Don't Call Me Mother (47 page)

I put down the phone, startled to find out that everyone had known about him all along but no one had said anything to me. No one had wondered about my sleeping there each summer and staying in the house with Billy?

The biggest loss was not to be able to sit in Edith’s kitchen ever again, to hear the clocks ticking, to see the way the elm tree swayed in the afternoon breeze—to never again visit the place I thought of as home even more than the house on Park Street. At Edith’s, Gram was always nicer and Mother had to watch her mouth. It was the home of all our pie making, of huge dinners where everyone gathered around the table. It never would be again.

One of my goals in writing my memoir was to create a love letter to the Iowa family. I loved the Mississippi River running like a poem through the lands our ancestors had worked. I wanted to honor Blanche, who’d taught me how to love the garden, pushing a ripe strawberry into my mouth, showing me that dirt was not dangerous. I wanted to honor Aunt Edith for teaching me how to make lemon meringue pie and making me feel that I had a caring mother as she taught me her country ways.

So in my final versions of the memoir, I left out the incidents with Billy and the other men, believing it best to preserve the relationship with my extended family.

After the confrontation with Billy, I still retained a comfortable relationship with his brother, K., and his wife. After the hoopla about my letter died down, they offered me hospitality if I wanted to visit. They asked me about what I’d included in the memoir about Billy, and I assured them that I had left out his sexual abuse.

When my memoir was released, eight years after the breach with Billy, I was welcomed as an author and “local” in the town. I enjoyed a long radio interview, a newspaper interview, and a bookstore presentation. By then, Billy had had a heart attack, and his brother suggested that we try to patch things up, so I invited Billy to the reading. Tears sprang to his eyes as I read a story about making lemon meringue pie with his mother, our summer ritual for forty years. Through gestures and even a careful hug, I believed that we’d both let the past go. He was an old man now, and alone.

I knew he had been furious with me for exposing him, and he denied everything, but I was sure he knew what I was talking about. I believed that forgiveness and reconciliation, with boundaries, of course, could lead to more visits to my Iowa homeland. I still clung to my yearning for the landscapes of my childhood. It was the birthplace of all the family I had ever known; it was home.

When I presented the positive side of my family in
Don’t Call Me Mother,
I believed that the details about Billy were not what the book was
really
about. I didn’t need to include that information, out of respect for the living and the dead. And as a therapist, I had boundaries about how much I wanted to reveal. I was preserving something positive, I thought. I’d made the right choice.

Then, upon the rerelease of my book,
Becoming Whole,
and another bookstore event in the town, something happened. I stayed with Billy’s brother again, and found myself in a tense encounter with him at breakfast. With narrowed eyes, he grilled me again, “Now what did you put in that there book?”

His wife fluttered around nervous about his grouchy mood. I wondered how many times in their marriage she’d had to appease him. “She didn’t include anything, remember. She left it all out!” Her grey curls fluttered.

K. growled a little and went on, “You know my brother said, sure she can come here again, but I don’t want to see her no more.”

I remembered the hug that seemed like an acknowledgement, some kind of truce. “Okay,” I said, “he doesn’t have to see me.” I grew clammy with dread as his eyes drilled into me, threatening, fierce.

“Now, what did you put in there, what did you say about him?”

I denied again including details about Billy and what he had done, but I found myself remembering a conversation I’d had with K. when he told me how his daughter had begged him not to send her to her Uncle Billy’s. She was only four years old. He’d ignored her request, and he’d assured me that she never said anything more about it. I thought of all the girls who never spoke up, knowing that the grown-ups didn’t want to hear the truth.

This morning we went a third round, his wife saying, “You didn’t read it, she said she left out the stuff about Billy.” Those eyes again, mocking eyes, like bullets.

Finally, I understood what was happening: He didn’t believe that Billy had done anything at all. He thought I was lying.

The alliances were clear: I was an outsider. Suddenly, as if a deck of cards had reshuffled itself, I saw the truth about the whole family. K.’s steely eyes—the hate, the disgust at who I was to him, was palpable. I was an intruder, someone who had falsely accused his brother. He had chosen sides. My whole body reverberated with danger, with the sense that my childhood house of cards had just tumbled down.

For years, my therapist had tried to warn me about idealizing the Iowa family, but I couldn’t see it. I’d created a spun-sugar fantasy to protect myself from my losses, from my mother’s denying that I was her daughter, from having been a virtual orphan.

I had to take a walk before giving my workshop, and then quickly leave to become my professional self at the bookstore. In a surreal daze a couple of hours after the shocking encounter with K., I taught a “Writing as Healing” workshop about writing the truth, and using writing to unlock old stories. The irony of what I was teaching, given my inner meltdown, was not lost on me.

After the workshop, I settled into trying to grasp what was happening over a glass of wine at a restaurant overlooking the river. The grief of losing Iowa, Edith’s house, the town that I’d adopted settled down on me like a heavy blanket. I noticed that none of my relatives had returned my calls to visit them. I didn’t belong. I had never belonged. The “family” I’d clung to had simply tolerated me, Gram, and Mother. When Gram left my mother behind, they judged her harshly, and later, when she had money, they took her expensive presents and stuffed them in the closet. She believed in education, liked nice clothes, loved the arts, and traveled to Europe. They were farm people. They knew my mother was a little bit crazy, and then there was me: I had the nerve to live in crazy California and write books! What insane thing might I do next? Perhaps they were afraid of what other secrets I might expose. I will never know. I made up a lie about why I had to leave town early, to keep any further attacks at bay, and rushed off in my rental car.

On that misty last summer day in Iowa, I visited all the beloved places that had been part of my pilgrimage to Iowa for nearly fifty years. I stood in the rain beside my mother’s and grandfather’s gravestones in Wapello and said goodbye. I drove by the house Mother had lived in as a child, and all the houses we’d visited through the years as Blanche and the other old ones told the stories of their childhood. We would haunt the old houses as a memorial to those who’d passed on, honoring our family story. I drove by the fields and little villages on the rutted roads I’d traveled since I was eight years old.

That day, I took off my shoes and let the cool waters of the Mississippi River bathe my feet as I wept my goodbyes to the landscape that had soothed me. The land, the woods, the hills, the sand—all of it had been etched into my heart. The golden waves of corn in August, the curving roads that led to farms where my grandmother was born, where she walked as a child, knowing where my roots were—all this had comforted me in the desert years of my childhood, and even as an adult when my mother rejected me year after year. I said goodbye forever to my illusions.

Since then, I have spoken to no one in the family, and they have not reached out to me. From time to time, I watch the obituaries, and finally saw that Billy had died, and then other grudge-holding, judgmental folks were gone, too. I mourned Edith’s house for years, dreaming of it, happy to be back there, but the dream would fade and there was emptiness. Finally, the pain and grieving receded. I realized that accepting these final losses were part of my story and part of my healing.

All this taught me that even if you leave out the secret stories, they’re still part of your history. I learned that you can lose everything and everyone
even if you leave out the damning details!

As for Billy, I remembered a time when I thought of him as the brother I never had, imperfect though he was. And the truths that I didn’t put in my memoir remained true, if silent. The truths that I knew, the secrets and the shame that destroyed my illusions, made me wish that I had included them in the first edition of my memoir, but I know why I didn’t: I was not ready to lose everything. I knew that I would. And I did.

This cautionary tale supports the idea that writing the truth may or may not destroy anything or anyone, but leaving it all out or writing it as a novel can’t guarantee safety either. We can only expose the story we are ready to share—if the world’s ear can bear to listen. Until then, we may keep our silence. But our memoir keeps asking us to open out, to bear witness, and to tell the truth as we know it while coming to terms with what we can bear and how much it might cost to share it.

Flowering

The wind blows across the graceful grasses, tugs the entwined vines in the vineyards. The sun dapples the spring blooming trees and the greening fields that flow by as I drive through the Napa Valley. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the curve of her cheek, her chestnut hair piled carefully and secured with a clip, the glance of her dark eyes toward me, and I’m time traveling through different eras. There’s a young woman in whose soul-dark eyes I want to drown and be absorbed. I yearn for the touch of her ivory fingers. I’m six, and she’s my mother. Then a hand with polished fingernails touches my leg, and it’s my daughter, and she’s the same age as my mother was when she left me. I’m flying through time with the look of my mother in my daughter, the resonance of her voice and the stylish way she dresses, but they are so different. The girl in me loves to see my mother as I would have liked her to be in my daughter. I have to remind myself I’m not the motherless girl I was, and this is my daughter. I’m
her
mother.

I’m driving us through wine country on a rare chance to spend a day with each other. Amanda tells me how important I am to her, her fingers touching my arm, her eyes brimming with warmth. Her words swim within me, filling the reservoir of my Being with mother-daughter riches, transporting me to a bliss that hardly has words. I’ve learned to live through adjusting to the legacy of the past—the deep divisions between mothers and daughters, the anger and abandonment. I know too well the dark side of our family, but what is this immense tenderness that I sense with us now? I have to breathe to allow it in.

Perhaps this sweet openness is a result of our time together when she had back surgery a couple of months ago. I kept coming to see her, to hold and comfort her, and help her and her family. It’s what a mother does. Perhaps it has to do with the family rituals we have now: On every visit we go on a train ride with Miles and Zoe, my six-year-old granddaughter, and in the summer we plunge into the pool, laughing and giggling. We have the “Nana’s present” ritual right after I get off the plane. Zoe, with her blonde hair and big brown eyes, looking so much like Amanda, me, and even my grandmother, waits with a gleam in her eye and a grin. Sweet Miles, now nine, holds out his hands, bursting with excitement to see what I’ve brought. As I do these rituals with them, I hear the faint echo of Gram’s not wanting to be a grandmother when I was born, and Mother, how she only saw my children twice. My children were in their thirties when she died. The old tradition breaks with each visit, and strands of new history are being woven into the fabric of the family.