For You Mom, Finally (6 page)

A sixties ad for Dexamyl depicted a woman wearing an ecstatic smile as she vacuumed her house. “Mood elevation is usually apparent within 30 to 60 minutes,” it enthused.

These were far from temporary remedies. My mother-in-law was given Benzedrine to help her cope with the tragic death of her young husband when she was in her early twenties. Betty was still dutifully taking the pills when I met her; by then she was in her fifties and her first husband was just a fuzzy memory. She had been remarried for more than twenty years, and she had two grown children. She was a conservative, churchgoing Midwesterner who thought of her daily pills as little more than vitamins; she would have been shocked to learn that she was a drug addict.

Drugs did help some people, but they brought my mother no peace. Although she was eventually diagnosed as manic-depressive it is impossible to know if she was clinically ill or merely a victim of what the woman at the Human Engineering Lab had called “idle aptitudes.” Was she crazy, or was she crazy because she had nothing to do?

I don’t know. I do know that she worried that the same fate would befall me, and she protected me in the only way that she knew how: by being honest. “I am so sorry,” Mom kept repeating. “I know it is hard on you that I do such ridiculous and foolish things.”

That could not have been easy to admit. Now I think it is what she meant by “the worthwhile risk,” the one that was not impulsive. As a little girl I had done my best to protect the world from my mother and my mother from herself. But as I grew older I began to resent cleaning up the messes that she made with her inept housekeeping, her poisonous food and her crazy parties. I wanted nothing so much as to be different from her. And that is exactly what she wanted too.

My grandmother had tried to turn her daughter into a carbon copy of herself. That had not worked out well. And so my mother did the opposite: Instead of holding herself up as a model to be emulated, she led by negative example, repeating “I am a failure” over and over, as if it were a mantra. “I am ridiculous. Don’t be like me. Don’t be like me.”

I can hardly imagine how excruciating that must have been. Parents yearn for their children’s respect; most of us want it more than anything else on earth. And yet my mother deliberately sabotaged my respect and emphasized her failings. She loved me enough to make me love her less. She wanted to make sure that I would not follow in her footsteps.

It was an enormous sacrifice. She made it willingly. And I never even thanked her.

I could not wait to escape
from my mother’s unhappiness. At sixteen I took off for a college halfway across the country, and from then on returned home as little as possible. When I graduated I was so terrified of getting caught once again in my mother’s orbit that I applied to graduate school.

But in 1970 I finally went home. I was about to be married, and I thought the least I could do was introduce my future husband to my parents.

Dad was very pleased. He reached to pat Doug on the back—they were exactly the same size—and within minutes they had disappeared into the study and a conversation that would last for the rest of my father’s life. Meanwhile Mom and I went into the kitchen to start dinner, and as the lobsters crawled across the counter I noticed that her hair was now entirely white and she was thickening around the middle. “Isn’t this very old-fashioned?” she asked, coolly stuffing the creatures into a pot. “I thought that these days people your age just lived together.”

I was certain that Mom would eventually warm to the idea. She did not. She wouldn’t help me plan the wedding, and she refused to buy herself a dress. During the weeks leading up to the event she groused about every aspect of the affair, from the fact that we were planning to recite our vows on a stretch of unfinished highway (“Why do you want to do it in the road?”) to my insistence on baking my own cake (“You know I have no pans”). When ten friends drove across the country and pitched their tents on the front lawn, she was not amused. “Why didn’t you just elope?” she asked crossly.

I should not have been surprised. Mom had hated being pressured into marriage, and she had scrupulously avoided doing the same thing to me. She had introduced me to her friends, shown me the drawbacks of a traditional marriage and offered me what she herself had wanted—permission not to marry. Now I was throwing it all away. Aggressively: Of all my friends I was the first to tie the knot.

She must have considered this an enormous rejection, and I suppose that was the point. She had trained me to be defiant, but this was an unanticipated consequence. Her response to my marriage was her way of jumping up and down, shouting, “This isn’t what I meant!”

Still, she saved the wedding announcement. On the front is a picture of Doug and me, standing on the bare dirt of the highway on which we were married. Earthmovers loom over us. My dress is a rainbow, there are colorful ribbons in my hair and I am clutching a bunch of wild daisies. Inside is the service that we had written together.

“Your marriage must be a vow to encourage each other to realize his own best qualities. You believe that you have found a person who will stretch your own limits, one who will provide a constantly challenging dialogue to encourage you each to grow in his own direction. You do not come to this marriage to find a resting place.”

Reading that, I thought how very sixties it sounded. But then I went back to the letter Mom had written, so hopefully, to her first husband thirty-five years earlier. She had wanted “an atmosphere of understanding,” a partnership, something very different than the “guidance” her father had so earnestly hoped a husband would offer her. There was an echo there, and it must have been bittersweet to watch me embark on exactly the sort of marriage that she herself had never achieved.

Mom apparently intended to send the announcement to a friend, because on the back she had written, “Ruth is now Mrs. Douglas Hollis. The wedding was completely unconventional. I hope the marriage will be too. But we all start off with such high hopes and look where we end up.”

Reading that brought back another memory. The night before the wedding, Mom came to my room to watch me try on my dress. She gulped when she saw the many layers of color, but managed to say “It’s lovely,” in a voice that sounded sincere. Then she cleared her throat and added, “I know you don’t need any advice on birds and bees. But you do know that you’re going to become a new person, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Once you’re married,” she replied, “you will stop being Ruth Reichl and start being Mrs. Douglas Hollis.”

Now I realize that she was being provocative, mischievously throwing out a lure. She knew how much I hated the idea of losing both my names, of disappearing into someone else’s identity. Oblivious, I took the hook.

“I don’t want to be a new person!” I shouted. “Don’t you ever call me by that name! I’m still me. If you ever send a letter addressed to Mrs. Douglas Hollis I swear I will return it unopened.”

It was a challenge that Mom was incapable of resisting. And there, in the bottom of the box, was the envelope with “return to sender” scrawled across the front. It was still sealed.

Curious, I slit it open.

Mom had known I wouldn’t read it: She had written the letter to herself.

It begins, “Why did I always do what my parents felt that I should do and not listen to my own feelings?” On the following page she listed all the mistakes that she had made in her life. But it ends on an optimistic note. “Your children are grown. From this day on you
must
stop looking back and move forward. It’s a new world.”

I wish that I had opened the letter; Mom had obviously been hoping that I would, because this was more than a reminder that a lot still lay ahead of her. Mom was writing to me, too, cheering me on and pointing out that I had an obligation, both to myself and to her, to use my life well. She understood that we had both come to a crossroads, and she was hoping that we would both head in the right direction.

Energized, Mom marched bravely
into the future. She sent out dozens of letters that began, “I am the editor of the twelve volume set, The Homemaker’s Encyclopedia,” to one group of prospects. To another group she wrote letters that called on her musical background. But she was now in her sixties, and all that came back were polite rejections. She wrote a few book proposals as well, but they went nowhere.

For a while she became a full-time volunteer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but she took umbrage at being treated as inferior to the paid employees. She wanted to be a curator, and while she tried to fool her friends (“I have the most fascinating new job!”) she could not fool herself. Frustrated, angry and increasingly frightened about her future, she picked fights with everyone.

She began with the people who ran the volunteer program at the museum, eventually becoming so contentious that she was asked to leave. Next she turned on me. Doug and I were living in New York, and when I got the contract to write my first book I went to my parents’ apartment to share the good news. Mom’s reaction was chilling. “Do you think we sent you to graduate school so you could write cookbooks?” she asked. “When are you going to do something worthwhile?”

Then it was Bob’s turn; she did not approve of his lifestyle, his values or the way he was bringing up her grandchildren. “I’ve been heartbroken about the way you treat me,” she began one letter. Another ended, “So I’ve stopped crying. What choice do I have?”

“My children have abandoned me,” she wailed after Bob and I both fled New York, unwilling to stay and endure her increasingly angry despair. But even her friends were not immune. “I’ve realized,” she wrote on one of those endless scraps of paper, “that I really don’t like Bert: He’s arrogant, undependable, contemptuous, dull and neurotic. And Jean is frivolous, calculating, a social climber, predatory, ambitious for the wrong things.”

Reading through this tsunami of pain, I couldn’t help wondering what it was about this particular point in Mom’s life that had caused such an extreme reaction. She had been unhappy in the past, but never before had she turned on everyone. What was different now?

I think that the moment when the last child marries and leaves home is a milestone for every parent. It is a turning point and an inexorable reminder of mortality. But for the women of my mother’s generation it must have been especially painful. Mom and her friends had poured so many of their hopes and aspirations into their daughters, and now they were watching us walk off into the future, leaving them behind.

In their letters Mom’s friends all brag shamelessly about their children. The girls are becoming doctors and lawyers, and their mothers are both pleased and pained. “How wonderful that Nancy is a doctor,” Mom wrote to one old friend. “She manages a house and two children as well; you must be so proud! Even when she was a child you could see what a capable woman she would become. I can’t get over how different their world is from ours.”

Mom sneered at my food career when she spoke to me, but her letters have a different tone. To one friend she wrote, “Ruthy has published a book. It’s just a cookbook, but it is the first of what we hope will be many more books.” She sent a review of the book to another friend, with a note that said, “We think she may have a real future as a writer!”

Reading that now, thirty-five years later, I can hear how the words come through gritted teeth and feel how unfair she considers all this. Indeed, an angry letter to my brother inadvertently revealed her true feelings. “You think that I’m a slob,” she wrote. “You would probably think the same of Ruth if you saw her house in Berkeley. It is not neat but it is filled with art, culture and interesting friends. She is an independent person, working hard at writing, and she is supporting herself. She and I both think it is more important to do interesting work than to shop, cook, and clean.”

But she, of course, was not doing interesting work. She was shopping, cooking, cleaning. Her parents had passed away, her husband was busy and her children were gone. Peering into the future, she saw only emptiness. But she was not ready to give up. “My life is not over,” she admonished herself. “I must work harder.”

It was a wish as much as an exhortation, but circumstances intervened to make the wish come true. One of Dad’s employees embezzled a large amount of money, putting his business into sudden jeopardy, and he asked Mom to find a temporary job. “Just until I get back on solid ground,” he pleaded.

Mom was nothing if not resourceful, and she took herself off to the Department of Aging. “I can’t imagine that they’ll have anything for someone like me,” she said dismissively. She was wrong. They offered her a job at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, and for the first time in her life my mother was doing work that employed both her training and her talents.

Dad’s business recovered but Mom would not consider giving up her job. She was at her desk when she learned that my father had suffered a sudden stroke. A few days later he was gone. Mom threw herself into planning the memorial service, but when it was over she fell into a deep depression.

She stopped working, calling in sick until it was clear that she would never go back to the library. She did not return her calls, and eventually the phone stopped ringing. She no longer left the house, and all but stopped breathing. She was inconsolable. Bob and I had no idea what we ought to do, but as the years went on we both worried that she would never recover.

My name is Miriam Reichl. I am 77 years old and now live alone in New York City, in the same apartment I’ve lived in for 43 years. You must have many readers who have the same problems I have, who don’t quite know how to cope now. Years ago we had husbands and children living at home, family meals to plan and serve, active social lives. And then, boom!
—
our husbands died and the bubble burst.