The Year My Mother Came Back Read online

  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 11th . . . 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.

  I feel momentarily crushed, on Jennifer’s behalf as well as my own. “A rare delight when school began—Alice is in kindergarten.” She couldn’t wait to get me out of the house; she was undone by baby Jennifer’s insatiable exploring.

  And yet, why wouldn’t she be? Haven’t I always been the same with my daughters? From Julia’s first days of preschool, I craved those precious child-free hours from nine a.m. to three p.m. when I could get back to my work, focus on the stuff of my adult life that was important to me. That’s exactly how I felt this morning, immensely relieved that both girls were back at school and I finally had the apartment to myself.

  But when I hear my mother’s 1959 sigh of relief, from this time capsule of letters, I feel a sharp jab, a remembered wound, an unrelieved longing: me wanting my mother more than she wanted me.

  Would I have preferred for her to conform to the fifties paradigm of a housewife and mother, single-mindedly dedicated to her children? Not now, now that I know better. And did that paradigm even exist outside of our black-and-white television set, or was it a fabrication designed to dissuade our mothers from “going out into the world”? But when I was a little kid, brought up on Leave it to Beaver sitcom family values, then yeah, sure, it seemed like the way things should be.

  “What should we get Mommy for Mother’s Day?” Dad asked my sisters and me.

  “How about a brand-new broom and dustpan?”

  “Yeah, a brand-new broom and dustpan,” we all agreed. As soon as we got home from the store, we ran into the kitchen where Mom was preparing lunch. “Happy Mother’s Day!” we shouted, handing her the gift—the unwrapped broom and dustpan, tied together at the neck with a red ribbon.

  She stared at it for a moment, let it drop loudly to the floor, and stormed out of the room in disgust. There was no laugh track to our blunder. We stared dumbly at the broom and dustpan on the floor, a collective thought bubble of slow recognition forming over our four heads.

  My fever is down. The infection is finally over.

  Michael and I make love that night. I ask him to try not to touch my left breast, which is still sore. He lavishes attention on my right breast, to compensate. I love that.

  “Do you mind the scar, Michael?”

  “I don’t notice it.”

  I love that, too.

  I start radiation next week. I won’t need chemo, and that’s a huge relief.

  After Michael falls asleep, I stand naked in front of the bedroom mirror. My left breast, deflated by surgery, then inflated by infection, is back to its original size. The scar is healed, barely visible. I feel good. I’m grateful my body wasn’t scarred by cancer, the way my mother’s was. I wonder if my daughters worried about that. Did they have a vision of me disfigured by surgery? I shudder, suddenly asking myself, What if my daughters’ beautiful bodies were some day ravaged by disease? What if Eliana’s leg-lengthening surgery injures rather than heals her?

  I’ve never told my girls what my mother went through.

  I picture my mother, naked. Her breasts are gone. Her bony chest is crisscrossed with long, red scars, like uneven train tracks. Her armpits are carved out, where the lymph nodes were removed. Her face is etched with sadness, anger, resentment, and envy. That’s how she looked at me—after her surgery, after my loving and exuberant mother was replaced by a gloomy, gray ghost of herself. These are the parts that frightened me when I was a teenager and made me hate her, the parts I’ve always tried to forget. When I was twelve and just starting to develop, Mom’s damaged body terrified me. When I picture her today, her scarred body looks heroic, sad but strangely beautiful. Now, I wish I could make amends for shutting her out.

  THE MUSICIANS SIT on the Persian rug covering the wide window seat. The long-necked, turbaned sitar player improvises a mind-bogglingly complex raga on his long-necked instrument, which he balances between his left foot and right knee; while the compact, black-haired tabla player extracts intricate rhythms from his two drums, varying the pitch with the heel of his hand.

  My mother and I sit at a table near the duo, enthralled by the music and by the plates of food passing by. Mom is ancient, white-haired, wrinkled and bony, but surprisingly animated. She’s wearing a white nightgown and she’s barefoot, which seems to fit in at this restaurant—maybe because the musicians are also barefoot and dressed in white. The slim young waiter glides as if on wheels, delivering aromatic dishes to other customers—steamy curries, sizzling tandoori platters, deep-fried pakoras, and puffy golden poori bread. Invisible tendrils of coriander, cumin, cloves, and cinnamon waft by our table. Each intoxicating spice has a particular sound and a color — a note that harmonizes with the music
and a hue that blends with the red and marigold walls, the purple upholstery, the copper statues of Hindu gods.

  “The music is so glorious, I feel guilty talking,” my mother whispers, leaning across the table. “Mmmm, everything looks and smells so delicious. I love this restaurant.”

  “We came here once, a long time ago.”

  “Did we? I don’t remember. It’s all a blur.”

  “Yeah . . . Mom, there’s so much I want to tell you.”

  “Well, here I am,” she says, and in slow motion she stands up and extends her arms, like an eagle spreading her wings—or maybe a scrawny angel. The musicians match her tempo and slow down the music as she opens herself up, as if this is meant to be a dance accompanied by tabla and sitar. The gown’s flimsy fabric reveals the angular contours of her rib cage and the loose skin drooping from her bony arms. “Here I am, Honeylamb. This is your chance to tell me anything.”

  Then she drops into her chair, exhausted by the effort. Slumped over, she rests her arms on the table and catches her breath. The musicians pick up the tempo, and she perks up.

  “Mom, I wish that you could have met my daughters, and my husband—and that they could have met you.”

  “Oh, goodness, yes, it’s a shame we never met.” She sits straighter. “From everything I’ve observed, my granddaughters are amazing girls, so different, one from the other, and yet both of them smart and kind and imaginative and brave—truly courageous, each in her own way. And Michael. You chose a wonderful man, Sweetheart, which is a laudable triumph. He’s one of the good ones. A gem.”

  “Wow, I’m glad you think so. You didn’t like any of my boyfriends.”

  “That was then. I’m sure I wasn’t easy to live with.”

  “No. I guess I wasn’t, either.”

  “Nope. Now where did that waiter go? I’m starving.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom, for so many things.”

  “Well, choose one thing and get it over with, Sweetheart, so we can order dinner.”

  “I’m sorry we gave you that stupid broom and dustpan on Mother’s Day.”