The Year My Mother Came Back (5 page)

“Of course you did.”

“And now—Anyway, it's done.”

“True. Brad can't un-find Zoe.”

“I know that this is great news. I'm being petulant and petty. And that's the worst thing, Mom. I'm ashamed. I want to be a better mother than that.”

“Your feelings are completely understandable, especially in context.”

“What context?”

“Julia leaving home on Saturday.”

“Ouch, don't remind me.”

“And your surgery is tomorrow.”

“Right. Ugh. I'm really scared, Mom. Mommy, I am. I'm really, really scared.”

“You'll be fine.”

“How do you know?”

“I don't.”

“Then why'd you say I'd be fine?”

“That's what we mothers say.”

“Whether or not it's true?”

“We comfort our children. It's part of the job. Anyway, your surgery isn't such a big deal.”

“Not like yours, you mean?”

“Good luck tomorrow, Alice—
tuh, tuh, tuh!
Be sure to throw salt over your left shoulder.”

SIX

Michael is there when I awaken from the anesthesia, my left breast smaller by a peach-sized lump of flesh than it was when I woke up that morning. I insist on walking the fifteen blocks home, even though I stumble out of the hospital in a groggy daze. Michael puts his arm around my shoulder and helps me to navigate the sidewalks and traffic lights on the steamy day. I zigzag drunkenly, hugging an ice pack under my shirt to reduce the swelling. I'm sore from the procedure, but I no longer have shooting pains. I'm infinitely grateful that the metal marker was removed, as promised. I desperately want coffee. Michael ushers me into a Starbucks, buys me a monumental cup of dark brew, and walks me home.

I look at myself in the bedroom mirror. The asymmetry of my breasts gives the pair a cock-eyed look. It amuses me.

I remember my mother's body, when it was beautiful. At three years old, I would play on the floor in the warm, steamy bathroom while Mom took a shower, her curvy silhouette visible through the translucent vinyl shower curtain. She turns off the water, opens the shower curtain, and reaches for the white towel. I look up to admire her large, round breasts as she leans over me, eclipsing the ceiling lamp, steam emanating from her body like a halo of light. She dries herself, wraps the towel around her chest. She's so young, much younger than I am now, lovely and sexy. My breasts are the same size and shape as hers were. Except that my left one is now a little smaller.

I WAKE UP
early the next day to make eleventh-hour revisions to
Oklahoma Samovar,
typing slowly with one hand, holding an ice pack in the other. It hurts, but I skip the pain meds, because they make me sleepy.

As five p.m. approaches, I type
FINAL DRAFT
on the cover page. Have I actually finished it?

My finger hovers over the keyboard for an inordinately long time.

I hit send. I sit with the finality of it.

I wait for a sense of euphoria.

Fulfillment? I'd settle for contentment.

Instead, I feel deeply unsettled. Why? Don't I want the play to be finished? I've been working on it for such a long time. Could it be that I'm not ready to end my relationship with it? Maybe writing this fictionalized story of Mom's family is my way of searching for my mother. Working on it all these years kept her with me, and hitting
send
is sending her away.

I'm troubled by a vestigial belief that I'm not allowed to complete it, that I've betrayed my mother's tradition of working on a book forever and never finishing.

Is that it? Are you mad at me, Mom? Envious that I finished my play, even though it took me twenty years?

Are you angry because my cancer isn't as bad as yours was? Do you resent that I have it easy, just a simple lumpectomy? That my cancer is stage zero and entirely curable, whereas yours disfigured and almost killed you?

Or am I unsettled because my breast hurts?

“Mom,” says Julia, startling me.

“Oh! Hi, Honey, I didn't hear you come in.”

She's fresh from a shower, wrapped in a white terrycloth robe and brushing her wet hair.

“Are you busy?”

“No. As a matter of fact, I just this minute finished the play I've been working on for—well, forever, it seems—so I'm done for the day.” I take off my reading glasses and emphatically close my laptop, to illustrate how
not
busy I am.

“How are you feeling, Mom?”

“Good. I mean. Only okay. Pretty sore, actually.”

“Can I get you a new ice pack? That one's melted.”

“Ah, so it is. Thank you, that would be lovely.”

I try to get comfortable on the sofa, propping myself up with strategically placed throw pillows. Julia hands me a new ice pack, which provides some relief. She sits across from me and folds her long legs under her. Her face brims with an emotion I can't identify.

“What's on your mind, sweetheart?”

“Did my dad mention to you that he found Zoe?”

“Yes, he did. I'm so excited for you. How do you feel about it? Do you want to contact her?”

Julia parts her lips, about to answer, pauses, grins, takes a deep breath. “Actually, I talked to Zoe on the phone last night.”

“What. Um. Wow! I. You already called her. You. Wow. Wha-wha-what? Did—Wow,” I babble, rendered temporarily incoherent, “Wow. What was it like?”

“It was really great!'

Ouch! I'm losing Julia. I've pushed her away and now she's found another mother. Her first mother. She leaves for college in two days. She's so out of here. I was so focused on taking care of Eliana's needs that I nearly forgot about Julia. What have I done?

“We friended each other on Facebook.”

“Really?

“Yeah.” Julia is glowing.

“That's amazing. That's—”

FRIENDED ON FACEBOOK!

Finding one's birth mother is supposed to be an Epic Quest. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought there would be some weight to the search, gravitas to the moment of connection. The archetypal reunion. Facebook? Too easy. But given Julia and Zoe's shared proclivity for smooth-sailing serenity, this was precisely their kind of quest.

Adopting wasn't easy. The two-year adoption process had plenty of pitfalls. As Julia grew up, I anticipated that her search for her birth mother would have all the Odyssean tasks that inevitably accompany quests. That's how I'd always imagined it. . . . Okay, so Julia isn't me. She's part Zoe. Zoe is breezy and light-hearted, as is Julia. I should rejoice. Being neither breezy nor light-hearted myself, this isn't easy for me.

Oh, and I should mention that Julia doesn't want to “friend” me. Which is totally
fine
with me. I don't need to be my teenage daughter's Facebook friend. I don't care. (Not until, like, this minute, when I desperately want to be one of Julia's thousand-plus “friends.”) I'm not jealous. Yes, I am. I'm
so
jealous.

Julia gets her laptop from the dining table, and returns to the sofa, snuggling up next to me with the computer on her lap.

“Look at this, Mom.”

Julia, beaming, shows me photos on Zoe's Facebook page. “Doesn't Zoe's baby look exactly like me as a baby? Isn't she adorable?”

“Yes, she does look like you, and yes, she's adorable.”

Zoe is still youthful-looking at age thirty-eight, with her handsome husband and their two very cute little girls, who both resemble Julia.

My ambivalence about Julia's joy at finding her birth mother is interfering with my goal of being an exemplary mother. I have to try harder. Everything is topsy-turvy. Julia is now the age Zoe was when she gave birth to Julia. Zoe is the age I was when I adopted Julia. It's confusing.

Why are both of our long-lost mothers suddenly back in our lives right now, after such a long absence? Of course, Julia's birth mother is alive, and my mother is, well—

“Zoe invited me to visit her in Florida and meet her family some time in the next year.”

“Wow, that's great, sweetheart!”

But it's not all great. Why have I been so eager to see Julia off to college? I miss her already.

“Thanks for being so supportive, Mom. It means the world to me.”

“Of course, of course, it's incredible, its, it's, it's . . . Can I take you out to celebrate? Right now, this minute?”

“Aw, thanks, but I'm about to have a picnic in the park with Emily and a few of our friends, and then we're going to a party downtown.” She glances at the clock and gets up. “I should get dressed.”

“Then how about the four of us go out to dinner tomorrow night,” I ask, sounding a little more desperate than I'd intended. “Our last night together before you go to college.”

“That sounds excellent.”

Why can't I admit to myself how much I love my children and how much I miss them when they are gone? This is the recurrent theme this summer. I want to be a great mother, but I keep tripping myself up. The harder I try to be a good mother, the more I'm haunted by being a daughter.

WHEN WE ARRIVE
at Princeton, Julia seems instantly at home. College is a perfect fit. At freshman registration, she registers to vote in New Jersey. She's recruited for Women's Crew. “You're the perfect size for rowing,” the coach tells Julia, the only six-foot-tall freshman girl in the gymnasium.

My breast hurts and I don't feel well, so I wait in the lobby of Julia's dorm while Michael, Julia, and Eliana haul her stuff up to the room. I gingerly hug Julia good-bye. On the drive back to the city, I remember the day Mom and Dad brought me to Princeton and helped me carry my stuff into the dorm. I couldn't wait to leave home that summer, but when Mom and Dad drove away that first day, I was terribly homesick and lonely—that is, until a very handsome boy invited me to join a game of Frisbee in the courtyard.

I WAKE EARLY
the next morning, feeling horrible. My left breast is burning hot. Turns out I have a staph infection. In the days following, I lie in bed with a high fever, popping antibiotics and Advil, alternating between fever dreams and TV, which isn't much better than the fever dreams; the Republican Convention has begun.

I have one of those resistant staph infections, so my doctor switches me to industrial strength antibiotics, big as horse pills. I can't start radiation until the infection is cured. I'm slightly delirious, sweating and shivering in bed.

Michael takes Eliana to her first day of fourth grade. My fever is down, but I'm wiped out, still recuperating at home. The house seems so quiet with both of my girls gone. I get out of bed and pad around in my nightgown and slippers. Harry Potter the Hamster finishes his aerobic workout on the squeaky running wheel. He stuffs his cheeks with food and carries it to his bedroom, fluffs up his bedding, surrounds himself with food, and goes to sleep for the day. It's an enviable plan.

I notice an old wooden cigar box on top of the bookshelf. I'd forgotten about it. My father gave it to me years ago. Inside is a stack of my mother's letters—the paper yellowed and crumbling. I've never read them before. It's all that's left of Mom's writing. After she died, we tossed out cartons of her papers, thousands of pages. In our rush to mourn and move on, we threw away nearly everything she ever wrote.

I carefully unfold a letter my Mom wrote in 1942, when she was a Columbia grad student. It's addressed to Matt, a lieutenant in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I guess Matt never got this letter—not this draft, anyway. The typed letter is covered with Mom's hand-written cross-outs and edits.

April
18
,
1942

Dear Matt,

I officially grew up last week. I was twenty-one on the
11
th . . . Was quite surprised at your attitude towards women going ‘out into the world.' It never occurred to me to doubt that I would do otherwise. Though there have been many a time that I felt I was attempting to cut across insurmountable feminine instincts for cooking, sewing, home-making and the like.

What I should really like to do is go to some wild woody place in the North West and seriously go in for farming. I think there's something very satisfying about working on the land. One can see the logical results of one's efforts. Besides I have some sort of mystical love of the outdoors. At any rate, it isn't up to us women to decide. We have to take on these new responsibilities.

The letter is both clarifying and mystifying. My mother was always a feminist ahead of her time, always wrestling with the contradictions between her ambitions and external rules and expectations. But farming? I guess she had some of her grandfather Jake in her. And, I wonder, did she ever go out into the world—
“It never occurred to me that I would do otherwise”
—in the way she always thought she would?

In a 1942 letter to her brother Edwin, then in officer training school, she wrote:

Dear Edwin . . . Last term I was really quite blue. I found myself drifting. But this term, all the bits of driftwood seem to be coming together and forming a most interesting pattern. All my work is beginning to dovetail. My public administration study forms the basis for analyzing planning problems, and sociology and general political science gives such analysis a valid and rounded foundation. I'm beginning to get a working methodology, a substantial frame of reference.

This sounds like Mom. Periods of unhappy brooding, leavened by intellectual euphoria, diving headlong into her work. I guess the pattern was imprinted at an early age.

A 1945 journal entry reads,

Sunday A.M.—Gloomy, unhappy. This idea of having three men in the space of two days converge and propose was too much. I should have been thrilled, but no feeling of elation. People's emotions are delicate but powerful . . . After a bond of intimacy or friendship has been established it is difficult to break it off.

Moving forward in time, her letters as a young mother probe the depths of “housewifely melancholia” and suburban life.

Jan
20
,
1959

Dear George and Beryl: How muddy this type is—obviously my typewriter is not primed for creative effort—nor my mind either. It's been snowing fitfully today, that sloshy, sleety indeterminate way it has of doing here—and the sogginess of the outside has mingled with the interior mood of our household. It is in fact the kind of day when I should have liked to commune with Beryl—and probe the depths of housewifely melancholia. But this is dispelled now—these acid yellow sheets of yours have charged the atmosphere. I am agog with the splendor of your life in Washington.

And ten months later:

Oct
10
,
1959

Dear George and Beryl: I can hardly wait the arrival of those dark, cozy, early evenings when the children and the supper can be packed up and off at a reasonable hour. This summer has been so diffuse. The baby was impossible to contain and there was never a moment's rest from her insatiable and ferocious drive to wander outside and away. . . .
The summer at home was incredibly busy with children. What a rare delight when school began—Alice is in kindergarten now. Playground hours in our backyard are now only after school.