When the freeway was built in Marin county, it cut through the neighborhoods of San Rafael and San Anselmo, creating pockets of culture composed of artistic, aging hippies, affluent young professionals or older, more rural, residents. Shanna was an artist living in one of these pockets in San Anselmo. In the spring of '91, my mother and I went to see some of her work.
The street has a 1950s feel, lined with small clapboard houses sitting on tiny, manicured plots—all except for Shanna's. Her home is a rambling rural oasis, hidden behind overgrown shrubbery and a line of massive acacia and live oaks. A small, rusty wire gate huddles in a hedge, bearing a hand-scrawled sign that says, “Please latch the gate and bungie it. Beware of dogs.” These come running out as we enter: a young, brisk Sheltie-cross with a long, inquisitive nose, and a shaggy, older dog, greying around the muzzle and walking stiffly. His milky eyes peer at us, and he gives a mournful “Yowww” as we approach the house.
Shanna emerges from the house to greet us. Her handshake is firm and dry, but her voice is soft and her manner a little shy, although she has met my mother once before. It's hard for me to determine her age. She has a youthful shape to her face, which is fair, blue-eyed, and devoid of make-up. Her hair is long and thick, with bangs cut across a slender forehead. But there is a lot of grey streaked among its blonde, and her cheeks are lined and rough from being outdoors.
She leads us to her home up a sidewalk speckled with vivid emerald moss and surrounded by dozens of large metal containers filled with dirt. Most of them have small green spears breaking through their soil. A few lilies-of-the-valley are up in one, and a cluster of paper-whites in another; Shanna is an avid grower, if not a gardener. Certainly, I have never seen such masses of English violets in a California yard; they bruise the shadows with their rich, purple color.
The house is light blue and a mix of shapes. Some of it is square, with large dusty windows at yard level; they hang at odd angles. Parts of the house appear to have been tacked on over the years, none too skillfully. The whole place looks as if it would fall over from a single blow. The front porch needs painting and some carpentry on its stairs. It holds more plants, a scarred wooden end table, and a sagging couch covered in dog hair. Mother and I cast surreptitious glances at each other. Shanna has gone in to get her sculptures; we are obviously to stay out here and view them. Shall we sit on the couch and risk the furry web and possibly rich smell of dog? Mother, being more fastidious, decides against it. I brush quickly and hopefully at a small square of couch and perch cautiously on the edge.
The house is dark inside, Shanna explains as she re-emerges, too dark to see her work well. She puts down two large cardboard boxes filled with newspaper. Inside are all her current sculptures, carefully wrapped. The dogs lie comfortably at our feet as we begin the process of revealing her work...
I'm unprepared for the delicacy and warmth of her art. Palm-sized figures of creamy, unglazed porcelain emerge from their sea of paper, mer-animals of every species and pose: laughing pigs with curled legs and hooves; fat, happy cats, sleeping or playing flute; supine elephants, entwining trunks; goats, sheep, hippos in tender pas de-deux—all skillfully carved and lifelike, except for the fact that their nether halves are fish. Each scale is carefully tooled. Tails toss and curl like a sailfish's fin, or lie in rippling serenity.
There are a few people, too: mermaid mothers playing with their babies, or cuddled up with mer-cats and dogs. Merchildren laughing and holding pets. I notice all the women's faces look a little like Shanna.
Soon the couch is a colony of strange and wondrous creatures. I am enchanted, and it's hard to choose between them. Mother decides on a pig and a small cat, licking its fishy tail. I choose a mer-cat that looks like my Duchess—fat, furry and curled on her back in blissful slumber.
Shanna tells us about an upcoming exhibition. She wants to design a display for her creatures, something that resembles a rocky beach but is light and easy to carry. She does not drive, she explains. She has no car. Through these intimations I also understand she has no husband, no lover, no steadfast friend to take her under his wing. She begs rides to the shows. She sallies forth on foot to shop in the nearby stores. In the heart of an affluent, mobile culture, Shanna remains a rural anachronism, contained by her own—what? Fears? Poverty? Artistic sacrifice?
After each piece is laboriously rewrapped, Shanna shows us her kiln. It's in an old barn, cluttered with equipment, hay and the strong smell of chickens. She picks up a mask, an interesting head made of equal parts of bear and crocodile.
“It cracked, you see,” she says. “It was so thick, and I rushed the drying process. It was ruined. I do better with the small pieces.”
She introduces us to her goats, two wall-eyed Nubians kept in a wire yard of hay and hard-packed dirt. There is an old orchard here, and its abundant apples hang on the leafless branches or lie on the ground, copper and bronze with rot. A large ginger-colored cat comes by, ignoring the eager interest of the dogs and allowing me to stroke it briefly. There is a vegetable garden adjacent to the goats, too; it contains some wilting cabbages and thick-stalked onions.
Mother and Shanna talk about the goats, and I wander back to the gate. There are ducks in the front yard now, flapping and quacking by a small pool. The cat follows me and sits beneath a bush.
The overall effect of this aging, chaotic garden and ramshackle house unsettles me. I feel as if I wandered into a fairy tale—Rapunzel perhaps—where (unlike the Disney version) the King, gazing from his castle, is surprised by the wild, magical grounds of his neighbor, the witch. In the original story, he trespasses into those grounds to pick campion for his ailing, pregnant Queen. It is an act of courage, not just because he risks the witch's righteous anger but because he leaves behind his pristine world for something wild and strange. Something that lives by different rules. Something enchanted.
I sense the same enchantment here: the delicate spirit of Shanna, living behind a simple, lonely heart. The whimsical, engaging art hidden in the shadowed, unkempt home. The rural, fecund garden thriving among trim suburban yards. What must her neighbors think, gazing over the wire fence?
What do I think, having braved the grimy porch and walked among the weeds?
I touch my little mer-cat, wrapped in paper, and smile.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
The Real Rescue
Obviously, this was written before my mother died...
Mother talks about dying all the time these days. Well, she has for years. She longs for it sometimes, because she’s so f’ing bored and in pain from her arthritic knees. Sometimes I have a passing urge to pick her up, part and parcel, and move her into my home. To give her relief, to take away the worry of her self-supporting existence, so she would have enough money and not have to pay rent or work. A house without stairs to climb. A place for her dog and cat, where she could be pet-sitter for my own animals when I’m at work or on the road.
But the problem with sharing a home with my mother is that she takes over, just like bindweed. She wraps herself around your time, your rooms, your television shows, and twists them into whatever she wants and needs. After a while, there’s no space for you anymore. You can’t breathe. And she always wants more, and she takes everything you do for her as her birthright. Too proud to sustain gratitude, too critical to be polite.
I've talked extensively about Rescuing and the real irony is, my mother was my Rescuer of choice for most of my life, even when I was married. Because I ran to her for everything. We had our moments of separation, of discord, but eventually, we circled back into each other's orbit. When I was done with marriage, I moved back in with her.
I've likened us to two dragons, locked mid-flight in mortal combat, breathing fire on each other.
In hindsight, I realize that I've been my mother's Rescuer, too. Like me, she's gone through marriages and relationships, hoping but not finding. In the end, she's had to build her own business and pay her own rent, stand on her own feet—and through all those times, she ran to me just like I ran to her. We are the Important Relationship in each other's life. We've outlasted the princes and there are probably no more coming at this point.
But even though we've tried, it hasn't been possible to establish a healthy footing.
The last house we shared, I had a huge bedroom downstairs with it's own television and fireplace. Nice, right? A good solution for separate spaces. My mother was always calling down to me, "When are you coming up? What are you doing?" If I was playing guitar and singing, she'd interrupt me with this question (even after I asked her not to). It wasn't enough to be in the same house. She wanted my company there, next to her, watching what she was watching on television.
She also had the habit of talking to my animals while I was downstairs getting ready for work in the morning. "Hasn't she come up to feed you yet? She's a bad mommy, isn't she?" Like that. I knew if I stayed any longer, I was going to stab her in the neck and throw her down the stairs, like a cheap horror film. When the chance came, I packed up and moved—first to the East Coast, then to the MidWest. For almost the first time in my life, I stood on my own two feet. No man. No mother. No family.
This is the last part of the process: to live far away from her, on my own, and discover my spirit's natural shape. My brothers are not always happy about this, especially as her health falters. They are near, I am not. They have to deal with her, I can hang up the phone and go on with my day.
So now, when I feel this deep impulse to gather her in and take care of her again, I resist it.
Mother talks about dying all the time these days. Well, she has for years. She longs for it sometimes, because she’s so f’ing bored and in pain from her arthritic knees. Sometimes I have a passing urge to pick her up, part and parcel, and move her into my home. To give her relief, to take away the worry of her self-supporting existence, so she would have enough money and not have to pay rent or work. A house without stairs to climb. A place for her dog and cat, where she could be pet-sitter for my own animals when I’m at work or on the road.
But the problem with sharing a home with my mother is that she takes over, just like bindweed. She wraps herself around your time, your rooms, your television shows, and twists them into whatever she wants and needs. After a while, there’s no space for you anymore. You can’t breathe. And she always wants more, and she takes everything you do for her as her birthright. Too proud to sustain gratitude, too critical to be polite.
I've talked extensively about Rescuing and the real irony is, my mother was my Rescuer of choice for most of my life, even when I was married. Because I ran to her for everything. We had our moments of separation, of discord, but eventually, we circled back into each other's orbit. When I was done with marriage, I moved back in with her.
I've likened us to two dragons, locked mid-flight in mortal combat, breathing fire on each other.
In hindsight, I realize that I've been my mother's Rescuer, too. Like me, she's gone through marriages and relationships, hoping but not finding. In the end, she's had to build her own business and pay her own rent, stand on her own feet—and through all those times, she ran to me just like I ran to her. We are the Important Relationship in each other's life. We've outlasted the princes and there are probably no more coming at this point.
But even though we've tried, it hasn't been possible to establish a healthy footing.
The last house we shared, I had a huge bedroom downstairs with it's own television and fireplace. Nice, right? A good solution for separate spaces. My mother was always calling down to me, "When are you coming up? What are you doing?" If I was playing guitar and singing, she'd interrupt me with this question (even after I asked her not to). It wasn't enough to be in the same house. She wanted my company there, next to her, watching what she was watching on television.
She also had the habit of talking to my animals while I was downstairs getting ready for work in the morning. "Hasn't she come up to feed you yet? She's a bad mommy, isn't she?" Like that. I knew if I stayed any longer, I was going to stab her in the neck and throw her down the stairs, like a cheap horror film. When the chance came, I packed up and moved—first to the East Coast, then to the MidWest. For almost the first time in my life, I stood on my own two feet. No man. No mother. No family.
This is the last part of the process: to live far away from her, on my own, and discover my spirit's natural shape. My brothers are not always happy about this, especially as her health falters. They are near, I am not. They have to deal with her, I can hang up the phone and go on with my day.
So now, when I feel this deep impulse to gather her in and take care of her again, I resist it.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
The Good Ship Lollipop
Shirley Temple Black died yesterday at age 85. Like most of my generation, I enjoyed her movies as a child, her brightness and dancing, her timely sense of pathos or courage. Her movies were before my time but, like generations after me, we all enjoyed them via reruns or DVDs and have this shared legacy of a cheerful little girl who overcame being an orphan, a scullery maid, a kidnapped companion kept away from her goats...
If you said, "Grandfather! Grandfather" with an accent in our house, we knew just what the joke was. (For those of you who don't, it's a quote from "Heidi.")
But what if there had never been a Shirley Temple? What if, instead, it had been another little girl? What if, in fact, it had been my mother?
Here's how the story goes, according to the way my mother told it, although it's been some years since I heard it...
When she was a little girl, living God knows where (I don't remember but from the photo it looks to be in the Southwest somewhere), her family was approached by "a man from Hollywood." Probably a talent scout or a producer. He was looking for the next child star. Shirley was a no-name at that point.
My mother was tiny for her age, had a wealth of very curly red hair, and was probably pretty cute with her big green eyes. The only photo I have of her is when she's around two and she's frowning, so hard to tell from that. She was different from Shirley, but her mouth could be a similar rosebud and goodness knows it could pout like Shirley's did!
Anyway...this gentleman wanted to take her back to Hollywood with him. He wanted my grandparents to sign a contract. I guess he convinced them because things were set into motion and apparently everyone was ready to go. Only, just like something out of a tragic Shirley Temple movie, the night before they were supposed to clinch the deal, my grandparents' house burned down.
Mom never talked about all the stuff they lost, that wasn't part of the story. I do know that their collie, Laddie, perished in the fire. (I still can't really think about that and I wish she'd never told me, but I understand why that made such an impression on her tender, animal-loving heart.)
My grandparents, staggering under this tragedy, reversed their decision and Mr. Hollywood went to knock on other front doors.
I never understood why they didn't go ahead. I mean, yes, they'd just suffered a great loss. But on the other hand, little Kay might have been their meal ticket for years to come, and help to make up for that loss and then some. Couldn't Grandmom have climbed on the bus with her daughter and left Grandad to work on salvaging things? Maybe not. Maybe in those days it was different, and maybe it was too much.
All I know is, that was the end of my mother's shot at stardom. Shirley was found and cast, and the rest is history.
And maybe that's what started the whole deal. Maybe they recounted this twist of Fate to little Kay as a child. Maybe it made her think she was Somebody, and that she'd missed her chance to prove it. Maybe it was the foundation for all the ambition and haughtiness and desire for the Best in Life that burned inside my mother, making her a swan among the ducks, an alien changeling that didn't fit the rest of her family. Something sure did.
She hungered for celebrity, and she found it in many smaller ways throughout her life. She hit the big time in her 40s as a psychic and was even courted by the prestigious William Morris Agency. But—and here's another head-scratcher—she turned them down.
The flip side of my mom's drive to be famous was a fierce need to be in control. Of f'ing everything and everyone! It made her family crazed, it ruined her marriages, it spoiled some of her best chances. My mother would rather be a big fish in a small pond than the reverse. She feared that the William Morris Agency would "control" her, manage her, and she couldn't stand the thought.
"They'll take a big cut of everything I earn," she said.
"Yeah, but Mom, ten or twenty percent of a whole lot of money is worth it," I said. "A hundred percent of nothing is...well, nothing."
But that's what she opted for. So Sylvia Brown was all over the place with books and interviews and fame. My mom did lots of good stuff and made some impressive appearances. But her books were small potatoes, and she ground her teeth every time Sylvia came on TV. There but for Fortune...
Maybe we all make our own Fortune. We get these chances, and we turn them down, sometimes for a good reason—sometimes not. Mom could have been singing "The Good Ship Lollipop" and I could've grown up in the Hollywood Hills. We'll never know.
If you said, "Grandfather! Grandfather" with an accent in our house, we knew just what the joke was. (For those of you who don't, it's a quote from "Heidi.")
But what if there had never been a Shirley Temple? What if, instead, it had been another little girl? What if, in fact, it had been my mother?
Here's how the story goes, according to the way my mother told it, although it's been some years since I heard it...
When she was a little girl, living God knows where (I don't remember but from the photo it looks to be in the Southwest somewhere), her family was approached by "a man from Hollywood." Probably a talent scout or a producer. He was looking for the next child star. Shirley was a no-name at that point.
My mother was tiny for her age, had a wealth of very curly red hair, and was probably pretty cute with her big green eyes. The only photo I have of her is when she's around two and she's frowning, so hard to tell from that. She was different from Shirley, but her mouth could be a similar rosebud and goodness knows it could pout like Shirley's did!
This isn't the photo I was thinking of, but I'll have to try and dig up the other one.
Anyway...this gentleman wanted to take her back to Hollywood with him. He wanted my grandparents to sign a contract. I guess he convinced them because things were set into motion and apparently everyone was ready to go. Only, just like something out of a tragic Shirley Temple movie, the night before they were supposed to clinch the deal, my grandparents' house burned down.
Mom never talked about all the stuff they lost, that wasn't part of the story. I do know that their collie, Laddie, perished in the fire. (I still can't really think about that and I wish she'd never told me, but I understand why that made such an impression on her tender, animal-loving heart.)
My grandparents, staggering under this tragedy, reversed their decision and Mr. Hollywood went to knock on other front doors.
I never understood why they didn't go ahead. I mean, yes, they'd just suffered a great loss. But on the other hand, little Kay might have been their meal ticket for years to come, and help to make up for that loss and then some. Couldn't Grandmom have climbed on the bus with her daughter and left Grandad to work on salvaging things? Maybe not. Maybe in those days it was different, and maybe it was too much.
All I know is, that was the end of my mother's shot at stardom. Shirley was found and cast, and the rest is history.
And maybe that's what started the whole deal. Maybe they recounted this twist of Fate to little Kay as a child. Maybe it made her think she was Somebody, and that she'd missed her chance to prove it. Maybe it was the foundation for all the ambition and haughtiness and desire for the Best in Life that burned inside my mother, making her a swan among the ducks, an alien changeling that didn't fit the rest of her family. Something sure did.
She hungered for celebrity, and she found it in many smaller ways throughout her life. She hit the big time in her 40s as a psychic and was even courted by the prestigious William Morris Agency. But—and here's another head-scratcher—she turned them down.
The flip side of my mom's drive to be famous was a fierce need to be in control. Of f'ing everything and everyone! It made her family crazed, it ruined her marriages, it spoiled some of her best chances. My mother would rather be a big fish in a small pond than the reverse. She feared that the William Morris Agency would "control" her, manage her, and she couldn't stand the thought.
"They'll take a big cut of everything I earn," she said.
"Yeah, but Mom, ten or twenty percent of a whole lot of money is worth it," I said. "A hundred percent of nothing is...well, nothing."
But that's what she opted for. So Sylvia Brown was all over the place with books and interviews and fame. My mom did lots of good stuff and made some impressive appearances. But her books were small potatoes, and she ground her teeth every time Sylvia came on TV. There but for Fortune...
Maybe we all make our own Fortune. We get these chances, and we turn them down, sometimes for a good reason—sometimes not. Mom could have been singing "The Good Ship Lollipop" and I could've grown up in the Hollywood Hills. We'll never know.
Monday, February 3, 2014
Resting Places
In a movie, a woman visits her son’s grave in northern France. He was killed in the War and she comes over from England periodically to talk to him.
I’ve never visited my father’s grave, although I remember very clearly the day we put him in it: the gray flocked casket that seemed too small to hold his tall, big-boned frame; the horrible clot of pain in my throat that seeping tears only slightly relieved. To weep openly, deeply, would have felt like letting go and I was afraid of where it would take me. So I stood in agony while they lowered him into the ground. And I never went back.
As I watched the movie, I wondered about this need to visit loved ones in a cemetery. After all, it’s only their bones, and they are not really there. I have visited my father frequently, but from wherever I was—driving, usually, across country as I fled from West to East Coast and back again, wandering, searching, living my life in geographical phases. I've felt him near me, I've talked to him, wept for him, prayed to him. I've retained a warmth from my early childhood toward him, culled from photos where I sat on his lap and he read to me, this little big-eyed girl with bangs and a ponytail. I remember the smell of his pipe tobacco and the way he cleared his throat before he spoke, especially if he’d been pondering for awhile. He wore Old Spice and I loved the fragrance and the shape and design of the bottles.
While alive, my dad was gone more than he was home, and there are great blank stretches where I don’t remember him at all. For having two parents, I was still a latchkey kid, coming home to emptiness most of the time. Later on, when he remarried, theological differences fenced us off from on another. We never reconciled those, but we overlooked them as he fell ill and death became a reality for both of us.
The preacher of the big church where they held his funeral spun stories of who he was—as if he even knew—mentioning me only among the children and stepchildren that Dad left behind. He talked about a person who had nothing to do with years of being my father. Someone who wasn’t always wrapped up in Jesus, who smoked a pipe and flew planes and sailed in on a carrier to us, with the smells of fuel and tar and salt water, and the cry of gulls above. That person wasn’t present in the church, and lives only in my heart now. So what would be the consolation of going to his grave? Maybe the tangible proof of his former existence, a spot where you can focus your thoughts and send them out to his soul, wherever it is? Perhaps that is the solace of a headstone, the place where you can take time and remember.
I don't have a home, even after all these years. I have places that I live and like, but even a decade living in the same place has not made it Home. For me, the old adage has become Truth: Home is where the heart is, and mine is scattered across the world with my siblings, my son's family, my grandchildren. Through choices and circumstances, I am an exile. I hope to not be one forever.
My mother wanted to be cremated. That meant that when she died, there would be no place to visit and ponder about her or chat. She would be scattered somewhere, and the thought pained me, it gave me grief and even a little terror. Gone is so gone. Whatever may be afterwards, you're still gone from this plane of existence. Feeble and aging as Mother was, at least she was a phone call away.
As it turned out, my mother's cremation—and the scattering of her ashes—is painful for me to contemplate, even now. She died in a nursing home after an eight-month descent into dementia via a series of vascular strokes. In the end, her brain forgot how to swallow. Such a simple function, but without it, she was doomed. She couldn't eat or drink or receive oral medication. Since she didn't wish her life to be artificially prolonged, the only decision was to keep her comfortable and let nature take its course. Dehydration. Not in a desert under a hot sun but in a bed in a cool room. Almost all of her children were there the last night, saying goodbye. I kissed her forehead and her eyes flickered open when I spoke to her, but I'm only hoping when I say she knew I was there. I hope she did. She died in the early morning before we could to her. But I knew when I kissed her goodbye the night before that I would never see her again.
Afterwards, it should have been a straightforward process to deliver her to the crematorium. But that's not what happened. The doctor who signed her death certificate at the nursing home made a mistake when noting down her meds and cause of death; this triggered an inquiry, and my mother's body was taken in a bag to the coroner's for medical exam. Everything was settled and the inquiry went away, but the result was that she went from the coroner's to the crematorium as a naked body in a bag, not as someone washed and dressed in a favorite outfit, as I always imagined.
Because of this hiccup and the time it took, I was already back home by the time Mom's body was released. We'd had a private celebration of her life and death at my brother's home, but no formal funeral—she didn't believe in them and thought they were a waste of time. She'd made no provisions, no will, she had nothing but a few personal possessions that we'd already taken care of before the nursing home. My mother never took care of business if she could avoid it.
But this last process was unsettling and irregular. At any rate, my brothers received her ashes. My sisters-in-law and I suggested that she be scattered from a boat into the Pacific Ocean, perhaps off the coast of Monterey or Carmel, which she loved.
Now, I love my brothers deeply; they are the best men I know, and I hope we walk this road for a long long time together. But their feelings toward Mom were a lot less explored and resolved than mine. Their anger was still fresh and simmering, breaking through the crust of civility like lava through the earth. Their reactions to her death were conflicted—and they are, all of them, (fiscally) practical men. So instead of paying for a boat that would take them out onto the ocean and scattering Mother's ashes there...they took her to a quiet local beach, said a prayer, waded in and dumped her just offshore. And guess what? Her ashes were caught and tumbled by the waves and slopped back up onto their legs and the beach where people walked and ran their dogs.
To their due, they were shocked. They expected the ashes to sink. I don't know why they didn't wait for a time when I could be there. I am unhappy that they wouldn't fork over some money to have a proper ceremony out to sea. My mother's decline and death were not what I would've predicted, and they stunned me; but her final disposal grieves me still. Not for the mingling of ash and sand and sea, but for the lack of beauty and ritual that we all deserve when our time comes.
I want to be cremated, too. But I've asked that it be in a lovely meadow or forest somewhere, under sun and shadows and birdsong. As much as I love the ocean, it is too deep and watery, too turbulent and volatile, for me to enjoy ending up there. It is, by its very nature, a place that does not rest.
The perfect place for a woman as restless as my mother.
I’ve never visited my father’s grave, although I remember very clearly the day we put him in it: the gray flocked casket that seemed too small to hold his tall, big-boned frame; the horrible clot of pain in my throat that seeping tears only slightly relieved. To weep openly, deeply, would have felt like letting go and I was afraid of where it would take me. So I stood in agony while they lowered him into the ground. And I never went back.
As I watched the movie, I wondered about this need to visit loved ones in a cemetery. After all, it’s only their bones, and they are not really there. I have visited my father frequently, but from wherever I was—driving, usually, across country as I fled from West to East Coast and back again, wandering, searching, living my life in geographical phases. I've felt him near me, I've talked to him, wept for him, prayed to him. I've retained a warmth from my early childhood toward him, culled from photos where I sat on his lap and he read to me, this little big-eyed girl with bangs and a ponytail. I remember the smell of his pipe tobacco and the way he cleared his throat before he spoke, especially if he’d been pondering for awhile. He wore Old Spice and I loved the fragrance and the shape and design of the bottles.
While alive, my dad was gone more than he was home, and there are great blank stretches where I don’t remember him at all. For having two parents, I was still a latchkey kid, coming home to emptiness most of the time. Later on, when he remarried, theological differences fenced us off from on another. We never reconciled those, but we overlooked them as he fell ill and death became a reality for both of us.
The preacher of the big church where they held his funeral spun stories of who he was—as if he even knew—mentioning me only among the children and stepchildren that Dad left behind. He talked about a person who had nothing to do with years of being my father. Someone who wasn’t always wrapped up in Jesus, who smoked a pipe and flew planes and sailed in on a carrier to us, with the smells of fuel and tar and salt water, and the cry of gulls above. That person wasn’t present in the church, and lives only in my heart now. So what would be the consolation of going to his grave? Maybe the tangible proof of his former existence, a spot where you can focus your thoughts and send them out to his soul, wherever it is? Perhaps that is the solace of a headstone, the place where you can take time and remember.
I don't have a home, even after all these years. I have places that I live and like, but even a decade living in the same place has not made it Home. For me, the old adage has become Truth: Home is where the heart is, and mine is scattered across the world with my siblings, my son's family, my grandchildren. Through choices and circumstances, I am an exile. I hope to not be one forever.
My mother wanted to be cremated. That meant that when she died, there would be no place to visit and ponder about her or chat. She would be scattered somewhere, and the thought pained me, it gave me grief and even a little terror. Gone is so gone. Whatever may be afterwards, you're still gone from this plane of existence. Feeble and aging as Mother was, at least she was a phone call away.
As it turned out, my mother's cremation—and the scattering of her ashes—is painful for me to contemplate, even now. She died in a nursing home after an eight-month descent into dementia via a series of vascular strokes. In the end, her brain forgot how to swallow. Such a simple function, but without it, she was doomed. She couldn't eat or drink or receive oral medication. Since she didn't wish her life to be artificially prolonged, the only decision was to keep her comfortable and let nature take its course. Dehydration. Not in a desert under a hot sun but in a bed in a cool room. Almost all of her children were there the last night, saying goodbye. I kissed her forehead and her eyes flickered open when I spoke to her, but I'm only hoping when I say she knew I was there. I hope she did. She died in the early morning before we could to her. But I knew when I kissed her goodbye the night before that I would never see her again.
Afterwards, it should have been a straightforward process to deliver her to the crematorium. But that's not what happened. The doctor who signed her death certificate at the nursing home made a mistake when noting down her meds and cause of death; this triggered an inquiry, and my mother's body was taken in a bag to the coroner's for medical exam. Everything was settled and the inquiry went away, but the result was that she went from the coroner's to the crematorium as a naked body in a bag, not as someone washed and dressed in a favorite outfit, as I always imagined.
Because of this hiccup and the time it took, I was already back home by the time Mom's body was released. We'd had a private celebration of her life and death at my brother's home, but no formal funeral—she didn't believe in them and thought they were a waste of time. She'd made no provisions, no will, she had nothing but a few personal possessions that we'd already taken care of before the nursing home. My mother never took care of business if she could avoid it.
But this last process was unsettling and irregular. At any rate, my brothers received her ashes. My sisters-in-law and I suggested that she be scattered from a boat into the Pacific Ocean, perhaps off the coast of Monterey or Carmel, which she loved.
Now, I love my brothers deeply; they are the best men I know, and I hope we walk this road for a long long time together. But their feelings toward Mom were a lot less explored and resolved than mine. Their anger was still fresh and simmering, breaking through the crust of civility like lava through the earth. Their reactions to her death were conflicted—and they are, all of them, (fiscally) practical men. So instead of paying for a boat that would take them out onto the ocean and scattering Mother's ashes there...they took her to a quiet local beach, said a prayer, waded in and dumped her just offshore. And guess what? Her ashes were caught and tumbled by the waves and slopped back up onto their legs and the beach where people walked and ran their dogs.
To their due, they were shocked. They expected the ashes to sink. I don't know why they didn't wait for a time when I could be there. I am unhappy that they wouldn't fork over some money to have a proper ceremony out to sea. My mother's decline and death were not what I would've predicted, and they stunned me; but her final disposal grieves me still. Not for the mingling of ash and sand and sea, but for the lack of beauty and ritual that we all deserve when our time comes.
I want to be cremated, too. But I've asked that it be in a lovely meadow or forest somewhere, under sun and shadows and birdsong. As much as I love the ocean, it is too deep and watery, too turbulent and volatile, for me to enjoy ending up there. It is, by its very nature, a place that does not rest.
The perfect place for a woman as restless as my mother.
Wrong Number
When I was 19 and looking for the Great Love of my Life to marry, my mother was still in the early days of her psychic powers. I consulted her like an oracle, often and eagerly. I pestered her for reviews of current crushes to see if they were worthy candidates. I had her look into the future to describe the man I’d finally choose to fall in love with. So she did. She described in great detail the big house I’d live in, the kind laughter of my husband, and the large, jeweled, heirloom ring he’d give me as an engagement present. It all came true—for my best friend Kathy. She married her boyfriend just a few months before I married mine, I was her maid of honor, and the details fit down to the sparkle in her (heirloom) ring.
Mom had seen correctly—but she’d misinterpreted. Both events happened around the same time, Kathy and I were close, and I'd even dated her husband before she fell in love with him. I was a member of the wedding party and I got to walk around in the big house of Mom's vision. So it's not surprising her wires got crossed. It was something she would hone over the years and get better at when dealing with clients. Perhaps less so with me, her daughter, for whom she had hopes and dreams; it was harder for her to "see" for her family with the same detachment and accuracy.
Romance is always a popular topic for prediction. It's probably what most women want to know about, whether they’re looking, suffering, escaping or embarking on. I've said before that, during the early years of my marriage, a dependency on my mother's visions put me in harm’s way. And it did.
My family lived in California at this point. So my husband and I, and our new baby, joined them there after he resigned from military life in the UK. The differences that existed between my husband and I in terms of values, cultures, and upbringing had already created cracks in our marriage. He didn't want to go to counseling and he was uncomfortable talking about it; I, patterning myself after my maternal role model, already had one foot out the door. Frankly, I'd had it there for a long time, only I was terrified to take the next step.
As my marriage crumbled, I sought desperately for my next Rescuer. So I consulted my longtime Oracle, and Mother described him in detail: tall, articulate, passionate, intelligent. With a very fast green car. Someone I had known in other lives. Someone with whom I would experience passion and romance. This eroded my marital commitment even further and gave me a fierce hope.
Though I could not imagine how I would meet such a man. Every day, my husband went to work and I stayed home with an infant—but with no car, very little money, and no social peers. We'd bought a modest house in a blue-collar neighborhood; to me, it may as well have been on the moon. (FYI, I had a strong intuition NOT to buy the house but it came too late and we were committed.) For friends I had the choice of a woman with a tribe of children and a smelly house full of sticky furniture or a shy, quiet Asian mother with a toddler girl, who was new to our culture. They were both lovely women in their own ways; it was me that was the fish out of water. I spent my time pushing my son's stroller to McDonald’s or bumping over parched, drought-stricken fields, soon to be developed. I felt like I was in hell. Where was I going to meet this prince? At the local golden arches? The cut-price supermarket? The dry, thorny meadows? You had to know where the princess lived before you could climb her tower and set her free. And I wasn’t likely to run into anyone.
My mother’s psychic ability seemed a lifeline to me in these unhappy times. She disliked my husband anyway, and was glad to predict a new love in my future. (He, in his turn, recognized the enemy when he saw her, so the feeling was mutual.) When I could escape to my family, she and I spent hours shopping, lunching, and spinning dreams about my life to come. She was totally sympathetic and indignant about my situation and my husband. And, miserable subordinate that I was, I told her everything. Even when I knew I shouldn’t, when shame flooded me, I confided in her—knowing she would never forget or forgive, even if I did. A hard word exchanged, the nasty mood of an hour or two, might pass and be resolved between me and my husband; we did have our happy moments, when we were kind to one another and tried to be committed to our child. But Mom would not move through that transition with us. She would keep a detailed emotional ledger on every complaint I made and she would hold a grudge forever.
I knew this. She had grudges against people who had been in their graves for decades. A comment from her mother-in-law, who thought Mom should get up and serve her husband regardless of Mom's pregnancy, was still brought up with indignant fury as fresh as the day it happened—despite the fact that this woman died when I was a child. Mother had a fierce tenacity toward any slight. So it was symptomatic of my toxic co-dependency on her, my immaturity, my desperate need for approval and for "being on her side" that I so inappropriately shared my unhappiness with her. Even when I knew both my husband and I would suffer for it.
The wisest thing my mother could have done would have been to tell me nothing about the future; to urge us both to counseling; to tell me that marriage is always hard work and that swapping one Rescuing Prince for another is just trading one set of problems for another. But how could she say any of that when she didn't know it herself? How surprising is it that I emulated my only role model, one who spent most of her life going from man to man, looking for just the right Rescuer to get her through life without fear or harm or want?
It's not healthy to be dreaming of a stranger while you're married to someone else. It's cowardly to wait for a rescuer instead of declaring your own freedom or, even better, working on the relationship you hold in your hands. I considered myself a smart person but that didn't mean I couldn't also be a foolish one.
One day the phone rang. When I answered it, there was a mix-up between the man who was calling and myself. He asked for me by my first name, then started trying to help me remember him. And I’ve lived so many lives, in so many places—well, I just suck at remembering names, faces, events, people, details. My head spins sometimes when two threads of the past come into juxtaposition. 'Don’t you remember?' my brother will say about a childhood event. 'We did such and such with so and so. It was important. You were there. You felt this way.' And I won’t remember any of it. So when I couldn't recall this guy on the phone, I didn't immediately conclude that he was a stranger. Eventually, we figured out that it was all a misunderstanding. He'd misdialed. We didn’t know each other at all. It was another girl of the same name. I hadn’t erased him from my overfilled memory banks, I’d just never known him.
And that's when the harm occurred. That's when the potent New Age brew of clairvoyance, reincarnation, karma and destiny led to a conclusion as flawed as Mother's prediction about my wedding. Maybe I’d known this man before, in another life. Maybe this was the universe delivering to my doorstep. Maybe this accident was really Fate stepping in, and I was talking to my Rescuer on the phone!
I'm going to digress for just a moment. Years earlier, when we moved to Virginia Beach, Mom had a client who was in love with a bus driver. During her reading, Mom gently probed the details of this relationship. The woman confided to her that she based it on the local paper's daily horoscope. Every day, she read her horoscope and applied an interpretation of it to her (quite imaginary) love relationship with the bus driver. Every day, he drove by her house. Well, yes...because that was his route! He'd never said anything to her, aside from the normal pleasantries as she entered the bus. The rest was all in her mind, distorted and made to fit, because of her belief in a newspaper horoscope. Mom and I shook our heads in amazement; how could a woman be so delusional?
I can tell you how because I did it myself.
I talked with this stranger on the phone. More than once. For hours. Laughing. Sharing. While my husband was at work. It wasn't long before he wanted to meet me. Wrapped in my dreams of longing, colored by my mother’s predictions, I agreed.
We discussed arrangements. But my stranger-prince wanted me to come to his apartment. We could swim, he said. Bring my suit. I wanted to meet at my mother’s home, around people I knew. Meet my family, I said. He didn’t like that. He demurred, urged, demanded. I started to tremble. I started to feel fear and to hear deception in his voice. He wanted me alone. He wanted sex. He wanted me away in his world, where no one could see. I argued with him and said no. I told him never to call again. I hung up, shaking.
I realized that I had almost allowed my illusions, my need for rescue, my dependence on prophecy, to potentially put me in the gravest harm. It’s ironic that my mother didn’t foresee this danger. But this was a situation I had NOT shared with her, and she was not always good at foreseeing danger in my life. Not even the greatest of them, which came later and which I've blogged about (read Didn't See It Coming).
Fortunately, I had never given the guy my address and this was years before Caller ID. He knew only my first name. He never called again and after a while, I started to feel safe. But I also felt sick because I'd been stupid, and only my common sense reasserting itself had helped me dodge a bullet.
Years later, Mom's prediction about the man in my future was proved right. I did meet a passionate man in a fast green car. Right in the hallway of her own home. Face to face, green eyes looking into my brown—and it was like lightning striking. Metaphorically, I jumped into his arms and demanded succor. My Prince at last! My rescuer!
In a way he was, but not as I imagined. This is life, not the Hallmark channel.
I divorced and married my new guy. In retrospect, I value the spiritual gifts he gave me, the journey we made together, for it was part of the learning and healing that led me to self-worth and independence. But I would pay the highest price for this "rescue." My first husband became an implacable enemy. As a result, I would lose most of my son’s childhood, the sweetest part of my motherhood. I would experience the greatest loss I have known in this life.
I would also learn that the only person who was going to rescue me was myself, and that was as hard and stoney a road as any storybook quest.
Mom had seen correctly—but she’d misinterpreted. Both events happened around the same time, Kathy and I were close, and I'd even dated her husband before she fell in love with him. I was a member of the wedding party and I got to walk around in the big house of Mom's vision. So it's not surprising her wires got crossed. It was something she would hone over the years and get better at when dealing with clients. Perhaps less so with me, her daughter, for whom she had hopes and dreams; it was harder for her to "see" for her family with the same detachment and accuracy.
Romance is always a popular topic for prediction. It's probably what most women want to know about, whether they’re looking, suffering, escaping or embarking on. I've said before that, during the early years of my marriage, a dependency on my mother's visions put me in harm’s way. And it did.
My family lived in California at this point. So my husband and I, and our new baby, joined them there after he resigned from military life in the UK. The differences that existed between my husband and I in terms of values, cultures, and upbringing had already created cracks in our marriage. He didn't want to go to counseling and he was uncomfortable talking about it; I, patterning myself after my maternal role model, already had one foot out the door. Frankly, I'd had it there for a long time, only I was terrified to take the next step.
As my marriage crumbled, I sought desperately for my next Rescuer. So I consulted my longtime Oracle, and Mother described him in detail: tall, articulate, passionate, intelligent. With a very fast green car. Someone I had known in other lives. Someone with whom I would experience passion and romance. This eroded my marital commitment even further and gave me a fierce hope.
Though I could not imagine how I would meet such a man. Every day, my husband went to work and I stayed home with an infant—but with no car, very little money, and no social peers. We'd bought a modest house in a blue-collar neighborhood; to me, it may as well have been on the moon. (FYI, I had a strong intuition NOT to buy the house but it came too late and we were committed.) For friends I had the choice of a woman with a tribe of children and a smelly house full of sticky furniture or a shy, quiet Asian mother with a toddler girl, who was new to our culture. They were both lovely women in their own ways; it was me that was the fish out of water. I spent my time pushing my son's stroller to McDonald’s or bumping over parched, drought-stricken fields, soon to be developed. I felt like I was in hell. Where was I going to meet this prince? At the local golden arches? The cut-price supermarket? The dry, thorny meadows? You had to know where the princess lived before you could climb her tower and set her free. And I wasn’t likely to run into anyone.
My mother’s psychic ability seemed a lifeline to me in these unhappy times. She disliked my husband anyway, and was glad to predict a new love in my future. (He, in his turn, recognized the enemy when he saw her, so the feeling was mutual.) When I could escape to my family, she and I spent hours shopping, lunching, and spinning dreams about my life to come. She was totally sympathetic and indignant about my situation and my husband. And, miserable subordinate that I was, I told her everything. Even when I knew I shouldn’t, when shame flooded me, I confided in her—knowing she would never forget or forgive, even if I did. A hard word exchanged, the nasty mood of an hour or two, might pass and be resolved between me and my husband; we did have our happy moments, when we were kind to one another and tried to be committed to our child. But Mom would not move through that transition with us. She would keep a detailed emotional ledger on every complaint I made and she would hold a grudge forever.
I knew this. She had grudges against people who had been in their graves for decades. A comment from her mother-in-law, who thought Mom should get up and serve her husband regardless of Mom's pregnancy, was still brought up with indignant fury as fresh as the day it happened—despite the fact that this woman died when I was a child. Mother had a fierce tenacity toward any slight. So it was symptomatic of my toxic co-dependency on her, my immaturity, my desperate need for approval and for "being on her side" that I so inappropriately shared my unhappiness with her. Even when I knew both my husband and I would suffer for it.
The wisest thing my mother could have done would have been to tell me nothing about the future; to urge us both to counseling; to tell me that marriage is always hard work and that swapping one Rescuing Prince for another is just trading one set of problems for another. But how could she say any of that when she didn't know it herself? How surprising is it that I emulated my only role model, one who spent most of her life going from man to man, looking for just the right Rescuer to get her through life without fear or harm or want?
It's not healthy to be dreaming of a stranger while you're married to someone else. It's cowardly to wait for a rescuer instead of declaring your own freedom or, even better, working on the relationship you hold in your hands. I considered myself a smart person but that didn't mean I couldn't also be a foolish one.
One day the phone rang. When I answered it, there was a mix-up between the man who was calling and myself. He asked for me by my first name, then started trying to help me remember him. And I’ve lived so many lives, in so many places—well, I just suck at remembering names, faces, events, people, details. My head spins sometimes when two threads of the past come into juxtaposition. 'Don’t you remember?' my brother will say about a childhood event. 'We did such and such with so and so. It was important. You were there. You felt this way.' And I won’t remember any of it. So when I couldn't recall this guy on the phone, I didn't immediately conclude that he was a stranger. Eventually, we figured out that it was all a misunderstanding. He'd misdialed. We didn’t know each other at all. It was another girl of the same name. I hadn’t erased him from my overfilled memory banks, I’d just never known him.
And that's when the harm occurred. That's when the potent New Age brew of clairvoyance, reincarnation, karma and destiny led to a conclusion as flawed as Mother's prediction about my wedding. Maybe I’d known this man before, in another life. Maybe this was the universe delivering to my doorstep. Maybe this accident was really Fate stepping in, and I was talking to my Rescuer on the phone!
I'm going to digress for just a moment. Years earlier, when we moved to Virginia Beach, Mom had a client who was in love with a bus driver. During her reading, Mom gently probed the details of this relationship. The woman confided to her that she based it on the local paper's daily horoscope. Every day, she read her horoscope and applied an interpretation of it to her (quite imaginary) love relationship with the bus driver. Every day, he drove by her house. Well, yes...because that was his route! He'd never said anything to her, aside from the normal pleasantries as she entered the bus. The rest was all in her mind, distorted and made to fit, because of her belief in a newspaper horoscope. Mom and I shook our heads in amazement; how could a woman be so delusional?
I can tell you how because I did it myself.
I talked with this stranger on the phone. More than once. For hours. Laughing. Sharing. While my husband was at work. It wasn't long before he wanted to meet me. Wrapped in my dreams of longing, colored by my mother’s predictions, I agreed.
We discussed arrangements. But my stranger-prince wanted me to come to his apartment. We could swim, he said. Bring my suit. I wanted to meet at my mother’s home, around people I knew. Meet my family, I said. He didn’t like that. He demurred, urged, demanded. I started to tremble. I started to feel fear and to hear deception in his voice. He wanted me alone. He wanted sex. He wanted me away in his world, where no one could see. I argued with him and said no. I told him never to call again. I hung up, shaking.
I realized that I had almost allowed my illusions, my need for rescue, my dependence on prophecy, to potentially put me in the gravest harm. It’s ironic that my mother didn’t foresee this danger. But this was a situation I had NOT shared with her, and she was not always good at foreseeing danger in my life. Not even the greatest of them, which came later and which I've blogged about (read Didn't See It Coming).
Fortunately, I had never given the guy my address and this was years before Caller ID. He knew only my first name. He never called again and after a while, I started to feel safe. But I also felt sick because I'd been stupid, and only my common sense reasserting itself had helped me dodge a bullet.
Years later, Mom's prediction about the man in my future was proved right. I did meet a passionate man in a fast green car. Right in the hallway of her own home. Face to face, green eyes looking into my brown—and it was like lightning striking. Metaphorically, I jumped into his arms and demanded succor. My Prince at last! My rescuer!
In a way he was, but not as I imagined. This is life, not the Hallmark channel.
I divorced and married my new guy. In retrospect, I value the spiritual gifts he gave me, the journey we made together, for it was part of the learning and healing that led me to self-worth and independence. But I would pay the highest price for this "rescue." My first husband became an implacable enemy. As a result, I would lose most of my son’s childhood, the sweetest part of my motherhood. I would experience the greatest loss I have known in this life.
I would also learn that the only person who was going to rescue me was myself, and that was as hard and stoney a road as any storybook quest.
Friday, January 31, 2014
Hunger
I have emotional issues around eating. Almost every diet I went on was at my mother’s urging, from the first one at age 17, when she had me lose 20 pounds so I could be a model. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if that first diet wasn't the beginning of a road to hell. Because I gradually gained that weight back when I decided modeling for my mother's minuscule agency was a dead end and another way for her to control me. And I added a little bit more weight on, as well. So I eventually dieted again. And the same happened. Over and over, a classic yo-yo-dieting routine. Gain it, lose it, regain it and then some.
What if I'd never started? My eating habits then were so much better than the ones I've subsequently formed through the confusing welter of diet programs. But then, America wasn't the land of the obese back then, either.
Anyway. Not dieting became a form of rebellion against my mother. Stupid and self-damaging, maybe, but true. I want to eat whatever I want to eat! Screw you!
It took therapy for me to understand that Eating (with a capital E) wasn't just about rebellion and diets. It was about equating Food with Love and compensating for Loss; and it came from my earliest years…
Being a Navy family, we traveled a lot, of course. Every two or three years, we’d all pick up sticks and move to my dad’s—or stepdad’s—new posting. My three brothers and I would be parceled into the car along with the family dog and spend hours in relative inactivity, waiting to be let out for food or the restroom.
Moving so often meant that I got good at leaving things behind, whether it was school, home, friends, pets, cherished possessions, outgrown clothes, whatever. Sometimes Mother, who wasn’t sentimental about childhood possessions and had none from her own, would give away books or toys that I really cared about—without asking. She believed in traveling light. I don’t have my high school yearbook or my Beatles paraphernalia or the boxes of things I wrote as a teenager because somewhere, sometime, those mementos were perceived as superfluous by my mother and tossed out just before a move.
I mention in another blog how—years later—my mom's moving van caught fire. (Bad brakes.) That's when the slides of my childhood went up in flames. Pictures of me in my Easter dress, the trip to the Chicago zoo when I was two, the matching bathing suits mom and I wore at the beach, the ranch my grandfather ran as foreman…all gone. Fragile paper and celluloid. I have a half dozen photos of me at various ages in my baby book, which was with me at the time. That’s all.
So back to Eating. It turns out that people often have trouble losing weight when they have lost a lot of other things in their lives. This revelation smacked me between the eyes. I’ve lost more than most people own; some through process, like constantly moving and sloughing off relationships; some through my own choice, such as my two divorces or living in another state from my family, or keeping potential friendships at bay; and some through death.
My inner child is still compensating for those losses by eating whatever feels good at the moment. Not only that, she's asserting her control over her own life.
Then there's the Food=Love equation, something that—ironically—originated with my mother. Food was the social interaction I enjoyed most Mom. She was ahead of her time, raising a family and running a business when most women were waving their husbands off to work in an apron and pearls. She didn’t have to work, she just had too much energy and drive to sit at home, and domesticity was never her thing. Decorators, painters, seamstresses, housekeepers and nannies—these were the troops she was made to lead. Once a home was painted, furnished, unpacked and planted, she was not interested in being constrained inside its shell. The military life gave her outlets as an officer’s wife, and she often ran events for the O Club. Or she might get a job as a local radio celebrity, gossiping about social events. Or run a newsletter. Or start a charm school. She was the object of my childhood admiration: independent, glamorous, in the public eye. But she was also elusive and absent. Whether Dad was home or at sea, she had her own schedule. As children, we never knew when she would be home. The hours between the end of school and her appearance seemed interminable. We pestered the current housekeeper with questions about her schedule and return. Sometimes the housekeeper would cook our dinner, frying pork chops and onions in a black iron skillet, served at the kitchen table with biscuits and applesauce. Other times Mom would be home in time for dinner. The housekeeper would leave and we’d have to wait for Mother to have her cocktail before cooking would begin.
Having lunch out with my mother meant that I received a concentrated amount of her time, focused on me and her and whatever delicious dishes were being enjoyed. Sometimes she picked me up at school for a lunch out—then let me play hooky for the rest of the day! I really didn’t enjoy school that much once I was past third grade, so this was a tremendous treat. Having lunch out, school or no, was one of the ways Mom and I enjoyed life. Salads piled high with crabmeat, eaten looking out on the ocean (Atlantic or Pacific). Sautéed abalone. She crab soup. Sourdough bread with butter. Chopped chicken liver. Hot pastrami on pumpernickel. Chinese chicken salad. Shrimp tempura. Ice cream. Cheesecake. Iced tea and, when I was older, wine. Alone or with my mother's friends, these lunches were explorations, social occasions, hedonistic pleasures. (My brothers were rarely included in these girl outings.)
But if lunch was Pleasure, dinner was Deprivation, and it explains some of my frantic need to avoid hunger. As toddlers, we were fed early and gotten out of the way so our parents could have their nightly pre-dinner cocktails and then eat "adult food" later in the evening. As children/adolescents, this pattern continued—only without the early feeding. Mom made us wait until she'd had her cocktail(s) and got around to cooking.
Parties were the worst, and ours was a party house. Years of peering through railings or around door jambs, watching people laugh and drink and waiting for our food. The fug of alcohol and cigarettes. At some point my mother would throw open doors and windows to let out the smoke—no matter the time of year—and to those smells would be added currents of cold air. From outside would come the odor of heating charcoal and later the smell of sizzling steaks. Or, if it was Mexican food, the pervasive indoor smell of hot fat and tortillas and chiles.
Mother would laugh and say that the reason people thought she was such a good cook was because by the time they ate, they were so hungry anything would taste good! She also liked to say we ate “continental”—that is, like Europeans, late and leisurely. We retorted that we ate at the same time as the Continent, which was six hours ahead of us. Either way, it was sometimes nine or nine-thirty before we ate during those social gatherings. In the morning, booze bottles and beer cans would litter the house. Garlicky french bread would be hardening inside a napkin-lined basket. Salad would lie limp and wet in the fridge. And sometimes there would be slabs of rare grilled steak wrapped in foil.
On occasion, someone would be snoring on the living room couch or under a table.
It’s no wonder I find both solace and independence in setting my own eating schedule, eating at the first sign of hunger, refusing to relive those times.
Despite my mother being an excellent cook (all joking aside), food was not a driver for her. She didn’t equate it with love. Often, when she was cooking for a party, she ended up not eating. “I’ve been smelling it all afternoon, I can’t stand to eat it,” she'd say. No surprise that, after a few Scotches or martinis, she was flirting and twirling her way through a room full of bachelor aviators or amorous commanders with tight-lipped wives. Mother didn’t think much of officers’ wives—“all they talk about is kids and recipes and their boring little lives”—and it’s no wonder they returned the opinion after watching their menfolk drool over the hot redhead with the deep cleavage. During one party, I saw my mother dance on top of the cocktail table.
My father must have drunk his share, too, he was a typical navy guy. But I never saw him drunk. He was quiet and deliberate, so maybe it just didn’t show up on him. Or maybe he was content to stay in the shadows and watch mom scintillate.
My brothers were stunned when I brought up my whole Food theory. It brought back an unexpected flood of their own memories, their own deprivations. We should have been nurtured. We should have been fed. As children, we should have been considered first. It was another sign of mom’s careless love.
My belief is that she didn’t really know how to love. I think that she was driven by her own deprivations, her own lack of being nurtured, and it caused her to try and fill up those holes by always putting herself first and central in any situation. She needed love and attention so desperately.
I wish I knew more about my mother’s real childhood and the dynamics in her family. She was a middle child and the only girl. My grandparents always seemed like nice people to me, but she fought bitterly with my grandmother. Clearly, something was amiss. I’ll never know, because mom continually rewrote her personal history and hung on to small slights with frightening tenacity. She was terrified of looking truly, clearly, at her life and her choices. She preferred the constructed mythology. It still mystifies me that she spent her life clarifying other people’s problems for them.
Mom did make beautiful homes for us. She put quality clothes on our backs. If she was around, she'd listen to our teenage problems (even sex) with a liberality that was rare in those times. If we needed money, she'd rob a bank to get it for us. And if we had to wait for our food, at least it was delicious. But she wanted too much, too desperately, to give without a lot of strings attached. So she remembered all those "gifts" and flogged us with them whenever we disagreed with her. She never considered them her maternal duty, something a mother does without thought of repayment.
It was truly a gift when she taught me to cook. My first dinner was roast chicken, and once I knew how to make that, food was on the table by seven o'clock. I learned how to cook lots of things through watching her and my own art. All my brothers can cook well.
Dinner continued to be unimportant to my mother for the rest of her life. She was a lunch gal, happy to fill up in the middle of the day then snack on ice cream and Scotch for dinner. Unless we went out for dinner, which happened more frequently when I worked and couldn't get away for lunch. Mom loved eating out. But if I came home from work and cooked dinner, she was as likely to turn it down or pick at it as eat it. It frustrated the hell out of me, and I wonder if it's because Food was Nurturing to me, and Mom wasn't letting me nurture her with it. I bet it dredged up old issues without my being aware of it and that's why I had such a strong emotional reaction. And it's like she knew it and would use it as a tool to irritate me, too—maybe a pattern she carried over from her own stormy childhood. So unhealthy! So complicated!
When I contemplate a diet, I break out in cold sweat. The fear. The deprivation. The hunger. Why go down that road when, ultimately, it will fail?
Food and pleasure entwine themselves from the first time we suck at the breast or bottle. Watching a baby feed, eyes closed in bliss, cries of hunger and need banished, little hand clasping and unclasping in instinctive sympathy...that's fulfillment. Strong stuff.
I wish I could say that these revelations have changed my relationship with food. That I understand and don't care about it anymore. But it hasn't. I continue to use food to compensate for loneliness, celibacy, sorrow, fear, as well as friendship, celebration, love. I still feel a burn of rebellion when I shove a cranberry-orange muffin in my face. Only...rebellion against who? Myself? Life? The ghost of my mother?
I understand this is my problem. I'm an adult, and whatever part my mother played in it is past. I'm not writing this to excuse myself and blame her. I'm just reflecting on my own roots.
What if I'd never started? My eating habits then were so much better than the ones I've subsequently formed through the confusing welter of diet programs. But then, America wasn't the land of the obese back then, either.
Anyway. Not dieting became a form of rebellion against my mother. Stupid and self-damaging, maybe, but true. I want to eat whatever I want to eat! Screw you!
It took therapy for me to understand that Eating (with a capital E) wasn't just about rebellion and diets. It was about equating Food with Love and compensating for Loss; and it came from my earliest years…
Being a Navy family, we traveled a lot, of course. Every two or three years, we’d all pick up sticks and move to my dad’s—or stepdad’s—new posting. My three brothers and I would be parceled into the car along with the family dog and spend hours in relative inactivity, waiting to be let out for food or the restroom.
Moving so often meant that I got good at leaving things behind, whether it was school, home, friends, pets, cherished possessions, outgrown clothes, whatever. Sometimes Mother, who wasn’t sentimental about childhood possessions and had none from her own, would give away books or toys that I really cared about—without asking. She believed in traveling light. I don’t have my high school yearbook or my Beatles paraphernalia or the boxes of things I wrote as a teenager because somewhere, sometime, those mementos were perceived as superfluous by my mother and tossed out just before a move.
I mention in another blog how—years later—my mom's moving van caught fire. (Bad brakes.) That's when the slides of my childhood went up in flames. Pictures of me in my Easter dress, the trip to the Chicago zoo when I was two, the matching bathing suits mom and I wore at the beach, the ranch my grandfather ran as foreman…all gone. Fragile paper and celluloid. I have a half dozen photos of me at various ages in my baby book, which was with me at the time. That’s all.
So back to Eating. It turns out that people often have trouble losing weight when they have lost a lot of other things in their lives. This revelation smacked me between the eyes. I’ve lost more than most people own; some through process, like constantly moving and sloughing off relationships; some through my own choice, such as my two divorces or living in another state from my family, or keeping potential friendships at bay; and some through death.
My inner child is still compensating for those losses by eating whatever feels good at the moment. Not only that, she's asserting her control over her own life.
Then there's the Food=Love equation, something that—ironically—originated with my mother. Food was the social interaction I enjoyed most Mom. She was ahead of her time, raising a family and running a business when most women were waving their husbands off to work in an apron and pearls. She didn’t have to work, she just had too much energy and drive to sit at home, and domesticity was never her thing. Decorators, painters, seamstresses, housekeepers and nannies—these were the troops she was made to lead. Once a home was painted, furnished, unpacked and planted, she was not interested in being constrained inside its shell. The military life gave her outlets as an officer’s wife, and she often ran events for the O Club. Or she might get a job as a local radio celebrity, gossiping about social events. Or run a newsletter. Or start a charm school. She was the object of my childhood admiration: independent, glamorous, in the public eye. But she was also elusive and absent. Whether Dad was home or at sea, she had her own schedule. As children, we never knew when she would be home. The hours between the end of school and her appearance seemed interminable. We pestered the current housekeeper with questions about her schedule and return. Sometimes the housekeeper would cook our dinner, frying pork chops and onions in a black iron skillet, served at the kitchen table with biscuits and applesauce. Other times Mom would be home in time for dinner. The housekeeper would leave and we’d have to wait for Mother to have her cocktail before cooking would begin.
Having lunch out with my mother meant that I received a concentrated amount of her time, focused on me and her and whatever delicious dishes were being enjoyed. Sometimes she picked me up at school for a lunch out—then let me play hooky for the rest of the day! I really didn’t enjoy school that much once I was past third grade, so this was a tremendous treat. Having lunch out, school or no, was one of the ways Mom and I enjoyed life. Salads piled high with crabmeat, eaten looking out on the ocean (Atlantic or Pacific). Sautéed abalone. She crab soup. Sourdough bread with butter. Chopped chicken liver. Hot pastrami on pumpernickel. Chinese chicken salad. Shrimp tempura. Ice cream. Cheesecake. Iced tea and, when I was older, wine. Alone or with my mother's friends, these lunches were explorations, social occasions, hedonistic pleasures. (My brothers were rarely included in these girl outings.)
But if lunch was Pleasure, dinner was Deprivation, and it explains some of my frantic need to avoid hunger. As toddlers, we were fed early and gotten out of the way so our parents could have their nightly pre-dinner cocktails and then eat "adult food" later in the evening. As children/adolescents, this pattern continued—only without the early feeding. Mom made us wait until she'd had her cocktail(s) and got around to cooking.
Parties were the worst, and ours was a party house. Years of peering through railings or around door jambs, watching people laugh and drink and waiting for our food. The fug of alcohol and cigarettes. At some point my mother would throw open doors and windows to let out the smoke—no matter the time of year—and to those smells would be added currents of cold air. From outside would come the odor of heating charcoal and later the smell of sizzling steaks. Or, if it was Mexican food, the pervasive indoor smell of hot fat and tortillas and chiles.
Mother would laugh and say that the reason people thought she was such a good cook was because by the time they ate, they were so hungry anything would taste good! She also liked to say we ate “continental”—that is, like Europeans, late and leisurely. We retorted that we ate at the same time as the Continent, which was six hours ahead of us. Either way, it was sometimes nine or nine-thirty before we ate during those social gatherings. In the morning, booze bottles and beer cans would litter the house. Garlicky french bread would be hardening inside a napkin-lined basket. Salad would lie limp and wet in the fridge. And sometimes there would be slabs of rare grilled steak wrapped in foil.
On occasion, someone would be snoring on the living room couch or under a table.
It’s no wonder I find both solace and independence in setting my own eating schedule, eating at the first sign of hunger, refusing to relive those times.
Despite my mother being an excellent cook (all joking aside), food was not a driver for her. She didn’t equate it with love. Often, when she was cooking for a party, she ended up not eating. “I’ve been smelling it all afternoon, I can’t stand to eat it,” she'd say. No surprise that, after a few Scotches or martinis, she was flirting and twirling her way through a room full of bachelor aviators or amorous commanders with tight-lipped wives. Mother didn’t think much of officers’ wives—“all they talk about is kids and recipes and their boring little lives”—and it’s no wonder they returned the opinion after watching their menfolk drool over the hot redhead with the deep cleavage. During one party, I saw my mother dance on top of the cocktail table.
My father must have drunk his share, too, he was a typical navy guy. But I never saw him drunk. He was quiet and deliberate, so maybe it just didn’t show up on him. Or maybe he was content to stay in the shadows and watch mom scintillate.
My brothers were stunned when I brought up my whole Food theory. It brought back an unexpected flood of their own memories, their own deprivations. We should have been nurtured. We should have been fed. As children, we should have been considered first. It was another sign of mom’s careless love.
My belief is that she didn’t really know how to love. I think that she was driven by her own deprivations, her own lack of being nurtured, and it caused her to try and fill up those holes by always putting herself first and central in any situation. She needed love and attention so desperately.
I wish I knew more about my mother’s real childhood and the dynamics in her family. She was a middle child and the only girl. My grandparents always seemed like nice people to me, but she fought bitterly with my grandmother. Clearly, something was amiss. I’ll never know, because mom continually rewrote her personal history and hung on to small slights with frightening tenacity. She was terrified of looking truly, clearly, at her life and her choices. She preferred the constructed mythology. It still mystifies me that she spent her life clarifying other people’s problems for them.
Mom did make beautiful homes for us. She put quality clothes on our backs. If she was around, she'd listen to our teenage problems (even sex) with a liberality that was rare in those times. If we needed money, she'd rob a bank to get it for us. And if we had to wait for our food, at least it was delicious. But she wanted too much, too desperately, to give without a lot of strings attached. So she remembered all those "gifts" and flogged us with them whenever we disagreed with her. She never considered them her maternal duty, something a mother does without thought of repayment.
It was truly a gift when she taught me to cook. My first dinner was roast chicken, and once I knew how to make that, food was on the table by seven o'clock. I learned how to cook lots of things through watching her and my own art. All my brothers can cook well.
Dinner continued to be unimportant to my mother for the rest of her life. She was a lunch gal, happy to fill up in the middle of the day then snack on ice cream and Scotch for dinner. Unless we went out for dinner, which happened more frequently when I worked and couldn't get away for lunch. Mom loved eating out. But if I came home from work and cooked dinner, she was as likely to turn it down or pick at it as eat it. It frustrated the hell out of me, and I wonder if it's because Food was Nurturing to me, and Mom wasn't letting me nurture her with it. I bet it dredged up old issues without my being aware of it and that's why I had such a strong emotional reaction. And it's like she knew it and would use it as a tool to irritate me, too—maybe a pattern she carried over from her own stormy childhood. So unhealthy! So complicated!
When I contemplate a diet, I break out in cold sweat. The fear. The deprivation. The hunger. Why go down that road when, ultimately, it will fail?
Food and pleasure entwine themselves from the first time we suck at the breast or bottle. Watching a baby feed, eyes closed in bliss, cries of hunger and need banished, little hand clasping and unclasping in instinctive sympathy...that's fulfillment. Strong stuff.
I wish I could say that these revelations have changed my relationship with food. That I understand and don't care about it anymore. But it hasn't. I continue to use food to compensate for loneliness, celibacy, sorrow, fear, as well as friendship, celebration, love. I still feel a burn of rebellion when I shove a cranberry-orange muffin in my face. Only...rebellion against who? Myself? Life? The ghost of my mother?
I understand this is my problem. I'm an adult, and whatever part my mother played in it is past. I'm not writing this to excuse myself and blame her. I'm just reflecting on my own roots.
Volume Control
I saw my mother on the television last night. It happens more often than you’d think, even though she’s been gone for more than a year. I’ll be cooking in the kitchen or chatting on the phone when, all of a sudden, I will hear her familiar voice coming from the other room.
That’s what television does to its celebrities, minor or major. It recycles them. Brings them back, fresh, to a new audience.
I watched the show. It was a well-told story and favorable to her abilities. I cried at the end, from pride in her accomplishments.
Not all such shows were supportive or even kind. I remember one that entrapped her into appearing only to twist everything she said and discredit her, putting her in the same class as charlatans and believers in urban myths. They interviewed people antagonistic to her efforts. I was appalled. She, of course, was humiliated. But without a manager or agent to protect her interests, these things occasionally happened.
Fortunately, the public has a short memory. In a couple of days, it was forgotten. Just another whack show. Just another psychic. Except, of course, for the reruns. Syndicated immortality.
I can’t help wondering if there is another kind of immortality as well, one that my mother is now enjoying? She believed in it—how could she not, when she worked on the threshold between life and death, when she routinely obtained information and greetings and love from people (and animals) who had left this earth? And because I lived in proximity to her and experienced her work, I tried to believe as well. That there is more, that we continue, that we can even communicate with those we love on either side.
But death has been a hard door. With my father, I experienced his presence deeply and often after death. In dreams. Washing dishes. In the car. Then his presence faded after a time. As if he’d gone on to do other things—or I had.
Mother and I were closer, more attuned, and shared a similar belief system. Unlike Dad, who died in a kind of shock that fervent religion did not save him from cancer. I said the same thing to both of them before they died.
"I don’t know what comes next. But you’re going to find out before I do. And I’m betting it’s not what we think—just like everything else about existence. I’m betting it’s more complex, more amazing, more cohesive than we can imagine. And if it’s not—well then, we’ll never know because we’ll be snuffed out like candles."
Still, I hoped that my mother’s abilities to communicate across different spheres or dimensions or whatever would make it easier for her to get word back to me. But nothing dramatic or spooky happened, like her appearing to me during the night or calling my name. I sometimes wonder if it's because I resisted hearing from her after she died; it sounds mean, but I carried the burden of my mom's communications for my entire life. Her decline and demise were painful to watch and not what I wished or expected, ever. But her absence in my life was also a relief. Not just relief for the end of her suffering; the relief of someone who's head has been hammered on a daily basis and now was free of it. Who wasn't going to be pulled into drama and bickering and complaints anymore.
That isn't to say I haven't missed her. After she died, the grief sometimes staggered me. I re-watched George Clooney in The Descendants and, in one tiny scene after he's announced his wife's impending demise, he falls to his knees on the lawn with bowed head and stays that way for a few moments. This time, when I saw him do that, I understood! I've had grief for my mom catch me and shove me to ground in just that way.
But actual contact with her has been nebulous, more like thinking of her unexpectedly than feeling her around me. So I still don’t know if that's her contacting me—or me contacting my own inner needs and desires. I’ve carried my mom's voice around inside me all my life. I’ve spent years trying to mute it. Maybe death just turns the volume up again.
That’s what television does to its celebrities, minor or major. It recycles them. Brings them back, fresh, to a new audience.
I watched the show. It was a well-told story and favorable to her abilities. I cried at the end, from pride in her accomplishments.
Not all such shows were supportive or even kind. I remember one that entrapped her into appearing only to twist everything she said and discredit her, putting her in the same class as charlatans and believers in urban myths. They interviewed people antagonistic to her efforts. I was appalled. She, of course, was humiliated. But without a manager or agent to protect her interests, these things occasionally happened.
Fortunately, the public has a short memory. In a couple of days, it was forgotten. Just another whack show. Just another psychic. Except, of course, for the reruns. Syndicated immortality.
I can’t help wondering if there is another kind of immortality as well, one that my mother is now enjoying? She believed in it—how could she not, when she worked on the threshold between life and death, when she routinely obtained information and greetings and love from people (and animals) who had left this earth? And because I lived in proximity to her and experienced her work, I tried to believe as well. That there is more, that we continue, that we can even communicate with those we love on either side.
But death has been a hard door. With my father, I experienced his presence deeply and often after death. In dreams. Washing dishes. In the car. Then his presence faded after a time. As if he’d gone on to do other things—or I had.
Mother and I were closer, more attuned, and shared a similar belief system. Unlike Dad, who died in a kind of shock that fervent religion did not save him from cancer. I said the same thing to both of them before they died.
"I don’t know what comes next. But you’re going to find out before I do. And I’m betting it’s not what we think—just like everything else about existence. I’m betting it’s more complex, more amazing, more cohesive than we can imagine. And if it’s not—well then, we’ll never know because we’ll be snuffed out like candles."
Still, I hoped that my mother’s abilities to communicate across different spheres or dimensions or whatever would make it easier for her to get word back to me. But nothing dramatic or spooky happened, like her appearing to me during the night or calling my name. I sometimes wonder if it's because I resisted hearing from her after she died; it sounds mean, but I carried the burden of my mom's communications for my entire life. Her decline and demise were painful to watch and not what I wished or expected, ever. But her absence in my life was also a relief. Not just relief for the end of her suffering; the relief of someone who's head has been hammered on a daily basis and now was free of it. Who wasn't going to be pulled into drama and bickering and complaints anymore.
That isn't to say I haven't missed her. After she died, the grief sometimes staggered me. I re-watched George Clooney in The Descendants and, in one tiny scene after he's announced his wife's impending demise, he falls to his knees on the lawn with bowed head and stays that way for a few moments. This time, when I saw him do that, I understood! I've had grief for my mom catch me and shove me to ground in just that way.
But actual contact with her has been nebulous, more like thinking of her unexpectedly than feeling her around me. So I still don’t know if that's her contacting me—or me contacting my own inner needs and desires. I’ve carried my mom's voice around inside me all my life. I’ve spent years trying to mute it. Maybe death just turns the volume up again.
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