Category: Daughters

Kraft American Singles

5/13/2018

We are watching Ed Sullivan, as we always do on Sunday nights. We are in the den, a narrow space off the living room. A couch lines the long wall beneath a couple of windows whose venetian blinds are shut; a few feet away, an upholstered chair sits in front of the desk where my father comes to pay bills. Now he’s in the chair: dark hair parted and combed to his left, button-down plaid shirt, khaki pants, each foot on the floor. The rest of us – my mother, my two younger brothers and I – perch side by side on the couch, twisting slightly to our right to face the television set.

During the commercials, we can get snacks. Eating while watching television – it’s the perfect pairing. My father likes to have an apple; my mother takes a little bowl of black licorice nubs. I don’t remember what my brothers have. I head for the kitchen, open the refrigerator and peer into its illuminated insides. I consider carefully until I know what I want: cheese.

Kraft American slices – the orange ones, each individually wrapped. I get one in my lunchbox sometimes. Tonight I slip one out of the package where a stack of them looks like shiny corduroy. I bring the piece back to the den intact, and as the program resumes, I start in.

I begin by lifting the cellophane and pulling it back to expose about a third of the slice of cheese, which I fold onto the rest of the slice and watch as it breaks off in a straight line, its edge jagged. I continue folding that third horizontally until I end up with three plastic-y squares. I put one on my tongue and let it sit; the cheese doesn’t dissolve, but it gets warmer, and creamier, and I mash it against the roof of my mouth. Flavor emanates – impossible to describe – a sweet saltiness that is somehow orange itself. Satisfying. It doesn’t take long before I’ve swallowed it, but its taste lingers within the cavern of my mouth.

I do this with the other two squares I’ve already broken off. Then I peel away more cellophane, fold another third and repeat the process until I’m left with the clear, weightless wrapper. Ed Sullivan continues; my father sucks the juice from his apple core. At the next commercial, I get up and toss the paper into the little brown wastebasket under my father’s desk.

~ Susan Hodara

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Dancing in the New Year

3/29/2016

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For the first time in a long time, my mother danced. It was on New Year’s Eve, at an annual celebration hosted by the senior residential facility in Bethesda, Maryland, where she has lived for a year and a half. They hold the event in what they call the ballroom, complete with live music, portable dance floor, instructors to assist the revelers, and, of course, champagne.

My mother attended the party last year, but was afraid to dance, worried she wasn’t steady enough and would fall. She was disappointed, she told me the next day. “Next year,” she said, a promise to herself.

Over the past 12 months, my mother has continued to exercise, but just shy of 89, she has come to rely more on her walker than her cane. Nevertheless, she kept her promise. She announced her victory first thing on New Year’s Day, when I called her from New York. “You’ll be happy to know that I danced last night,” she said. “I’m very proud of myself.”

I fired some questions at her as I tried to conjure the scene.

What did she wear? Her black pants, her embroidered red jacket, and her pearls, she told me. “What I always wear on special occasions,” she said. I knew the outfit; she had probably worn well-blotted red lipstick, too.

Whom did she dance with? First, one of the instructors. “I explained my situation and he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll hold onto you.’” Then she danced with one of the residents, someone she’d shared meals with in the dining hall along with his wife.

What music did they play? Jazz standards, old familiars. “I danced to ‘It Had to be You,’” she said, the song I’d heard her sing in the kitchen of the house she’d lived in with my father, and where she remained alone for seven years after he died.

There are two versions of that night that I picture in my mind. In one, my mother clutches the instructor’s arms as she moves her feet in tiny, tentative increments. She is small, a little stooped, and her skin is pallid against her short gray hair. She is concentrating, willing herself to stay upright, barely hearing the song.

In the other, she is gliding, her satiny pants flowing around her ankles, her pearls glistening in the light from a chandelier. Her lips form a rosy smile and her cheeks are blushing as she sings along with the music: “It had to be you, it had to be you…” She has forgotten her age, as have I.

~ Susan Hodara

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Elusive Memory

7/24/2014

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Memories are elusive. Sometimes they come in broken pieces, like dreams; sometimes they’re confusing and you find yourself surprised that they happened.

One of the greatest challenges of writing memoir is the choppiness of memory. You might have a strong image of your mother cooking breakfast, but you can’t connect it with a particular event. You might remember that you had measles, but you can’t recall the details of the experience.

People often ask if it’s okay to make things up to fill in the gaps. The answer is no. One of the most basic and important tenets of memoir is that it’s the truth – your truth. It’s the truth of what you carry with you from your past. The minute you veer away from that – add a straw hat or make up a location or throw in a line of dialogue that you don’t really recall – you are breaking your pact with your reader, and with yourself. Memoir comes from your life. If you want to embellish, call it fiction.

There are ways to work with the slippery realities of memory. Often my starting point is a clear but isolated image – like a tiny movie that begins and ends abruptly. I believe it’s there for a reason; it holds some significance. So I describe the image: my mother is here, my brothers are there, the weather is warm, the wind is blowing through the window, I have a sore throat.

I’ve found that through the process of writing, more memories emerge. When we decided to write our book, one of my biggest fears was that I didn’t remember enough. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to fill my section with stories. But by sitting down and starting with the few distinct memories I had, other moments resurfaced, details unfolded, and new truths were revealed. It was like finding buried treasure, and I was finally able to tell the story I wanted to tell.

~Susan Hodara

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Just Write

6/2/2014

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Whenever we do readings, many audience members are anxious to tell us how much they identify with our experiences, and to share stories of their own mothers. In response, the four of us have been offering mother memoir workshops. After we’ve read from our book and talked a bit about memoir, the participants write about their own mothers. It might be for fifteen minutes, or even just five, the scratching of pens and the clicking of keyboards the only sounds in the room. Then one by one they read aloud what they’ve written.

Images of mothers materialize, this one in a wide-brimmed hat, that one sunning herself at the beach. Daughters idolize their mothers, or hate them, or can’t wait for them to come home from work. They watch their mothers reading magazines, preparing food, applying lipstick, and zipping up a fancy dress. One women wept as she read about her mother being beaten by her father and calling to her for help. In her story, she was a little girl; now her long gray hair was piled onto her head, but the memory still burned.

I am always inspired by the power of the details and the depth of emotion that emerge so quickly, so spontaneously. These snippets of memories culled in just minutes demolish the excuse of not having enough time or of not being in the right frame of mind. They are testimony to the long-running wisdom behind the craft: just write.

~Susan Hodara

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A Second Look

4/13/2014

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My father died in January. The house where he lived, where I grew up, where my mother and brother and sisters and grandparents and great-grandmother and great-aunt had all lived at one time, is now empty. Empty of people, that is. It’s still full of stuff.

My siblings and I have to clean it out and clean it up. We have to sell the old place.

I went there early this morning. I pulled a chair into the kitchen, climbed on it, and started taking down all the potholders Mom had tacked on the walls. I didn’t count but my guess is she had twenty up there. She used them as decorations. They were embroidered with flowers and vegetables. They’d been hung along the top of the wall above the cabinets for so long that they were dusty and grimy. As I was piling them on the dining room table my sister Debi walked in. She grabbed a trash bag, shook it open, and slid the potholders off the table into the bag.

“You don’t want these, do you?” she asked.

“Nope,” I said.

My mother was a clutterer. Knick-knacks everywhere. Shelves, windowsills, end tables, any flat surface - covered. Not one wall in that house has more than a few inches of naked space. She loved to go to garage sales, flea markets, and craft fairs and bring home more stuff. To her it was cute or pretty or funny, and that’s all that mattered. The only problem was all that junk collected dust, and Mom did not like to spend much time cleaning. The house always looked neat, and it was always welcoming and homey, but if you looked closely, you could see the layers of dust growing denser as time passed.

After Mom died, my father developed a schedule for his cleaning. But by this point, the crust of dust on all the knick-knacks had become a thick shroud, and my father’s efforts weren’t enough to wipe it away.

Debi and I laughed at the ghostly imprints left behind by all the things we cleared away. A donut where a wreath of dried flowers had been. When we removed a narrow shelf from the dining room wall, there appeared the silhouette of an erect penis. Flower pots stuck to the windowsills and had to be pried off. We’d hold up each object, like a game of show and tell, and ask, “Do you want this?” Nine times out of ten the answer was, “No.”

I did want the crystals Mom had hung with lace ribbon in the dining room window. Debi said, “Fine, they’re yours.” I had bought them for my mother. Going through the dining room and living room I came across other knick-knacks that I’d given to her. A birdcage, made of wood, Victorian-looking, painted a pale blue, with pink rose decals along the wider bars. I remember loving it when I bought it for her. I must have been a teenager. I don’t think she liked it very much, though she wouldn’t have told me that.

Many of the gifts I gave my mother were, in her eyes, strange. Like the crystals. Things I liked. One Christmas I gave her a huge box wrapped in newspaper. She looked so excited, like a little kid, as she opened it. But then I knew. I saw her face: her disappointment. Well, maybe it was puzzlement. I had bought her a model of a tall colonial sailing ship. I had thought she would go crazy for it, but when I saw her looking at it, I realized I had no idea why I thought she’d want something like that. It became the perfect dust collector. Mom put it on the corner shelf in the dining room, a prominent position, and it sat there for years. When my nephew Billy was a toddler he’d cry to play with it, and so she would take it down for him. Soon the strings holding the sails together were broken, the sails themselves in tatters, and now she had a good excuse. “I’m so sorry, but I think I have to throw this out.”

Debi and I were working away when my cell phone rang. It was my boss. “What happened?” she asked. I told her I’d stopped by the house and got caught up in some reminiscing. She was fine with that and understood. I have a very nice boss.

“I’m going to stay for awhile,” Debi said. “If I think there’s anything you might want to keep I’ll put it aside.”

“I don’t want anything.”

As I was driving to work I thought about all the stuff Debi and I had tossed into the trash. Were we pretending that it was easy? Easy to empty a house of things, perhaps. But what about the memories? I think about how it will feel to shut the front door for the last time and walk away.

Then I remember the giant duck cookie jar - or maybe it’s a goose. And the paint-by-number “tapestry” of a red barn that my mother had done. She wrote the year on the back, 1966. The frame is broken, but I could fix it. Maybe I should take a second look.

~Vicki Addesso

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Phoning Mom

1/5/2014

Growing up, I felt I had little to say to my mother. Now I speak with her on the telephone every day.

I don’t mean a quick hello-how-are-you kind of checking in; often we talk for nearly half an hour. And because we’ve spoken the day before, there isn’t much news we have to share. But I know the particulars of my mother’s life: the television programs she watches, the trouble she’s having with her Hebrew homework, the stir-fry she made with all the vegetables in her refrigerator that were getting old. I know about the books she’s reading, the floor she’s having installed in her kitchen, the walk she took or is about to take when we say goodbye.

It started a few years ago when she ended up in the hospital after a fall. Following a visit of several days, daily phone calls were the best way to alleviate my worries about her, and to offer her some distraction until she could return home. When she did, my calls became less frequent — until she fell a few months later and was back in the hospital once again.

I’m the one who calls her, usually late in the afternoons. And because I’m generally not one for prolonged telephone conversations, I prefer to talk when I’m doing something else. Sometimes I chop garlic or unload the dishwasher or fold laundry; if the weather’s nice, I’ll use my cell phone and go for a walk. I have to confess that there are days when I wish I could take a break — when the call begins to feel like an obligation.

Then the other day I got an early morning email from my brother, who lives with his family a few miles from my mother. On the subject line I read “Mom (she’s fine)” and my breath stopped. My mother had been in the hospital the previous night, I learned. She’d been feeling dizzy, something related to the timing of her blood pressure medication. “She was discharged about 3 a.m.,” he wrote. “She’s probably sleeping now.”

I waited an hour before I called her. She filled me in on the details of the episode; she was okay, she said, planning on taking it easy for the day. As I listened, it struck me that no matter how mundane our conversations, they have become a part of my life. They are a touchstone, a simple pleasure that I already know I will miss. It is a gift that I get to have them at all.
~Susan Hodara

Solo

11/17/2013

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I have a close friend who, in a span of seven years, lost her father and grandmother to cancer, her brother to lymphoma, and then her husband to a car accident over an icy bridge that should've been marked. Shortly before her husband’s death, she discovered she was pregnant. She and her husband already had a toddler, and she had a daughter by a previous marriage. Here my friend was, in mourning, and knee deep in motherhood, dealing with it alone.

Over the years, when my sons were testing my limits, I sometimes thought of her. When a difficult decision had to be made, I sometimes thought of her. When my husband offered to pick up the boys from a friend’s house so I could make dinner or I was simply tired, I sometimes thought of her.

At her daughter's wedding this past summer, after the ceremony, my friend was sitting alone in the front row, her curly blond hair framing her profile, the sun setting. My husband and I were seated behind her, and I was thinking of how far she’d carried her children. Then I noticed an ever so slight trembling, and I drifted over to hug her hard. Yes, we were celebrating her daughter’s joy over having found love, but I was also celebrating all that I valued in her, even the quiet tears. I thought: Look at what you’ve done. You’ve raised three bright children who are personable and caring. Later I told her these same thoughts, realizing that I could only imagine the challenges and sacrifices that she, or any single mother, had to face.

During the process of writing our collaborative memoir about mothers and daughters, I explored a mother’s role, my own as well as my co-authors’, and I followed the sweeping impact, the indelible fingerprint she leaves on her child’s spirit. For many reasons, I’m lucky to know my friend, but when it comes to motherhood, she has shown me another side of the story, a narrative suffused with an inimitable resilience and fire.

~ Lori Toppel

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In the Eye of the Beholder

10/8/2013

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“I have a problem with any memoir about a person who is no longer alive to defend themselves or tell their side of the story,” wrote a family member who was displeased with my section of our book.

“First of all,” I wrote in a reply to the e-mail, “if people could only write memoirs about those who are still alive, there wouldn’t be many memoirs.”

But the comment led me to review each of my stories to assure myself that they were fair. I had written about my impressions of my mother when I was a child, my memories of times she had supported and helped me, her independent spirit, and events of her life as she had related them. In only one story was I critical of her actions.

Knowing my mother – who was proud of my writing career – I think she would pretty much agree with what I wrote about her. Perhaps her memories would be a little different, but not so much that she would need to defend herself. Even in the story that criticized her, I believe she might say, “Maybe you’re right, Joan. Maybe I should have acted differently.”

In my e-mail to the family member, I pointed out that all but one of my stories were positive, thus implying that they did not require a defense. The family member has not yet responded.

~Joan Potter

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Fathers

9/8/2013

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At our readings, after we have shared excerpts of our stories, we invite the audience to ask questions. Inevitably, someone wants to know whether the four of us would consider writing another book together — and how do we feel about the topic of fathers?

My response has always been “never,” but recently I’m not so sure.

My mother has been dead for sixteen years. My father is eighty-four and still lives in the house where I grew up. But even though it’s just minutes from where I live, I rarely see him. My relationship with him was painful, difficult, damaging. Yet something has changed since he read our book.

Although I had been writing stories about my mother for years, it terrified me to publish them, mostly because of the thought that my father might read them. I never told him I’d written them, and when our book was published, I didn’t tell him about it. But somehow he found out. And without my knowing, he asked my brother to order a copy for him, and he read it.

One day he called and told me. He said that he admired my honesty, and that he was shocked at some of the things he had never known about me. He apologized for not being a better father. Then he asked if he could buy seven more copies to send to family and friends.

I brought the books to him, and we sat at his dining room table. He thumbed through his copy and read a few passages aloud. I listened to my words being spoken by my father. He read softly, slowly, and with gentleness. He was not angry. He was sorry.

Since that day we have been talking, hesitantly, and in circles, around the things we know but cannot yet say. This is a man who had hurt me, a man I feared. Now when I’m with him, I am nervous but not quite scared. Neither of us knows where we are headed. Maybe some day I will write about where we end up.

~Vicki Addesso

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On Second Thought

7/30/2013

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It wasn’t until my mother’s second reading of my section of our book that she told me it made her sad. The first time she read it (as I waited for days, edgy and unsettled, terrified about how it might make her feel), she seemed to like it. “Some of the early scenes were a little upsetting,” she said on the telephone, “but it ended up so nicely.”

I tried not to think about the brash histories I’d written and my damning observations: my mother’s submission in the face of my father’s temper, the persistent yearning I carried for an emotional connection with her, and my often misguided activities as a young woman that I insinuated were the result of her passivity. But my mother was happy that our book had been published, and she bought copies to give to her friends.

Then, a few months later, without my knowing, she read it again. This time, she told me she felt bad about the kind of mother she’d been to me. She wasn’t angry; she didn’t try to defend herself. She knew it was all true, and it filled her with regret. “I wish I had a second chance,” she said.

I sat holding the phone, reeling. I searched frantically for words to obliterate the sentences I’d written. “Oh, that? That’s not really what I meant,” I wanted to say, but how could I? I’d written exactly what I’d meant. What had I been thinking?

The fact was, I hadn’t been thinking — not about how my mother would react to my stories. I put her aside while I was writing. It was the only way I could be honest in how I presented my past.

My mother’s response was to be expected. What saved me was the way our story ended: she and I finding each other, establishing the kind of mother-daughter relationship that had been thwarted decades earlier. She was redeemed, and so was I.
~Susan Hodara

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Kraft American Singles

Dancing in the New Year

Elusive Memory

Just Write

A Second Look

Phoning Mom

Solo

In the Eye of the Beholder

Fathers

On Second Thought

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