Mother's Day

 Yesterday was Mother’s Day and as I walked among the people hurrying places with bouquets and crowding the sidewalk cafés, I remembered the day Dad and I forgot completely that it was Mother’s Day and wandered into a neighborhood restaurant.  We were startled to find it decked out in pink flowers in full of families. Feeling awkward in our motherless state, we made a hasty report.

Decades later, when Dad’s memory was fading, he asked for my mother over and over. At first, I would carefully tell him, breaking the story into pieces, like a bar of chocolate so that he could understand- but then I realized that was just creating pain for both of us as he found out about her death again and again. So I started just telling him “she isn’t here,” which he was completely satisfied with.  

But even when she was physically alive, she wasn’t here.  I don’t know when she began to disappear but by the time I was old enough to really know her, she was fading rapidly.

I heard stories and saw evidence that she had once been a creative, vibrant beautiful woman.  Back in Kansas, she had played the organ in several churches, been a national merit scholar, and dreamed of being a journalist like William Allen White . I had seen the articles she wrote for the Emporia Gazette that my grandparents had squirreled away, like they later did with videotapes of me as a teen activist on TV, taking about AIDS and activism.

I could tell she must have been as headstrong as I was at that age- and still am- because she defied my stern grandfather’s insistence that she go to the University of Kansas, where he taught and tuition would be free, to come to NYC to attend Barnard.  He cut her off for that, leaving to work her way through school as an accompanist and various odd jobs, which was not common at a prestigious school. 

She stayed cut off, he never sent her another dime, not when my asshole father left her alone and pregnant and not when her failing health left her unable to work, and she had to rely on government benefits. I was away at college then and I sent her money from my work study job so she could keep the cats fed and make ends meet.

From her story, I learned that doing what is right for you might mean making sacrifices. I also learned that when I went to college and had to submit a report every semester about what I was taking and what I was going to take, along with my evaluations (Hampshire’s substitute for grades) that my grandfather’s limited amount of financial support was contingent on whether he approved of my choices.

My mother didn’t finish college- anti-Vietnam and civil rights activism consumed her senior year, culminating in the student takeover of Columbia and she got derailed.  She also met my asshole father, who was a Professor there. That fact alone tells you all you need to know about what kind of man he was.

She still had most of her Kansas naïveté and believed he would marry her, but what he did was send her a letter telling her to have an abortion “you crazy bitch,” which we found in the filing cabinet after her death. Maybe she started disappearing then.

Or maybe it was when she, as a young female reporter, was banished from the newsroom she dreamed of to the fashion pages, where she watched them duct tape models into garments, and spray food with hairspray to make it look glossy and delectable.  There was enough of her left then that she took home the sample size garments that fit her tiny frame from the photo shoots and traveled in Mexico with my Dad.

Another part of her disappeared when her newspaper, the Journal American, one of the many daily papers in nYC back then folded during the teamster’s strike. For the rest of her life she blamed unions for that, a dent in her progressive idealism.  With her severance pay, she bought a piano and an orange kitten she named Sam, who would slice open entenmann’s boxes with his claws, fish out cheese danishes and stash them in her boots.

she never worked for a newspaper again, turning freelance and taking on transcription jobs to make ends meet. Mostly she transcribed medical conferences, but also postal disciplinary hearings, and interviews for other journalists. As a young  kid, I slept in the room where she worked, the click click click of her fingers flying across the typewriter followed by the ding my lullaby.

Sometimes there was a lot of work and she would type for days at a time, sleeping very little and surviving on endless cups of coffee and her ubiquitous cigarettes. Other times there was no work, and no money. She would occupy herself playing the piano. Mozart and the thundering Rachmaninov my Dad preferred. She would grow things in the garden and can then in the August heat, steam billowing through the kitchen, tomato sauce and mint jelly.

She was endlessly creative but also often unsuccessful. She knitted me a clown doll, beautiful in the details of the costume, but never did the face, leaving it strangely blank. She decided to make rope sandals, busily dyeing the rope various colors and festooning the house with it while it dried, only to leave it there for years until eventually it was knocked down by the hijinks of various cats.  She tried drying the herbs she grew, stringing an indoor clothesline along the basement hall and hanging them upside down in batches where they not only dried but fossilized.

When Dad planned the trips she once enjoyed, he and I would be packed and ready but she could not get herself organized, still ironing as the time we had to leave approached and then finally waving us off on her own, seeming relieved to see us go.

She seemed relieved when he picked me up early Saturday mornings too and we headed off to Coney Island or rowing in Central Park. He stocked his apartment with Special K and bubble bath, toys and magic markers, creating a space for me so that we could stay out of her way.  Sometimes she banished us entirely, claiming that she needed us gone so that she could quit smoking, so we would head up to Gloucester or to Mohonk, leaving her the whole City.

She was quiet, her genteel voice so quiet that people in Brooklyn, accustomed to shouting at each other out the windows, could not hear her and I had to be her translator, her voice.

There was no way to know when  she would go into a stony kind of rage, terrifying in its silence. I learned to be very still in those moments, a camoflauged animal fading into the nicotine stained walls.  It didn’t always work, sometimes she would turn on me, using her gift with words to slice me into ribbons.

More and more I also became her presence in the world, first short trips to nearby shops, then the supermarket, then trips into Manhattan to deliver her finished transcripts to clients.

Mostly she disappeared into a world of words, reading reading reading. Dad and I were readers, too, but not the way she was, unable to dispose of anything until she had read every single word. 

Towards the end of her life, a visiting nurse came to see what she would need when she came home from the hospital and when I opened the bedroom door she just stood there surveying the hip high piles of magazines and newspapers and the narrow paths between them to the closet and bed and door.

Even at her own funeral she was not there, the service planned by my grandparents to reflect the norms of their Kansas world rather than who she really was.  I stood in line and shook hands with elderly people who had only known the girl she was, her life in NYC obscured by her distance and my grandparents lies.