Los Angeles, September 2020. Five years since my mother’s death and I want to see mountains, feel ocean on the air.
My husband, Jon, and I drive to Topanga Canyon. Windows down, we roll past a roadside gem shop. A set of chimes hangs outside the front door. Each chime is made of glass and shaped like a circle. Together with the wind, they make a sound like women chatting, concentric and questioning. I feel drawn to them.
At home, Jon hangs the chimes above the strip of balcony that adjoins our apartment. It’s too sunny to go out, and the Santa Ana winds are early this year, whipping up the last of the long, hot days. I sit inside and listen.
Before my mother died, we spoke often. On the phone, in person. I was engaged, in Los Angeles. She was in Connecticut. But once I married, she planned to move. “Somewhere close,” she said, “but not too close.” Dreamily, she mused about the cottage she’d buy, the paintings she’d make of the California light. There would be bougainvillea, an herb garden, an extra bedroom for the grandchild I might someday give her.
Now, when I hear my windchimes, I imagine them hanging from the front porch of the cottage she never lived in. I imagine the paintings she never made, the child I haven’t produced. How can I become a mother without a mother of my own?
“You tell me when you’re ready,” Jon says when we discuss this very question. “I am if you are.” His mother also died, two years ago. I find both his willingness to become a father, and his deference to my hesitance to become a mother, aspirational, and desperately romantic.
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We met ten years ago, in a writing program at CalArts. I was twenty-three and arrived in California at the end of a summer spent caretaking my mother, who had recovered from major surgery in New York, just in time to see me leave her. Jon had lived in Los Angeles all his life.
On our first date, we walked our dogs through a corridor of leafless trees. The Santa Ana winds were blowing then too, rattling branches, kicking up dust. I told Jon about my mother’s cancer, onset when I was three, recurrent every year after, like a curse. I told him about her wound, torso length and septic, leftover from the operation she’d had in June. It had been big enough to kill her, and nearly did. But she’d survived; the wound had closed, day by day, like a zipper. As if she’d willed herself shut, to let me live.
Jon said he knew what it meant to caretake. Two years prior, his mother had tried to die. “She asked to live with me in my studio apartment and when I said no, she slit her own throat with sewing scissors.”
The only reason she was still alive was the winter cold, which clotted her blood and slowed the flow. “Now,” he said, “she lives in assisted living in Glendale.” She was fifty-four, the youngest resident in a facility meant for old folks.
After Jon said the words throat, scissors, he said nothing, just scanned my face for signs of shock. “Nothing shocks Allie,” he would later tell his mother, permission to them both not to be embarrassed by what she had become.
Her name was Rachelle.
I met Rachelle a few dates later, in the psych ward of Glendale Adventist, where she’d been transferred for a course of Electroshock Therapy. She sat, hunched at a table, auburn hair curtaining her body. She still had her teeth then, but barely. Within a year, they’d all be gone.
“You’re so beautiful,” she said when we shook hands, her voice high and soft like a little girl’s. Then she looked down, ashamed. “I’m sorry,” she said, referring, I guessed, to the psych ward, the locked doors, the weird food smell and overhead florescence.
“Mom, don’t be sorry,” Jon said. “Nothing shocks Allie.”
I was barely an adult, then. Now, I have a PhD, one published book, one on the way, several others in the drawer, as they say. I am inarguably a woman, a writer, though I rarely feel like it. I do feel driven. To create and publish, create and nurture. What’s the difference between a baby and a book?
When Jon and I met, I didn’t think of babies, didn’t think much of career, was not particularly concerned with writing, though I was in school for it. I thought about Jon and to a lesser extent my mother, sick again a month after I left, then recovered when the CT scans turned out to have been mistaken. But within a year, she’d once again be sick, and it would not be a mistake. Then, once more, she would be well.
During that time, I wrote sporadically, spastically. At cafes, mostly, little fragments I pieced together into lush, lyrical essays that went nowhere. I couldn’t sit still, didn’t have the attention span needed to produce anything longer. Not until my late twenties did I successfully write beyond one hundred pages. Lately, I’ve been wishing I could go back in time and push myself. To work for long hours, pen to the page; to think critically about art; to be the literary sensation almost anyone with a touch of talent can be when they are young. I mention this to Jon, who rolls his eyes. “Give yourself a break,” he says. “People who experience success too early often burn out, anyway.” I try to agree. But I can’t shake the question: if I had capitalized on the currency of my youth, produced a book at twenty-three, rather than thirty, would I be further along in my career by now, and therefore ready for a child?
I woke up this morning confident that I want one. In the shower, soaping, I close my eyes and imagine cradling an object. Surely it is an infant. But, faceless and silent, it is also a void.
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That I can be certain about motherhood one day and torn the next; it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I’ve never been one to waffle. The big life choices I’ve made–where to go to college, which art form to pursue, which person–were all instinctive, absolute. Jon asked me to marry him, dropping a knee on an icy hilltop in San Francisco, when I was twenty-five, and I never considered saying no. It was what I wanted, not marriage necessarily, but to spend my life with Jon. And for Jon to want to spend his life with me.
Still, I was afraid. “What’s wrong with you,” Jon asked on the flight back to LA after the engagement. “You seem dour.” The small plane made its motor sounds. We hit turbulence, then steadied. “Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “I’m happy.” But I was preoccupied with my new diamond band, how easily it might slip from my finger and disappear, an omen; I was haunted, the specter of my parents looming in the background.
My parents, who were estranged for seventeen years. The important years of my adolescence. During those years my father hated my mother so much he couldn’t say her name. He called her “the woman,” instead.
But three months before my mother’s death, my father returned to her, ready to make amends. She welcomed him back with a forgiveness that enraged me. How, when it had been me who took his place? Me who had taken care of her for a decade of prolonged illness. Me, because I had no siblings and she had no spouse to share the work. At the end, once the hard part was over, my mother wrote my father back into her will. And then, like she was finally ready, she began to die.
It took her days. First, she lost the ability to speak. Soon thereafter, consciousness left her, too. But she lingered, breathing, twitching sometimes when she heard my voice, or Jon’s voice, or the voice of Judy, her best friend. By then, my father had left again, returned to his home in New Hampshire. I was relieved to see him go. I didn’t think I’d be able to cry in front of him the way I knew I’d need to. For my entire childhood, he had warned me not to cry.
Never having seen a body die before, I was surprised my mother’s took so long. There were stages, the hospice nurse explained, lifting the sheets to show me my mother’s legs, turning blue. “It begins at the toes,” she said and I left the room thinking how closely my mother’s body, working to die, resembled a pregnant person’s body, laboring to give birth. Even at the end, my mother seemed to be producing.
After her death, I felt surprisingly normal. The feeling lasted a month, maybe two. Then, slowly, I began to dream about her, sick and sullen and alone. I woke and heard her voice in my head, alternately laughing and afraid. The harder I listened, the fainter she became. But I wanted any version of her, even the nightmarish. I strained for a sign that she might rise from the dead. I had fantasies that I might accidentally join her there, a car crash, or careless slip on the wet tile of the new apartment Jon and I bought with the money she left us. The fantasies were grief, though I didn’t recognize them as grief. They felt like mirrors, reflecting the person I had always feared myself to be. My true self, unmothered, unsure, wreathed in hazy darkness.
“You can call me Mom, now,” Rachelle said the first time I saw her after my mother’s funeral. Her mouth was totally toothless by then, her voice was mushed. The offer was the closest she’d ever come to acknowledging my mother’s death. I told myself I shouldn’t blame her. Rachelle was limited, mentally ill, though the exact diagnosis eluded every doctor. Borderline Personality Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder and Anxiety Disorder enmeshed with Fibromyalgia, seasonal allergies and migraine headaches to keep her apartment-bound, medication-dependent, sick.
“You can call me Mom, Allie,” Rachelle repeated, as if willing me to comply. I thanked her, wanted to please her, tried to force the word Mom from my mouth. But I couldn’t, not yet.
Instead I slumped through her doctor’s appointments and grocery runs. I stood beside Jon as he counted out the medication–Morphine, Klonopin, Seroquel, Ambien, Abilify–Rachelle took several times a day. She needed better assistance, but we couldn’t afford a full care facility willing to accept someone so young, nor could we afford to hire a private nurse to manage her meds, nor could we find a nursing agency willing to take on the liability, anyway. So Jon and I sifted pills into the compartments of a weekly case, and hoped for the best. Increasingly, Rachelle took too many and was confused, angry, when she ran out. She slept a lot.
Most visits, Jon and I would arrive at Emerald City to pick Rachelle up at two p.m., three p.m., and find the blinds in her apartment drawn, all the lights turned off. We’d knock on the door for a long time before she answered, sleep crusted, in sweats.
“Mom,” Jon would yell, “What are you doing? We’ll miss the appointment!”
“Sorry,” Rachelle muttered.
She shuffled around, getting dressed in the dark. Jon and I sat, as we often sat, on the porch-swing Rachelle had begged us to buy from the Ralph’s garden department. The swing, set up inside, was weird. Initially, Jon resisted buying it. But I had supported his mother’s desire. “Who cares? Let her have a porch swing if she wants one!”
The day Jon relented, we all went to the store, and Rachelle and I sat on the display model, in amongst the potted begonia and ferns and pre-packed firewood bundles. Jon stood back and watched.
“See? It’s fun!” his mother called to him, pushing off the pavement with her pink knockoff crocs. “Yea, it’s fun!” I echoed. If Rachelle had the swing, maybe she’d sit in the living room, instead of in bed. Maybe she’d make friends who would come over and sit in the living room with her. She promised she would try. This was Jon’s hope, his purest desire. That she would at least try to create a life she wanted to live. So eventually, he bought the swing, lugged it up the moldy staircase to her apartment, and assembled it. But since then, Jon and I had been the only ones to sit in the swing. Waiting for Rachelle.
“Don’t forget to wear your teeth,” Jon called to his mom on typical waiting days. I pushed with my feet to make us fly higher. Rachelle didn’t reply, nor did she come out, so after five minutes, I went in to find her, sitting on the bed, sifting through mail, a concentrated look on her face.
“Rachelle,” I yelled, “Come on, let’s go.”
Jon arrived behind me saying, “Seriously?”
The bed was covered in paper. There were carboard boxes of more papers on the floor. There were Ziplock bags inside Ziplock bags and scrunchies and half-drunk cans of Arizona Iced Tea.
In a rush by then, we let Rachelle leave her new dentures out, so we could go. To the “pain doctor,” a young guy with red eyes and drooping lids, high on his own supply. Or grocery shopping at Ralphs and Food A Rama. Or to Value Village, the thrift store where Rachelle and I looked for the nicer clothes Jon wanted her to wear. “No more sweats,” he often said of the grey Champions she favored, old and dirty and pocked with cigarette burns. So she and I picked out dresses and jeans, then squished together into a dingy dressing room where she tried them on.
Always, as I helped her remove layers, I felt both loving and bereft. My mother’s sick body bore similarities to Rachelle’s: legs stocked up with fluid, face fallen and sad, bones and bruises and a certain yellow pallor. In such moments, my loss felt unfair. Why had my mother, full of life and the will to live it, died? Why had Jon’s mother survived?
But unfairness was a pointless concern. It was also Rachelle’s primary complaint. About the cost of food, clothes, the shows on TV. About the past, her own mother, who was also mentally ill, and abandoned Rachelle and her sisters to their father’s abuse. Rachelle was twenty-three when Jon was born, the product of casual relationship that soon dissolved. She put herself through nursing school to provide for her child, and landed work in the ICU, where she tended to AIDS patients, cancer patients, patients like my mother, who rarely recovered. She worked fifteen years before the pain started in her aching feet, her head, her heart. An amorphous, undiagnosable pain that altered her mind. Along with the drugs. Rachelle came into her pain at the height of the American opioid boom, oxycodone prescribed like candy. A whole decade later, and she couldn’t live without her morphine. The same medication my mother took to die, Rachelle took to live.
In the Value Village dressing room Rachelle watched her reflection in every outfit for a long time. “I need to lose ten pounds,” she concluded and turned away. Other times, she talked about the pink bikini she wanted to buy, so she could lay out on her balcony and attract men. Other times, the focus would be on me. “You’re so beautiful,” she would say. “So thin. Jon loves you so much. Why can’t I be thin like you? Why can’t I be beautiful?”
“I’m not having this conversation with you,” I learned to reply.
“You’re too thin,” my mother often told me, eyeing my body, disappointed by what she saw. “You’re all spirit, you’re all bone, where are you?” For my entire adolescence she said this, knowing I was slipping, every day, into the grasp of the eating disorder I’ll never fully shake.
Before that, when I was a child, she said little about my appearance. My body, when she spoke of it, was only “strong,” and “big boned.”
“This is the body I always wanted,” my mother told me once, speaking this time, of herself. She was trying on a new bathing suit, so emaciated from the cancer that she had a permanent IV, heart palpitations and ceaseless charley horse leg cramps. But her bush was full and glorious, climbing from the crotch of her one piece with the persistence of unwanted moss. “Obviously I need to shave,” she said when she saw my face. Her voice was embarrassed. I wondered if the cancer had hit her brain yet, as if forgetting to remove pubic hair was a sign of mental illness. She was well enough then, swimming twice a week at the YMCA, doing water aerobics, keeping her strength up and planning for her cottage in California, the co-op of women artists she’d create, her grandchild. Once, I went to the pool with her, let her show me how she rode the foam noodle like a horse.
At Value Village, after Rachelle and I selected new clothes for a new, more active life, we found Jon at the jewelry cases. He was always searching for a turquoise ring, like the one he gave his mom once, an object she had loved. The ring had since been stolen or lost. But they both spoke of it fondly, like a talisman, embodying care, easily given, easily received. While Jon searched for a new ring, I paid. I knew there was nothing there.
After such shopping trips, Rachelle would thank us, swear to wear her new clothes. But the next time we saw her, she’d be in the old grey uniform again, in her dark apartment, woozy, maybe mean. A cigarette wilting from the fork of her fingers and her mouth a gummy, downward frown. She understood she was a disappointment, expected Jon’s anger to come next. He’d yell for a bit then beg her to try and she’d be obstinate, lashing out. Or maybe she would be sorry again. Sorry sorry sorry she was always sorry, the word a tic, tacked on to every sentence and meaningless there.
Driving home after those defeating days, Jon was always crestfallen. “That’s it,” he would say, “I’m through with her.” I’d take hold of his free hand. We both knew this wasn’t true. Without us, his mother would be homeless. Neither of us would allow that to happen, though I especially wanted to be finished taking care. I wanted to be free of dreading death and working to prevent it. But the job of tending to my mother’s illness had ended in my failure to prevent her decline. The work of tending to Rachelle sometimes felt like a do-over, but always like a punishment.
Some nights, I drank too much and cried about it. Jon sat by, alternately angry and concerned. Nothing shocks Allie, he had once promised, an omen to ward off exactly what was happening. Another woman he loved, disappeared into an internal battle with the unfairness of it all.
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“I didn’t say it was fair,” my latest OBGYN says and then, “Thirty-four is when I start to worry. So you say the word and I’ll pull that IUD.” She puts a gloved hand inside me, roots around my uterus, removes her hand. “It’s wedged in tight,” she says. “But I like a challenge.”
She takes off her gloves and sits at a computer, asks after my family history. Maternal grandmother, dead at forty-five of cancer. Mother, also dead, also of cancer, onset at forty-two, though she lived with it for years. Paternal grandmother, dead of heart disease. Paternal grandfather, dead of heart disease. Father, alive after a quadruple bypass. “You see why I’m on the fence about a baby?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says, “I do,” and suggests we scan for cancer, MRIs every six months, because I’m so high risk.
On the way out the door, she turns. “I had two babies during my med school residency,” she says. “Then my husband left me for a younger woman.”
“That’s awful,” I say.
“Yup!” She leaves the room and I sit there wondering if she was trying to dissuade me.
“My OB said thirty-seven is the worrying age,” my friend Sarah says. She’s a writer, author of a brilliant memoir, owner of a brilliant mind; and she also lost her mom some years back. Now she is at work on a novel about a pregnant artist who is writing a book about women artists. It’s a fertile text, in process and already stunning. As is Wes, Sarah’s two-year-old son, his whole face a smile. Every time I’m around them, motherhood feels possible, even preferable, for me also.
“You can’t avoid the mess of it,” Elena says. “Whatever you choose, children or no children, you’ll have to face a mess of feelings.” Elena is my therapist. If I had to guess, I’d say she is fifty-three, though her cheeks are smooth and plump, no wrinkles. I’m older, she sometime says, a means of contextualizing our relationship. What she never says is that she is a stand in for my mother. Though we both know that’s exactly what she is.
My own mother was forty when I was born. “It was the age at which I finally felt ready to parent,” she always said. But she was also too young when she died, twenty-eight years later, and left me. And I was too young, to be left.
Last night I dreamed my mother had risen from the dead and Jon and I were showing her our life. But she was morose and distant and kept asking me why I was donating the money she left me, as I do each month, to Planned Parenthood. Wasn’t there a worthier organization?
I was frustrated, that of all the things, the specific liberal organization to which I was donating was of consequence to her. Didn’t she want to know who I’d become since she died? Didn’t she want to see my apartment, read my books, pet my dogs? Didn’t she want to meet Elena? No, she wanted to talk about Planned Parenthood.
In the morning, during our phone session, Elena also wants to talk about Planned Parenthood. The concept of planning parenthood. “Putting it off year after year is assuming you’ll arrive at a future self who is more ready than your current self,” she says. “It’s assuming you know you’ll be better someday, that is not this day.”
“Be wary of assuming omnipotence,” she adds, referring to the responsibility I compulsively feel for other people’s mortality, my own mortality, as if I can somehow create death, alter life. Which, as a woman, in some sense, I can.
I tell her that the dream developed into a nightmare, an invisible threat to my mother’s reincarnated life, and me with a gun, protecting her.
After therapy, I download Sheila Heiti’s Motherhood on Audible and listen as I walk around the neighborhood. Winter bougainvillea blooms purple and red, draping over chain link fences, like fragrant, floral viscera. I pass couples with their toddlers, an empty car seat, out on the curb for the taking. And a woman my age, pushing a stroller. She gives me a little wave, I wave back. Heiti tells me that women have between twenty and thirty to be free of the burden of caretaking, motherhood.
In my teens, I became so anorexic that I developed peach fuzz, night sweats, heart palpitations, amenorrhea, the absence of my period. For a time, as I adjusted to my changing body, I thought about babies often. Defiant, I weighed my addiction to starvation against the future, motherhood a silhouette on the distant horizon. I didn’t need kids, I told myself after a stern OBGYN informed me I was killing myself. If I died, but even if I didn’t, I would be thin and beautiful forever, which was better than being someone’s mom.
When I was twenty and not yet healed, my mother went into the hospital for the first time since her first surgery, when I was five. When I was twenty-two and fresh out of rehab, she was in the hospital again, then home, where I moved to take care of her. She slept in a rented hospital bed on the first floor, with a baby monitor beside her head. I slept above her, with the baby monitor’s twin port, waiting to hear the crackle of her voice in the night.
As I turned twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, my mother was in and out of the hospital, in and out of using the rented hospital bed, the baby monitor.
The January before my wedding, six years ago now, she had her final surgery, a radical last-ditch operation only one doctor agreed to try. “He’s a dancer,” she said, trying to convince me the man would be careful with his hands. But when I met him, he was shaking. And though at first the surgery seemed to work, by May she was sick again. By June I was a wife. By September she was gone.
With her leaving, Jon and I came into her money. Over the course of a year, we used it to move Rachelle to a nicer assisted living. We bought her new furniture, princess themed. Eventually, sick of sifting her pills ourselves, Jon and I agreed that we should find her better doctors, get her off the opioids, muscle relaxers, benzodiazepines. Maybe, beneath their weighted layers, we would find a sane mother to replace the one we’d lost.
At first Rachelle seemed glad for the money, the attention a step-up from our usual involvement in her life. Then, she began to detox. Then, she began to decompensate. Decompensation is a term we learned once it was already too late, once we were already in crisis, checking her in and out of psych wards, emergency rooms, assisted living facilities. Decompensation means what it sounds like. It means what happened to my mother, a slow unraveling, a slow return to infancy. But less, in Rachelle’s case, an unraveling of the body. More, in Rachelle’s case, an unraveling of the mind. Though of course the two were inextricably bound.
Those desperate months, lived one emergency to another, turned to a year. Rachelle was sometimes comatose, staring into space. Sometimes she was what doctors call psychotic, seeing men with machine guns on the lawn outside her room. Or holding in her hands invisible objects–a cup, a pen, a sheet of paper–she was convinced were real. She would pass these objects to me or to Jon, and we would take them, wrap our hands around air, to appease her.
Then it was Rachelle’s birthday, which falls eight days after my own mother’s birthday. As always, we threw her a child’s party, pink bows and paper, a trip to the Alamo movie theater where she sat with her feet dangling in the big reclining chair, gumming her hamburger. We celebrated her life, adorned her in reasons to keep living it–new crocs! New outfits from JC Penny! A framed photograph of the three of us, to hang on her apartment wall. Privately, I looked to the future and saw only decades of Rachelle’s slow deterioration, Jon and I in constant crisis.
But my assumption of omnipotence was faulty. A year later, Rachelle committed suicide. She cut her wrists then jumped out the six-story window of the newest, nicest assisted living we couldn’t afford, but needed to afford. A place where meds were carefully measured and could not be fudged. A place with twenty-four-hour nurses and art classes, music classes, chair exercise classes.
Right before her death, exhausted and overwhelmed, Jon and I had been trying to set boundaries. No more constant phone calls, no more needless trips to the ER, no more crises. Thinking I could spare Jon some measure of pain, I had taken over the small details of his mother’s care. Together, Rachelle and I negotiated what she needed, what she wanted, and what Jon and I were willing to give.
Our last conversation was an argument. How many diapers could Jon and I buy her every month? “But you don’t need diapers,” I argued. The head nurse had advised me not to give in. “She can use the toilet like a big girl,” she had said.
“You don’t understand,” Rachelle pleaded. “Please.”
She wanted Depends, a pack a day. She wanted protection. She wanted more than we were willing to give.
I post about Heiti’s Motherhood on Instagram, receive many messages in response. Women want to talk. About their choice to have, to not have. When I respond, I feel aligned with the ones who’ve chosen, or are in the process of choosing, not. What does this tell me? There’s an impasse between where I am, and where the mothers are. A pixelated wall at the edge of a video game screen. I’ve got my nose up against it; I am marching in place, going nowhere.
So why push? I’m happy where I am. The Santa Anas have moved on by now, leaving a pleasant cold snap in their wake. And detritus. Branches and trash litter the freeways, Sunset Boulevard, the hiking trails that snake through Griffith Park, up to the Hollywood Sign. I sit on my balcony, wrapped in a blanket, listening to my windchimes, sipping my mug of coffee, and writing the book I hope will be my next. I take walks with Jon, and walks alone, listening to audiobooks. I cuddle and coo over my dogs, faces small and smushed as infants. Could they ever be enough?
My mother’s best friend, Judy, stayed childless by choice. Her mother, like my mother’s mother, died of cancer when Judy was fourteen. “The fear was too much for me,” she tells me and I know she means the fear of repeating the cycle–early death, abandoned child. “But,” she adds, “I don’t think that’s a proven formula, or a wise way to live.” I want to ask if she has regrets, but don’t. What does that even mean? She’s seventy-five now, surrounded by a pack of dogs she trains, caretakes. She seems happy.
Like Judy, most of my mother’s friends were childless. Artists. Growing up, I was often the only kid at their dinner parties. I was often an inconvenience, a barrier between my mother and the women who wanted her attention for themselves. I have spent my adult life fostering such friendships of my own. I don’t want to erect any barriers between myself and the women I love, though many of them are already mothers. I don’t want to be left behind, either. And what about my art?
Sarah sends me a snippet of her novel research. It’s an article in The New York Times Review of Books about women writers who were, or are, also mothers. The gist is that, according to most of them, and contrary to popular conception, motherhood helped, rather than hindered, their productivity. The world is richer through a mother’s eye, and time is more carefully allotted, more efficiently used.
My young mother painted in a studio behind our house and I painted there too, or colored, or wrote. So long as I could keep quiet, I could stay. This was how I learned to treat my writing with the sanctity it deserves. Sometimes, as I worked, I looked up to see my mother, sketching me.
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When my mother died, I was not just sad, but overwhelmed. I was twenty-eight, fully adult but still unprepared for so much administrative work. Lawyers, wills, probate court. My job was supposed to be to adjust to marriage, and move forward with Jon, our life together, our writing. Instead, I was looking down the long barrel of a grief I wanted to run from, and the long barrel of Rachelle’s escalating needs. Such conflict made me absent when it came to the technical details of my mother’s estate, her artwork, which was her life’s work. There was too much to keep. I could hang a painting on every wall of my new house and still have hundreds left over. What became of them? I can still see the lesser canvases, their color, bright oranges and blues, standing out against the dismal trash, when I threw them in a rented dumpster.
Jon sometimes remarks on how easy life is, now. Our ease, a trade for both our mothers’ lives. In those first spinning years of our inheritance, Rachelle’s rent and nursing fees were on the way to costing the whole of my mother’s bequest, gone to the care of a woman who had nothing. Even if we had wanted a baby then, we couldn’t have had one. So in a way, like my mother, Rachelle did us a favor by dying when she did. I think Jon likes to look at it this way. Like her suicide was an act of compassion, not punishment or rage.
It’s impossible to know. She didn’t leave a note.
“What the fuck,” Jon sobbed the day she did it. We visited her room, saw the spray of blood where she slit her writs with an exacto knife, stolen from the art room. Saw how she’d stood over the toilet, so as not to make a bigger mess. But the blood splattered anyway–over the bookshelf we’d bought and assembled, the white princess bed, draped in twinkle lights we had set up, the pictures of the three of us together. Rachelle was still alive when a nurse discovered her. But she didn’t want to be saved and ran to the window, took flight.
No, there was no note, but there were journals. They provide few clues. Save for one entry, several months before her death: I just don’t want to be a bother anymore to Jon and Allie.
It was sunny, the day Rachelle died. Afterward, it rained. January in Los Angeles, a record downpour, and Jon on the couch, full of fever. He slept for an entire week, waking only for sips of soup, fragments of the heist and horror movies he watched before falling unconscious again.
Then it was his birthday. We sat across the table from one another at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant, miserable. The food was gooey, over-salted. Rachelle would have loved it. We left as soon as we could, returned to sleep. We were free. We were in shock. I felt an overwhelming concern for my beloved. I tried not to show him the extent of it.
◆
December now. I send my latest novel draft to my agent and begin the anxious process of waiting for her response. Without a writing project, on break from teaching and my city still in lockdown, I wake up each day and wonder when to begin watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. 10 a.m.? 12 p.m.? I like to sit on the balcony with my laptop and stream the show, the women’s voices melding with the tinkling of my chimes. Most days, I try to wait until 4 p.m. and when I get to 4 p.m., I try to wait longer, a tactic left over from my anorexic days, when I’d assign myself an arbitrary hour at which to eat, then push it when the hour finally arrived. This made me feel powerful. The Real Housewives also make me feel powerful. I take my laptop to the balcony, curl up against the cold, sheathed in a bubble, the world of women friends, however fake or fraught. And restaurants, vacations, adventure. I rip through whole seasons in a week and move on to the next and it is always comforting to see the women hardly age. Their frozen faces, stripped of trouble, soothe me. Elena says that people like to see carefully constructed personae crumble. That’s what makes The Housewives compelling.
In another dream, Real Housewife Lisa Vanderpump takes a liking to me and my dog, Butter. Butter looks good in pink fluff, the kind of outrageous outfits Lisa favors for her own dogs. And I am the same age as Lisa’s real daughter, Pandora. In real life, despite constant public pressure from Lisa to, “make me a grandmother,” Pandora has yet to produce. In the dream, I know it is my job to do what Pandora won’t do, or can’t do, or isn’t yet ready for. And I am fine with it, I am ready. Because in producing Lisa’s grandchild, I will become Lisa’s daughter, chosen, protected, special. I wake, unhappy the dream wasn’t real.
I call LeeLee, my friend since childhood. She answers from her home in Vermont, where she farms, paints, raises her son, Finn. I tell her the dream, tell her it’s so much more complicated in “real life.”
“What’s your greatest fear about motherhood,” she asks. I say my greatest fear is to feel unchosen, unprotected, un-special, all alone. “I picture myself, isolated in a house that is not my house,” I say. “And I’m exhausted, with a screaming baby in my arms and all I want to do is call my mom, but I can’t, because she’s dead.”
The fear is of needing, and not receiving, care; the fear is of being confronted by my mother’s absence, with no way to avoid the confrontation, no way to rid myself of the confrontation, because it comes in the form of my baby, the one choice I can’t un-choose. It is, I realize now, how I felt around Rachelle, particularly in the first year after my mother’s death. I felt enraged that she was less a mother, than a warped, twisted daughter. I burned with hate and self-pity every Mother’s Day, and on Rachelle’s every birthday. But now that she’s gone, I miss her.
“Well, there probably will be some of that overwhelm, some of that grief,” LeeLee says. “But it’s never just one thing. And you can always call me. I’m no substitute for your mom. But I’m always here.” I begin to cry. I believe her.
Partly, my belief comes from Lee having known my mom. Few of my friends ever met her, or if they did, few of them knew her the way LeeLee did. We met when we were eight years old and quickly became inseparable. My mother was our touchstone. “A Northstar,” Lee calls her when we talk about the past. “Someone we could ask about anything, especially the scary stuff.” It was true.
When my mother was dying, LeeLee came to her bedside, carrying Finn, who was not yet six months old. By then, my mom was exhausted, often irritable. I was embarrassed by how abruptly she ended LeeLee’s visit, and how disinterested she appeared to be in Finn. But LeeLee never mentioned it.
Later, in therapy, Elena asks if I’ve consulted my mother’s diaries and if so what from the pages of her pregnancy I recall.
What I remember of my mother’s pregnancy are a series of self-portraits she painted, her pregnant body in natural settings, breaking open like an egg, revealing vibrant shades of color, a whole world once hidden, now revealed. In becoming, I became an indelible aspect of her becoming, the role both comforting and pressurized.
On our next call, LeeLee says she’s glad she went straight to the hospital to deliver Finn. She would have wound up needing to be transferred anyway. “It’s definitely a good idea to go to the Hospital for your first,” she says. Sarah says so, too. But how can I set foot in that place, as I have so many times? For my mom, for Jon’s. I never want to be in their position. I never want to be the one strapped to the bed. I am afraid that once I enter, I won’t come out. The plastic surgery I’ve had feels different, performed in a back room at a surgeon’s office that looked like an upscale clothing boutique. A means of conquering my fear? Of reversing my mother’s story? Perfection through surgery, rather than failure; healing, rather than death.
My mother chose a birthing center but was transferred to the Hospital when I went into distress. She loved to tell the story, how I pooped in the womb, a sign I was imperiled. “All I could focus on was getting you safely out,” she’d say. And she did. On the brink of an emergency C-section a nurse yelled push and my mother delivered me to the world outside of her.
Rachelle gave birth via C-section and had the scar to prove it. But by the time I met her and asked for her birth story, she couldn’t remember. Once, in a medical exam room, I sat with her while the doctor checked her body. “Here’s the scar from your C-section,” he said and palpitated the tissue.
“No,” she said. “No C-section.”
“You gave birth vaginally?” He sounded suspicious.
“I’m pretty sure you had a C-section, Rachelle,” I said.
“No,” she said, firmer, “I didn’t.”
“Ms. Pillsbury,” the doctor said, “This is very clearly a C-section scar.”
“No,” she yelled, “it’s not.”
After that, the surgeon excised her gallbladder. She was in the hospital longer than expected. And she was happy, to be safe there, cared for. This was always true for her, so much so that she sometimes self-inflicted illness, and once fell on purpose, breaking her collarbone, in order to be admitted.
◆
My mother had been dead nine months the first time I called Rachelle Mom. It was on the heels of a frantic text from Jon. He was at the Hospital. Rachelle had just been admitted for a urinary tract infection so severe it had caused her to hallucinate. I jumped in the car, sped toward them, both urgent to arrive, and afraid to arrive. Then, the revolving lights of a cop car in my rearview mirror. An officer approaching. And suddenly, I was crying. Hysterical, breathless sobs.
“Can you tell me why you were speeding?” the officer asked. She had seemed stern when she arrived at my window. But now she seemed concerned, empathic. Maternal, even.
“My mom,” I gasped. “My mom is in the hospital.”
I got off without a ticket, arrived at the hospital, splashed cold water on my face before I made my way to Rachelle’s room. And still, when I rounded the corner, I expected, for a brief, magical moment, to see my own mother in her place, knees under the blankets, wrists hooked up to wires, eyes on the door, waiting for me to arrive, and care for her.
One of my earliest memories is of visiting my mother in the hospital. I stood on the threshold of her room, holding my father’s hand. I ran to her side, climbed in bed beside her, pressed my body into hers. She winced. There was an incision on her stomach, soon to be a scar. I asked if I had hurt her. She said I never could.
The symptoms of that first cancer diagnosis started when I was too young to remember, though I think I remember, think, privately, that I may have caused them. Before my birth, my mother was healthy. After, she was sick. The neuroendocrine cancer she was diagnosed with had much to do with hormones. It’s not a stretch.
And then there is the other pregnancy, the one after me, lost when my mother ran to the swing set where I dangled, stuck on the monkey bars calling for her to save me. She lifted her arms to embrace my hanging body and told me to let go. I did. My whole weight dropped into hers and she felt wet warmth between her legs. And so, once more, it was just us two.
◆
I dream I get a call from Elena just as I am entering Target. I’m on a mission to buy party supplies and let the call drop. I feel guilty, rejecting my therapist. But the party is imminent, a celebration of Jon and me. Is it a wedding? A birthday? A book party? I don’t know. But my mother is there, revealed when I arrive from behind a wall of balloons. She is smiling, bright eyed, nothing like the sullen, sickly mother I’m used to encountering in my dreams. How can this be real? I ask everyone. How? Are you real? I ask her. Are you healthy? She tells me yes. The only thing to check is her uterus, she says.
Back in the waking world, I sit on the balcony and tell Elena the dream. It’s spring now, and the hillside behind my apartment is in busy bloom.
“You never told me your mother’s birth story,” she says. I deliver it best I can, the birthing center, the meconium, how my mother always said her only thought was of getting us through my distress, to safety.
“What do you think your mother meant by the plot points she emphasized?” Elena asks.
“That she had me. That it was her primary goal, to have me.”
“The two of you were in it together,” she says. “There was autonomy, but also connection. Often, when you talk to me about pregnancy, that is precisely what I notice is missing.”
“Do you think that’s because of inexperience?” I ask. “Or do you think it’s fear?”
Behind me, the chimes sound like circles, Elena’s theories, my mother’s laughter, the word beautiful in Rachelle’s sweet voice; they sound like the endless, impossible questions of a child I’ve never met.