Mother Daughter Me (33 page)

She tells me that during these conversations, Sarah does nearly all the talking. Mostly, Sarah talks about her favorite TV shows, movies, books, handbags, and skin products. Not only does she recommend that my mother try this lotion or that cream, but she sends bottles and tubes of whatever she is championing at the moment. Sarah also sends some framed pieces of her own striking artwork. I’m moved by my sister’s generosity, even if it comes wrapped in a guilt trip, as Sarah often goes out of her way to remind my mother that the object in question was “expensive.”

“You know,” my mother says between bites, “I’ve learned not to even utter your name to Sarah.”

I say nothing, and she continues. “A few weeks ago, I told Sarah I was going to a concert with you, and she blew up. She said, ‘You
do
love Katie more than me,’ and she hung up.”

For years, Sarah has resented what she perceived as my closeness to our mother. Here I am, coming to understand that my bond with my mother was unhealthy for both my mother and me. Yet how was Sarah to know this? A wave of compassion for Sarah sweeps over me. Even in times like this, when Sarah and I don’t speak, I know we will always have each other and I will always be grateful for what she did for me during the worst of our childhood together. If what Sarah needs now in order to feel close to our mother is to fence me out, then it’s what she should have.

“What did you do after she hung up?” I ask.

“I waited for a few hours, then I called her back.”

I’m impressed by the steady calm with which my mother interacts with her volatile, fragile older daughter, and I say this to her. For years she wasn’t there for Sarah, and now she is.

It’s near the end of the meal, my wineglass is empty, and the waiter asks me if I’d like another. I ask if I can have half a glass.

“And I should have the other half?” my mother asks.

“Absolutely. It’s delicious.”

When our wine arrives, my mother takes a sip.

“It’s divine,” she says.

She takes two more sips, then leaves the rest. I knew she would do that, because she really is that rare alcoholic who can enjoy a sip or two without retriggering the horrible cycle. At this moment, in this restaurant, at this table I share with my mother, I am content.

While driving home, tired to the bone, I worry I’ll fall asleep while Zoë and I watch
Desperate Housewives
, our weekly ritual. When I arrive, I find Zoë eager to model her entire prom outfit for me, complete with accessories. I’m honored to be invited for a preview a week before the event. When she emerges from her room wearing the pink strapless dress and gold heels she’s picked out, she appears slightly bashful, as if she’s uncomfortable with her emerging womanhood. The child is stunning—and not looking very much like a child. “Gorgeous,” I tell her.

She changes back into her sweats and we settle on the couch for
Desperate Housewives
. The whole gang is in trouble. Bree is being blackmailed by a young weasel; Lynette is about to be strangled by a wacko who’s been killing off women in the neighborhood all season; and Carlos finally confesses to Gaby that he’s not so wild about her lasagna after all.

Zoë tucks herself close to my side, and I think of my mother safe in her own apartment, complete with a backup toilet. I manage to stay awake for the entire show. And later, when I do go to bed, happiness lays a warm paw on my chest, and I descend into a heavy, peaceful sleep.

———

Z
OË AND I ARE PREPARING FOR HER TRIP TO BRAZIL. I’M WORRIED
about how she will weather this absence from me. But as we race around getting the visa, buying the travel-sized toiletries, stocking up on sunscreen, and going to the doctor for the necessary typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza shots, I can see that Zoë is more concerned about how I’ll do without her.

“Mom, maybe we should take a cab to the airport, because I’m worried about you driving back by yourself,” she says one morning as her departure draws near. “I know you’ll be pretty upset.”

I’m touched by her concern. “Don’t worry, sweetie. I’ll be fine.”

“Mom,” she says, switching gears, “which do you think is worse for a kid—having parents who are divorced or having one of your parents die?”

“I don’t know,” I reply. “Both are bad, but in different ways. Why do you ask?”

“Because I have friends whose parents are divorced, and it looks so terrible.”

“Really? Who?”

She rattles off a list of troubled households among her classmates, some of whom I know and others I don’t. I’m aware of the tough circumstances in which Gwen lives, but I’m surprised to hear how intractable some of the other problems sound.

She must be thinking of this because at the moment we’re headed to a store to buy Matt’s birthday candle. The Matt birthday cycle, like so many other reminders of our loss, seems to be getting easier. When Zoë’s prom night came and went without my anguishing over yet another important event in her life that her father wouldn’t witness, I felt lighter. With time, I’m finding that Zoë and I can truly celebrate milestones that had once been overshadowed by her father’s absence. As the day of Matt’s birthday approached, I did not assault her with a drumroll of reminders, as I had always done in the past. Only when she got home from school on the actual day did I say anything. She looked crestfallen. She had forgotten. But I told her not to worry, that it didn’t mean that she loved him any the less and that we’d honor the day as we always do.

Every year on Matt’s birthday, we carry out the same ritual: We go to a small Parisian
perfumerie
in Union Square to find the perfect candle. It’s just the kind of place my aesthetically minded late husband would have liked—a boutique devoted to nothing but expensive scented things. We’re the only customers in the store this day, and the salesman indulges us as we make a production out of smelling each of the candles. He doesn’t merely hold them up for us to sniff but pops them out of the glass with a whack at the bottom, for the full effect.

One of the candles is fig-scented. “Guys really like that one,” says the salesman. It’s settled, then. The cheerful salesman offers to gift wrap the candle. I look at Zoë and she says, “Sure.” Zoë turns to me. “Let’s just pretend he’s alive,” she whispers, an echo of what she confided over Christmas. “Isn’t it fun?” I smile. Yes, for her, right now, it is. In some ways Zoë is dealing with the reality of her father’s death, and in other ways she isn’t. She needs to process it at her own pace.

We unwrap the candle at home and light it. Then we have a “what do you remember” conversation, and she tells me her strongest memory of
her dad is his reading
Harry Potter
aloud to her. Matt read the books
con brio
, putting on an English accent and dramatizing the action with expert inflection. They made it through the first three volumes before he died. Zoë read the next four on her own, and at the height of her separation anxiety, one surefire method she had of calming herself down was to read
Harry Potter
or, better yet, listen to it on her iPod.

And with that, we’ve ushered in Matthew’s fifty-fourth birthday.

ZOË’S QUESTION ABOUT DIVORCE
and its effect on kids rouses my curiosity. A couple of days later I wander around Amazon.com and find a book titled
The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce
, written by psychologist Judith Wallerstein. I immediately recognize the name: She’s the same woman who counseled me so well on the day Matt died, as she would do again in the pages of her book.

Reading the book is a revelation. I see myself everywhere in its pages. I recognize my lifelong fear of conflict and my inability, until Matt came back to me, to do much of anything except flee—anything to avoid reliving the turmoil I experienced as a child. In Wallerstein’s vivid case studies, I see Sarah in the role of substitute parent she took on for her younger sister—a degree of caregiving that involved no small amount of sacrifice. Wallerstein also helps me to understand Sarah’s clinging to my mother’s side at the court hearing three decades ago as a mix of neediness and protectiveness. How could she abandon my mother, who had no one but us? Wallerstein describes the love and compassion that daughters of divorce—and I see both Sarah and myself on this page—feel for their mothers who are alone. “Negotiating separation becomes a heroic task.”

Besides Matt’s death, this is the most important challenge I have had to face. It finally came into focus for me in the months we spent living together, months of mounting disappointments, during which I learned I had to surrender my fantasy of my mother and me as best friends.

Thinking about all this sets me to thinking about the house in Rochester. The family home may be a symbol of continuity for children of intact families. But for children of divorce, Wallerstein emphasizes, it’s a symbol of what has been lost.

When I read this, I flash on Sarah’s quilts. In her thirties, Sarah started
to make quilts covered with colorful houses, each structural element—the chimney, the walls, the windows, and the front door—cut by hand and stitched together into an individual panel. Depending on the size, one of Sarah’s quilts could contain dozens of houses. For years, she made house quilts and only house quilts. When Zoë was born, Sarah made her a miniature house quilt with an extra touch: Onto the fabric she placed silk-screened photographs of assorted family members. Then she took a glow-in-the-dark pen, and in one corner she wrote, “I love you, Zoë.” It was years before I noticed that message, late one night after I switched off the light in Zoë’s room.

My mother calls to chat, and before I can stop myself, I’m saying to her, “There’s a book I’d like you to read, about the effect of divorce on children.” Since my mother vigorously swore off introspection about the past when she quit the Lia sessions, I immediately regret my words, but her response surprises me. While we’re on the phone she goes to Amazon.com, finds the Wallerstein book, and buys it. In a few clicks, she’s done something I wouldn’t have dared suggest just a few months earlier. “I’ll read it,” she says. Her voice is steady and resolute.

That night, I take Wallerstein’s book from my bedside table and reread something she mentioned only in passing: the ambivalence that many adult children of divorce feel about their obligation to their aging parents. So lasting are the effects of divorce, so disruptive to the bond between parent and child, that some of these children find that when the roles are reversed and it is their parents who now need them, they want to pay them back in kind. What they didn’t get, they don’t want to give. Yet even as I read this, I don’t budge from what has become a personal mantra for me:
Our parents do the best they can with what they have to work with, and we owe them the same
.

I get out of bed, go to my computer, and send my mother an email. As I watch the words form on the screen, I know that what I am writing comes from a quiet, true place:

—–

ON THE MORNING OF
Zoë’s flight to Brazil, I agree to stop at Starbucks on the way to the airport. I usually grouse about their overpriced drinks, then get angry with her when she takes just a few sips of her four-dollar mocha and leaves the rest. But on this morning, when my daughter is about to leave for South America for six weeks, had she wanted ten mochas and taken a small sip from each, that would have been just fine with me.

As I’m waiting for her, I notice we’re parked close to the very spot where I happened to be when I was driving to work one morning two years earlier and got the call telling me I had been laid off from the
Times
. I have a choice: I can allow the anger to bubble back to the surface, or I can take a deep breath and take stock of my good fortune. And I realize how much good fortune I have had since then. I’m now freelancing occasionally for the
Times
, and I have the luxury of choosing my topics and setting my own schedule. I can devote time to Zoë without giving it a second thought. And, even more important, I have a daughter who is now doing just fine and a man whose company both Zoë and I enjoy more with each passing week. I am beginning to have a relationship with my mother that is set against a backdrop not of denial but truth. And both my mother and I are finding a way to implement the all-important boundaries Lia mentioned over and over, especially when it comes to inappropriate and gratuitous comments about Bob, which only crop up from time to time. When I speak of him to her, my tone is matter-of-fact, making it clear that I am not soliciting advice of any kind. There will be no magical moment of rapprochement between him and my mother, or between her and Zoë, certainly not anytime soon; this fact, too, I am coming to terms with. I can have relationships with all of the people I love without needing to connect the dots between the individuals. This is a liberating thought. Zoë returns to the car and hands me a bag containing a walnut scone. “I’m worried you won’t eat,” she says sweetly.

Zoë was correct in predicting that I’d be flustered. I miss the exit for the San Francisco airport—an airport I’ve driven to hundreds of times. When we arrive, I invite her to buy as many magazines as she wants.
Ditto the candy and gum. As the parent of a minor, I’m issued a special gate pass and we head for the gate. Zoë insists I stay put until the plane pushes back, and I dutifully station myself in a chair at the window. All I can see is the plane’s nose and the two pilots holding their coffee cups. Zoë texts me from her seat to tell me she’s already met someone in her program, also headed for Brazil. This, I decide, is a very good sign. I watch the plane back away from the gate.