Mother, me: How divorce re-invented a daughter
September, 2023
I don’t want to be like my mother.
But I see her sometimes, like a ghost in the mirror. I’ll be cutting up the carrots for dinner, and there she is, her blue veins stretching romantically from my wrists to my knuckles. I run my thumb across her veins, and I remember her hands caressing my baby brother as she used to rock him to sleep.
She would rub his back in gentle clockwise circles, her head resting on the back of the rocker while she hummed so delicately you couldn’t possibly make out the tune. Only the lamp was lit as she teetered back and forth, not even remembering I was in the room, watching her be a mother.
She would stand up at the stove, her right leg perched up onto her left like a flamingo in the water, stirring beef tips and broth into the egg noodles like every Sunday. I’d be buttering the bread behind her while the light bulb above the sink flickered near its end. “Dad’ll get to it,” we’d both say to ourselves.
My little sister and I had bunk beds that Dad built for us in the corner room of our house on Joseph Street, where Mom would climb up to sing us goodnight. “Sweet dreams until tomorrow, I’ll think of you till then …” She’d tuck my long, blond hair behind my ear and kiss my temple with a mighty inhale, then she’d monkey over to my sister and do the same.
Of course, she really would think only of us till dawn, consuming her entire life into ours. “And so it is,” she’d bemoan as she turned away from any possibility of seeing herself.
The possibility still awaits.
Some afternoons, she was quiet. She’d curl up on the far corner of the faded blue floral-print couch, both knees tucked into her body tightly enough for her to sink into the cushions and disappear. Her right forearm would hold her heavy chin while her long, beautiful curls hid in a tightly-wound bun up top, concealing nearly everything from us, and she would just settle right there into another catatonia.
Her young skin was wearier than it should have been, and her sadness was showing. She would stay that way for what seemed like hours to a child, so we’d just snuggle into her, tracing the blue lines that stretched from her wrist to her knuckles, and we’d hum together. Was she crying beneath the reverberations of the song in her throat?
These are among the many paintings of my childhood that hang in my memories, conjured from old photographs, the familiar quietness in her eyes even now, and the tales we repeat every Thanksgiving. My brother tells me he remembers nothing from perhaps the first six years of his life — not in a harrowing, traumatic sort of way, but maybe because the sun was always shining on him while he sat cozily in his car seat on long drives west and my sister and I sang along with him, “You Gotta Be” by Des’ree.
You gotta be bad, you gotta be bold, you gotta be wiser.
You gotta be hard, you gotta be tough, you gotta be stronger.
You gotta be cool, you gotta be calm, you gotta stay together.
All I know, all I know, love will save the day.
My childhood was pleasant like that, too— Lisa Loeb on MTV blaring in the living room and biking one block to the local grocery store for penny Tootsie Frooties after school. It was safe and beautiful, and my mother was always there: loving, darling, charming, exquisite. “Remember to always moisturize your neck, honey!” and, “I buy the plastic tampon applicators, the cardboard ones are gross,” she’d chirp as I rummaged through her makeup and lotions. I wrote in my diaries how I wanted to be just like her someday, with a smile and a heart at the end of the sentences.
In so many ways, I am.
I see her in pictures of me now, the way I tilt my head and relax my ears and toss my shoulders back just a bit. “Mom, stop trying so hard!” I used to laugh. But now I’m trying too hard, too, and sometimes it’s all I can muster to remove myself from the catatonia she’s probably still in.
I sing her song to my boys now every night, when they let me, pushing away their long, blond hair from their forehead, inhaling every morsel of skin with one more kiss. I, too, am equally attached to my motherhood, bound to the responsibility as if there is nothing else to give.
Just like my mother.
It was around 5:40 p.m. on a summer Monday, 25 years removed from the warmth of my bunk bed, when I told her I was leaving my husband and that I loved someone else. She already knew that, she told me, and her breaking heart showed up as cynicism in her eyes.
“Everybody likes attention, honey,” she hissed by 5:45. I kept a cavalier stance while inside a panic rolled to a boil – my body meeting a hurt that would take years to dull – and a theatrical response from the both of us ensued.
I wanted to defend myself in that moment, but her disappointment snapped each of my tendons and twisted each of my muscles until all those years of pleasing her crumpled like a broken skeleton to the floor, defenseless.
She was my moon and stars, how could I betray this offshoot of her own life, the one she needed me to be?
Maybe she softened before the embarrassment of me settled in, but I remember her voice was hasty, like someone put out their cigarette on our entire relationship two minutes into their smoke break. Singe went the motherhood,
the closeness,
the attachment,
the need,
the togetherness,
the trust.
I left that conversation to hurriedly mourn a divorce, introduce myself to the hell that is co-parenting, and come to terms with a self I was no longer, but in the tumult, I was missing my mother the most.
First, I fear I grieved wrongly and treated myself so poorly so as to pretend to be ok. I didn’t want my mother to see me unsure. I didn’t want anyone to think I was unsure, for fear of humiliating her.
So I made a fool of myself, nearly mocking my own suffering – my pain a farce. But there is no healing in impersonation, only someone else to please.
What is the appeal of approval anyway? My mom was showing up, eventually. After a holiday one year, I glanced from the dining room table I was wiping down to see my new lover and my old mother washing dishes together. He was asking her questions, and her tone seemed happy to oblige. There were no lasers from her eyes or body language that suggested running. She was leaning in over the bubbles and into this new life for me, I think they even laughed.
But it wasn’t enough to satiate me.
Approval only begets approval – the quest for her permission like a worn out path in the lion’s cage. It was time to understand the suffering, not just withstand it.
To endure is not as becoming as it seems, but what a drag for the drunken pleaser I was so used to being.
I can see now that, when I got divorced and then became a co-parent and then remarried, the grief was not borne from a mother who started loving me less, it was my own discomfort in realizing what she must have been trying to protect me from all along: just how lonely adulthood can be — deceased is the childhood with a mother to the rescue. Deceased is the child in me who could call for her at night.
In seeking a mother in my forlorn adulthood now, I realized I needed to listen instead for a selfhood that could never have been heard over the cries for her. And wouldn’t myself to the rescue suffice?
To mother ourselves is to rub the backs of our discontent and hush the expectations of the others. But they were never the chokehold here. These were my own hands around my neck – my god we are the martyrs – yet I came back around every time gripping ever tighter, unhealed and disenchanted by this beautiful new life that was trying to repair me.
To look for the approval of my mother only blinded me from my own approval,
of me.
Chase me through the rows of old pine trees, the ones that grew tall while I once did but need water still. Warm me, braid the hair off my back, take me to church and make me a child, wistful like the girl I never was. Cradle me desperately, as if my limbs are wet sand on a hot day. Turn up the music in the morning, and remove thought from the stillness at night. Unhear them daily, all those rote rationalities, and listen instead for me. I’m here. Sing for me, and love me without limitation. Push me, challenge me, shake me, and show me compassion until the suffering is a friend of ours. Stand up for me, defend my spirit, hold me, and remember all of it. Take it all in, don’t hasten, just be with me, please. Mother me, and love me anyway.
I say to myself.
I could become my mother – in her charm and compassion, complacency and malaise. My family tells me often that I am unmistakably her, flamingoed at the stove while I toss the beef tips, or cupping your hand as I shake it.
But maybe just for today, I will be the provider I need instead, discounting nothing in the daughter I was for a little while.
I will love me, and then I will love my mother.
