For a long time, when I was younger and she was alive, I told stories about my mother. The stories were funny, meant to be funny, made funny in the telling. I might say to you, “Jesus, I just got off the phone with my mother.”
“How is she?” you might say.
“She wore one of her outfits to the symphony, and now she’s distraught because no one talked to her,” I would answer.
“Outfits?” you’d ask.
“She’s a seamstress and a tailor,” I’d explain. “She calls the things she makes creations.”
From there I might describe, say, a gold jacket with floppy lapels and giant clown buttons. That would lead me to grievance and psychoanalysis: “She’s infuriating. She isolates herself from people, and her loneliness grows, and she wears these garments around town, and people shy away, and she doesn’t understand, and she’s traumatized. She does it again and again.”
I’d be traumatized myself. But I might get a laugh as I went on to describe her terrible haircuts, or the way she ate, or her big, round glasses, like a bug’s eyes—or, wait, it gets worse.
She’d been a horrible drunk, but had nonetheless got sober, a testament to her strength and the Twelve Steps. I’d been a part of all that—flying from here to there, Florida, New York, North Carolina, getting her on and off the ward in Miami, cooking for her in her trashed duplex when she hadn’t eaten for a week or two, picking up cat shit, wishing her well as she went out the door for another A.A. meeting, another start.
Was I, in telling these stories, somehow protecting myself from her? Or was this my way of healing wounds, or even of keeping her at a distance?
I told stories of her drinking. I told about our fights. I would riff on her creepy New Age friends in the mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina, on her belief in her own afterlife, on the kimono that she’d sewn—and sewn well—and then draped with ribbons and hanging things, stuffed birds and little cats and various personal totems.
Then, in 2000, she died, and soon after that I began to tell those stories in the pages of this magazine.
At first, it was awful. The anxiety kept coming. I had a hard time writing, because I saw myself as a betrayer. I worked at memory, and made it a point to be accurate in my reporting. Under revision, the stories that I’d told for so long—on first dates, or long car rides, or while sitting at home, talking on the phone—seemed to expand, to grow in detail, to become more interconnected and complex and ambiguous in relation to the judgments I’d heaped on her in the form of laughter. Memoir is a responsibility, a set of responsibilities, not only to the people represented in the writing but to the characters those people become in a narrative. My mother, as a character, became a more serious figure as time went on; I recognized that she’d had a work ethic, that she’d been desperately lonely, and sad.
I told the stories less and less, and I promised myself that I would not write memoir again; it was too strenuous, too costly, too harmful, no matter how cathartic it might be. I had breakdowns and hospitalizations, which I attributed in part to the act of writing memoir, and which led, counterintuitively, to more memoir, a short work on suicide, itself a set of stories that I’d already told. This time, I wrote not about my mother’s failings but about my own.
These days, I refer to my mother in conversation, but I never tell the stories that I used to tell, before I began writing them down. I certainly never talk about my mother’s haircuts, or her manner of eating, or her crazy kimono. Nor do I quietly speak to her, as I did in the year after her death. I don’t push her away. She just doesn’t come around. All those old stories, those little conversations, were lost to me at the moment that I published them. I’ve learned by now that the act of publishing is its own kind of ending, and, with each publication, my mother has seemed to recede further, to, as it were, drift off into some distant past. I am getting older.
It’s not that I don’t miss her. I miss her more every day. ♦