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On Second Thought

7/30/2013

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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Unchanged Memory

6/24/2013

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I’m watching a dance competition, a reality show that I like to think is not skewed in any way. Three tappers are in flight across the stage, the music fast and playful. I realize I’ve been smiling, which makes me think of my mother. As trying as she became in her last years, I sometimes caught her smiling when engrossed in a particular television program – a Fred Astaire or Katherine Hepburn rerun, or a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet. Then, briefly, my mother rose above the bitterness and anger over her drawn-out divorce and ensuing loneliness. She must have been swept away. I remember her spectator grin, a sustained, gentle suggestion of love. The residual effects of her joy lingered for an hour or so until she stepped back into her reality.

Whenever I watch a show that moves me, a show that I’m sure would have moved her, too, I picture her sitting across the room. My recollection of her benevolent look is often a fleeting one; it’s never that poignant. It’s a moment when I feel her near me, her countenance one of pleasure and, I’ve come to think, forgiveness.
~Lori Toppel

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The True Line

5/22/2013

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As I recall the scene, my two sisters and I are standing side by side on a ridge overlooking red cliffs and desert sands in an Arizona recreation area close to the border of Nevada, where my sister Abby lives with her husband. We are there to spread our mother’s ashes, which Abby had been holding on to until the three of us decided what to do with them.

In my memory, we open the bag of ashes and take turns flinging them over the ridge, but the breeze blows some back to us, where they settle on our faces and clothing. I can hear my sister Linda saying something kind of mystical about this being a signal from our mother, and that’s what I related in the story I wrote in our book.

But after Abby read the story, she told me Linda hadn’t said that at all, that what she did say was a piece of ash had gotten under her contact lens. I like that remark. It’s more specific than my vague spiritual recollection, and it reflects Linda’s self-absorption. If I’d remembered the line—and if Linda actually said it—I’d have used it in my story.

My sister Abby has a different memory of the same event. She believes what I remember didn’t happen. I can’t change what seems true to me; I can’t adopt someone else’s memory because it would make a better story. So the contact lens line will be lost to history, only to appear in the deleted e-mail I got from Abby when she questioned my version of the incident.
~Joan Potter

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Thursday Mornings: "Missing Our Mothers"

4/24/2013

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There was a period when we were working on our book that we recorded conversations about different aspects of our experience together. We called them “Thursday Mornings at Ten.” Here’s one titled “Missing Our Mothers.”

Lori: I’ve found that when something’s going wrong, when something feels very dramatic in my life, or if I’m sad, I want to call my mother.

Joan: I know what you mean. When Roy was in the hospital after his cancer surgery, my mother was on my mind all the time. It was like she was hovering there, which was really weird. I wished I had been able to talk to her about it, and gotten her support.

Susan: Even though my mother is still alive, I already know what I will miss. It’s not so much her advice, but there’s something about her responses, the way she’ll say, “Oh yes, things can be hard,” or, “Time will make it better” — they’re clichés, but I know I can count on her to say something nice, completely judgment-free. That unquestioning acceptance — it’s so simple and kind.

Joan: I’m sorry my mother isn’t here to see some of the good things. She knew her first great-grandchild, Julia, when she was a toddler. Julia was such a terror, and my mother would say, “Oh my goodness, what is going to become of that child?” I would love for her to see Julia now, singing and playing her guitar.

Vicki: Yes, there are all those things they’ll never know. I remember moving into my house in 2001. I loved the house, but I had such a hard time when I moved in. Then my sister said to me, “You know, this is the first place you’ve lived in since Mommy died.” And she was right. I was making my home in a place that my mother would never be a part of.

Lori: I have no illusions that my mother would have changed. She would have continued to want attention, be difficult and demanding. But I think now I could have served her better, and that would have made her happier. That’s what I was always looking for: to make her happy, to see that smile.

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Guilt

4/8/2013

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I was writing about a night when my mother was drinking heavily. She was telling me a story I had never heard before, a secret about her own mother. I sat at my computer and typed, but I wondered: why am I writing this? I felt ashamed, guilty, not because of what my mother was saying and doing in this piece, but because I was writing it.

What belongs to me? What am I allowed to reveal?

I feel safer with fiction. There I can disguise, exaggerate, maneuver people and events into place and have it all make sense. Life isn’t like that. You have to take what you get and it doesn’t always make sense. My mother was a good mother, but on the night I was writing about I didn’t think that. I wanted her to stop drinking; I wanted her to be quiet.

When I read this piece in our writing group I was nervous. I thought, “I am making a mistake.” I was ruining the mother I had been sharing with the others those past months. When I finished reading they were quiet at first. Then Joan said she felt sorry for my mother. Susan found our intimacy touching. They seemed to understand; they did not judge her.

We talked about the writing. I listened, took notes, crossed out words or whole sentences.

But what I really needed to know was this: am I allowed to betray her?

~Vicki Addesso

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A Writer's Gang

3/23/2013

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I have an armchair in my office. It’s a comfortable spot in which to read, research, and reflect, but my Aussie mix sleeps in it just about every day while I write, unless she’s unlucky and one of my other two dogs grabs the chair first. It’s prime property. I’ve lost out. Do I care?

The truth is, if my dogs need a place to rest, sleep, or simply keep an eye on me while I write, that’s fine with me. They are accustomed to being close to me and have learned to take long naps either in the chair or on their two beds near my desk. Whenever I jump up, they’re quick to wag their tails as if in approval of whatever I’ve just written. If they hear the doorbell ring or the UPS truck at the gate, they’ll run downstairs, barking in unison. They are a force to reckon with; all three send out the message that visitors are not welcome. When the coast is clear, they return upstairs, reassume their places, sigh, and close their eyes.

In Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of A Dog she posits that families with dogs resemble more of a gang than the traditional pack: “If we are a gang, we are a merrily navel-gazing gang, worshipping nothing but the maintenance of our gang itself.” My dogs are cooperative and respectful. As much as I require my own undisturbed space when writing, they understand that they belong in it and are there to protect it.
~Lori Toppel

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Having My Way

3/9/2013

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I recently met a friend for lunch at an Indian restaurant in town. It’s a small space with about ten tables placed close together. We chose a table in the center of the room, but I was tempted by a nearby spot near a sunny window. So we moved. But once there, we realized the sun was so glaring through the window that we had to squint to read the menu. Apologizing to the server, we returned to our original seats.

I thought of my mother, who was never pleased with her first choice of a restaurant table. In a piece called “Having Her Way” in Still Here Thinking of You, I recall the ways in which she would – calmly but firmly – get what she wanted in certain situations, even once encouraging a group to give up their table so our family could sit there.

Her habits of persuasion appear in me from time to time. The other day, my daughter Kathy and I were reminiscing about a Richie Havens concert we’d attended a couple of years before. While he was singing a particularly gentle song, accompanied only by his guitar, a man and woman sitting directly in front of us decided to have a chat. I poked the woman on the back and told her to be quiet.

“You sounded so severe,” Kathy said. “It was kind of scary.”

“Well, they shut up didn’t they?” I said. “And don’t forget, I’m my mother’s daughter.”

~Joan Potter

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The habits...the set of a brow...

1/31/2013

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In his recent The New Yorker Personal History, “Becoming Them,” James Wood noted the similarity between his legs and his elderly father’s. “The other day,” he wrote, “I saw that I have the same calves, with the shiny, unlit pallor I found ugly when I was a boy, and with those oddly hairless patches at the back…”

I was reminded of my mother — of my mother’s leg, and by extension, of my own. In Still Here Thinking of You, I wrote about a parallel incident of suddenly spotting the likenesses between my legs and my mother’s while glimpsing her rarely seen bare leg on a visit to her home: “Then it strikes me: this is my own leg.” In my story, I am momentarily sad.

Wood’s piece is about the ways we take on elements of our parents as a way of mourning them, even before they are gone. The habits, the turn of a phrase, the set of a brow: we go on about our lives, but our parents are there.

The sadness I felt in identifying my mother’s leg as my own certainly anticipated her loss, and the role that my leg will then have in embodying a part of her that no longer exists. It is a role that I — that we who are all partly our parents in one way or another — rarely think about.

~Susan Hodara

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Forward>>

On Second Thought

Unchanged Memory

The True Line

Thursday Mornings: "Missing Our Mothers"

Guilt

A Writer's Gang

Having My Way

The habits...the set of a brow...

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