“Don’t stay out too late,” my mother says, handing me her car keys.
“Do you want to wait up for me?” I ask her.
She shrugs. “I won’t be able to sleep anyway.”
When I left home to come visit my mother, I was a mature woman. But once I enter my mother’s house, I revert to my earliest, most practiced role, that of daughter.
Every mother knows so much more than her daughter. Every mother sees the beauty, the secret hollows and lost potential of her daughter. The mother saves these insights like precious unread love letters. She prays that somehow, someday her daughter will ask her just how much she knows. I, too, am a mother. I know the exact words that could change my daughters into happier women. And like my own mother, I wait helplessly for them to open their ears to me.
I return to my mother’s house before midnight. Though my old friends were yearning to go to another jazz club, I felt my mother waiting for me. She opens the door before I even knock.
“I have something to show you,” she says. I follow her into the breakfast room.
“Look at this,” she says, pointing to a photo of a beautiful woman sitting coquettishly under a tree. Her lipstick is a taunting red, her hair a provocative black. “This was taken when I was in nurse’s training,” my mother says. I see her secret smile, her joy in how beautiful she was.
I sit down and study the picture, knowing that she had already lost her mother and her first husband, that deep sorrow stretched underneath her beauty. Then my mother spreads more pictures. Me at age five, playing jacks on the front porch. Me and my daughters sitting in a mimosa tree.
“No one can hurt you as much as your own daughter can,” my mother says as she hands me another photo, one of my wedding. “I knew you were making a big mistake,” she says, jabbing her finger at my ex-husband’s picture.
Before when my mother made remarks like this, I resented it. But this visit, I listen. I allow the words to soak in. I hear their translation: “I love you. I think of you all the time. You are so important to me.” Has she been speaking in a foreign language all these years, so I never noticed the real meaning of her words?
I call home to check on my fifteen-year-old daughter.
“Hi, how are you?” I say.
“Fine,” she answers.
“How was your day?”
“Okay.”
I know when she is done talking to me, she will call her friends and they will laugh and chat for hours. I feel like a thirsty woman, wanting too many drops of water.
“Want some coffee, dear?” my mother asks, when I get off the phone.
I take the coffee, made the way she likes it, too strong. We sit together on the sofa, and she asks me if I eat properly.
I want to answer, “Yes,” in a voice crisp and clipped as my daughter’s.
I take a deep breath before I answer. “Yes,” I say, “I eat properly.”
“Do you get enough rest?” she asks.
My friends and I talk about money, work, relationships, children. No one else asks me these basic questions: Am I surviving? No one dares get so deep, so primal.
In the beginning, the mother is the everything, the arms and the heart and breath of her daughter. The mother is the leader, the model. She takes a step, and her daughter follows. But gradually, the child pushes away from her mother. Like a swimmer, kicking off from the side of the pool, the child moves herself into deeper water.
I know that moment, standing alone at the edge of the pool, watching my daughter swim faster and farther. It is a moment of “hallelujah” success and heartbreaking loneliness. To be a good mother means to lose your child to the world.
My mother’s child has returned. I am old enough to allow her to renew our original bond, my original role in life. I am old enough that I truly treasure having a mother. |
Online
Moneycontrol 
