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Do our mothers remain intrinsically unknowable to us because we have such a vested interest in our own emotional survival that they must remain “mothers” to us and not fleshed-out human beings?
Not too long before my mother died, she told me that when she couldn’t sleep in the night, she would go sit in a striped wing chair near the window of her apartment.
“You just sit there in the dark?” I asked.
“Oh no,” she replied, “I sit there and I review my life, chapter by chapter.” Only because it was she who said this, it came out in her New England accent, still unshakable after five decades of living here, as “chaptuh by chaptuh.”
It wasn’t until after she was gone that I, who had called her daily, seen her weekly, and thought that no mother and daughter could be closer, realized I was missing a few “chaptuhs.”
What had I been thinking? She was 90, so there’d been a lot of time for me to ask her anything I wanted to know — but somehow I still had questions:
Why was there an emotional distance between her and her siblings that couldn’t be explained merely by geography? When had she been the happiest with my father, from whom she was divorced when I was in my 20s? What had it been like to be a single woman, working overseas, approaching 30 and still — unusual in those days — not settled down with a husband and kids?
I’m not alone. A close friend said to me of her mother, who had six children, died at 56 of cancer and “might have been depressed” for years: “I would like to have known who my mother really was.” Another was hungry for details about her mother’s early married life, and yet another said: “I actually sat down and interviewed my mom on digital, grilling her on everything from getting married at 30 (scandalously old in 1961), travelling in Europe on her own, hooking up with my Catholic-Irish immigrant dad to her Ontario Protestant parents’ dismay.”
This daughter came to the same conclusion as others: “I still think, I don’t really know who she is.”
Are we afraid to ask our mothers deeply personal questions, concerned that it might be a breach of their privacy or even come across as judgmental? (Believe me, many mothers, even in “those” days, whenever those days were, were pregnant at the altar, and yet so few have talked about it.)
I wonder too whether our mothers remain intrinsically unknowable to us because we have such a vested interest in our own emotional survival that they must remain “mothers” to us and not fleshed-out human beings, capable of grand passions, great deceits and just plain contrary behaviour.
My mother was a delightful story teller — about growing up in a New Hampshire family that valued education above all, about her college days, about her administrative work overseas in the U.S. Foreign Service and about her fateful marriage to my father, which brought her to Toronto.
She always placed herself in the middle of one startling mishap or another: the time she felt like throwing herself down the college library steps after thinking she would fail her history exam; or a challenging domestic moment when my father, a street savvy newspaperman, rented out a room to Uncle Miltie, one of his cronies, who brought home ladies of the night, much to my mother’s consternation.
“You just sit there in the dark?” I asked.
“Oh no,” she replied, “I sit there and I review my life, chapter by chapter.” Only because it was she who said this, it came out in her New England accent, still unshakable after five decades of living here, as “chaptuh by chaptuh.”
It wasn’t until after she was gone that I, who had called her daily, seen her weekly, and thought that no mother and daughter could be closer, realized I was missing a few “chaptuhs.”
What had I been thinking? She was 90, so there’d been a lot of time for me to ask her anything I wanted to know — but somehow I still had questions:
Why was there an emotional distance between her and her siblings that couldn’t be explained merely by geography? When had she been the happiest with my father, from whom she was divorced when I was in my 20s? What had it been like to be a single woman, working overseas, approaching 30 and still — unusual in those days — not settled down with a husband and kids?
I’m not alone. A close friend said to me of her mother, who had six children, died at 56 of cancer and “might have been depressed” for years: “I would like to have known who my mother really was.” Another was hungry for details about her mother’s early married life, and yet another said: “I actually sat down and interviewed my mom on digital, grilling her on everything from getting married at 30 (scandalously old in 1961), travelling in Europe on her own, hooking up with my Catholic-Irish immigrant dad to her Ontario Protestant parents’ dismay.”
This daughter came to the same conclusion as others: “I still think, I don’t really know who she is.”
Are we afraid to ask our mothers deeply personal questions, concerned that it might be a breach of their privacy or even come across as judgmental? (Believe me, many mothers, even in “those” days, whenever those days were, were pregnant at the altar, and yet so few have talked about it.)
I wonder too whether our mothers remain intrinsically unknowable to us because we have such a vested interest in our own emotional survival that they must remain “mothers” to us and not fleshed-out human beings, capable of grand passions, great deceits and just plain contrary behaviour.
My mother was a delightful story teller — about growing up in a New Hampshire family that valued education above all, about her college days, about her administrative work overseas in the U.S. Foreign Service and about her fateful marriage to my father, which brought her to Toronto.
She always placed herself in the middle of one startling mishap or another: the time she felt like throwing herself down the college library steps after thinking she would fail her history exam; or a challenging domestic moment when my father, a street savvy newspaperman, rented out a room to Uncle Miltie, one of his cronies, who brought home ladies of the night, much to my mother’s consternation.
But she didn’t dwell on the deep emotional texture of her life, how she kept it together, raised two kids to adore her, remained, by necessity, a self-sufficient woman who lived for almost 30 years as a single woman after her divorce. I do know she regarded her divorce as necessary and was happy after it.
If she had been a wife and mother today, would she have, in the early years, joined the overshare era with one of those sadmommy.com blogs that leave no moment, no matter how banal, unrecorded? Hard to imagine. Unless those blogs disappear into the ether, it’s debatable whether mothers today will leave any air of maternal mystery at all.
I knew who my mother was. I knew her deeply — at a certain point we became each other’s confidants and lifelong supports.
And yet she obviously chose not to tell me certain things, whether from oversight or reluctance, or because we had other things to talk about. Or maybe just because I forgot to ask.
It’s not just emotionally resonant questions I have left, they’re also about her times — her favourite dress, the social mores, what her parents were like in her childhood.
On Mother’s Day, if your mother is still alive, maybe now is the time to start asking those questions. You never know when it will be too late.
Source : Thestar.com
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