On the way to the airport, I glance at his face. His eyes stare blankly, as if he’s trying not to feel what he feels. At the airport, I reassure him, telling him I love him, but I can see in his face that he’s holding back what he wants to say. I hug his small body tightly, and he clings to me for several moments, letting me know that he doesn’t want to go. His white-blonde hair bounces with each step as he walks away. He turns around once to wave, his eyes hangdog and sad. We wave until he disappears around the corner.
I am not my mother. This is different.
One summer evening, Vivaldi pours from the stereo. Amanda is finally in bed after a day of diarrhea and temper tantrums, and my glass of wine rests on the coffee table. Outside, mothers and fathers tumble on the grass with their children. Lying on the couch, I can hear the sound of laughter, and I know that if things were normal here in my house, we’d be out there playing too. Not being allowed to play when I was young, I find that watching young children frolic makes me sad instead of happy. A profound grief about many things having to do with children and childhood has surfaced since Amanda was born. Suddenly, the full awareness of my situation hits me like a punch in the stomach: My son is already gone, and I am barely able to take care of my daughter.
I don’t know the name of what is wrong with me. Naming my condition—depression—will come later. All I know is that I’m sinking into an impenetrable darkness, fear and shame slithering around me like snakes. Gram’s cruel voice attacks me as I lie there: “You’ll never make anything of yourself; you’re nothing, nothing.” As I sip my wine, I pour over the images I created in the etching: the little girl reaching for her father, the crying grandmother, the passive mother. Nothing is the way it was supposed to be. Is it fate that has created the life I have, or am I truly a write-off, another example of failure like those who came before me—those other crazy, bad mothers.
The voice in my head starts up again: “You are just like your mother and grandmother. You’ve lost your son, and you’re barely able to care properly for your daughter.” There’s Gram, sitting as I am sitting now, consumed by dark thoughts, sinking into the couch. Somehow the cheer I had maintained for so long, a kind of Pollyanna hope that my childhood hadn’t scarred me, has vanished, leaving me in despair. The only thing that soothes me is creating art, painting and drawing the stories that have filled my dreams and nightmares, stories I’ve been too ashamed to tell in words.
A friend who is worried about me refers me to a therapist. If I need a shrink, I must be crazy, like my mother. It means there’s something terribly wrong with me. I make the appointment despite these fears drumming constantly in my head.
The therapist is a soft-spoken man with large blue eyes full of compassion. I’m a nervous wreck. I answer his questions about my childhood, crying, shaking, afraid to look at him. To me it is a shameful story, a story I don’t want to tell, but I know somehow that I need to get it out. Finally I am beginning to unravel the tangled threads.
Compassion flows from him into me, soothing, subtle, and beyond words. He accepts me without criticism and listens attentively for an entire hour. He tells me to write about falling apart when the despair threatens to engulf me, to give particulars to all my thoughts and experiences. Sometimes I have to call him on the phone for reassurance, when the waking nightmares trap me. There are times that I can’t clearly discern what I feel and believe. Being told so often as a child that I was lying when I was actually telling the truth has made me distrustful of my own perceptions. In Gram’s house, she alone possessed the “truth.” I feel guilty because of all the lies I told to protect myself from her, to escape from her prison, to allow myself a little life outside her influence. What is real? I wonder now. Who am I? I explore these questions with my therapist and in my journal.
I discover that my process of recovery involves learning to face my worst anxieties and fears. My therapist and I spend much time in Vera’s basement, at train stations, in smoke-filled rooms. We revisit Mr. Brauninger, Aunt Helen, and all my Iowa relatives. Now that I have a compassionate witness, I can learn to unpeel the layers of my past, but it takes many years.
Fear is my most constant companion, fear of falling and tumbling into a dark abyss, which sometimes happens for apparently little reason. I’m confronted with my mood swings and my impatience, my dreams of making a whole family with two parents, and my disappointment at not being able to do it. Each week, no matter how much resistance I have to overcome, I meet with my therapist. He teaches me about the path to myself, a path that gets lost in the woods where I have to double back to find myself again. There are times I don’t want to continue—it’s too difficult to face the ghosts that haunt me—but I won’t let myself give up. I know this is the only way to break free of the generations of patterns etched so deeply within me. After several years, I take a break, then return on my knees after a relationship breakup that sends me to the depths of the loss of my mother, tumbling me into whirlpools of grief I’d repressed when she left so long ago.
Many different paths of healing, including Buddhist psychology and meditation, are presented to me. The idea that you can be present here and now, not caught in a sleeve of time, not defined by the past with its terrible pain, is new to me. In meditation I learn about relaxing the mind and letting go. I learn about appropriate anger and managing my fears. I rebuild myself from the bottom up, brick by brick, tearing down the old structure that never worked, trying to find out what love really means. It means opening fully to my children, my pets, my friends, the plants I learn to grow. I have to learn how to be here with them with my whole heart.
It takes a long time to learn how to love. Gifts come to me frequently in good friends who understand, in my children whose love shines from their eyes. There is much to heal between us, but we at least talk about our issues with honesty, trying to resolve them. This is a huge improvement in the old family dynamics. I learn that it’s okay to be imperfect, though I was punished for it as a child. I come to understand that life is a work of art, an ever-dynamic process that flows and moves, imbued by energies we don’t always understand, gifts that are truly given without asking.
I’m grateful for all the healing that comes to me, but one thing doesn’t heal completely: the broken relationship with my mother. I cannot accept her rejection of me, which has continued through the years. I have tried for decades to prove to her that I’m a worthwhile daughter, and there are brief moments, precious moments of tenderness between us, but then comes the usual fight, her grinding criticisms of me. Though we are destined to find our way to each other, it will not be an easy road. At the very end we will meet each other eye to eye, but only when there is no way for her to escape.
For the Grace of Dan
Battle-ready, Amanda and I stand nose to nose in the kitchen. At fourteen, her golden-brown hair is streaked with various shades of red and black, her eyes ringed like a raccoon’s with black eye liner. In some subconscious way, she’s modeling herself after me, even wearing my trademark black leggings and tunic shirt. I know she’s at the love–hate stage all teenagers go through, but mothers’ and daughters’ love–hate relationships are terrifying for me. I’m afraid these yelling matches mean we’re turning into a version of my mother and Gram. Amanda and I have fought and made up since she was eleven, but today there’s a new edge to it.
During the argument, I tune out Dan, our aging golden retriever, who sits beside us with his tongue hanging out, waiting to be fed. My youngest son, ten-year-old Shannon, chugs his third glass of milk in front of morning cartoons instead of eating his breakfast. I reflect sadly that the dog and Shannon are used to scenes like this between Amanda and me. Today I have the flu, and all I want to do is go back to bed with a hot water bottle. My daughter is more adamant than usual, though, so I have to stand my ground.
“No, you absolutely can’t go hang out somewhere today. There’s a ton of homework waiting for you. That report on the Miwok Indians is due on Monday.”
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�But Mom, it’s so important. They’re my best friends, I have to go.” This is her cajoling phase, but I know that soon she’ll turn more angry and demanding.
We go on and on, our voices rising as we pace in endless circles around the kitchen, shrieking our way to an impasse. Finally, she rushes into her room and slams the door.
It’s hopeless, I think. How could I ever believe it possible to break the mother–daughter pattern I witnessed so many times during my childhood? Apparently, it’s in my genes. Can there ever be a resolution to decades—nearly a century, in fact—of this stuff? I’m not quite used to having big arguments and conflict with Amanda. For a long time in her childhood, though she was stubborn and we had struggles between us, she showered me with hugs, little drawings with hearts, love notes, and adoration. I soaked it all up, yet there was a small part of me I kept from her, as if afraid to allow my heart to open all the way.
Heavy in body and soul, I spoon a few reluctant bites into Shannon, feed the dog, and slink back to bed. Every few weeks it seems, I’m felled by another bug. Burrowing down under the quilt, I feel miserable. I’m a failure for getting sick all the time, for having a daughter who’s barely interested in school. What would my therapy clients think? After all, isn’t a therapist supposed to have it all together?
Over the last eight years, I’ve completed a master’s program, earning a license to practice psychotherapy after putting in three thousand hours of internship and passing a state exam. I have a private practice and a twenty-hour-a-week job at a family agency, where I help people like Amanda and me resolve their problems. I should feel good about all this, and I do, but the dark times still come and go, as they always have, setting off moods I find hard to combat.
During the years of study and internship, I gave birth to Shannon, and shortly after that my most recent marriage ended—another good reason to feel bad about myself, though I know that staying would have been worse. It’s a sign of good mental health not to stay married to men who remind me at times of my grandmother, but I have to wonder why I keep bringing people like that into my life. Don’t I get it yet? How much therapy will it take?
I sink back under the quilts and finally fall asleep. In the dream world, I find myself wandering through shadowy labyrinths in Vera’s basement. She is screaming at me, her vicious eyes gleaming with an eerie yellow light. She morphs into Gram, then Mother, then back to herself. She chases me through haunted, lonely landscapes. I’m afraid of every sound and every movement in a foggy world of leafless trees, an eternity of doom.
Dan soon snuffles at the door, waking me up. He finds a crack, pushes, and wanders in, waving his tail back and forth, a smile on his face. I’m glad to see him; he’s such a cheerful antidote to my bad dreams. Generally, I’m a cat person, but I got Dan from a rescue agency because I thought a dog would be good for the kids. As it turns out, he has been good for me, too. He’s taught me more about self-acceptance and unconditional love than any human I’ve ever known, except for Mr. Brauninger.
Shannon was with me when I went to pick up Dan. When we arrived at the rescuer’s house, Dan rushed up to me, tail wagging, eager for a new home with us. Unaccustomed to this enthusiastic doggie reception, I wouldn’t let him lick me. Once we got him home, I offered him newly purchased dog food and took him for a walk with our new leash. Later, I noticed that Dan kept following me from room to room, even into the bathroom. I knew he had eaten and I had just taken him for a walk. As I had with the children when they were babies, I ascertained that Dan had all his needs met. Still, he followed me from room to room.
Perplexed, I asked Shannon, “Why is he following me? What does he want?”
“Mom,” said Shannon, big brown eyes peering at me over the rim of his glasses, “he just likes you, that’s all.”
I stood thinking for a moment. We’d just picked Dan up that day. He didn’t even know me. “But I haven’t done anything to deserve it.”
“Oh Mom,” Shannon explained patiently, as if he were the adult and I were the child, “you don’t have to.”
I was taken aback. What do you mean I don’t have to do anything to deserve such devotion? I stared at Shannon, then at Dan, who sat in front of me, panting slightly, his pink tongue lolling out of his mouth. I realized that the look on his face was a dog smile, and patted his head. He made a move to lick me, then stopped, as if respecting my wish not to be licked. Moved almost to tears, I kneeled down in front of him and gazed into his eyes, trying to understand this radical notion of unconditional love, such generosity of spirit.
Now Dan is tending me in my illness the best he can, checking on me, making sure I don’t lose faith. He is a spiritual being, emanating peacefulness and patience. He’s certainly more spiritual than my mother, and much more accepting. She’s never given up her position of denying me, and in recent years she’s extended it to my children. Dan, just a dog, is an advanced teacher of love and acceptance, showing me that it is indeed possible. My mother, on the other hand, hasn’t got a clue. Yet I keep trying to win her over, desperate to prove to her—and, I suppose, to myself—that we’re a great family and I’m a good mother.
The California Zephyr
Through the years, I’ve returned to Iowa many times in summer to see my relatives, always staying at Aunt Edith’s, where we’ve kept up our tradition of working in the garden together and making lemon meringue and rhubarb pies. This year, Amanda and Shannon have come with me on the train, the California Zephyr, all the way from San Francisco. It’s important to me to introduce them to the hypnotic rhythms of the train as it chugs up the Sierras and across the rocky wilds of Utah. They get to see the Rockies, winding between canyons that follow the Colorado River, sleeping through the night as the train rolls through Nebraska. On the way they learn about the gold rush, the forty-niners, the Donner party, and other histories of America, encountering a world larger than themselves.
Once we get to Edith’s house, I show the kids how to cultivate the squash and tomato plants on August evenings, imagining Blanche beside me, her voice murmuring in my ear: “Don’t give up keeping the garden. You can trust the cycles of nature. You can count on the tomatoes, year after year.” Back in this place that always feels like home, I surrender to life’s simple pleasures. At night, after a dinner of pot roast and vegetables, fresh tomatoes, and pie, as always we sit out in the slow summer evening, watching the fireflies and telling family stories, initiating my children into the quiet rituals of country life.
At night, after Uncle Willard winds his seven chiming clocks, I tuck the kids into their sleeping bags and ascend the stairs. In my mind’s eye, Blanche is clump, clump, clumping up the stairs ahead of me. I settle into the bed we used to share, all those years of my young life captured in a patch of silver moonlight on the ceiling. My heart aches as I settle in, yearning to sleep with Blanche one more time, listening to her in the dark.
She whispers, “Don’t you give up, you hear me? I never did think your mama or Gram did right by you, but you have to go on.”
In my mind, I answer her. “I’ve been in therapy all these years, but I can’t seem to get over the past. When will Mother accept me? When will she just realize that I’m her daughter and it’s all okay?”
“You got to be yourself, that’s all you can do. Your mother has a few screws loose, but she’s still my little Jo’tine.”
“Blanche, I wish I could see you again. I miss making potato soup on your wood cookstove. You could teach me so much more now. I loved all your stories. Tell me one more time about baking bread, canning tomatoes…”
Silence. The reason death is so hard is that even when you tune in and listen, imagining what the dead would say, in the end you find only silence. Too much silence. I’m grateful, though, that Gram doesn’t haunt me as she threatened to. It seems like a miracle, but most days I don’t think of her at all. Perhaps that’s the gift of forgiveness.
Don’t Call Me Grandmother
The next day, Shannon, Amanda, and I get in
to an old rented station wagon for the trek to Chicago to see Mother. She hasn’t ever met Shannon, and has met Amanda only once, when she was a babe in arms. She’s already given me strict instructions and a long lecture over the phone. “Don’t tell them you’re related to me. I don’t want anyone to know my business.”
I fought with her, angry that she could be so cold and self-absorbed. In response, she shrieked so loudly I had to hold the phone away from my ear.
“I told you already—they don’t know I’ve been married, so I can’t have a child. God forbid, grandchildren. That makes me sound so old. I’m the youngest person in my building, and I rather like being treated like a youngster.” Mother went on, unaware of my heavy breathing. I was sweating with rage at her stubbornness, but I’m hardheaded too. I can’t seem to give up hoping that one day she’ll claim me and my children, the pride shining in her eyes. It’s probably a ridiculous dream, but I still believe it will happen someday, if I just keep trying.
Of course, if the past is any indicator of the future, this dream isn’t likely to come true. The worst memory I have of Mother’s overt rejection of me happened fifteen years earlier. On my way to Europe, I stopped to see her overnight. I got off the elevator and my heart raced, as always, when I saw her coming toward me down the hall. She was smoking, of course, and kept her eyes cast down as she walked within inches of me. I waited for her to say hello, certain that she knew it was me, but she passed by without a word. Stunned, I called her name.
She turned, surprise registering on her face. “Oh, I didn’t see you.” I stood there in shock, grief-stricken that my own mother didn’t recognize me. After all, I was the only other person in the hallway. Had she really become so oblivious to the rest of the world?
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