becoming my mother

when i was little, there were two things that could invariably make me fall asleep: long drives and eaves dropping. nestled against my mom's side, i so often fell asleep to the sound of her voice as she talked on the phone with her mother. i don't remember exactly what they talked about, but (rather egocentrically) i assume it had something to do with me, my dad or my brother. i became so accustomed to the daily conversations between mom and grandma that i began to see their identities as inseparable. i knew my grandma was my mommy's mommy. i saw their mother-daughter bond as one which included me, and from a very early age i recognized the fact that at one point my mother was a child like me (and that she never really stopped needing her mother, and so neither would i).

growing up i often took for granted the omnipresence of my grandma in my life. i must have seen her at least once a week for most of my childhood, and when i didn't see her i felt her presence in the mannerisms she passed on to my mother or in the mumble of her voice through the phone. even during her last few years, when she lived in the room adjoining to mine, i saw my grandma and my mother as so tightly bonded that i knew that anything i said to one of them would be known by the other. anything that one said to me, the other would undoubtedly agree upon.

it was only after my freshman year of college that i really began to feel a widening divide between the personalities of the 'mothers' in my life. it started with a phone call. i was walking through the quad on a breezy, slightly chilly afternoon in early june. studying substitution reactions for my o-chem final, i occasionally looked up at the bright tiled roofs, the voluptuous arch of the palms and the plumes of jacarandas dancing in eddies above the sun-bathed pavement. basking in an aesthetic paradise, organic chemistry was rather low on my list of priorities, so put down my chem notes, and picked up my course-reader for my first poetry class "literature into life," and read a poem that has lived beneath my skin for four years now:

jacaranda

Because the branches hang down with blossoms
for only a few weeks, lavender clumps
that let go quickly
and drop to the ground,

because the flowers are so delicate
even their motion through the air
bruises them,
and they lie where they fall
like tiny pouches of shriveled skin,

because our lives are sagging with marvels
ready to fail us,
clusters of faces drifting away,

what's settled for is not nearly
what we are after, claims
we keep making or are made on us.
But the recurrence of change
can still surprise us, lilac
that darts and flickers
like the iridescent head of a fly,
and the tree making us
look again.

-shirley kaufman

in a twist of fate that still clenches my stomach with a grasp that whispers, "there's no such thing as coincidence," my phone rang. i answered to hear my mother's voice, "grammie's in the hospital." to me, the perfect beauty of that june day became an embodiment of wallace stevens' aphorism, "death is the mother of beauty." that day marked the beginning of a blurry summer and a new relationship with my mother.

my mom and i had always been close, but during that summer that we held our breath together. we wiped my grandma's dying body with sponges, slept on the floors of hospitals and squeezed desperate 'i love you's' into the palms of tired hands.

it was during that summer that i saw that my mother was weak, so human some day i might lose her too. my aunts and uncles like to tease that my mom is the 'cheerleader' of the family (just for the record, she was never actually a cheerleader). she is the sweetest, warmest, most supportive person any of you will ever meet. i kid you not. my mother never had a cruel intention as long as she's lived. when faced with her mother's own imminent death, she only became kinder. she and i brought my grandma all kinds of foods (including the frequent pies that my grandma always asked for but could never eat), we sat by her bedside almost everyday; and for the first time in my life, i saw my loquacious, social butterfly of a mother sit silent for hours.

my brother and i agree that our mom is a genius. where my dad excels with books, my mom has the ability to read people with an uncanny accuracy. not only can my mother tell me exactly who my brother or i will date/who likes us months before we even realize they exist, but she can discern a hundred different nuances about anyone's situation just from the way he says 'hello.' this skill made my mother the most attentive of caretakers, but it also grieved her immensely as she understood the profound pain my grandma endured during her final months.

during one of my grandma's last days, i watched her struggle for air, gasping "help me, ellie, help." i was alone in the room with her and held her hand, knowing that i could offer her no consolation. in an almost cinematic moment, after catching her breath, with her eyes closed my grandma said, "take care of your mom." my grandma died in the early morning before i had to drive back up for my sophomore year of college. i didn't eat or sleep for days and i didn't know what to say to my mom, but time passed. my mom and i talked about inane everyday life and slowly but surely our daily conversations fortified the mother-daughter bond my grandma cherished so much.

i know i am a pretty shitty daughter a lot of the time. i pretty much never answer my phone. i make fun of the ditsy and often bizarre things my mom says and does (usually in front of her face). i get frustrated with her incessant worries and nagging remarks about my health. but when it comes down to it, i am extension of my mother. sure, we are pretty different people, but she knows me better than anyone and she loves me better than anyone ever will. if some day i can love other people the way she does, if i can have a daughter (or son) who loves me the way i love her, i'll know i've succeeded. i just hope that the tight-bond i inherited is one that transcends generations and stays strong longer than i live.