MY MOTHER TONGUE
I arrived in China with the goal of understanding my mother’s childhood. By experiencing the place where she had grown up, I hoped to understand how it had influenced the whole rest of her life. I thought I would see what she had seen and feel what she had felt as a little girl.
I hoped to find my mother’s true self as a means of replacing what had become the bludgeoning voice of my mother in my head, which was the language in which both of our false selves spoke. But sometimes the ways I encountered my mother on the trip surprised even me.
Whenever I travel to a foreign country, I’ve always had a tendency to adapt my speech to my surroundings. In China, it took me a couple of days to realize that I was mimicking my guides. In every region, I had a different guide—each of whom spoke a different accented and idiomatic English. I realized that I was changing my speech patterns, almost unconsciously, so that after a few days together, I began slowing down, leaving out unnecessary words, using their idioms, and becoming monosyllabic and stilted. Frankly, it sounded both condescending and dorky.
It’s human nature when we catch ourselves doing something embarrassing to try to let ourselves off the hook by blaming someone else. I once went on a horseback ride on a friend’s ranch in Montana. It was the first ride of the season, so the horses were frisky, which resulted in a series of mostly funny mishaps. The wrangler’s wife had decided to join us. Toward the end of our six-hour ride as we were heading back to the barn, her horse started to buck. Instead of trying to get the horse under control, she just let it buck away while she yelled at her husband, “Goddamn it, Dave. Goddamn it, Dave.” Over and over again. As I watched myself mimic my guides, I Goddamn-it-Dave’d my own mother, because I suddenly realized this embarrassing linguistic idiosyncrasy had actually come from her.
My mother was an inveterate but mostly unconscious mimic. Whenever we caught a cab together, my rather proper Anglo-Saxon mother would suddenly morph into an Irishwoman, Bostonian, or East Indian, depending on the nationality or ethnic background of the driver, settling into a lively conversation in his or her native brogue, accent, or dialect. Her specialty was Pidgin, the common parlance used to communicate across cultures throughout the Pacific Rim, which she used with abandon while living in Honolulu.
Mary Grant grew up being shuffled, as she liked to say, from pillar to post in four different countries—Wales, England, China, and Canada—before immigrating to the United States by herself at the age of 18. She was born during World War I while her father was off fighting for the Scots National Guard in Gallipoli. My grandfather survived, but he came back to an almost nonexistent job market in the United Kingdom. So when he and my grandmother, who had met while they were both studying at a dairy college in Scotland, were offered a job running the dairy in Shanghai that brought pasteurization to China, they took it.
My mother was five. Because she was much younger than her older brother and sister, my mother was with an amah (an East Asian nanny) who taught her Pidgin while her siblings were in school. As many colonials do in a foreign country, the Grants lived much better than they had in the U.K., in a very large, white, Western-style house in the French Concession, with servants and trips to the countryside to escape the summer heat. After her father chose to relocate the family to British Columbia shortly before my mother’s tenth birthday—a global move that would drive the Grants into increasing poverty during the Depression—my mother came to think of her time in Shanghai as the best of her childhood.
My mother went on to study French in high school, as well as Italian and Spanish as an adult. Whenever she traveled, she loved to speak in the native tongue of whatever country she visited. I was proud to have inherited my mother’s love for and gift with languages. When I lived in Germany as a teenager studying abroad, I became so fluent in German that whenever I mentioned an experience I had had in the United States, people thought I had lived in the U.S. as an exchange student, instead of the other way around. What I hadn’t wanted to see until I went to China was that I had also inherited her aptitude for mimicry.
When you mimic someone, whether consciously or not, what you’re really doing is paying attention and finding common ground. That, of course, was what my mother had been doing not only on all those multicultural cab rides, but for her whole life. The girl who had been moved from pillar to post was trying to fit in.
When my St. Louis–born father met my English mother at a dinner party in Bel Air, California, he turned to her and said, “You know, I’ve never met anyone from the Bronx.” My mother burst out laughing. When she began her career as a designer, she had worked in New York City’s Fashion District, where people had poked fun at her British accent. So she had changed it. By the time she met my father, my mother sounded like a New Yorker from the Bronx. Within a few years of settling down in California after their marriage, however, Mary Grant Price sounded like she had spent her whole life on the West Coast.
At the end of her life, my mother had homes in Boston, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, and Honolulu. She adapted her speech to the dialects of each place as naturally as breathing. She couldn’t even hear herself do it.
Before my mother died, I had dreamed of taking her to China so she could revisit the place where she had grown up. Well, I finally did—in a different way than I had originally envisioned. I took her love of language, her desire to see and experience many countries and cultures, her unconscious desire to eradicate the difference between herself and others through communication, her gritty self-determination not to live a provincial life, and her expansive love of the world. I took the mother I knew, and I tried to make China explain what I wanted to see about her. I cut and pasted my memory of her on top of the place where she spent her childhood and looked for easy answers that would explain her.
That, I found out, is not forgiveness.
Taking my mother to China on a journey of forgiveness actually meant being willing to release all of my stories of her as well as all of my stories of “me.” All the Goddamn-it-Dave blaming, all the ways I wanted to be different from her, all the ways I used her voice in my head to do my dirty work.
The journey of forgiveness takes us from blame to blessing if we can see one another as we are instead of who we want one another to be. The Chinese person living on the other side of the world in a country precariously poised between capitalist boom and communist oppression is no different from me—the tall blonde Westerner—the moment we can both see that we are all simply trying to live a life of peace and meaning. I had to learn to see my mother with the same unclouded eyes of Love with which I saw a stranger on the other side of the world.
At the end of her life, my mother finally told me something I had always known. We had just finished a late breakfast in a brightly lit coffee shop in Waikiki. For a woman who surrounded herself with jewel-tone opulent Victorian splendor, I always found it fascinating that she felt most at ease eating at plain Jane coffee shops. She had her favorite spots, where the servers knew her by name, gave her a Naugahyde booth with a view of the room, and always remembered that she liked both her bacon and hash browns extra crispy. She loved this one for its vintage pastel color scheme and low-key glimpse at the frenetic tourist scene on Honolulu’s most famous beach. We had just finished eating when she finally shared something she must have wanted to release for decades.
From the time I was born, she told me, she saw how much my father loved me. That terrified her, she said, because she thought it would kill him if something ever happened to me. From that moment on, she had been afraid. She was 45 years old, and all of her friends’ children were teenagers already. She had helped raise my brother, her stepson, but only after he became a teenager. Whenever something would happen to me as a baby—when I was fussy or flatulent, uncomfortable or restless—she felt too embarrassed to ask her friends for their advice, feeling that she should have known the answers herself. She read everything she could get her hands on, but she still could not shake the fear that something bad might happen to her baby.
That fear, something all mothers have, began to spiral out of control. What she did not know when she was talking to me as an adult that afternoon in Waikiki was that I was aware of how dependent she became during my childhood on a regime of caffeine, pills, alcohol, and antacids. She took uppers and copious amounts of coffee in the morning to carry her through a daunting routine of raising me, running a vast household, and working on films as well as on her art and design projects. Then she’d have her first martini of the day in the late afternoon, followed by a few more to take the edge off and give her the stamina and social courage for the networking and party life that she, the ultimate introvert, led with my dad. In addition, she’d take antacids to soothe what must have been a perpetual ache in her gut, the ache of abandoning herself.
That wasn’t all I knew. What I knew most of all was what her fear felt like. I knew it because I had felt it my whole life—first as something I strongly resisted by being a child who would gleefully risk anything and later as something I hoped to shield her from. Finally, when I moved into adulthood, I felt my mother’s fear in the form of my own anxieties. It was those anxieties—mounting to the point that they felt like mortal illnesses, mushrooming into myriad terrors, and eventually manifesting in panic attacks that felt like little deaths—that by my early thirties had finally shepherded me into my conscious and committed spiritual practice.
I listened to my mother’s confession partly like her child and partly filled with a desire to help her in any way I could. At first, we talked about how her fear had led her to tether me to what she hoped was safety. I never once was allowed to attend a party all through high school because she was so afraid I might be exposed to alcohol or drugs.
“You should have let me make my own mistakes,” I told her. “I’ve never been someone who liked to lose control. I didn’t really ever want to drink or do drugs.” But then I realized that she was hardly listening to me. She had one more thing she needed to say.
“I am afraid all the time,” she told me.
Suddenly I stopped thinking about me, and instead I heard her from my heart. She needed me to bear witness to her.
“I am afraid of fear,” she admitted.
Her calm face, her unwavering voice, her ramrod posture, her eternal composure belied what I knew to be roiling underneath.
I knew it because I, too, knew what it was to be afraid of fear.
I don’t think I ever loved my mother as much as I did in that moment of her purest honesty and vulnerability.
I don’t remember my response, but that conversation shifted something profound between us, leveled the playing field, made us more like peers and less like mother and daughter. From then on, we could be more honest, talk about the things that scared us.
All those years of bludgeoning ourselves with a mirage of human perfection, and at the end of my mother’s life, we both finally experienced a measure of the only kind of perfect there really is: The Perfect Love that always casts out fear. Letting ourselves be vulnerable with one another was that Perfect Love.
I had judged my mother for letting her fear rule the day because I judged myself. I had to release that judgment by recognizing that the rules and rigidity that were such a big part of her legacy to me really just masked the terror and shame that plagued her every day. I hated her for her fear, and yet how could I, who have so often struggled with my own shame and terror, not feel compassion for her?
Many people are afraid to travel to foreign countries because they fear the differences in culture will take them too far out of their comfort zones. I love to travel and find the beautiful common ground that exists across all cultures. On my trip to China, however, I often felt fear. That perplexed me, until I finally realized it was not my own fear I was feeling. I was not afraid of spending three weeks alone halfway across the world in a country whose languages I did not speak or read. I was afraid that, like my mother, I would become so afraid of being afraid that I would never show up to my own life and do something that made a difference in the world. To face down that lie and heal, I had to forgive both her fear and my own.
My trip to China gave me the chance to fully step into Love and out of fear. As the trip progressed, I kept asking myself: Which mother will I choose to carry in my heart in the future—the one I often feared and resented for being so fearful and for imposing her fears on me, or the one for whom I have compassion?
I have never been one to travel lightly. I come with too much stuff, and I usually leave with more. China was no exception. I lugged around a too-heavy suitcase, made heavier with each gift I found to bring back. But one item in my suitcase I was determined to leave there.
When my mother died in 2002, I had hoped that the difficult parts of our relationship would die with her. In many ways they did. But there were so many old wounds that had never stopped bleeding, so many old voices, inherited from her, that had kept me from listening to my truth. As I traced those wounds, those old voices, back to my mother’s fear, I knew it was up to me to heal for us both. Fear was the voice of our false selves. That voice had bludgeoned us both enough. By learning to listen to Love, I could rediscover both my mother’s and my true selves.
I had taken my mother to China. It was time to leave the old baggage that no longer served either of us behind.