The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t know, in that moment, the details of what was about to come. How my father would come to her bedside to say goodbye, and my sister Connie would remove the oxygen tubes from my mother’s nose and place my mother’s left hand on top of the coverlet and slide off her wedding band and engagement ring, and hand them to my father: Till death do us part.

  How we would sit there together around my mother’s body as my father would tell us all again the story we had heard so many times before: How he bought that West Point miniature class ring, had it engraved with their names, and presented it to her without having first asked her to marry him. How she was outraged and gave it back to him until he made a proper proposal. How as a newlywed, pregnant and thin with morning sickness, the ring had slid off her finger while she was doing holiday cooking and got baked into a fruitcake—and how she had to cut all the fruitcakes apart to find it.

  Connie would cover my mother’s body with the black and green crocheted afghan that her grandmother had made for her when my mother was a baby—the one my mother had asked to be buried in. The medical examiner would be called. My mother’s body would be wrapped up in a blue microfiber blanket, with her face covered, and strapped to a gurney. My brothers would push it down the hall, me and all my sisters walking along with it, my father in a wheelchair. We would try to sing “When the Saints Go Marching In,” but none of us would know all the words. We would ride with the body in a freight elevator down to a loading dock, where it would be put in the back of a van.

  As the van would drive away with my mother’s body in it, we would all stand and watch it go, waving goodbye until the vehicle pulled out of sight—just as my mother always waved goodbye when one of us left after a visit, so her wave would be the last thing we’d see when we looked back. One of us would say, through the tears, “Onward and upward!”

  There would be a funeral at West Point, where my mother used to visit from Connecticut College for dances and dates when my father was a cadet. This time the West Point gym would be hung with banners for the Army-Navy football game that coming weekend. My sister Mary would pass around my mother’s datebook from 1943—a gift from my father, with the West Point chapel on the cover and my mother’s appointments recorded in it in her loopy nineteen-year-old handwriting: Logic exam. English exam. Meetings for the college newspaper staff. And increasingly, every weekend, my father’s name—Jack. Jack. Jack.

  We would look to see what she was doing that week in 1943, seventy-three years ago. We would discover that she had been going to the Army-Navy game at West Point with my father, the young cadet with whom she had just fallen in love.

  After the funeral, we would drive to the cemetery and that beloved cadet—now a retired general, unsteady on his feet—would watch her body be lowered into the ground, a mile from the path along the Hudson River where they had taken their first walk together, a few weeks after they met in Georgia.

  At the time of that walk, she had just returned to Connecticut College, so he had invited her for a West Point visit—surprised but undeterred when she brought her mother along as chaperone. He had taken my mother for a stroll past Flirtation Rock—named for the legend that if a cadet didn’t get a kiss from his date when he passed it, the rock would fall down.

  “Did you kiss on that first date?” I once asked my father.

  “Well,” he said, “the rock is still standing.”

  SUTRA 17

  Finding My Daughter

  • • • • •

  WHEN A CHILD enters your life through conception and birth, or as a baby, there’s a clear beginning to the story: a moment when you feel a kick in your belly, or hold a squalling infant in your arms, and know that a new relationship has begun.

  When a child enters your life through a different door—as an adolescent, a teenager, or a young adult—it’s harder to know when your story together begins. Sometimes it only becomes apparent in retrospect, when you notice that your family—and your heart—has gotten bigger through the long accrual of ordinary moments that build into something precious, like stones added one on top of another to make a temple.

  I’d always wanted to have a daughter as well as a son. When I first envisioned having a child, it was always a little girl I could mother in some of the ways I had been mothered—and some of the ways I only wished I had been. I would read aloud to her all my favorite horse and dog stories, which Forest was never interested in: Misty of Chincoteague, Black Beauty, Lad, A Dog. She would be quirky and sensitive and brilliant and a little eccentric, but because of my wise and skillful mothering she would be the trendsetting adventurer of her middle school, not the weird kid who no one wanted to sit with at lunch.

  But instead, for most of my years as Forest’s mother, what I had was the memory of a daughter’s loss: a beautiful baby girl who never breathed, lying in my arms with rosebud lips and a swirl of dark hair on her forehead.

  My urgency about having another baby girl had fueled my dating in the years after my marriage fell apart. I studied the face of each man I grew temporarily close to—what might those blue eyes look like gazing up at me from a daughter’s face? I researched still-experimental sperm-sorting methods that maximized the chances for those double-X chromosomes. But I learned that since I was already in my late thirties, I was too old to qualify for the experiments. I investigated adopting a baby girl from China but decided that as a single mom with a financially shaky career as a freelance writer and meditation teacher, I couldn’t take the leap.

  By the time I got together with Teja, I was forty-six and my baby-bearing years were basically behind me. I stopped using birth control, telling myself that if I became a fertility miracle, whose picture turned up on the cover of the National Enquirer, that would be fine with me. But the urgency had waned along with my estrogen levels. I adored Forest and was grateful for him every day, and I told myself that was enough.

  But I still felt a pang when my friend Janice took a road trip down the coast with her preteen girl, windows open and their long hair tangling together in the breeze as they sang along with Taylor Swift’s CD; or when Rachael showed up at a potluck wearing a pair of skinny jeans and boots she’d borrowed from her daughter.

  I’d grown up as one of seven children. In one of my earliest memories, the Thanksgiving table actually collapsed from the weight of the food. It had never felt quite right, sitting at the dinner table with just one child and an irritable cat. I loved it when Forest’s friends came over for sleepovers and I could cook blueberry pancakes in the morning for more than just one hungry boy. But in my imagination, sometimes I set the table for Forest’s big sister, Sierra, too.

  * * *

  —

  Starting with our very first date, Teja had told me stories about his daughter, who was sixteen when I met him.

  When she was a baby, he used to do qigong with her in his arms—sweeping her high over his head and then low to the earth as he spiraled through the movements. When her mom went back to work at an office job when River was six weeks old, Teja took care of her all day—then stayed up late in his recording studio, producing albums for other musicians while keeping one ear tuned to the baby monitor. He parked her in her playpen at his dojo while he taught aikido, and she giggled and shrieked as she watched him roll and throw and high-fall on the mat. For her ninth birthday party, he and his sister threw a party and invited River and all her friends to paint his old truck with house paints—the girls painted it bright blue and decorated it with flowers, kittens, and stars. Whenever he used it to haul debris to the dump, people waved and honked. When River won a telescope in a science essay-writing contest, he took her out at night to view Saturn’s rings and identify the craters on the moon.

  But in the aftermath of his divorce, when River was twelve, she had gone to live with her mother. When Teja moved in with me and Forest during River’s last year of high school, River
didn’t come with him at first. Instead, on the bookshelf over his computer, he set a letter from River written when she was eleven—“You are the best dad in the world! I will love you forever.” As the holidays came without a visit, we put a picture of three-year-old River on the piano in our living room, laughing with a tangle of Christmas lights in her hair.

  River first came to stay with us the summer after her sophomore year in college. I was thrilled for Teja that she was coming, but also a little nervous about what this might mean for me. I didn’t dare dream that I might be getting a daughter—I just hoped she didn’t hate me.

  But when River met me that first night, she greeted me with a hug and a smile that reminded me of her dad’s. Later that week she suggested that we get a pedicure together, and she helped me pick out wine-red polish for my normally scruffy toenails. As we sat with our feet in the warm, soapy water at the nail salon, she asked me candidly what I thought our connection was supposed to be.

  “Let’s not decide that right away,” I answered, touched by her directness. “We don’t have to force anything. You already have a mother, and I’m not trying to replace her. Let’s let our connection grow, and just see what it becomes.”

  * * *

  —

  It was different, living with a girl. In the mornings that first summer, I delighted in the smells of floral shampoo and body lotion that flowed up the stairs from her bathroom, perfuming the house. I was still having to remind Forest, just turning thirteen, to bathe at all. Before special occasions, there was the sound of a blow-dryer and the click of high heels on the tiled hallway. And there were more special occasions for all of us than there used to be; with River around, a simple family dinner out became a celebration. She had a natural gift for noticing daily delights the moment they appeared—a hummingbird at the window, the smell of bread baking in her dad’s bread machine.

  Several nights a week, she and her dad stayed up late—a huge bowl of homemade popcorn between them—watching the animated feature films they had loved when she was a child (Kiki’s Delivery Service, Pocahontas) and the action flicks they both loved now (Captain America and Star Trek). She introduced him to the syncopated electronic bass lines of dubstep, and he played her the classical guitar pieces and folk songs with which he used to sing her to sleep. One night she flat-ironed my hair and did my makeup for me, and she, Forest, and I went to hear her dad’s band play at a pub in our town.

  The four of us settled into the ordinary rhythms of family life: daily walks around the wooded banks of the local reservoir, spotting coyotes, egrets, and owls; trips to Costco to buy bulk perishables—broccolini, spinach, salad greens—in quantities that had never made sense for a family of two; blueberry waffles on our deck on weekend mornings; home-cooked family dinners, where we swapped stories about our day as we sautéed veggies and scrubbed pots.

  I taught her how to chop an onion and how to make a grilled cheese sandwich. With exquisite tact, she let me know which of my handful of party dresses were hopelessly out of date—before I wore them to parties—and then offered me hers to borrow. We discovered we shared a passion for reading and made trips to the library together to pick out piles of novels.

  To my delight, she and Forest slipped into an effortless rapport. Eight years apart in age—and different genders—they felt no need to compete with each other for love from me and Teja. He showed her the best hiking trails near our house. She gave him advice about girls and began referring to him as her “little brother.”

  I marveled at her warmth, sweetness, and sensitivity. She was as emotional, intuitive, empathic, and heart-based as Forest and I were geeky and cerebral. She loved to hold hands or link her arm through mine or her dad’s as we walked, and to lean into us for long, melting hugs. She sensed the emotional undercurrents when people were talking, sometimes even before the speaker did—when someone else in the room was sad, tears came to her eyes.

  She was an artist and tuned in to visual details I was oblivious to—laying out brightly colored placemats and napkins on our dining room table, picking a bouquet of flowers that I hadn’t noticed had bloomed in our garden, and putting them in a cobalt blue vase that had been gathering dust on a top shelf. She had bright, lacy underwear and pretty bras arranged by color with their cups neatly nested inside one another; my underwear was drab and utilitarian, with frayed elastic, tossed in a jumble in a drawer. She had high-heeled boots and a bathroom drawer full of eyeshadow and mascara and foundations; I had sneakers with orthotic inserts, and a single tube of lipstick I’d used since Forest was in kindergarten.

  And yet I recognized myself in her. My childhood had been fractured by war and boarding school. Hers had been fractured by divorce. Now we were creating a new family together. This was a fresh start not just for her but also for the young woman who still lived inside me. In embracing my partner’s daughter, I was also taking myself in my own arms.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of that first summer with us, River headed back to her Southern California college for a semester, then flew to Marseille for a yearlong exchange program in international business. Midway through the program, knowing she was hungry to balance her business studies with creative expression, I helped her apply for a summer work-exchange residency where a friend of mine had taught, in an artist’s colony in the countryside of the south of France. The excitement I felt when she called me to say that she had gotten the position was a clue to me about how deeply I had taken her into my heart. For hours after our conversation I kept finding myself smiling with joy at odd moments—as if I were the one who was about to spend my summer doing watercolor paintings and helping change the sheets in a stone farmhouse in Carcassonne.

  After her year in France, River came home for our first family Christmas together. Our family relationship had leaped ahead in the time apart, as if we had all come to know that it was something we could count on.

  She and I laid out the makings for sugar cookies. Teja put on a CD of guitar music—a holiday collection he had released before River was born. “I grew up listening to this,” she told me and Forest, as we rolled out two big balls of dough into flat sheets.

  As the music played, we used cookie cutters to make Christmas trees, stars, Santas, and a menagerie of tigers, deer, and bears. We slipped them in the oven to bake. Then we took the leftover scraps from the two batches and kneaded them together into one big ball for the final batch.

  “Keep kneading until all the seams disappear, so when you roll it out you don’t have cracks in the cookies,” I told River and Forest as they took turns kneading the dough.

  I was so happy, I almost couldn’t bear it. I wanted to inhale the whole moment deeply—the smell of baking butter and sugar, the laughter of my two children, my partner’s arm around me.

  I could feel the way that the four of us were being kneaded together into one batch of cookies—the seams between our separate, fractured families disappearing.

  * * *

  —

  An international internship was a graduation requirement for River’s program, so over that holiday, Teja and I helped her apply for one at a multinational company where we’d been leading executive meditation retreats. As a writer, I generally guard my time tightly, but I was thrilled to help her write and rewrite her application and slog through interminable work permit application forms in French and Dutch (with the help of Google Translate). I realized that I was feeling the same way about helping her that I did about helping Forest—that her well-being and success made me happier than my own.

  Early one morning, both of us still in our pajamas, we checked her email together at dawn and found out that her work permit had come through and that she would be flying to Amsterdam in two weeks. We jumped up and down together and squealed as we hugged each other.

  While River worked in Amsterdam, Teja and I Skyped with her every week—helping her find an apartment overlooki
ng Rembrandtpark; meeting her new roommate; meeting her new Dutch boyfriend. When she finished her internship, she came home to live with us again while she wrote her thesis. She painted the walls of her bedroom in marbled layers of peach, she and her dad working side by side as they dabbed at the walls with sponges to create the faux effect. Then she settled down to write her case study, an analysis of the mindfulness-training retreats that her dad and I led for the company where she’d worked.

  * * *

  —

  One day River suggested we clean out the kitchen spice rack together. The inspiration for this came when she opened a jar of cayenne for her refried beans and found bugs wriggling in it. I do know that it’s a good idea to purge one’s spice shelves periodically. It’s just that it hadn’t been on my priority list for…oh, maybe a quarter century or so?

  So digging through the spices was an archaeological expedition through my culinary past. There were jars of cardamom pods and sulfurous asafoetida from the time I reviewed an ayurvedic cookbook for Yoga Journal and got inspired to make mung-bean kedgeree to calm my fly-away vata energy. There was faded saffron I picked up in Mysore while studying ashtanga yoga and which I had daily simmered in fresh milk from the cow stabled below my bedroom. There was yeast from a brief foray into bread baking when my now six-foot son was in kindergarten, and red curry paste from an adventure with Thai cuisine.

  There were two unopened jars of faded tarragon, an herb that I can’t recall ever using—my best guess is that one arrived when my ex-husband moved in with me, and the other when Teja did. There was fenugreek seed that I had bought without having any idea what to cook it with, because—back in my own premotherhood, twenty-something life when I wrote down my dreams every morning—a dream owl had informed me that I needed to eat more fenugreek. Especially with items like these, with expiration dates before she could talk, River helped me be ruthless.