When my husband died my daughter did what he’d always done for me: kept my financial affairs in order. But she had to do more than he did because now I just lay in bed, often with the covers over my head, wishing I could die. I let the mail, including bills and checks, lie around any old place, piling up.
For months I didn’t even get dressed to fetch food and there were many times that my frig and cupboard were completely bare. My clothes were in shambles. I didn’t buy anything new for four years.
I slept a lot, and procrastinated as much as possible. After all, I had no control over my life, did I? I even put off making beauty appointments until it was too late and the salon was all booked up. Then I felt so unkempt that I was too embarrassed to go anyplace, so I just stayed home.
And then
—
just as suddenly as I gave up—I came back to life. What happened? I realized that so many people had so many more problems than I did that it behooved me to be grateful.
I’d like to tell my story to your readers, so that they too can experience the same miraculous recovery.
The manuscript ends there. I imagine it is because Mom did not know what to say next. She couldn’t tell anyone how to experience the miraculous recovery, because she had no idea how it had happened to her.
It was not drugs. She stopped taking them long before my father died. She did occasionally see a psychiatrist, but he was a man who treated her with nothing but kindness. His sympathetic ear was surely helpful, but he was not the reason behind the great transformation. The real catalyst was something that Mom could not admit, even to herself.
This was the first time in her life that she had ever lived alone, and once Mom finished mourning my father, she thrived on it. You could see it just by looking at her. She wrote in a note, “People tell me that I’ve never looked better.” It was true. Nearing eighty, with thick white hair and a vivacious smile, she had turned into a very beautiful old lady. She stopped caring what people thought and started wearing outlandish clothes of many colors. She draped herself with costume jewelry and delighted in her own eccentricity. Mom had always talked easily to strangers, and now she made new friends each time she boarded a bus. She met people everywhere she went—in the grocery store, at the movies, just walking through the park. But most of all she stopped berating herself for all the things she hadn’t done—and she switched off the voice inside her head.
“My mother is dead,” she wrote. “It’s time I stopped letting her tell me how to live. Why should I care what she thinks? I have so little time.”
She was slightly high, like a person just after the first electric sip of a martini, and she did exactly what she felt like doing. She had always wanted to serve people, and now she simply started helping those around her. She would never be a doctor, but she could care for sick friends, and she often had them stay with her for months on end. She made a kind of family of other people’s children and grandchildren, and they were constantly in and out of her house.
She took in student boarders too. She said it was to help pay the rent, but it was really because she liked having young people in the apartment. Her phone was always busy, her apartment always full of life. She traveled—to Russia, to India, to visit old friends in France and Switzerland. And she invited them to visit her.
She filled her life with all the things that she had always wanted—art, music, people—and freed herself from everything that did not make her happy. When she found that Bob and I could not keep from treating her like the sad old Mom she used to be, she simply cut us loose. She did not need that. For the happiest years of her life, Mom relied almost entirely on herself.
She wrote the very last note in the box when she was almost eighty. By then her arthritic hands had trouble grasping the pen, and her handwriting had turned into a hesitant wavering line. But the words are strong, positive, optimistic, without a single uncertain note. “I am not going to lower my sights,” Mom wrote. “I am going to live up to the best in myself. Even if it means some painful changes. I am no longer afraid.”
Gifts
That last letter was my mother’s
final gift to me, and I read it with tears running down my face. She had no way to know that I would ever find it, or how happy I would be to discover that at the end of her life she finally found her truest self. She had traveled through obedience to anger and rebellion and finally come to rest in a place where she was not only independent, but also happy.
Meeting Mom—the real Mom—was even harder than I had expected. I never thought her life was easy, but until I read her letters I had not known the enormous burden of pain that she carried with her. Each letter was like a reproach, and as I thought about the Mim Tales I wished that I had been more considerate, more understanding, that I had given her more support. Mom was so generous to me, and I gave so little in return.
In her own oblique way Mom passed on all the knowledge she had gleaned, giving me the tools I needed not to become her. Believing that work, beauty, marriage and motherhood were the forces that had shaped her destiny, she tried to teach me how to do better at each of them than she had.
Work was her most basic lesson: Using herself as an example, she made me see that working is as necessary as breathing. Mom’s strongest belief was that “it is what we are made for,” and she was convinced that those who are not useful can never be satisfied. She tried to make me see that a job was not enough; she wanted me to have the meaningful career that she herself had yearned for.
Stamped at an early age by her own lack of beauty, Mom tried to spare me that pain. The fate of men is not decided by their looks, and my mother did not want beauty—or the lack of it—to determine my destiny. Throughout human history beauty has been seen as a gift from God, but Mom had another notion; she thought that beauty could be earned through self-knowledge. It may be a revolutionary idea, but it has offered me great comfort.
Mom also had her own ideas about marriage. Unlike most women of her time, she did not think that a woman needed a man to be complete. She believed that marriage was important, but she tried to show me that it works only when it is based on mutual respect between two people who encourage each other to live up to the best in themselves.
But Mom’s most important lesson was how to be a mother. I see now how hard she tried to be a good one, despite her many handicaps. Her struggle with her own mother had shown her that it is important to encourage your children to be themselves, even if they do not turn out to be the people that you wish they were. And so she urged me to independence, asking only that I work hard, be kind and live up to my own possibilities.
Growing up, I was utterly oblivious to the fact that Mom was teaching me all that. But I was instantly aware of her final lesson, which was hidden in her notes and letters. As I read them I began to understand that in the end you are the only one who can make yourself happy. More important, Mom showed me that it is never too late to find out how to do it.
Afterword
I thought that writing this book was going to be easy. The speech had simply come to me, and the response was so powerful that I expected to sit down at the computer and find the words, once again, pouring onto the page. But my mother’s box changed all that. I took the letters out to my little writing cabin in the woods and sat there, day after day, staring at those fading bits of paper. Reading those words written so long ago I could feel my mother materializing around me, ghostly but new. As the woman became more real, the writing became more difficult. Most days I cried, and some days I’d go fleeing from my cabin, running through the trees shouting, “I can’t do this anymore!” to astonished deer and squirrels.
I had started with a very clear vision of what this book should be. It was not going to be about my mother, but about
all
the women of her generation and the ways that they passed their dreams down to their daughters. After struggling for many months I finally had a finished manuscript. Heaving an enormous sigh of relief I locked the cabin door, happy to put those demons behind me.
So when my editor, Ann Godoff, called to say that we needed to talk, I was extremely wary. Ann didn’t beat about the bush. “Your book’s not finished,” she said, and I had an eerily physical sensation that my heart was sinking. “I know you want to make this book universal,” she continued, “but I think you’re missing the point. This
isn’t
a book about all those other women. It’s a book about you and your mother. You’ve picked up a big rock and looked underneath it, which is something most of us are loath to do. What you have is a book about you, a grown woman, finally coming to terms with who your mother really was. You need to acknowledge that. Stop trying to turn this book into something that it doesn’t want to be.”
I was furious, and with very bad grace I unlocked my cabin, lit a fire, and started over again. This time, however, the work went quickly, and as the words spilled onto the page, I realized that Ann was right. For she was not only telling me to be honest with myself; she was also urging me to trust the reader. She understood that if I were able to find my own truth, inside of it each reader would find her own.
But it would be many months before I realized exactly what that meant.
Some books are finished the moment they are published. They go off into the world complete, and people devour them, reading the words exactly as they were written. Others require the reader to make them whole: they are simply one side of a conversation that each person completes in his own unique fashion. This book is one of those; everybody who opens these pages discovers a different book. But I did not find that out until I went off on the book tour.
The first night the audience was mostly women, and they were so eager to talk about their relationships with their mothers that when the lights went up we flowed from the theater into a nearby restaurant, staying long into the night. “I felt as if I were in church,” one woman said later, “as woman after woman got up to testify about her mother’s life.” In that moment I saw that Ann had been right, and that my story had made other women think about their own mothers, the way they had been raised, their own lives.
I was thrilled about this. And utterly taken aback the next night when a man in the audience stood up and cried passionately, “What about us? Why do you women think that you’re the only ones affected? Don’t you realize how hard it has been for us to figure out what it means to be a man in a world that is so different than that of our fathers?” He was practically weeping when another man picked up that refrain shouting, “You may not have wanted to be your mother, but I didn’t want to be either her or my father. Where was my role model?” Before long we were embarked on a discussion that ranged from why men hunt to gay rights, and I was starting to see that this book was not about women, but about an entire generation, both male and female, that had been deeply affected by the changing role of women.
So I could not have been more surprised a few nights later when a small young voice called out, “I am your mother!” Peering into the audience I discovered that it belonged to an attractive young woman who could not have been more than thirty-five. She stood, twisting her hands nervously as she began to speak. “I’m a lawyer. I loved working, but when my second child was born I felt that I could not keep my job and also be a good mother, so I gave it up to stay home with my kids. Now my youngest is almost ten, and I realize that I have made a terrible mistake. My kids no longer need my full-time attention, and I’d like to go back to work. But it’s too late. I feel trapped. I can already feel myself driving my kids crazy....” She began crying and apologizing, and then abruptly sat down. The audience, galvanized, picked up the conversation and began an impassioned discussion of childcare, family leave policy, and how limited the choices for women continue to be. As the evening ended one woman said, “Gloria Steinem put it best. She said, ‘The problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don’t get young men standing up and saying, “How can I combine career and family?” Why is this still a woman’s issue?’ ”
This became the new theme, and for the next few days the conversation turned to the need for a new kind of woman’s movement. That ended abruptly the night a teenager stood up to say, “You may not want to be your mother, but I do. I certainly don’t want to be you.” It was like a bucket of cold water heaved straight at my face, and I stood there, dripping, as she continued to speak. “I don’t want to be Superwoman. I don’t want to have it all. I’m almost twenty, and I’m trying to figure out whether I want a career or a family. I know I don’t want both. Why would I ever want to work as hard as you do? Why would anyone?”
To me the answer had been obvious. I thought that while we may not have solved the issues of gender, family, and power that plagued earlier generations, in the America of the twenty-first century we had at least defined the terms. But I was wrong; what I keep learning from this book is that there are still so many questions and so few answers.
I suspect my mother would be very pleased to know that this was one last lesson that she had to teach me.
Acknowledgments
So many people helped me with this book that I will never be able to thank them all. But here’s a start.
Women in Communications: If they had not given me the Matrix Award, I never would have channeled Mom to thank them for it. And if the members had not responded so generously, I never would have tried to turn the speech into a book.
My agent, Kathy Robbins, who spent hours talking me through this project, reading pages, sending encouraging notes.
All of the people who told me stories about their mothers. I don’t think there was a single interview that did not end in tears.