My mother wouldn’t tell me the name of her surgery—it was for old ladies, and she didn’t want to talk about it. No, it wasn’t dangerous, yes, she’d stay the night in a hospital, and she wanted me there and at home with her for a few days afterward. My father would be there too, but he wasn’t good around sick people or hospitals, though he’d been a sick person in a hospital twice in recent memory.
I’m not sick, she assured me. There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s a female surgery, she said, like that answered things.
I made plans to drive to Virginia, to the distant hospital in Suffolk where her doctor practiced. We had reservations at a Quality Inn that looked seedy even on the website (unlike the spiffier Holiday Inn Express, the Quality Inn would allow my parents’ dog).
It was August of the hottest year on record. Along the highway, grasses and weeds were yellowed and burnt. Out west, farmers struggled to feed their livestock; hay was high, water dear. A drought map of North Carolina showed every county in dangerous red-brown territory, and our well at home had to be managed carefully: brief showers, short laundry cycles, no guests. The Haw River was drained to a bathwater stillness, too low to paddle more than short stretches.
What bothers me, a biologist friend told me the last time we were on the water together, is the idea that there is something wrong with me. The idea that I am damaged, faulty.
She was strong, healthy, beautiful, successful. She was also infertile. Our shared condition was why we met, through another friend who knew about our mutual struggle. Of course, I told her, you aren’t damaged. But her body wasn’t working the way she wanted it to, and mine wasn’t either.
What is wrong with having something wrong with you, I wondered on my drive to Virginia—windows closed, too hot then for anything but the blaring air conditioner. I had told my mother almost as little about my infertility or treatment as she had now told me about her surgery. Our broken parts—the broken female parts, at least—were an uncommon silence between us.
In Of Woman Born, her book of memoir and cultural criticism about the patriarchy-suffused experience of motherhood, Adrienne Rich writes about the need women felt in her youth to present to the world an image of health, industry, and fertility. Already a serious poet when she married at twenty-four, she remembers taking up a broom the day after her wedding, thinking, “This is what women have always done.” While Rich was ambivalent about how motherhood would affect her ambitions (by the birth of her first child, she’d won the Yale Younger Poets prize, and before her marriage she had wanted to travel and become a journalist), she knew that “to have a child was to assume adult womanhood to the full, to prove myself, to be ‘like other women.’” As a pregnant woman—she had three sons in quick succession—she writes that she felt, “for the first time in my adolescent and adult life, not-guilty. The atmosphere of approval in which I was bathed—even by strangers on the street, it seemed—was like an aura I carried with me, in which doubts, fears, misgivings, met with absolute denial.”
The pregnant body suggests a story we think we know: health, love, happiness. That pregnancy is in fact a dangerous condition that tends to make women poorer and more vulnerable to violence and some diseases—and certainly less likely to write books—isn’t something we talk about. We instead learn, early on, that the inconveniences particular to the female body—getting a period, wearing a bra, worrying about becoming or not becoming pregnant—are properly suffered in secret, even in shame. We learn not to talk about “doubts, fears, misgivings,” related to the female body—and we celebrate instead the visible condition of pregnancy, in part because it is so visually obvious but also because it has been done to a woman and can be seen (incorrectly) as something she endures or even passively enjoys rather than as something she has to handle.
My own mother remembers her 1970s pregnancies with a fondness that emphasizes how natural and intuitive they were. She didn’t have an ultrasound for either pregnancy but “knew” that I was a girl and my brother was a boy. In fact, she didn’t see a doctor—there were no obstetricians in our county—until she was seven months along with me, and he and my mother disagreed about my due date (she was right, the doctor almost a month off). Both of her births were natural births. That was the story she told me.
Except, I learned later, for the Demerol she took intravenously in the last stage of labor with me. Of course I wouldn’t have judged my mom for any pain relief she needed, opiates or an epidural or even complete sedation, which Rich experienced for all three of her births. But my mother needed the story of my birth to be about nature taking its course and the perfection of the experience. “You didn’t even cry,” she always told me proudly.
Blond, five feet tall, and one hundred pounds, my mother sits on a pillow to see over the steering wheel of her fourteen-year-old Mercedes station wagon and was once pulled over by a county sheriff who assumed she was a child on a joyride. On school field trips, as parent chaperone, she was often mistaken for a student by my teachers and was once yanked up by her hair while she tried to get something out of our lunch bag (that this would be considered an appropriate thing to do to a child is another matter). Her lifestyle is a specialized one: she knows how to build a roaring fire in a wood stove but not where the gas goes in her car. I’ve registered several email accounts for her, but she has never checked them, not once. For a small person, she has large bones—big, knobby artist’s hands, knock-knees. Her shoes (she has many; none are sneakers) are boats. Scoliosis, uncorrected in her childhood, makes her short-torsoed, and her arms and legs are disproportionately long and thin. She excels at rowing, kayaking, and waterskiing and walks like a New Yorker with somewhere to be; I have never seen her run or play a team sport.
Before my grandmother died, it was a tradition in my family for the women (my grandmother, my mother, and my aunt) to attend their yearly mammograms together, on the same day. Maybe you can credit the pervasive pink-ribbon campaigns, but breast health appeared to exist in a separate realm from other women’s health issues—not a source of embarrassment but a chance for bonding. On mammogram day my mother, aunt, and grandmother each took their turn at the imaging machine and then went out for lunch and pedicures. Once, when I was in college, Mom had a follow-up appointment at a specialist’s office near my apartment in Richmond. I met her there to wait with her, and while she was gone—it felt like hours—I had a panic attack in the floral-wallpapered waiting room. I felt suddenly as though a lobe of my left lung had slipped through my rib cage and was caught on one of the bones. I couldn’t sit up in my chair and had to lean over, breathing shallowly, until she returned. Just a problem with the machine, she explained lightly. It took my breathing and posture the rest of the day to recover.
Before I had a child, whenever I imagined what was most terrifying to me, it was always the loss of my mother. Ostrich-like, I tried to avoid it, like thoughts of climate change, water shortages: inevitable catastrophes, a long way off. It was the “greatest disaster that could happen,” as Virginia Woolf remembered the death of her own beloved mother. William Maxwell, another writer who lost his mother young, fictionalized mother loss in So Long, See You Tomorrow similarly as “the worst that could happen.”
“After that,” he wrote, “there were no more disasters.” Maxwell was writing from the perspective of a lonely, abandoned boy, recounting the immediate atmosphere of shocked, uncommunicative despair that overtook his household. Woolf writes about her mother’s death directly, as an abandonment that happened and continued to happen, until her own life ended.
Childlessness bound me to my mother in a strange way—at my age she had two children and was busy making school lunches and dinners, overseeing after-school activities, keeping the house running. She talked to her mother regularly but not every day, as I did (there was no telephone for a while on the farm where we lived when I was little, and then only a party line).
Other than Richard, she was the person I knew best, the person I imagined there with me for all the biggest moments of my life. She accompanied me on parts of my first book tour, fetching coffee for us in the mornings but also losing her wallet (stuffed with cash earned selling flowers at the Walkerton Farmers’ Market) along the way. She expertly read subway maps but nearly fainted when she stepped in gum. I found the wallet, iced her sandaled foot and peeled away the gum. She took care of me, and I took care of her.
I suppose what I was most afraid of, when I thought of losing her, was an untethering from family, from female-kind. Who would wait with me in a few years while I took my turn at the mammogram machine? My brother called us “the non-kid-having cousins” because all of our adult cousins had children, while we, in our way, were children: still reporting our achievements to our parents, eager for their approval. We had no non-kid-having models in our family—our surfer uncle had a son, and his son had two kids. Our unstable aunt? Two kids, still in college, or so we were told. My dad’s two brothers had kids, and their kids had kids—we weren’t even sure how many at this point—while our parents, for years, talked of granddogs and grandcats.
I waited with Gus, my parents’ mini schnauzer and a fine approximation of a toddler, while my mother completed pre-op paperwork in the hospital and my dad paced the parking lot, talking on his cell phone. Mini schnauzers are known for attaching fiercely to one owner, and Gus is heartbroken when my mother leaves him. He splayed at my feet on the hot sidewalk, dejected. Occasionally he thought he recognized a Walkerton neighbor ambling in or out of the hospital’s automatic doors and perked up and stood at attention until the stranger passed without admiring him.
She didn’t have a good feeling about the hospital, my mother said on her return, bending to take Gus’s gently offered paw. It was so far from home, and everyone inside looked sick. Not hospital-sick, she said. Life-sick. Why hadn’t she switched doctors already? Her mother was gone, and she barely spoke to my aunt. But here we were: suffering in Suffolk.
The motel had a turbid, greenish swimming pool, and the nonsmoking rooms smelled of smoke. We killed time by carefully checking the beds for bedbugs, scratching imaginary bites, changing into rooms that weren’t any better, and walking Gus around the far corners of the property, where we could find the shade and privacy he required to do his business. We were the first party seated at the only sit-down restaurant in town.
The next morning we checked Mom in to the surgical center. She looked smaller than ever on the gurney when we kissed her goodbye. I wasn’t worried about the surgery, exactly; I knew it was low risk (though I still didn’t know the name or even the goal of the operation) and that she’d spend only a single night in the hospital. My father, by contrast, had recovered for almost a week in a hospital after his triple bypass and even longer for a follow-up surgery that nearly killed him. He’d come away from that experience changed. Sometimes now his feet hurt almost too badly to walk, and he was more prone to the kind of blunt, death-anticipating commentary I associate with the elderly. I suppose that was what I worried about most: that the surgery would change her.
My dad and I took turns walking around the hospital, which had been donated by and named for the Obici family, of the Planters peanut fortune. A Mr. Peanut statue greeted patients in the lobby. The gift shop sold a complement of “Lil’ Peanut” baby gifts—onesies, bibs, blankets—though I read, in a commemorative hospital exhibit, that Amedeo and Louise Obici could not have children. The display suggested that they focused instead on charity work, on helping the children in their community.
I thought of two of my friends at home, both going through their first IVF cycles. I would miss our support-group meeting this month, but I imagined using my turn around the table, in September, to tell the story of wandering the peanut hospital while my mom had some unnamed female surgery. This was what I liked best about attending the group—storytelling, recounting the lowest or strangest moments of the month before—though lately it felt as though we had devolved into more practical discussions. Which doctor to consult, which pills to try, which medication to inject where. Maybe we’d evolved instead; maybe the practical was more hopeful—I thought this sometimes, until we returned, next month, and found that the pills and supplements and injections described so earnestly the month before hadn’t worked. The narrative failed because it was about only one thing: becoming pregnant. I needed my story to be more flexible.
Mom came out of anesthesia crying. Common, a nurse-anesthesiologist friend told me later: teenage boys fight, and older women cry.
I stood next to her and took her hand. “What’s wrong? Are you hurting?”
“I’m crying about my sister,” she said bitterly.
“Do you want me to call her?”
“No!”
My mother and her sister had barely spoken for more than a year, since my grandmother’s death and an ugly fight over her estate. My aunt wanted to sell my grandmother’s things at an estate sale. My mom thought this was tacky and careless; plus, she wanted everything for herself. Then she found out that my aunt had raided my grandmother’s bank account before she died. Now we weren’t allowed to say my aunt’s name. This was another benefit of having children, I thought—with so many tethers, you could afford to let some go.
The nurse, a smiling, middle-aged woman, checked my mom’s vitals but didn’t seem concerned about her tears or nausea. She told me that she wished she could have the surgery my mom had just had, like maybe my mom was ungrateful, and I wondered again what it was that had been done to her. Nothing glamorous, surely. And why couldn’t this woman, a nurse in a hospital, have any surgery she needed?
“It comes from having kids,” the nurse told me. “You can’t hold your pee.”
You can’t hold your pee? This was obviously something my mom hadn’t wanted me to know, but here was the nurse, talking as if my mother wasn’t in the room. I looked over at her, tiny in the hospital bed and writhing in discomfort.
“I think she needs something,” I told the nurse. “For nausea.”
They all say they need something, the nurse said. It’s normal.
I held my mom’s hand and danced a jig to make her feel better. These were the things I knew how to do: child things, diversions. I reprised our suffering in Suffolk joke and made fun of the nurse, slightly out of her earshot.
“I could stay here,” I suggested, patting the guest cot by the window. “It’s nicer than the motel.”
My dad, returning from his phone-calling peregrinations, thought this was a good idea: he’d go home to Walkerton, get a good night’s sleep, and pick us up in the morning. He’d already packed the car. Here was my bag. Have fun, feel better, he loved us.
My parents are progressive, liberal people, but in their forty-plus years together, they’ve assumed old-fashioned gender roles—my mom does all the cooking, even fried chicken and barbecue (she is vegetarian); my dad fixes the many things that can go wrong in a two-hundred-year-old house. She stayed home with us and painted in spare moments; he worked as a carpenter and contractor. In particular, my mother has done most of the caretaking our family has needed. She took care of my father’s mother before she died of cancer, and of his brother, another cancer victim, before that.
Raised for ten years of her life in the nursing home run by her grandmother Donna, she must have picked up on the mix of gentleness and toughness it required, the strong stomach, the unflappability, the constant attention to pills, the clock, and laundry. Donna’s patients lived in relative luxury, surrounded by the kinds of things they would have had in their own homes: silver tea services and fine china and pressed linens. The doors to their rooms stood wide open, and my mother, who identified strongly with Kay Thompson’s spoiled and neglected Eloise, visited them daily to ask for treats or make silly faces, but she saw, all around her, the constant work of keeping them clean and fed and alive. At night, some of the patients had terrors and would scream or moan until my great-grandmother or another nurse could soothe them. Once, working to resuscitate a dying man, a nurse fainted, and Donna kicked her under the bed and continued chest compressions. She trained her staff to be endlessly polite, mentioning disability or illness with embarrassed euphemisms; incontinent patients were asked if they had to make water.
I have sometimes thought I inherited this gentle-toughness too. In the Brooklyn elementary school where I taught in my twenties, I was the go-to replacement for the squeamish, and I remember cleaning an unfortunate kindergartener, another teacher’s student, head to toe after a bathroom accident. The custodian noticed me crouched beside the girl with my rapidly diminishing box of wet wipes and said, approvingly, “You a country girl, Ms. Boggs.”
It was one of the best compliments I received in that school and something I remind myself of when I have to deal with unexpected messes. But I was hardly any help at all when my grandmother developed Alzheimer’s-type dementia—no good at what we called the bathroom business, when my mother and I visited together and were left to care for Jeannie on our own. Mom did it all—walking her to the toilet, easing her onto the seat, wiping her bottom—while I stood in the doorway, spraying Febreze.
She had her own difficulty with caring for her mother—she could not stand it when Jeannie took out her false teeth (which was often) and would turn away, crying, “No! Put them back in, Mama!” There was something painful and poignant in hearing her call my grandmother Mama, the name she’d used as a child, when Jeannie had so little awareness of our relationships and how we fit together.
Once Jeannie asked, while I was reading to her from The Little Prince, a book she might have read to me, “Where is my mommy?”
“Here I am!” my mother answered. “What do you need?”
There was no regret and no self-pity in identifying herself as her mother’s mother, perhaps because she’d been my mother too. This shape-shifting, transforming from child to nurse to parent and back again, is the caretaker’s neatest trick, and one that evaded me. I feared becoming only a mother to my mother, a lopsided orbit that would leave me, eventually, alone.
Midafternoon, I decided to take a walk while my mother slept. I wrote my cell phone number on the whiteboard in her room, next to Goals for Today (“Manage nausea,” “Walk”). Turning left and following the yellowish corridor, I exited the wing next to an infant’s nursery. There were people waiting, grandmas and grandpas, kids, holding pink and blue balloons, flowers and teddy bears. That one, a proud father said, pointing at the glass. I didn’t look but took out my phone and scrolled to my brother’s number.
“Make a casserole or something for after I leave,” I bossed him once I got outside. The sun was blazing; there was nowhere shaded to walk, hardly even any grassy spaces. I’d once imagined the birth of my own child—the people who would have waited for us—but now steeled myself to be the one waiting while my brother and his wife were in the delivery room. They weren’t expecting, not yet, but I was afraid of the jealousy I imagined for myself. I was already jealous of the capability I assumed they had, and ashamed.
“This is hard,” I told him.
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
I found a different way back to my mother’s room. We tried watching television, got bored, and for a while I amused my mother by reading, from my laptop, a semi public email rant from a disgraced former editor of a magazine I’d once written for. I shouted the all-caps parts and lowered my voice for the salacious parts about feet. I acted out a drunken come-on and read the goofily profane texts.
“No,” she said, clutching her side. “Laughing hurts.”
She held my arm on the way to the bathroom but didn’t want help changing the diaper-sized pad they’d given her for bleeding; she kept the door closed while she fumbled with it herself. I still had no real idea what they’d done, what stitching or removing or internal adjusting. I hadn’t googled it or asked the dismissive nurse for more details. All my mother would say was, “It feels wrong.” All the doctor would say, on his brief visit earlier, was that everything had gone perfectly.
My mother fell asleep once it was dark outside, and I lay on my side on the narrow, padded bench, covered in as many thin hospital blankets as I could scrounge. I’m good at falling asleep—a farm-kid’s talent—but if I wake up, it’s hard to find my way back. Sometime after midnight I became aware of noises. They were muffled at first, as if in a dream, then louder as a hall door opened and my mind focused. Someone was moaning in pain; someone else was shushing and soothing. It went on for a while, and I remember being afraid my mother’s pain medicine would wear off and she’d soon be moaning too.
I’d imagined that everyone on our quiet wing had been given my mother’s still-unnamed surgery or some similar minor corrective. But then I heard the unmistakable cause: a baby crying, shocked and sudden, right next to our room. We weren’t near the maternity ward, as I’d assumed walking past the nursery; we were in it, and all around us, all night, women moaned, grunted, and pushed. Their babies—miraculous, tiny, with perfect, messy, mewling cries—were born, wrapped in blankets, handed back to them; were snuggled and breast-fed; had their fingers and toes counted, and counted again. This is as close as you may ever get, I thought. It was all so perfectly awful—my aging mother in bed not ten feet away while women labored all around me—that it felt like a message from the universe. This is as close as you ever will get.
I pulled the blankets over my head, the thin pillow too. By now the sheet I’d stretched over the bench cushions had come untucked, and I pressed my face against the smooth vinyl. I cried, but it wasn’t the normal crying I’m used to, a response to thinking, an eventual giving up on not crying. It was abject and passive and barely connected to my brain at all; it was the crying I’m always warning my students against writing in their stories. “Tears filled my eyes.” “Tears rolled down my cheeks.” Tears pasted my face to the cushion.
The next morning Mom told me she’d heard the birthing women and crying babies, too. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is horrible.” She blamed Suffolk—how stupid and backward it was to put all the women in the same part of the hospital, like some kind of red tent of suffering.
Suffering certainly happened there, but it wasn’t a red tent or a place of shame. The maternity ward, like the one at the hospital where my support group met, was front and center: the one place in a hospital where people are supposed to be glad to go. That some people enter or leave a maternity ward terrified, alone, hurting, or in sorrow is not something we talk about. That the experience of maternity might cause someone to return decades later for surgery to repair the damage, and that a maternity ward might be a painful place for some of us, are other omissions of our culture.
But today Mom was feeling better. She could sit up and eat a little breakfast, rolled to her on a tray. Nurses came and went; they took her blood pressure and her temperature. She was in good shape to leave, the nurse said, if she felt as though we could handle things at home. Oh definitely, we both said. They began the process of discharging her.
Then another woman in scrubs came in, a large camera fitted with a flash slung around her neck. She smiled at Mom. “Where’s the baby?” she asked. “They always take them to the nursery right before I get there …”
Mom, who loves to be carded and didn’t mind that time the policeman thought she was a child, smiled and waved. “I’m the baby!” she said.
“There is no baby,” I explained.
It’s strange to feel jealous of someone in the excruciating pain of labor, someone you can’t see and don’t know. I would not have traded places with a laboring woman in Suffolk, Virginia, but, like my friend the biologist, I thought it was unfair that I would not pass into the same community of human experience. Adrienne Rich wrote in her diary of jealousy—another silence we maintain as women, the reality of our own envy—directed at “the barren woman who has the luxury of her regrets but lives a life of privacy and freedom.” She eventually repudiated the term “barren woman” and only a paragraph later in her diary entry acknowledges the love she has for her children, implicitly suggesting she’d never trade places with the childless.
On my drive back to Walkerton, on another blazing-hot day, I told Richard about my night in the hospital, how alienated and lonely I felt, and he reminded me that I couldn’t know what got those women there. Maybe someone there had the same problems we had, he said. Maybe they tried IVF and now they had a child. “I doubt it,” I said. I didn’t want his reasonable or positive perspective.
I bought Kotex for my mom, and groceries. I stayed a few days, cooking and doing laundry and watching reruns of Fashion Police with her. We didn’t talk about our time in Suffolk, the surgery or the maternity ward or whether she would ever be a grandmother. We didn’t talk about what might be wrong with me or wrong with her.
“Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other—beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival—a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal,” Rich writes in what she describes as the “core” of her memoir, the hardest and most crucial chapter. “[It is] the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.” Rich describes women who have powerful mental connections to their mothers in labor or who suddenly remember the smell of their mother when they breastfeed their own children. Menstruation, too, is an initiation into the rites of womanhood. But what about the subverted body—the one that doesn’t bleed on schedule, doesn’t endure labor or suckle an infant? What about the aging female body? The hospitalized female body? What about the body that isn’t alike in some way, the body that strays from the trajectory of womanhood through motherhood?
A fractious and eccentric mother-daughter pair once lived next to my family in Walkerton—Miss Anne, the matriarch of the family, and Miss Deirdre, her funny, profane daughter (“Goddamn it, Mama!” is the phrase I most associate with the younger woman). After they died, we found a laundry hamper in the pole barn behind their empty house stuffed with Miss Deirdre’s party dresses—frothy pastel ball gowns, strapless and uncomfortably boned. Mom and I aired them on the clothesline and kept them in a closet, for costumes and household decoration.
The day after we came home from Suffolk, I tried them all on, sucking in and zipping up, flouncing around the scattered cat dishes on their deck. Mom rested on the chaise longue in a purple hat, a yellow nightgown, and Mardi Gras beads. I wrapped my hair in a scarf like Little Edie in Grey Gardens, draped myself in costume jewelry. We took turns holding the tamest of Mom’s eleven cats—Tadpole and Hush Puppy, just kittens then—and snapping pictures.
I look back on the photos now and see my mother, an eccentric woman with two children, who has given paintings and sculptures away all her life, who dreamed of being a doting grandmother like her beloved Donna, who feeds and spays and neuters all the stray cats in her town, who frightened me as a child by writing checks to “Shitty Bank” and claiming that communism didn’t sound so bad by comparison with capitalism. Who has never been to Europe but sometimes talks about going with me. Who sleeps on seven down pillows and has a horror of gum chewing. Who keeps portfolios stuffed with every piece of paper my brother and I ever gave her. Whose mother kept a similar collection in her bedroom wardrobe. Whose mother died and left her alone—except that she had a daughter.
And there I am, hidden behind sunglasses and crinolines and kittens, someone who faints when she has blood drawn and was never any good at sports, who dreamed of having two kids like her mother but has been to Europe, who has published a book, has been a favorite and least-favorite teacher, a dutiful if sometimes less-than-useful daughter. In the background: a garden overgrown with zinnias and black-eyed Susans, pink crape myrtle blossoms strewn like confetti. It’s so humid I can feel the thick, hot air fogging my sunglasses when I look at the photos, so familiar that I know, by slant of light, exactly the time of day.
It’s eleven in the morning on August 9, seven days before my mother’s sixty-second birthday, eight days before my tenth wedding anniversary. We look young in the photos, and healthy.