In the last raw days of winter I find myself wide awake in the dark, trying not to disturb my husband sleeping beside me. I shift, freeze in one position after another. Finally I go downstairs, turn on the kitchen faucet, and get a glass of water. Looking out the back window into the yard, I see that the bare branches of the oak tree are like ink drops rolled every which way on paper. In an upper window of the house across the way, blue flows like a lava lamp behind a curtain. I open the hall closet and get out the box of my mother’s papers. I’ve had the box since I closed down her house five years ago, but only lately have I heard, like a faint heartbeat, the box signaling to me.
In the dark, I think of my mother in the years our relationship was at its worst. I was a teenager and she was in her late forties when she stalked our un-air-conditioned Virginia ranch house wearing only a slip, her face red and covered in sweat. When I asked what was wrong, she’d say nothing. I often found her sitting on the stairs in the only cool place, the unfinished basement, sobbing so hard she could hardly catch her breath.
I’ve always wanted my mother in the dark. When I cried out from my crib, my mother said, I settled down if she brought me into her bed. As a child, when I would go into my parents’ dark room and get in bed on my mother’s side, I wanted to feel her skin, her warmth, her vast oceanic presence enveloping me. I wanted to feel, as I must have longed to do as an infant, that we were one.
Inside the box, I find an envelope of pictures of my parents’ wedding. Their second wedding—the first was a quick courtroom affair held six weeks earlier, just after my mother found out she was pregnant. At the reception after the second wedding, my father is blond and boyish in his clericals. His black minister suit coat hangs on his thin frame. My mother wears a knee-length white satin dress, gloves, and pearls. Her veil falls in folds of netting around her face. She is twenty years old, flushed and beautiful. The pictures are like a million others from the early 1960s. They cut the cake, feed slices to each other. What fascinates me is not my parents’ youth but what is not there, or more precisely, what’s not yet visible. Inside my mother’s body, in the space above and between her legs, a tiny creature no bigger than a pinkie fingernail. A clump of cells on a mission. Me.
On our last evening together, I made my mother a roast chicken with vegetables, which I served on a bare table. The thrift-store plates, the mismatched silver, the paper napkins, the terrible blankness of the white enamel tabletop. The rawness of the table continues to haunt me. For our last meal, couldn’t I have used my good plates and put a cloth on the table? After dinner she wanted to watch the television show Downton Abbey, about a lord and his family in the early 1900s. She’d always loved everything about rich people. To my mother, money, which she never had much of, was an object of adoration. This adoration was not tainted by greed but was pure, almost religious in nature. I didn’t have a TV, only my laptop. I suggested we watch the Will Ferrell movie Elf. She sneered—a movie about a grown man pretending to be a Christmas elf?
Midway through the movie, she took a photo out of her wallet. It was an image of my wedding to Mike the spring before. I stood smiling under the Oriental Pavilion in Prospect Park in my pink silk wedding dress. The photo was taken just after the ceremony, and though it was a gray day, I am clearly euphoric. “Do you notice anything?” my mother asked, her voice moving toward a familiar self-righteousness. I looked again. I knew my happiness was not what she wanted me to see. She had always spoken out against elaborate second weddings, saying they were inappropriate, tacky. I’d always assumed she was jealous, as she herself had not had a second marriage. She was also angry that men tended to remarry much younger women. But Mike and I were the same age. Our wedding modest. I looked again at my silver cage sandals, pale legs, the pink silk dress, my hair up in a loose bun. Did my mother think the dress was too young for me? At forty-nine, I was a menopausal bride. “Your pubic hair is showing,” my mother finally said.
At first I thought I’d misheard her. I looked at the photo. Under the dress, I’d worn a thick beige bodysuit and control-top tights. I knew for a fact that there was no way my pubic hair could be showing. “It’s just a shadow in the material,” I said. My mother shook her head and said, “I don’t think so.” She stuck the photo inside the slit of her purse. I felt light-headed, numb, furious. She continued to complain about the loss of Downton Abbey until Elf was over and we both went to bed.
I’ve come out of my mother’s body three times. Once when I was born; once in adolescence, a baby woman breaking out of the maternal crust; and when she died, I came out a final time. The times before this last time, though I was outside, I was also partly inside her. But now that she’s dead, I’ve come out completely. This is why, just after she died, I felt so exposed. As if for the first time I was abandoned under the huge dome of sky. Unprotected. Now that I’m finally out, I’m trying to see her and also to consume her. I can’t be inside her anymore. Now I must work to get her inside me.
In Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz, self-ownership is what heals fifty-year-old Violet’s fragmented self, an ownership reached only by finally having compassion for her own menopausal mother: “Mama, Mama? Is this where you got to and couldn’t do it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know you are not and never again will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it?”
“What does one discover,” Elena Ferrante was asked, “in freeing the body of the mother from shapelessness?” Frankly I have no idea. It’s been five years since my mother died, and then, many days later, the police found her body naked on the living room floor. In the years since her death I’ve contemplated her monstrousness, her witch-like power. I’d dismissed her pain as outsize bitterness. But that is too easy, reductive. I see that my mother and I must go another round. Otherwise she won’t stay buried. Already her fingertips are reaching up out of the dirt, trying to grab on to my own.
Lessened progesterone may be responsible for menopausal insomnia, though this, like most menopause speculation, has yet to be proven conclusively. Some studies show that it’s hot flashes that wake women in the night and keep them awake. Others indicate that hormonal shifts upset circadian rhythms that control sleep patterns. Either way, insomnia is a primordial opening, a world inverted, where, as Elizabeth Bishop says, “left is always right, / when the shadows are really the body, / where we stay awake all night.” In the dark I have the intimation of something coming closer, of a presence or the presence of a presence. “Here we go mother on the shipless ocean,” the poet Anne Carson wrote. “Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.”
My own night hunting is less like that of the owl that swoops from its perch and at the last moment extends its talons and closes its eyes, and more like the methodical nighttime work of the burying beetle. The burying beetle is black with scarlet scallops, and red tufts on the tips of its antennae. As night falls, the beetle is attracted to the smell of small dead snakes, birds, mice. On YouTube I watch as a beetle approaches a dead mouse, crawls underneath it, and lies on its back to push the body forward with its legs. Once a spot of soft earth is found, the beetle digs underneath the mouse, removes the fur, and works the corpse into an edible ball. “I shall have to frame that monstrous, infinite flesh,” Clarice Lispector writes in The Passion According to G.H., “and cut it into pieces that something the size of my mouth can take in.”
On the last morning I took for granted that my mother was alive, I’d just bought my ticket at MoMA and was walking toward the galleries when my cell phone rang. It was my brother David, telling me that my mother’s neighbor had called him to say newspapers were gathering on my mother’s front porch. The neighbor had walked around to the back door, which was wide open to the elements, and called my mother’s name. She did not answer.
While I was waiting for my brother to call me back to tell me what the police, who were on their way to the scene, found, I walked out of MoMA and up and down the New York City streets, past carts selling roasted peanuts and soft pretzels, tourists squinting into maps, and New Yorkers dashing to work. I was thinking she must be in the bathtub and was too embarrassed to call back. In my mind I sent out an SOS: Are you OK? I wandered into St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There was a service going on so far from me it was as if I were watching people moving deep beneath the sea.
I continued to send out my signal. Finally an answer came: I am safe. I sat in the back pew, looking at the cross, the saint statues, a bank of electric votive candles. People talk about what a great comfort religion is during a crisis, but I felt the opposite. The symbols seemed ridiculous, like ancient broken toys. When my phone began to vibrate, I slipped out of the pew and the organ swelled and swept me out into the narthex, where my brother told me that my mother was dead.
I find it interesting that the voice I heard, or thought I heard, or in my misery imagined I heard, did not say I am alive but I am safe. It’s the kind of thing a person might say by text or cell phone once their flight has arrived in a foreign land: I’m OK. I made it. I am on the other side.
Under the wedding photos, in the box of my mother’s things, I find a composition notebook, mottled black and white, the same sort I have always used and am using now for my Flash Count Diary. I assume it’s one of my own that my mother had saved from high school or college. But when I open the cover, I see not my messy handwriting but my mother’s graceful cursive.
I was never loved, liked, appreciated. From the time I gave birth to Darcey he never loved me.
I wanted to leave after Jonathan was born. No place to go—parents had no place for me and three kids.
I was treated like dirt for 25 years and my willingness to lie down and be walked over allowed my kids to do the same to me.
In the night, witness to her rage, I feel as I did in her presence. “I entered I knew not where,” writes Saint John of the Cross. I feel sucked into a silence where my body is numb but my mind works frenetically.
What I have learned in the dark: (1) The devil, if he even exists, has nothing to do with it. (2) It’s hard work to make something dead into food. (3) We have to make an absurd leap after horror has been revealed.
I waited in the car while my brothers went inside my mother’s house. The coroner’s office had taken my mother’s body out earlier. The back of her house looked like the set of a horror movie. The small one-story cottage, the wood porch, the old-fashioned screen door. To the right of the porch, above a window-unit air-conditioner, I saw that a lamp was on in my mother’s bedroom, illuminating a patch of wall and the darker indented corner. I imagined my brothers searching for the items we had talked about on the drive up: the safe-deposit box from the top shelf in the pantry, her jewelry box on her bedroom dresser, the papers in the plastic file folder on the attic stairs.
When the back door finally opened, I thought my mother was with my brothers, a dark shape floating just behind them as they locked the door and walked across the yard to the car.
At the hotel, my brothers and I drank whiskey straight from the bottle, and they told me of the chaos of the TV room. While she’d visited me at Christmas, no one had been inside her house since the fall. Much had changed since then. Piles of dirty clothes, trash, moldy dishes, empty containers, and newspapers were spread on the floor and soaked with urine. Couch cushions stripped of their covers to the yellowed foam. “It was like a hamster cage,” my brother said, and mentioned again that the back door had been wide open and that my mother’s body had been found naked. Though the police were treating my mother’s death as a natural one, my brothers and I were worried that someone had broken in, wrecked the house, maybe even assaulted my mother, causing what the coroner speculated was a heart attack.
In her journal, while blasting my father and us kids, my mother is mostly angry at herself. The fury she has for herself is the most violent. Why didn’t she go to college after high school? Why did she get pregnant and marry my father? Why did she work at home and raise three children when neither my father nor we kids appreciated her? I think she even blamed herself for the divorce. I made myself into a doormat. She’s mad at my father but also at how freely men move in the world. My father could have dealt better with my mother’s misery, though I’m not sure anything any of us could have done would have changed her rage over how society treats older women. Several times in the journal she mentions the joke about trading in a forty-year-old wife for two twenty-year-olds.
My mother’s story, the story of a mother and wife tossed at midlife to the sidelines, disconnected from a social network, barely able to support herself, is far from original. It’s a story so familiar as to be outside of empathy, deactivated of its pain by repetition, by cliché.
The only entries in my mother’s journals that look forward instead of back are the many about dieting. I know her weight was something she and my father fought over. Once when he asked me what he should get her for her birthday, I said chocolate. “I would never buy your mother candy,” he said. Most of the dieting entries are procedural: I can lose 1 pound every four days. I must lose 100 pounds. And: Fat makes Fat. Eat small portions.
She often told me that fat was the last societally condoned prejudice. She understood the cultural cruelty, but her journal shows that she never stopped trying to get out from under the shame of being overweight. I am all I have, reads an entry in the last months of her life. I must get healthy. It is not too late.
Shame was the first feeling my mother had when she found out she was pregnant with me. And shame was her most insistent form of communication with me. Her father, my grandfather, drank, and her family never had much money. So even before I came into my mother’s body, shame was like air to her, like water. It affected every aspect of her life, her perception of herself, her relationships, her ability to be intimate, her ability to take chances, to stick up for herself, to achieve in a career. Her shame didn’t abate as she matured. It increased: weight, menopause, divorce, breast cancer. After her mastectomy, on tamoxifen, her face got a shade of red closer to black, and she’d jump up and run to the window as if she’d actually caught fire.
Shame begins when a baby is seven months old. “That is the moment,” the literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has written in her book Touching Feeling, “when the mother’s face, which mirrors the child’s, refuses to play its part in the continuation of the mutual gaze, when for any one of many reasons it fails to be recognizable to the infant, and breaks the baby’s faith in the continuity of the circuit.” The child, no longer acknowledged and held inside the mother’s gaze, feels abandoned, cast out. The baby concludes that it must have done something wrong and feels, for the first time, shame.
Even when I was an adult, my mother’s face never lost its ability to unnerve me. As we watched Elf, I studied her features for signs of softening, any relaxation in the set of her mouth or the wrinkles in her brow. Her gray hair was held back with combs, and her face was pink and lovely. I looked into her eyes, not just for clues to her mood but also for the secret to myself. “In interrupting identity,” Sedgwick writes, “shame makes identity. It’s in the disconnection from the mother that the self in essence begins its life.”
Jung writes that in midlife we must find the corpse and bury it. The corpse being our former identity, the one we have outgrown and can no longer identify with. Once the corpse of our former life is buried, according to Jung, we float in a period of liminality, or what others have called the fertile void. During this time we have the chance, if we take it, to see ourselves more clearly. Simone Weil writes, “I am also other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.”
Rather than bury the corpse, my mother became the corpse herself. She was a pain devil, getting stiff and upset if my father’s name was mentioned, raging about the unfairness of her own life and the sexist world in general. I looked to her for clues of what it was to be a woman, but what I saw was her powerlessness. “Many daughters,” writes Adrienne Rich, “live in a rage at their mothers for having accepted, too readily and passively, ‘whatever comes.’” For the first part of her life my mother was passive. She played the role of beauty queen, young mother, minister’s wife. But after menopause, she no longer repressed her feelings. She raged, furious that men’s freedom was absolute while her own was constrained.
To combat my insomnia I have taken magnesium, which breaks through the blood-brain barrier. I have tried kava, hemp oil, valerian, melatonin, and a pill called Zen. I practice sleep hygiene: no screens after six, no eating after eight, New Age music, warm baths. I’ve listened nightly to a hypnotic CD on which a man with a soothing British accent tells me that sleep is delicious, encourages me to imagine person after person on a bus, lids heavy, heads drooping, till I’m the only one awake. I have, at the instruction of a Buddhist, not turned on any electric light and sat as twilight and then darkness fell. I got my doctor to prescribe doxepin, used to aid sleep.
The best remedy, though, remains meeting my mother in the dark, working, like the burying beetle, to make her body into food. Something I can ingest, take inside my body—a substance that will not poison but sustain me.
Last phone call: Out the window snow rushed down, flakes as big as potato chips and all the trees around covered in piles of white. After telling me about her dental problems, financial worries, and the newscaster who’d been accused of sexual harassment, my mother said, apropos of nothing: “You haven’t always been kind to me.” I started to defend myself for the zillionth time. “But in these last years,” she interrupted me, “you have been kind.”
My mother was an ambivalent feminist. She’d tell me that I should stop writing and stay at home with my daughter, Abbie. She told me she wished that rather than caring for me and my brothers she’d had a career. She despised elaborate second-marriage celebrations but once told me she wished she’d left my father earlier when it still might have been possible to build a life with someone else. With my mother there was always a paradox, an oppositional binary. That binary had to be healed in order to understand what she was trying to say.
When I wake in the dark, I often come back to that last night with my mother the day after Christmas. How she pulled out the photo of me in my wedding dress and pointed to where she thought I was exposed. Was she accusing me of being sleazy? Telling me that even on my wedding day I should feel shame? “Shame,” Bernard Williams writes in his book Shame and Necessity, “is straightforwardly connected with nakedness, particularly in a sexual connection.” The Greek word aidos, a derivative of the word for “shame,” is a standard Greek term for the genitals.
In pointing to the photograph of me in my wedding dress, to the dark space between my legs, my mother was saying my body, like hers, was a female body and therefore an object of shame. Shame connected us, made us intimate. She was saying something upside down but true: showing me where I was implanted, growing inside her body on her own wedding day long ago, and implying that she, disguised as shame, was also inside me on mine.
I’m almost to the bottom of my mother’s box. I look through newspaper clippings of her beauty-queen years, mortgage papers for our house in Virginia, her baptismal candle. A white wax taper with the gold symbol for Alpha and Omega. There is a valentine from my dad, in which he has written a goofy love poem, as well as a letter from him after the divorce in which he demands the return of his favorite spatula.
You could read my mother’s journal as the rants of a bitter, unhappy divorcée. Someone who blamed all her problems on others, my father in particular. You could discredit my mother’s pain as familiar, trite. Her struggles and failures are so common they hardly delineate. But in another, more urgent reading, my mother’s journal, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, tells a story of a woman who was both humiliated and oppressed under patriarchy. A woman who nevertheless persisted, who stayed inside an active resistance even in her death.
My mother was on a slew of medications, none of which my brothers and I found. At first we suspected a home invader had taken them, but now I’m certain that weeks earlier she’d willfully thrown all her medicine bottles out. No one broke into my mother’s house. She left the back door open, perhaps by accident but maybe because she knew she was in her last hours and didn’t want us to have to break a window to get inside. I hope she left the door open in Rilke’s sense of the word. An openness to something that comes from the strange, the other, the sacred, the new. The squalor of her room was not forced on her by an evil intruder but was of her own creation, or de-creation. A final fuck-you to the idea of soft-focus redemption.
In the dark I set my mother’s baptismal candle into a brass holder and light a match. The taper throws out a circle of wobbling light. At the bottom of the box, underneath a stack of tax returns, I find a small notebook covered in red silk. Maybe it’s her own flash count diary. But the pages inside are blank. How like my mother to save something so beautiful. When I closed down her house, I found brand-new sheets and comforters still in plastic, dresses with the tags still on, fancy soaps and lotions unused and at the back of the bathroom cabinet. In the attic, plastic containers filled with new pots and pans, a toaster, a teapot. I know many women of her age were in the habit of saving new things, though ten large plastic storage containers seem less like saving items for a current life than preparing for a hoped-for future one. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think my mother was saving each of those items as an act of rebellion as well as hope. My mother was waiting for a new world in which she’d have the dignity she knew she deserved, a world where she would not be invisible. The pages of the notebook are empty, but on the back flyleaf I do find my mother’s voluptuous cursive.
Life is hard. Justice is as inconsistent as the people who create it. Accept this reality and continue to struggle or give up and lose control.