FOR ALL THE ups and downs in my relationship with my mother, I never doubted that I needed her and that she needed me. I’d chosen her over my father, if reluctantly. However, not all of her sons saw her that way. Ronald also lived in Denver, but we almost never saw him, and he was growing increasingly estranged from her, as slights imagined and real built to a breaking point.
One day, when I was fifteen, Ronald suddenly announced that he wanted nothing to do with our mother. Now in his early twenties, he told her that she had been a bad mother and that he planned to move as far away as possible because there was “not enough room in Denver” for the two of them. Her unforgivable betrayal, apparently, was my mother’s kindness to Ronald’s girlfriend, Dawn, during a tumultuous moment when he and Dawn had temporarily broken up. Now that they were back together, Ronald announced, they were moving to the other side of the world: New Zealand. After years of conciliatory efforts by my mother, Ronald finally began communicating with her again, and she spent the rest of her life tiptoeing around him. Her diaries during this period are littered with self-tortured entries about what went wrong between her and Ronald: “I do feel guilt, lots of it, and for what I don’t know, except that he probably needed an extra measure of love.”
It wasn’t only her, though. We all tiptoed around Ronald on the rare occasion that we saw him. No one could hold a grudge quite like he did: he had cut off contact with Grandpa Rich after Grandpa chastised him for not finding a job; he had a falling-out with Greg, his best friend and roommate in Denver, because of a perceived slight; he suddenly stopped talking to our cousin Alan, and this later continued even as Alan was dying of cancer. Ronald never cut ties with our father, but he was always critical and kept his distance.
I hadn’t been close to him, either; had barely seen him since we lived together at the commune in Berkeley. In Denver, he did take me skiing a few times. He always insisted on racing down the slopes to see who could ski the fastest. The year I was fourteen, he gave me a lift ticket for Christmas. Joel came with us, though he’d never even been on skis before, and I myself had only skied a handful of times. As soon as we got to the ski area, Ronald took off on his own, leaving me to introduce Joel to skiing, though I was almost a beginner myself. As Ronald got on the lift, I shouted at him as loud as I could, “You asshole!” We didn’t see Ronald again until the lifts closed for the day.
Joel was hopeless; the ski patrol ended up banning him from the slopes for recklessness. He didn’t mind—it was a “bourgeois sport” anyway—so he spent the afternoon watching football on the TV in the ski lodge. Hours later, Joel’s jeans were still soaked from falling—neither one of us owned snow pants.
When Ronald finally showed up, he was fuming that I had called him an asshole in public. “How dare you insult me like that? How dare you! I should just leave you here.” On the two-hour drive back to Denver on I-70, Ronald kept threatening to pull over and leave me by the side of the road. “That would teach you a lesson,” he yelled at me as I slunk down in the backseat of his white Subaru. “You should be grateful I brought you skiing, but no, you insult me.” Joel stayed out of it. Ronald had never been much of a big brother to me, but this was the end of any pretense.
Before he and Dawn moved to New Zealand, Ronald had a big yard sale. I told him our mother wanted a few small items they were getting rid of and asked if we could come pick them up in a borrowed car. Sure, Ronald said, as long as our mother stayed in the car. She did, parking in front of the house with the engine running. Ronald did not even glance toward the car. As bad as I felt for her, there was no point in confronting Ronald. It wasn’t going to change his mind. I quickly found the things my mother wanted and ran back to the car. As we drove off, my mother asked how Ronald was doing, whether he had asked about her, whether he had said anything at all about her. I didn’t reply—which was a reply of sorts—and her disappointment was visible.
My mother took Ronald’s rejection hard, telling everyone that her son had “denounced” her. It tormented her. The more depressed she grew, the angrier I became at Ronald. Sure, he had grievances, I thought to myself. But didn’t we all? Well, yes, Ronald would say—he had urged me to cut her off, too. Maybe he blamed our mother for not being around to get him out of juvenile detention when he was arrested after fighting with his girlfriend. Or maybe he resented her for giving me more attention and letting him bum around South America by himself when he was only fourteen. Perhaps something else happened that I didn’t know about. Whatever had happened to Ronald, the middle child who got lost in the divorce and had basically been on his own since his early teens, I still thought he was being cruel.
I did my best to console my mother. “Peter doesn’t like me wringing my hands over the situation with Ronald,” she wrote in her diary, “or to blame myself at all.” One day when my mother was especially down, I wrote her a letter to try to describe the person I thought she was, and to assure her that her youngest son still loved her, understood her, and would never give up on her:
Mami, mom, mum, mama, Carol, Andrea . . . She is many people at different times of her life trying to figure out which person she wants. A mother, a housewife, a swinging single, an adventurer, a lover, a feminist, a runner, a saver, a peacemaker, a revolutionary. She likes a little of each person so she switches and adds and takes away from the various persons to make the next day a challenge and exciting experience. She survives day by day on hope and without this hope she would have no will to survive in the world. She fights for what she believes in but she slowly changes these beliefs over the years.
She’s not attracted to older men because they have in them some of the things she rejected, so she is satisfied with her brief but sweet excitement with the younger men she falls in love with, a new challenge to change these men into the sculptures she wants until they go on to other adventures and new experiences leaving her behind or she leaving them behind while she heals her broken heart with new problems. It would be a dead world for her without problems.
She sits back and watches her sons grow up, none of them the way she planned, and she wonders and watches her youngest son grow out of phases and clothes. She wonders at how he will turn out because he’s gone through so much with her, she hopes some good has rubbed off on him from her, she learns from him, he learns from her. She realizes that he’s started going his separate way and that he’s started to have a few ideas that are different from hers. She realizes she hasn’t kept him totally isolated from the evil American society, yet at the same time she’s glad he experiences everything because she wants him to be his own person for better or worse. She sees things in him, the good and the bad that will be with him whether or not he’s a revolutionary or a fink. She knows that her son will probably be somewhere in between, some good and some bad, but she also knows he loves her very much and that no matter what happens she’ll love him, too, just like she loves her other two sons, but he’ll never denounce her like his older brother has done.
She is a strong woman with many weaknesses who is critical of everything whether good or evil. She is confused because she doesn’t understand life, but no one else understands it either.
After reading it, my mother didn’t say anything but just gave me a warm hug, holding me tightly for longer than I ever remember her doing. More than two decades later, right after my mother’s sudden death, I was sorting through her belongings and came across a sealed envelope with the words For Peter handwritten across the front. Inside, I found that letter, with a photo of the two of us stapled to it.