Mother Daughter Me (18 page)

———

I
N A FIT OF OPTIMISM AT THE BEGINNING OF ZOË’S JUNIOR YEAR IN
high school, just when my mother was coming to live with us, I had written her name on a form as the grandparent of record. Apparently my mother’s outlook had been equally sunny. At around the same time she must have checked a box on a reply card indicating she would attend Grandparents Day, because in late November Zoë found a notice in her school mailbox, along with some materials to give to the grandmother who had RSVP’d to the invitation. Now my disenchanted daughter tells me she’s determined to avoid an encounter between her classmates and the infamous woman who shrieked at them and confiscated their alcohol on that disastrous Halloween night.

“She’s not coming,” Zoë says as the day approaches. “I fear for her safety.”

When Grandparents Day arrives, hoping my mother has forgotten about it, I set off for a trip to Costco with her instead. She tells me she’d like to drive us there. But first she wants to practice her parallel parking.
I’m not feeling very patient but agree to help her with it, because—and, while she has explained this point to me umpteen times, I am just now beginning to absorb it—she won’t feel truly free to explore the city with her car until she knows she can also park it anywhere.

While we circle the neighborhood in search of a suitable practice spot, she talks nonstop. The first thing she wants to bring up is Lia.

“Lia is ageist,” she says.

“Ageist? What do you mean?”

“She treats me differently than she treats you,” she says. “If I take out my checkbook, she says, ‘Oh, you’re sooo organized!’ in a condescending way, like she’s praising a child. But if you take out your checkbook, she doesn’t say a thing.”

“Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed that,” I say. “I’ll watch for it next time.”

She’s moved on to the matter at hand—the parallel-parking lesson. The topic has obviously been on her mind. She has a two-page, nineteen-point primer that she found online and printed out. I can tell she has read it carefully—probably more than once—because she keeps referring to its teachings.

As we continue to circle, my mother analyzes her relationship to the challenge of parallel parking, comparing herself to me.

“You’re adventurous, and that’s why you’re so good at it,” she says. It’s true that after years of city driving, I’m now very good at getting myself in and out of spots so small they look like a crane would be needed for the job. But adventurous? Mountain climbing is adventurous. Helicopter skiing is adventurous. Parallel parking, which requires little more than practice, is not. Then I remind myself that this
is
my mother’s version of mountain climbing. The whole move to San Francisco has been her personal Mount Everest, and she will not have reached the summit until she learns to maneuver her car into a parking space.

She sees a spot and decides to go for it. As parking spots go, this one seems pretty roomy—a relative cinch. She pulls her car up alongside the car in front of the spot. So far, so good. She recites a few lines of parallel-parking lingo from the instruction sheet, but then, just as she’s backing up, she stops, paralyzed with fear.

“Let’s do it another time,” she says.

“Wow, you weren’t kidding when you said you can’t parallel park.”

My mother takes this in good spirits, offering a kind of compliment to Zoë in response. “Unlike me, Zoë has a parallel-parking personality.”

“What?”

“She has a lot of physical competence and confidence.”

My mother’s words sweeten my day. Ever so cautiously, she is expressing her admiration of Zoë and me for what she sees as our skill and adventurousness. And I’m admiring my mother in return: for the steps she is taking to change her life, to move forward at such an advanced age.

MY MOTHER AND I
return to Lia in early December—without Zoë—and this time it’s my birthday that’s around the corner. I’ve told my mother and Zoë that there’s only one thing I want for my birthday: a gift that comes from the two of them. I don’t care if it’s a tube of toothpaste, as long as the two of them have called a cranky truce, gotten together, and found a gift that is from them to me. I relayed this request to each of them separately; neither looked thrilled. This could be another futile attempt to force them into détente, but I know that a team effort would please me no end.

At Lia’s, we rehash the session with Zoë, and all agree it was a disaster.

“I have the feeling that a great many of Katie’s friends know what a terrible childhood she had and what a bad mother I was,” my mother says. “It feels like everyone who comes into the house says, ‘There she is. There’s that bad mother.’ I should wear a sign that says ‘leper.’ ”

She goes on. “I don’t like that young woman I was. That was one unhappy cookie, not being able to face the day and get out of bed. But why the short honeymoon period with Zoë? Why the warm welcome if she’s always known about our tragedy?”

Lia jumps on this. “You take a lot of what that kid is doing as something really personal,” she tells my mother. “You cannot see that she’s just basically a kid. You can but you don’t, because you are so raw. In order to stop being so reactive to her, you need to give yourself the room to be with yourself, to soothe the pain for yourself, even to mother yourself. The reason you couldn’t be a good mother to your daughters was because
you had been deprived by your own mother. Maybe it’s time to be more understanding of what you need. You need to ask, ‘What is it that I want? Where am I going? What am I trying to accomplish?’ ”

This is more therapy-speak than we’ve heard from Lia to date. Usually her strategy is to tell us just enough to allow us to arrive at our own interpretation. But the last visit must have sent her back to the manual or to search her computer for “what to do when nothing’s working,” and now she’s decided to lay it out for us. I nod, because I think I understand what she’s saying. But this isn’t working for my mother. Lia is using a language of the emotions that my mother simply doesn’t understand. Even if Lia doesn’t see this, I do. I see my mother chafe. She starts to wring her hands and says nothing.

On the way home, my mother says, “You seem to understand what Lia’s saying, and I don’t have a clue.” Then she says, “I think I prefer the unexamined life.”

This is something that I, too, might have said as recently as six months ago. Now, however, I see that it was living the unexamined life that brought my mother and me to this place.

BOB AND I HAVE
continued to see each other, and while we’re compatible in many ways, we also have some very real differences. Unlike me, Bob enjoyed a carefree and happy childhood, which he spent in one house in an affluent town on Long Island. His parents, he tells me, are normal, loving people who paid for his college and medical school education, contributed to their grandchildren’s college funds, and, on the occasion of each grandchild’s eighth birthday, went on special trips to destinations of the child’s choosing. In all of these ways, he and I are so different that Bob might as well be telling me he was raised on the moon.

These misalignments don’t stop at our upbringings. Bob informs me that
Seinfeld
is his most important cultural touchstone, that in fact most of life’s big topics—love, friendship, work, religion, family, and various rites of passage—have been addressed in a
Seinfeld
episode. (“
Seinfeld
is like the Talmud. All truth lies therein.”) I confess to never having seen the show. Not only is
Animal House
his favorite movie, but he has no qualms about telling anyone he meets that it’s one of the best movies
ever made. I’ve never seen
Animal House
, either, and I’m not entirely sure what it’s about.

My musical tastes veer in the direction of classical, Cole Porter, and bossa nova, while he likes Billy Joel and Barry Manilow and idolizes Bruce Springsteen. I read books; he doesn’t. When I first mentioned my love for Kafka, he responded, “You mean the guy with the bug?” Bob is a passionate golfer who started playing as a boy. Addicted to tennis, I’ve never stepped foot on a golf course. In other words, on Match.com both of us would have promptly clicked to the next prospect. But none of this seems to matter much, for there is some connection of heart, humor, and outlook on the world that overrides our differences.

For my birthday, Bob wants to treat me to an overnight stay at a spa/resort in the Napa Valley. He comes to pick me up the day before, and as we’re about to leave, my mother comes upstairs to say hello to Bob and goodbye to me. She has met Bob a couple of times, and each time she has asked him about orthopedic surgeons for her left knee (the unreplaced one), which is now bothering her. She tells him that the surgeon he recommended never got back to her. In what I’ve come to recognize as Bob’s modus operandi when it comes to addressing my mother’s medical questions, he responds not with indifference exactly but with doctorly reserve. “Why don’t you try one more time, and if that doesn’t work I’ll send him a note,” Bob says. I’m learning that this studied blandness is common among doctors when they’re asked for advice outside a clinical setting, and his response seems fine to me. But I see that my mother has taken it as a slight. She falls silent.

My mother has sent me off with a birthday gift from her and told me to open it that night. Bob will appreciate it, she said. As instructed, I open it after we return from dinner. There is no card, and the object itself has been wrapped in plain tissue and placed in a large gift bag. I dig into it and remove the tissue to reveal something that looks very familiar. It’s a long red-and-white flannel nightgown from L.L.Bean with a smocked, high-button top. It looks familiar because I already own that nightgown; my mother gave me its identical twin a few years earlier, when I was going through a terrible time. When she sent it to me the first time, I was touched beyond words. It was exactly the comfort item I needed, and somehow she had known this. But this time, sitting with
Bob on a fancy four-poster bed in Napa, what am I to make of the fact that her gift choice is a nightgown whose prototype was quite possibly the night frock worn by Granny on
The Beverly Hillbillies
? And what does it mean that she has told me that Bob will appreciate it? I don’t want to go there.

As we’re driving home the next day, Bob asks me if I’d like to accompany him to Florida in March, to a surprise party for his father’s eightieth birthday. This is certainly unexpected. I hardly know this man. Our time together has been nice, but I wasn’t aware of just how far beyond spreadsheet-entry status I’d progressed. I’m wary of doing anything too hastily, and a cross-country trip to meet the family is a big step. I tell him I’m honored by the invitation and I’ll think about it.

After our lovely but too brief overnight trip to the wine country, Bob drops me at home. The house is quiet. It’s my birthday. I’ve clung to my hope for a gift collaboration between Zoë and my mother, but when I enter the kitchen, I see nothing. No present, and no cake, not even a cupcake. My mother hears me in the kitchen and comes upstairs. She wishes me a happy birthday and asks how the getaway went.

“It was fine,” I say.

“How did you like my gift?”

I start to say it was very sweet, but then I tell her the truth. “You gave me that same nightgown a couple of years ago.”

“Really?” she asks, taken aback.

“Yes. You don’t remember?”

I change the subject. “I’d love to have a birthday cake.”

“You want a cake?” she says, looking genuinely surprised.

Suddenly I’m a child again and I’m over the moon because my father is in San Diego for a visit. We’re living in the apartment complex in La Jolla, and Dieter has yet to enter our lives. My father and mother take me out to dinner at a fancy restaurant. It’s my birthday. I’m finally eight. For these few hours, I’ll be with both my parents, on my very birthday. We’ll go home later and there will be cake and presents. And everything will be right with the world.

Halfway through the meal, they tell me there’s something I should know. Today, November 5, isn’t actually my birthday. It’s not for another month. They explain: I was born a week too late to enter kindergarten, so
they forged my birth certificate. With some heavy eraser work and a typewriter similar to the one used for the original certificate, my father changed
Dec. 5
to
Nov. 5
. And voilà! I was out of the house and in school a year before I should have been. They tell me they kept up the lie because they were so deep into it with the schools. And, of course, they didn’t want to confuse me when I was too young to understand.

By now I’m crying, sobbing. I’m not really
eight
?! My parents shake their heads. No, not for another month. I cry harder. Everything is ruined. Shocked by my outburst, my mother takes me home to our apartment, where there is no cake, and no gifts. Because it’s not my birthday.

Now my mother is standing by her door, looking at me. “I’ll go down to the bakery with you if you want to get a cake.”

“No thanks.”

“Well, I’m not much of a cake eater anyway,” she says, and heads back downstairs.

———

P
ART OF THE PROCESS OF ENTERING INTO A RELATIONSHIP WITH BOB
means we’re stepping into each other’s social lives. As a busy physician at the University of California, San Francisco, Bob has many social obligations related to work, especially around the holidays, when there are parties to attend. As we mingle our way through one of them, held at an elegant Pacific Heights house, Bob makes a point of introducing me to his UCSF colleague Louann Brizendine and her husband, Sam Barondes. Both Sam and Louann are psychiatrists, and in the midst of our small talk, I tell them about my living arrangement. They’re immediately curious, their questions so disarming that I tell them more. Within minutes, we’re huddled on a window seat in a corner of the dining room, with the rest of the party melting away. I’m leaning into Sam and Louann’s sympathetic probing with my head down, studying the pattern of the room-sized Oriental rug
under my feet as I tell them about my childhood and my mother’s drinking.