medical school. But I want to leave this particular door to the future open. Some of the women I know are further along; they are convinced that they have stopped at two children, or three, or one, happy and content. And yet … and yet. “I sometimes still think about it,” one woman said the other day, amid the perpetual chaos of her living room. “And then I think that I still can if I want to.” Then she laid the flat of her hand on her abdomen, which will never be taut again.
Knowing that I still can, knowing that I might, knowing that I will: these are all very different things. I will be thirty-five-years old this summer. Someday a time will come when the apparatus that has worked so well will no longer work for me. For all I know, that time came last month, or will come this year, or will not come for a long, long time. But that will be an ending reached without my acquiescence. This one requiresmy cooperation. And as I look into a box of crib sheets, yellow with milk stains, yellowing just a bit with age, I know that I cannot cooperate right now. I have a feeling of possibility within me that means too much to give away. I could use the closet space, but right now it is something else I need much, much more.
MOTHER’S DAY
F or several years after my mother’s death, I felt about Mother’s Day the way I suppose recently divorced people feel about Valentine’s Day. It seemed to be an organized effort by the immediate world to spit in my eye, and I gladly would have set fire to every card in every card rack in every card shop in town. In time, the rage abated, and what remained in its place was an emotionless distance. Mother’s Day became much like Passover, a holiday that people like me did not celebrate.
Secretly, I suspected that I would be reconciled to it someday, when I had children, when I was a mother. This conclusion seemed logical and sensible and was completely wrong. Mother’s Day is still fraught with strong emotion, if only because each year I feel like a fraud. It is undeniable that I have given birth to two children; I remember both occasions quite vividly. But the orchid corsage, the baby-pink card with the bigM in curly script, the burnt toast on a tray in bed—they belong to someone else, some other kind of person, some sort of moral authority. They belong to Mother, and each of us knows quite well who that person is, and always will be.
That person is a concept. I suppose that is where it all goes wrong. I know few people who have managed to separate the two. My friends speak about their mothers, about their manipulations and criticisms and pointed remarks, and when I meet these same women I can recognize very little of them in the child’s description. They usually seem intelligent, thoughtful, kind. But I am not in a position to judge. To me they are simply people, not some lifelong foil, a yardstick by which to measure myself, to publicly find Mother wanting, to privately find the fault within.
And yet I know the feeling. Although she was long dead when I had my children, my mother and I were then somehow equals, peers, alike in my mind. That was the most disconcerting feeling of my life. I was part of a generation of women so different from their mothers as to sometimes be a palpable insult, daughters who were perhaps as likely to model themselves on the male parent as the female one. For all of my life my mother had been the other: I was aggressive, she was passive. (Perhaps simply reserved?) I was intellectual, she was not. (Perhaps not given the opportunity?) I was gregarious, she was shy. (Perhaps simply more selective in her attachments?) At a family gathering recently, several people I have not seen since I was a girl approached and said they knew who I was because I looked exactly like my mother. I was chilled to the bone. How dare they? How dare they consign me to her shoes? How dare they allow me to fill them?
But in some sense I have slipped into them simply by
Knowing that I still can, knowing that I might, knowing that I will: these are all very different things. I will be thirty-five-years old this summer. Someday a time will come when the apparatus that has worked so well will no longer work for me. For all I know, that time came last month, or will come this year, or will not come for a long, long time. But that will be an ending reached without my acquiescence. This one requiresmy cooperation. And as I look into a box of crib sheets, yellow with milk stains, yellowing just a bit with age, I know that I cannot cooperate right now. I have a feeling of possibility within me that means too much to give away. I could use the closet space, but right now it is something else I need much, much more.
MOTHER’S DAY
F or several years after my mother’s death, I felt about Mother’s Day the way I suppose recently divorced people feel about Valentine’s Day. It seemed to be an organized effort by the immediate world to spit in my eye, and I gladly would have set fire to every card in every card rack in every card shop in town. In time, the rage abated, and what remained in its place was an emotionless distance. Mother’s Day became much like Passover, a holiday that people like me did not celebrate.
Secretly, I suspected that I would be reconciled to it someday, when I had children, when I was a mother. This conclusion seemed logical and sensible and was completely wrong. Mother’s Day is still fraught with strong emotion, if only because each year I feel like a fraud. It is undeniable that I have given birth to two children; I remember both occasions quite vividly. But the orchid corsage, the baby-pink card with the bigM in curly script, the burnt toast on a tray in bed—they belong to someone else, some other kind of person, some sort of moral authority. They belong to Mother, and each of us knows quite well who that person is, and always will be.
That person is a concept. I suppose that is where it all goes wrong. I know few people who have managed to separate the two. My friends speak about their mothers, about their manipulations and criticisms and pointed remarks, and when I meet these same women I can recognize very little of them in the child’s description. They usually seem intelligent, thoughtful, kind. But I am not in a position to judge. To me they are simply people, not some lifelong foil, a yardstick by which to measure myself, to publicly find Mother wanting, to privately find the fault within.
And yet I know the feeling. Although she was long dead when I had my children, my mother and I were then somehow equals, peers, alike in my mind. That was the most disconcerting feeling of my life. I was part of a generation of women so different from their mothers as to sometimes be a palpable insult, daughters who were perhaps as likely to model themselves on the male parent as the female one. For all of my life my mother had been the other: I was aggressive, she was passive. (Perhaps simply reserved?) I was intellectual, she was not. (Perhaps not given the opportunity?) I was gregarious, she was shy. (Perhaps simply more selective in her attachments?) At a family gathering recently, several people I have not seen since I was a girl approached and said they knew who I was because I looked exactly like my mother. I was chilled to the bone. How dare they? How dare they consign me to her shoes? How dare they allow me to fill them?
But in some sense I have slipped into them simply by
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