Anatomy of a Mother
by Abby Howell
I grew up in a house full of words, heavy with words, bricks of words. Written. Spoken. Ironic. Cutting. Educated. Words with tornado force, with freight train volume. Screaming words, fighting words; even crying (though crying is sound, akin to the dogs’ whine or the cats’ low snarl.)
In between the words, silence. It was a reading house, a deeply reading, deeply thinking, house. Books everywhere. Stacks of books. Towers of books. Stories built upon stories. Facts burdened with facts. But silence was tricky; unlike words where you pretty much knew where you were at, silence was not always a choice. Sometimes, it was forced upon you.
I am at my weekly 9 A.M. therapist appointment that I have had forever, or at least longer than I would like to admit. My therapist, white haired, even older than me, is listening. His rug is listening. Mostly to silence. Arms clasped together, thumbs worrying my shirt, I tell him, I tell the rug, “I think I have been afraid all of my life.”
*
Okay, let’s start with my mother. Let’s really dig in. My mother who, late in life, travels across the world--Mongolia, Costa Rica, France--freed from my father by his death. She would eat anything--chicken feet, crickets, warm goat’s milk. One of the last times I saw her, she sat in her wheelchair, head drooping to her chest as I fed her shiny globes of cherry cobbler. Nursing home food. Spoon up to her mouth, she silently swallowed the cherries. I wiped her mouth clean from the syrup, that’s good, Mom. And again.
My mother was a talker, maybe the biggest talker of the house. She taught students at a women’s college about humans, their cells, their systems, circulatory and otherwise. She taught about breath, the mechanics of living, about lungs, about nerves. She was a wordsmith of the body. Some students—they were soft while she was hard—might have called her mean. Some, those who loved knocking against her words, adored her.
I was and was not her student. I was and was not graded, but let’s agree my mother had a temper. Let’s agree when my mother saw that I, full of 10-year-old Girl Scout knot-knowledge, had unknotted the end of the cloth belt of her green and white dress, one of her nicest I-wear-this-when-I-teach-dresses, when I took apart the knot that looked to me like the smooth waves of a brain, when I re-made the knot and the brain was undeniably lumpy, she was very angry. She was why-do-you-always-ruin-everything- red-faced-hand-waving angry.
My mother had a closet jammed with dresses. And shoes. Each day of the semester, she commanded her physiology class podium in a different dress and pair of high-heeled shoes. The students noticed. They counted her dresses.
Speaking of Girl Scouts and my mother, when I was eight, I peed myself. A dark patch spread like a germ on my green Girl Scout uniform. I told my mother I had slipped into a puddle of water. She started up the iron , then the smell hit her. God Damnit. Why did you lie to me? Why did I lie to her?
My mother’s tongue could slice knives. I thought of my mother as a goddess of war, arrows aimed straight at the heart of the matter. Also, of the person. I thought of myself that way too. A tough-as-dried clay, I’ll-do-anything I-don’t-care category of a girl. I was a student of war. I could talk to my mother. Sometimes. In the way I could Never. Talk. To. My. Father. My mother was packaged-small, five-foot one inch mythic. I grew much taller, slim, but I learned to roll my shoulders over. Have I told you I learned to wait? To be still. Inside. And. Out.
*
My dead mother comes to me, even today, in a dream. I ask her why she walked past me on a movie set, cameras rolling, director yelling directions. Why did she refuse to acknowledge my presence? She turns, leans in, her coffee-breath and tight roller-curled hair so real and says, “The question is, why are you ignoring me?” I am stunned. I had thought, when I finally learned to think about it at all, when my voice could finally squeak out its true sound, it was the other way around. Was I wrong?
When I was five and jumped into a motel pool , my chin hit smack-a-doodle hard against the corner. I did not cry. I swam to the steps and climbed out of the pool. I said, “Mommy, I think…”, as the blood, diluted with the clear pool water, dripped onto my feet.
Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. But I knew not to cry (to take it on the chin?). “Mommy, I think I… “ a finger on the ribbon of blood running down my swimsuit’s belly. Amazingly, I found myself softly curled, a small parenthesis in her lap, held firmly, an almost hug, by the chin, as we drove towards help. Did she think of me as broken cells she was trying to glue together? I did not cry when the ER doctor numbed me. I did not cry when they stitched me up, towel over my face. Six, breath in, seven, breath out, eight stitches? I did not cry because I knew all I needed was to be nowhere at all.
*
Goldfish. No matter what color, or size, they never lived for long. A nameless series, bought for a quarter from behind the pet store counter, amid yelping puppies and coiled snakes, poured from a sloppy shape-shifting water-filled bag and carefully carried upright from store to home. Singularly mine. It wasn’t love but, at eight, I liked to track their endless back and forth, orange purple puffs of light trailing through the glass. I’d carefully drop a palm of food, the grains massing on top, only briefly held by the weakly viscous water, before slow-motion sinking down, the sleepy fish roused to catch and eat. Just being fed, I learned, was not enough. They always jumped, out and sideways over the bowl. Why they jumped, I never knew. What care, what love, was missing? Didn’t they understand the line between water and the poisoned air? Sometimes I’d hear the splash and flop. I’d scoop them up, hold them softly, rescued, and slip them back into the water.
There is a skill in learning how to wait. My mother taught me that. My mother taught me how to hold patience. With no malice, she taught me, “Shut up, I’m reading.”
At the counter, on the stool, with a porcelain cup of coffee she had poured from the percolator on the stove, a Lucky Strike cigarette, and the newspaper—The Memphis Commercial Appeal or the thick Sunday New York Times--my mother could not be talked to before that coffee and cigarette. I learned to watch her from across the counter, track each slow puff and sip. This is how I see her, over and over again. The rigid flip of the paper. The inhale of smoke. The coffee pushed to the side. Is caution a type of fear? Another lesson from my mother: Fear makes things worse.
*
In a lab filled with loose-boned skeletons and gloomy formaldehyde jars, I am trying to tell you that my mother was a mother who thought nothing of demonstrating how to pith a frog to her ten-year-old daughter. Watch my hands. Make the puncture sure and quick. She’d drive the silver needle deep into its brain. Then a quick scissor snip to free the leg. A peeling back of skin. A bit over the counter’s height, I stood close as she placed the electrode along the frog’s bare nerves, watching the miracle of the leg uncontrollably twitch.
She had wrapped the lab’s resident boa constrictor around my arm—I’d said Yes, I want to—and sent me walking proudly, the snake’s cold squeeze around my arm, down the biology department’s wide hallways. Between classes, the college students ooed and ahhed.
She showed me how to steady my ground when the neighbor’s unleashed dogs lunged. Arm straight. Fist out. Stop. She would offer the dogs her fist and they would smell and lick and body-shiver.
Magic. She bent over me: if you splash your face with cold water, the redness, the puffy eyes, the clues that you’ve been crying (again and again and again) will disappear. My mother taught me how to erase all evidence of emotion.
Perhaps my mother thought, if she thought at all about this, her words were her gift to me. Minus certain words. Love you or good job learned much later and from other people. (Touch absent too. She herself, perhaps, had never learned touch. Hug, holding hands, fond shoulder squeeze also learned from other people.)
*
My mother taught me solitaire and how to shuffle a deck, the careful weaving in and out of cards. She used each deck until the cards were bent and sticky. Solitaire with percolated black coffee—no sugar, no cream—and a cigarette. I would lean over her shoulder, so close I could feel the cigarette’s heat, the coffee’s steam. Careful not to bump her hands, I’d guess where to put each card. Sometimes she let me choose. Sometimes not. I’d watch her cheat. Though she knew that turning over the facedown cards didn’t always guarantee the win.
Other lessons:
How to clean. A blue-handled mop for the broad sweeps of soapy water over the floor. The coarse brush on hands and knees to fully probe the darkened corners.
How to bake. Cake-mix cake. Chocolate. Stir hard until all ingredients mix together. Pancakes. Wait till all the bubbles surface and pop until you flip the circle over. And those little measurements? The half-teaspoons? Don’t bother with a measuring spoon. Have the confidence to measure by feel.
How to sew. Pinning the patterns carefully to cloth, piecing the parts together, lining the seams just so. A strong arm to pull the fabric straight through.
How to knit. We sat, mirrored-image, my left-handedness to her right, the yarn unspooling.
How to ride an escalator. How to take the first step on (and off), no fear of the silver monster that could not stop moving.
Also, unintended lessons:
How to hate beets. Six years old, I could not leave the table until I ate them. Crying, my face bloated and red as those gaseous globes, I wrap them in white bread, the blood-maroon seeping through, and still I cannot eat. She walks out and, alone, I push the mess deep into the garbage can where it can’t be found.
How to hate the drawn shade, the closed curtain, the closed door, the closed-off face.
*
My mother, retired, (my father dead) offers vacations to me—relief from my three toddler kids. We share books in our hotel room , mostly in silence. She visits my home in the Northwest, and I drive for hours to an active volcano. Mount St. Helen’s, (I had imagined a woman-martyr-saint) whose top had exploded, killing dozens of people. We look together in the visitor’s center without comment across the divide into the smoking crater. She nods. I think she’s impressed, and I know I want to impress her. That world we shared before, my childhood world, I could never bring myself to ask about. I wanted to, but froze, her presence never having lost the ability to bury my words.
*
In her last years, dementia took reason and control, but not her words. As I pushed her wheelchair, she talked to the sky about being a mother, how she hated seeing me, Abby, curled up in the corner of a room terrified, when father got his belt out and yelled. Did she know I was right there, behind her?
Very close to the end of her life, while reading to her from a book about an old man dreaming peacefully under a tree, I tried to manufacture a moment while she slept, curled over in her wheelchair. I imagined something huggable and bright, a life, a relationship, that had never been. I dared to touch her thinned hair. She cried out—tangles, get out the tangles—but I didn’t have a comb.
*
I spoke at neither of her memorials. In my brother’s city, where she had died, I cried in the back of the room at her photos enlarged on the screen. At the one outside the biology building at the college in Columbus, Mississippi where she taught for 25 years, my brother Joel and I spread part of her ashes, which I learned is really just gritty hapless sand, around a newly planted magnolia tree. I went back the next day, alone, and read a poem, to her, to me.
Months after her death, in silence, I poured my mother’s ashes out in a place she had never been. A Northwest beach, on a sunny summer day, in a hidden cove of cold bright water. A place that is dear to me. As the tide went out, I chose to believe that there was nothing more I needed to say.