There followed the whole rest of my mother’s life, years crammed with activities and commitments, weeks busy with conversations (some) and monologues (many), day after day balancing her maternal, business, and civic duties, being always herself. She was always herself, Rida Howland. Because all four of us bore witness to those years, we possess a plethora of facts, most of them presented through four separate and perhaps equal points of view. Thus, there is an overabundance of information, and that is the first of the three great obstacles to understanding our mother.
The second is the woman herself. What was she thinking? What guided her in the things she chose to tell us and what she required of us, what advice she gave and which opinions she aired? Did she even have a plan? We seem unable to determine this, although I see to it that we keep on trying.
And that is the third obstacle: Me. My obstinacy. I insist on continuing to try to understand our mother, apparently convinced, first, that this can be done and second, that I can do it. I am after all a scholar, as well as a long-time observer of the woman. I possess both direct information—she said that, she did this—and inferred—that is, all the material I have gleaned by observing the women my sisters have become, guided and shaped as they were by the experience of our mother. I listen to what they say. That each of them has reached a different conclusion doesn’t surprise me.
“She was a realist,” Amy announces.
“And a perfectionist,” is Meg’s opinion. “About everything, and all of us, too.”
“Can a person be both a perfectionist and a realist?” I ask.
“A genuine humanist, too. I mean, as she got older,” Jo remarks. “Didn’t you think?”
“A humanist-realist-perfectionist? Is that possible?” I wonder at them.
“How about laying off the Socratic method for five minutes?” one of them will request, and another will comment, “What else can you expect from a college professor,” pronouncing the last two words if not with an actual sneer then certainly stripped of the respect usually accorded us.
“Pops was never like that,” the third will say.
“He had Mumma,” I point out.
“She wouldn’t have stood for it,” we agree.
We mimic her voice: “I was ahead of my times,” and laugh.
If the early part of Mumma’s life seems to have a narrative structure (one hurdle after another, o’erleapt), I suspect that this is only because they are the stories Mumma told about herself. She presented herself as she intended to be seen, perhaps made simple for our more simple minds, although it is equally possible that this is the person she believed she was. If she were telling the story of these subsequent years herself, would they also have clear dramatic shape and didactic purpose, as well as the same redoubtable heroine? Probably, but the only way I can present them is as a thematic narrative, involving swerves, not vaultings, growth, not change. Although, as far as I can see from observation of any woman’s adult years, from the four women’s lives I’ve observed most closely, this is entirely common.
Except, of course, that I’m talking about Mumma. Thus, while the topics are common, because it is Mumma who lived them they assume capital letters: Motherhood, Wifehood, Friendship, Age, and then, inevitably, sadly…But not Death, really, so much as Absence. (Although in the case of my mother, this last is proving to be something of a vale atque ave, she having left behind what I can only think of as Aftermath, in the person of her youngest grandchild, Sarah, who is also and not incidentally—there being nothing incidental about Sarah—my own daughter.)
If we tend to mother the way we enjoyed being mothered, as I believe we do, and also the way we would have liked to have been mothered, that is to say by reflection and reaction, then I persist in the hope that by examining Mumma from all of the angles available to me I will learn. Not learn how to be a good mother to Sarah, who abandoned me on the sidewalk in front of the school building on the first day of kindergarten (“I don’t need a mother anymore”), but rather, to understand her, to know when to stand at her shoulder, when to sit in the stands and cheer her on, when to place myself squarely behind her, and when to throw myself in front of her onrushing train. Or even, maybe, when to come after her balloon with a hatpin. How to help her see that she is loved and to know, about herself, that her love is welcomed.