to herself.
It begins, “Why did I always do what my parents felt that I should do and not listen to my own feelings?” On the following page she listed all the mistakes that she had made in her life. But it ends on an optimistic note. “Your children are grown. From this day on you must stop looking back and move forward. It’s a new world.”
I wish that I had opened the letter; Mom had obviously been hoping that I would, because this was more than a reminder that a lot still lay ahead of her. Mom was writing to me, too, cheering me on and pointing out that I had an obligation, both to myself and to her, to use my life well. She understood that we had both come to a crossroads, and she was hoping that we would both head in the right direction.
Tsunami of Pain
Energized, Mom marched bravely into the future. She sent out dozens of letters that began, “I am the editor of the twelve volume set, The Homemaker’s Encyclopedia,” to one group of prospects. To another group she wrote letters that called on her musical background. But she was now in her sixties, and all that came back were polite rejections. She wrote a few book proposals as well, but they went nowhere.
For a while she became a full-time volunteer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but she took umbrage at being treated as inferior to the paid employees. She wanted to be a curator, and while she tried to fool her friends (“I have the most fascinating new job!”) she could not fool herself. Frustrated, angry and increasingly frightened about her future, she picked fights with everyone.
She began with the people who ran the volunteer program at the museum, eventually becoming so contentious that she was asked to leave. Next she turned on me. Doug and I were living in New York, and when I got the contract to write my first book I went to my parents’ apartment to share the good news. Mom’s reaction was chilling. “Do you think we sent you to graduate school so you could write cookbooks?” she asked. “When are you going to do something worthwhile?”
Then it was Bob’s turn; she did not approve of his lifestyle, his values or the way he was bringing up her grandchildren. “I’ve been heartbroken about the way you treat me,” she began one letter. Another ended, “So I’ve stopped crying. What choice do I have?”
“My children have abandoned me,” she wailed after Bob and I both fled New York, unwilling to stay and endure her increasingly angry despair. But even her friends were not immune. “I’ve realized,” she wrote on one of those endless scraps of paper, “that I really don’t like Bert: He’s arrogant, undependable, contemptuous, dull and neurotic. And Jean is frivolous, calculating, a social climber, predatory, ambitious for the wrong things.”
Reading through this tsunami of pain, I couldn’t help wondering what it was about this particular point in Mom’s life that had caused such an extreme reaction. She had been unhappy in the past, but never before had she turned on everyone. What was different now?
I think that the moment when the last child marries and leaves home is a milestone for every parent. It is a turning point and an inexorable reminder of mortality. But for the women of my mother’s generation it must have been especially painful. Mom and her friends had poured so many of their hopes and aspirations into their daughters, and now they were watching us walk off into the future, leaving them behind.
In their letters Mom’s friends all brag shamelessly about their children. The girls are becoming doctors and lawyers, and their mothers are both pleased and pained. “How wonderful that Nancy is a doctor,” Mom wrote to one old friend. “She manages a house and two children as well; you must be so proud! Even when she was a child you could see what a capable woman she would become. I can’t get over how different their world is from ours.”
Mom sneered at my food career when she spoke to me, but her letters have a different tone. To one friend she wrote, “Ruthy has published a book. It’s just a cookbook, but it is the first of what we hope will be many more books.” She sent a review of the book to another friend, with a note that said, “We think she may have a real future as a writer!”
Reading that now, thirty-five years later, I can hear how the words come through gritted teeth and feel how unfair she considers all this. Indeed, an angry letter to my brother inadvertently revealed her true feelings. “You think that I’m a slob,” she wrote. “You would probably think the same of Ruth if you saw her house in Berkeley. It is not neat but it is filled with art, culture and interesting friends. She is an independent person, working hard at writing, and she is supporting herself. She and I both think it is more important to do interesting work than to shop, cook, and clean.”
But she, of course, was not doing interesting work. She was shopping, cooking, cleaning. Her parents had passed away, her husband was busy and her children were gone. Peering into the future, she saw only emptiness. But she was not ready to give up. “My life is not over,” she admonished herself. “I must work harder.”
It was a wish as much as an exhortation, but circumstances intervened to make the wish come true. One of Dad’s employees embezzled a large amount of money, putting his business into sudden jeopardy, and he asked Mom to find a temporary job. “Just until I get back on solid ground,” he pleaded.
Mom was nothing if not resourceful, and she took herself off to the Department of Aging. “I can’t imagine that they’ll have anything for someone like me,” she said dismissively. She was wrong. They offered her a job at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, and for the first time in her life my mother was doing work that employed both her training and her talents.
Dad’s business recovered but Mom would not consider giving up her job. She was at her desk when she learned that my father had suffered a sudden stroke. A few days later he was gone. Mom threw herself into planning the memorial service, but when it was over she fell into a deep depression.
She stopped working, calling in sick until it was clear that she would never go back to the library. She did not return her calls, and eventually the phone stopped ringing. She no longer left the house, and all but stopped breathing. She was inconsolable. Bob and I had no idea what we ought to do, but as the years went on we both worried that she would never recover.
Grateful
Dear Editor:
My name is Miriam Reichl. I am 77 years old and now live alone in New York City, in the same apartment I’ve lived in for 43 years. You must have many readers who have the same problems I have, who don’t quite know how to cope now. Years ago we had husbands and children living at home, family meals to plan and serve, active social lives. And then, boom!—our husbands died and the bubble burst.
When my husband died my daughter did what he’d always done for me: kept my financial affairs in order. But she had to do more than he did because now I just lay in bed
, often with the covers over my head, wishing I could die. I let the mail, including bills and checks, lie around any old place, piling up.
For months I didn’t even get dressed to fetch food and there were many times that my frig and cupboard were completely bare. My clothes were in shambles. I didn’t buy anything new for four years.
I slept a lot, and procrastinated as much as possible. After all, I had no control over my life, did I? I even put off making beauty appointments until it was too late and the salon was all booked up. Then I felt so unkempt that I was too embarrassed to go anyplace, so I just stayed home.
And then—just as suddenly as I gave up—I came back to life. What happened? I realized that so many people had so many more problems than I did that it behooved me to be grateful.
I’d like to tell my story to your readers, so that they too can experience the same miraculous recovery.
The manuscript ends there. I imagine it is because Mom did not know what to say next. She couldn’t tell anyone how to experience the miraculous recovery, because she had no idea how it had happened to her.
It was not drugs. She stopped taking them long before my father died. She did occasionally see a psychiatrist, but he was a man who treated her with nothing but kindness. His sympathetic ear was surely helpful, but he was not the reason behind the great transformation. The real catalyst was something that Mom could not admit, even to herself.
This was the first time in her life that she had ever lived alone, and once Mom finished mourning my father, she thrived on it. You could see it just by looking at her. She wrote in a note, “People tell me that I’ve never looked better.” It was true. Nearing eighty, with thick white hair and a vivacious smile, she had turned into a very beautiful old lady. She stopped caring what people thought and started wearing outlandish clothes of many colors. She draped herself with costume jewelry and delighted in her own eccentricity. Mom had always talked easily to strangers, and now she made new friends each time she boarded a bus. She met people everywhere she went—in the grocery store, at the movies, just walking through the park. But most of all she stopped berating herself for all the things she hadn’t done—and she switched off the voice inside her head.
“My mother is dead,” she wrote. “It’s time I stopped letting her tell me how to live. Why should I care what she thinks? I have so little time.”
She was slightly high, like a person just after the first electric sip of a martini, and she did exactly what she felt like doing. She had always wanted to serve people, and now she simply started helping those around her. She would never be a doctor, but she could care for sick friends, and she often had them stay with her for months on end. She made a kind of family of other people’s children and grandchildren, and they were constantly in and out of her house.
She took in student boarders too. She said it was to help pay the rent, but it was really because she liked having young people in the apartment. Her phone was always busy, her apartment always full of life. She traveled—to Russia, to India, to visit old friends in France and Switzerland. And she invited them to visit her.
She filled her life with all the things that she had always wanted—art, music, people—and freed herself from everything that did not make her happy. When she found that Bob and I could not keep from treating her like the sad old Mom she used to be, she simply cut us loose. She did not need that. For the happiest years of her life, Mom relied almost entirely on herself.
She wrote the very last note in the box when she was almost eighty. By then her arthritic hands had trouble grasping the pen, and her handwriting had turned into a hesitant wavering line. But the words are strong, positive, optimistic, without a single uncertain note. “I am not going to lower my sights,” Mom wrote. “I am going to live up to the best in myself. Even if it means some painful changes. I am no longer afraid.”
Gifts
That last letter was my mother’s final gift to me, and I read it with tears running down my face. She had no way to know that I would ever find it, or how happy I would be to discover that at the end of her life she finally found her truest self. She had traveled through obedience to anger and rebellion and finally come to rest in a place where she was not only independent, but also happy.
Meeting Mom—the real Mom—was even harder than I had expected. I never thought her life was easy, but until I read her letters I had not known the enormous burden of pain that she carried with her. Each letter was like a reproach, and as I thought about the Mim Tales I wished that I had been more considerate, more understanding, that I had given her more support. Mom was so generous to me, and I gave so little in return.
In her own oblique way Mom passed on all the knowledge she had gleaned, giving me the tools I needed not to become her. Believing that work, beauty, marriage and motherhood were the forces that had shaped her destiny, she tried to teach me how to do better at each of them than she had.
Work was her most basic lesson: Using herself as an example, she made me see that working is as necessary as breathing. Mom’s strongest belief was that “it is what we are made for,” and she was convinced that those who are not useful can never be satisfied. She tried to make me see that a job was not enough; she wanted me to have the meaningful career that she herself had yearned for.
Stamped at an early age by her own lack of beauty, Mom tried to spare me that pain. The fate of men is not decided by their looks, and my mother did not want beauty—or the lack of it—to determine my destiny. Throughout human history beauty has been seen as a gift from God, but Mom had another notion; she thought that beauty could be earned through self-knowledge. It may be a revolutionary idea, but it has offered me great comfort.
Mom also had her own ideas about marriage. Unlike most women of her time, she did not think that a woman needed a man to be complete. She believed that marriage was important, but she tried to show me that it works only when it is based on mutual respect between two people who encourage each other to live up to the best in themselves.
But Mom’s most important lesson was how to be a mother. I see now how hard she tried to be a good one, despite her many handicaps. Her struggle with her own mother had shown her that it is important to encourage your children to be themselves, even if they do not turn out to be the people that you wish they were. And so she urged me to independence, asking only that I work hard, be kind and live up to my own possibilities.
Growing up, I was utterly oblivious to the fact that Mom was teaching me all that. But I was instantly aware of her final lesson, which was hidden in her notes and letters. As I read them I began to understand that in the end you are the only one who can make yourself happy. More important, Mom showed me that it is never too late to find out how to do it.
Afterword
I thought that writing this book was going to be easy. The speech had simply come to me, and the response was so powerful that I expected to sit down at the computer and find the words, once again, pouring onto the page. But my mother’s box changed all that. I took the letters out to my little writing cabin in the woods and sat there, day after day, staring at those fading bits of paper. Reading those words written so long ago I could feel my mother materializing around me, ghostly but new. As the woman became more real, the writing became more difficult. Most days I cried, and some days I’d go fleeing from my cabin, running through the trees shouting, “I can’t do this anymore!” to astonished deer and squirrels.
I had started with a very clear vision of what this book should be. It was not going to be about my mother, but about all the women of her generation and the ways that they passed their dreams down to their daughters. After struggling for many months I finally had a finished manuscript. Heaving an enormous sigh of relief I locked the cabin door, happy to put those demons behind me.
So when my editor, Ann Godoff, called to say that we needed to talk, I was extremely wary. Ann didn’t beat about the bush. “Your book’s not finished,” she said, and I had an eerily physical sensation that my
heart was sinking. “I know you want to make this book universal,” she continued, “but I think you’re missing the point. This isn’t a book about all those other women. It’s a book about you and your mother. You’ve picked up a big rock and looked underneath it, which is something most of us are loath to do. What you have is a book about you, a grown woman, finally coming to terms with who your mother really was. You need to acknowledge that. Stop trying to turn this book into something that it doesn’t want to be.”
I was furious, and with very bad grace I unlocked my cabin, lit a fire, and started over again. This time, however, the work went quickly, and as the words spilled onto the page, I realized that Ann was right. For she was not only telling me to be honest with myself; she was also urging me to trust the reader. She understood that if I were able to find my own truth, inside of it each reader would find her own.
But it would be many months before I realized exactly what that meant.
Some books are finished the moment they are published. They go off into the world complete, and people devour them, reading the words exactly as they were written. Others require the reader to make them whole: they are simply one side of a conversation that each person completes in his own unique fashion. This book is one of those; everybody who opens these pages discovers a different book. But I did not find that out until I went off on the book tour.
The first night the audience was mostly women, and they were so eager to talk about their relationships with their mothers that when the lights went up we flowed from the theater into a nearby restaurant, staying long into the night. “I felt as if I were in church,” one woman said later, “as woman after woman got up to testify about her mother’s life.” In that moment I saw that Ann had been right, and that my story had made other women think about their own mothers, the way they had been raised, their own lives.
