Second Life

At the dentist the other day, I took note of one of the two receptionists. She looked about Mom's age. Like Mom, she was bubbly and laughed often, sometimes out of nervousness, sometimes because humor was simply her most accessible emotion. She had a well-established rapport with her colleagues, referencing inside jokes and moving between Professional Service Mode and playful banter with ease. I watched her take instruction from the other, much younger receptionist; she seemed a bit sheepish about not fully grasping some aspect of their scheduling software, poking fun at her age and separateness from today's all-digital world. She was liked by her coworkers, quickly recognized by most of the patients that came through the door. This could have been my mom if her brain were still functioning, if she'd left my stepdad long ago, if she'd fulfilled her destiny of following me wherever I ventured, living in an ornately furnished mother-in-law cottage/loft space/attic/basement and being full-time daycare to my son. That's what we always envisioned for ourselves, before I had work or a husband or a kid. Part of the fantasy was that she'd hold some low-stakes part-time job where it didn't much matter what she did as long as she was interacting with people, probably her greatest talent and skill. She almost got to do this — the part-time job part, anyway — in 2004, the year I got engaged. Mom hadn't worked or had her own car in 17 years. Independence was the casualty of her dysfunctional marriage. She'd fought this reality off and on over the years, never really resigning herself to it. My stepdad wanted her home — even outings to the mall and evenings at friends' houses (well, her one friend's house) were highly negotiated propositions. Sometimes my stepdad would wait until the last minute, while she was finishing her makeup or blow drying her hair, to tell her she couldn't go. It was his car she'd have to borrow for these infrequent jaunts, after all. He did not share enough of his income to even afford her cab fare.

But my engagement lit a fire under Mom's ass. She was going to contribute financially to her daughter's wedding, goddammit. She wouldn't hear my protests. For her, being so financially hobbled as to be unable to help pay for her daughter's wedding was a concession too big, definitive proof that her situation really was as bad as it looked. Because my stepfather was the sole breadwinner, she told him that either he allow her to work and earn some money of her own or he'd have to pony up for the wedding, a ballsy move for a wife who had become pathologically averse to rocking the boat. She pulled it off — my stepfather relented. Mom and I spent the next year planning and pricing, brainstorming inexpensive tricks and workarounds to craft a low budget but classy affair. She loved it. She found part-time work at a Restoration Hardware, racking up a respectable sales record. Most of her coworkers were young 20-somethings, and the upper-class clientele preferred to buy their expensive pieces of furniture from a mature adult who seemed to know a thing or two about furniture. She was enjoying a degree of independence she hadn't had in years, and I thought, with the naïveté and magnanimity of a new bride, that this could be her turning point. Maybe my wedding would give Mom her groove back, remind her that she could rely on herself, could survive and even thrive without a possessive, psychologically abusive spouse weighing her down.

It wasn't until after the wedding that Mom's bouts of forgetfulness became worrisome. The burst of confidence she felt at the start of her second working life waned under the pressure to understand the company's computer-based checkout system. She couldn't keep up with her younger, computer-savvy colleagues, who had cameras on their phones and did something called "texting." We had one computer at home, and my stepfather made clear that no one but he could use it. He even kept a protective plastic cover on it. Mom was a ball of nerves around the work computer. My husband, Adam, and I created tutorials for her, tried convincing her that she wouldn't break it, that it wasn't made of glass. But our reassurances didn't sink in. Work became a dreaded exercise in which all of her insecurities — all of the bullshit my stepdad had shoveled at her for years — were validated. Her once-friendly coworkers who had enjoyed chatting with her and hearing her maternal advice became irritated by her ineptitude, her seeming unwillingness to master one of her basic job requirements. So began Mom's slow slide backward. Her second life kicked her back into her first one, where she felt more dependent than ever on my stepdad, the man who'd stooped so low as to be with her.

I like to imagine my Second Life Mom flashing her wide, warm smile from behind the reception desk at the dentist's office, offering advice on grades of leather at the furniture boutique, or perhaps making small talk in the checkout line at the grocery store. I sometimes linger in front of the For Rent signs outside one-bedroom apartments in our neighborhood, envisioning her inside the blueprint layouts, getting crafty with furniture arrangement to determine the best flow for each room. I imagine her spoiling Henry, driving Adam and I nuts by not reinforcing our parenting rules, and Henry adoring her for it. It wouldn't be the life she imagined for herself or hoped for when she took her second marriage vows. Leaving my stepdad wouldn't have cured the deep-seated insecurities that drove her into a toxic relationship. And being a single middle-aged woman would surely present its own set of fears, including financial hardship and loneliness. But I'd have taken it, if only to witness her experiencing her own strength, the spark of her own possibility.

My Mom and My Son, the Style Icons

When the much beloved and mourned magazine Domino folded, its publisher tried to make up for my unfulfilled subscription by sending me Lucky magazine. I hate this magazine. Besides being a poor Domino replacement, it's basically a SkyMall for beauty products masquerading as a fashion glossy. Of course, there are pretty people in it and products! clothes! and stickers! But beyond its unmitigated advertising blitz, there wasn’t much for me to latch onto, except for one feature: the last page of the magazine was dedicated to the column "My Mom, the Style Icon" (based on a blog, which became a book for Chronicle). The one-page feature included an old photograph of a mom, dressed fabulously ahead of or very much of her time, plus a brief write-up from her admiring daughter.

I also grew up admiring my mom’s sense of style. Whether rock-show casual, girls’-night glitzed, or gussied up in her Sunday best, Mom could put an outfit together with flair. When it came to clothes, Mom operated with an instinct that I did not inherit. I loved clothes as much as she did, but my fashion sensibility was (is) more sweaterista than fashionista. Mom loved big costume jewelry, brooches, even (gasp) shoulder pads, but managed to craft those otherwise gaudy elements into something sophisticated and luxe.

Mom tried to impart her style on me to disastrous effect. I recall the epic fights we would have getting me dressed before school. She always wanted me in skirts and shirts with ruffles or — horror of horrors — to pop my collar. (Clearly, she always envisioned me this way.) I wanted to blend into the scenery, and she wanted me to burst out of it like the Kool-Aid Man. This struggle continued throughout my adolescence. In high school, after lamenting that none of the boys noticed me, she declared, “Sweetie, we just need to sex you up a bit, is all.”

She was basically the fabulous queer eye to my conformist straight guy.

While I never had the gumption to wear my fashion fantasies on my sleeve, it appears Mom’s sense of style has skipped a generation. My four-year-old Henry loves dressing himself. He regularly incorporates pieces of flair and elements of drama into his preschool outfits. Sometimes it’s a turban; often it’s a cape. He tucks muscle shirts into pink and purple tights, requests pigtails (like the girls at school) and buns (like Mulan) atop his head, and morphs his sleeveless shirts into tube tops. At the heart of this sartorial inventiveness is a pair of Hello Kitty rain boots worn so thin that they may disintegrate off his feet before he grows out of them. And lest you pigeonhole him as a rigid aesthete who is all form and no function, these outfits always leave room for a weapon. The tube top doubles as a holster for a foam sword, and the elastic waistband of his hot pink tights provides a secure spot for a plush baseball bat, should a villain present him/herself.

My son: the fashion warrior.

And the best part? The kid pops his own collar. I never taught him this or did it for him. Though he won’t know the stylish and fabulous woman she once was, Henry is definitely taking after his grandmother. (Though Mom always said she would never be called “Grandma”; it made her feel too old, and she was too vain. “What are you going to have my kids call you, then?” I asked long ago. “Can't they just call me Lee?”)

Whether this love of dress up is a phase or some strain of inherited fabulousness, Henry and my mom would have had a blast together. I imagine Henry picking through Lee's stash of costume jewelry and her dutifully rummaging through old clothes and fabrics to help him realize his Little Edie-cum-superhero visions. They'd have made a great (and well-dressed) team.

Swimming Lessons

We are Starfish, Henry and I. I pick him up early from daycare, and we worry through the traffic until we make it to his 4:15 class at the community pool. We are one of seven, maybe ten, parent-and-child pairs in the class. A teenage swim instructor has us circle up, parents holding toddlers. We sing "Motorboat" and "The Grand Old Duke of York" and "Ring around the Lily Pad," substituting swimming terms for the original nouns ("pocketful of posies" becomes "pocketful of frogies;" "ashes" become "splashes"). The kids instinctually do a sort of standing run in the water, legs kicking frantically and arms pushing the water down, as if to gain an imagined traction. Their little bodies are revved up on the new sensory experience, desperate to set out, not understanding that the pool isn't filled with invisible hands to support them. We parents hold them with one hand under their armpit, using our other arm to help us tread water in the deeper parts of the pool. We are treading for two. Our songs and supporting holds are an elaborate show, disguising the water's indifference to the kids' effort. I was holding Henry in this way, one hand palming the curve of his ribs where they wrap under the crook of his arm, as I made my way to the wall for a Humpty Dumpty (kids sit on the wall, parents sing "Humpty Dumpty," and kids jump into parents' arms). Most of the parents had already staked out spots on the wall, so I ventured into deeper water. I was on tiptoe — literally balanced on the tip of my big toe as I hopped my way toward the wall, my leg like a pogo stick. The arm holding Henry moved down through the water, involuntarily. I looked right and noticed that I had dunked him, pulled him right down, head under water. I jerked my arm up, and his head surfaced, wriggling and spastic, his suspended running legs supercharged and sprinting with fear. He let out a cry, then a high-pitched shriek signaling the turn from fear to anger. The other parents turned away from their kids to see. Henry's "Mom-eeee!" was outraged, accusatory, the kind I hear a lot lately.

"I'm so sorry, buddy, oh no. You're okay, you're okay . . ."

In these moments of injury and near misses and almost unlucky breaks, something in me shuts off, not down. It's not operated by a dimmer but a switch. My typically nervous, easy-to-panic nature flatlines. I am nonreactive, a passive cipher through which experience is happening, a situation unfolding where the only actor is inertia. I get self-conscious that other parents see this in me, that children stop to notice the adult whose instinct cannot be trusted. I am a milky-eyed inert mother who merely watches as her child acts out, behaves badly, drowns.

Is there anything more dismissive, more enraging, than being told you are okay when you're not?

I was four, Henry's age, when I learned how to swim. Before that, when I was a baby, Mom regularly took me to the pool in our apartment complex. She would get me comfortable in the water, swish me around with her hands cupping my armpits. There is a picture of us in the pool, Mom walking through the shallow end toward the steps, brow furrowed. She's carrying me under her arm like a football. I'm horizontal, head arched up and crying. The swimming lesson is over.

By the time I was four, I was playing in my godmother's pool. I was afraid to put my head under the water, so Mom urged me to practice by putting my face in little by little, starting with my mouth, then my nose, then my eyes. I was reluctant, terrified of the world under the surface, blurred and fuzzy with eerie, alien sounds. Mom suggested I jump in and that she would catch me. She stood a few feet from the wall, arms outstretched to receive me. I jumped, and she wasn't there. Water plumed up my nose, and in that first experience of flooded nostrils and burning sinuses, I was certain that something had gone horribly wrong and I was drowning. My hands paddled furiously in front of me to get my head out of the water. I coughed and sputtered. Mom held me and hoorayed, trying to drum up enthusiasm for the big achievement of getting my head underwater for the first time.

"Sometimes you can't think about things; you just have to jump in, feet first."

I was mad in that way that devolves into tears, which only makes you angrier because the tears betray the fury you want to communicate, and this frustration mixed with the inciting anger makes you cry more. I sulked, and my mom and godmother chastised me for not appreciating the lesson imparted. When they became lost in conversation, I sat quietly on the pool steps and practiced putting my face under the surface. Lips first, then nose, then eyes. I've been swimming underwater ever since.

Don't You Forget About Me

Dementia is a prism through which all memory is refracted. As the person my mom was continues to recede, I realize that I too am forgetting her. My memories have morphed into a series of impressions, like a Terrence Malick movie. I know her hands and feet, her long fingers and toes, her knuckles knotted from years of cracking. I know her hair, how one side flips out and the other curves in (like mine). I remember how she regarded herself in the mirror, working up courage to confront her reflection and accepting the disappointment that washed over her before moving on. I can conjure all these impressions, but our past conversations, the rhythm with which we spoke, is blurring. I have the general plot outlines of our stories, but they are Monets; there is no specificity of form, just the interplay of light and movement and feeling. Because I forget as Mom forgets, I figure it’s time to start record keeping. My son will not know the mother I knew, won’t experience the ways in which the two of them are already so similar. As Henry gets older, I’ll share my memories of Mom, fuzzy though they may be. But the prudent Virgo list-maker in me is compelled to document some details of myself that Henry may, one day, find himself straining to recall—the nuances, quirks, and peccadillos that make up and enhance the whole and which, unfortunately, are the first pieces of us to go. So, to the future Henry, here’s my List of Things I Don’t Want You to Forget About Me:

1. I like movie trailers. No, I love movie trailers. I do not miss them when I go to the movies, and I even regularly use my Trailers app to watch several. In one sitting. I guess I enjoy the anticipation of a new movie as much as the event itself. When done well, a good trailer reads like the short story version of the film, which sometimes proves better than the actual film. For reference, you can dismiss any trailer with voiceover, big red comedy font, or lines that begin with “This fall, celebrate the wonder . . . ” said in voiceover while appearing onscreen in big red comedy font.

2. I love a good blooper reel. Isn’t that dumb? It’s an elemental, base form of entertainment to crack up for no other reason than because other people are cracking up. The best outtakes lack any logic or shape; they are just viral, infectious energy. Of course, moments like this can be experienced firsthand, but if you ever need a shot of good, clean entertainment that won’t result in an arrest record or getting intimate with a toilet bowl, watch outtakes of Brian Unger interviewing Zach (Seth) Galifianakis from Live at the Purple Onion. Also of note: any outtake featuring Ricky Gervais.

3. My favorite time to watch a horror film is midday, preferably when it’s moody and stormy outside. I discovered this after years of yo-yoing between loving scary movies and being, well, scared shitless by them. I’m a fraidy cat and a safety enforcer, but I also love the (fake) thrill of a good (fake) scare. At the time of this writing, you are four years old, but when you hit sixteen, I plan to school you in some of my favorites. But only during daylight hours.

4. I take great (and somewhat undeserved) pride in my working as a server during college. I was mediocre at best—I refused to upsell and once spilled a tray of drinks on a family of four—but through it I developed a taste for hard work and hard play, learned how to hustle, and saw the best and worst of what humanity has to offer. You walk through life with new eyes once you’ve had to serve others, returning their perfectly cooked steaks to the grill guy and crawling under booths for their kids’ dirty diapers. But I like to think it makes you a better person and educates you in the art of appreciating others and treating them well. Also, I can carry three drinks in one hand and nearly all the sensation has been singed off my fingertips by hot plates!

5. I instigate tickle fights and turn into a spastic pinwheel of limbs when tickled back. I am not above biting, hair pulling, or eye gouging in a tickle attack. Daddy has learned this the hard way.

6. I sing a lot, subjecting you to weak and quavering renditions of Patsy Cline, Jolie Holland, Fiona Apple, Jenny Lewis, and Emily Haines songs in the car and at bedtime. My voice is lowish and my range limited, but I do not let that stop me. Sometimes in the car, you cover your ears and shriek, “Mommy, stop the singing you’re hurting my ears!” Sometimes when I’m bathing you and singing low, you look at me with doleful eyes and say, “Mommy, that’s lovely.” You’re the only person I do this around, and my mother did it with me. She and I used to harmonize to Simon & Garfunkel and Aretha Franklin and (god help me) The Judds. I don’t know how much longer you’ll allow me to do this without becoming critical (more critical than “you’re hurting my ears,” that is) and mortally humiliated, so I’m doing it while I can. But if by the time you’re older you have no memory of me singing, let this be your reminder.

Now and again, a forgotten aspect of Mom will float past me like a leaf swept up in a breeze, and I catch it by writing it down, committing it to paper. The remembering helps me to grieve in a way that is necessary and productive and deserving of her, rather than the rest of it, which is groping, blind, in a dark space. If I can give Henry some roadmap for remembering his neurotic, singing, laughing, potty-mouthed, loving mother, then maybe losing my mom in this particular way has purpose, has meaning.

Independence Day

My mom married my stepfather on the Fourth of July. Her second marriage and his third, the celebration was small and the guest list short on immediate family. The wedding took place across the street from my stepfather’s house — our new house — at the home of a neighbor who ran the nondenominational Christian church we attended. The following year, I would be baptized in that same neighbor’s pool, wearing a starched white robe, my sins washed clean in chlorinated water. Mom wore a mauve dress and a matching broad-brimmed hat. I donned a yellow dress and worked triple duty as flower girl, maid of honor, and ring bearer. My legs grew tired during the long ceremony, but I took my roles seriously, staring stoically at the minister.

Mom’s wedding ring was a cluster of diamonds and sapphires, my birthstone, because, as my stepdad liked to say, he was “marrying them both.” Unlike most men who spotted the truckload of baggage my 30-year-old single mother dragged into a first date and bolted for the nearest exit, my stepdad was thrilled to be a father. During the reception, he ushered me from table to table, showing off the trophy-sized version of his wife to his coworkers. Wasn’t his new family pretty? So charming, so pleasing, so blonde.

The reception took place on the neighbor’s waterfront deck. After the sun set and the new couple enjoyed bites of wedding cake, the stormy night sky lit up with a perfect view of the city’s Fourth of July fireworks display.

I wanted to like him, but I just couldn’t. He was too old, his tall, broad frame too physically imposing to find comforting. He was too eager to hug me. I felt bad that I didn’t like him, knew that I was being the stereotypical stepchild, unhappy with any parental copy vying to replace the original. I was softened by his prideful, paternal glow, but his hand on my shoulder was heavy and oppressive, like dead weight. The determined way he maneuvered me around tables of new faces at the reception made me uncomfortable. Well wishers and cheek pinchers said that Mom and I had much to be thankful for because my new dad loved us very much and would be very good for us.

Good for us. What about to us?

He was neither. This Thursday marks the 237th anniversary of our country’s independence and the 26th anniversary of my mother’s dependence on an abusive spouse. He was cruel and psychologically abusive, berating us — mostly her — on a daily basis. He picked fights, pushed us to breaking points, and then exercised his will, dangling our freedom in front of us like a carrot. If we took the abuse without “mouthing off” or “disrespecting” him, maybe we’d get what we wanted, which was usually a day without fights or insults.

I’ve found it difficult to convey the experience of living with him. He did not fit the familiar Lifetime movie mold of the abusive husband. He did not hit or molest us, but he told us we were unlovable and dim-witted. The golden trophy family he once proudly boasted became his “stupid bitches,” “lazy brats,” “fat pigs,” and “cunts.” Mom preached endurance to me; she saw our union with my stepfather as a trying but finite sentence. We would endure him until I was off to college. We would use his good neighborhood, zoned for good schools, to get me a good education and arm me with everything I needed — everything she said she couldn’t give me on her own — to get out. We strategized and conspired as if we were tunneling out of Alcatraz. Between the ages of seven and eighteen, it became clear that the dual escape we were planning was only meant for me. We argued and fought and Mom placated me, but her interpretation of our situation shifted from “I’ve made a mistake. I’ll make it right.” to “I can handle him. Don’t you worry about me.”

With each year of marriage gained, Mom gave something up in kind. First it was her job, followed by her car. Then she wasn’t to leave the house during the day. Next she was limited to one phone call per day (she snuck in more), with no incoming calls after 6pm. We spent the years keeping secrets from my stepdad to ensure I enjoyed more freedom as a teenager than she did as a middle-aged woman. She manipulated and cajoled and weathered his outbursts and accepted the brunt of his venom.

Five years ago, when Mom began forgetting things, withdrawing from family members, and acting insecure and fearful, I assumed that 20+ years of verbal abuse were simply taking their toll. Amidst the usual exhortations to leave him, I tried to give her perspective. “You’re not stupid. I forget things all time, and I’m not being berated constantly.” But her smile and trademark Pollyanna optimism weakened. Needless to say, recent research suggesting a link between depression and dementia comes as no surprise to me.

Now that early onset dementia has reduced my mother to a husk of her former self, my stepfather is in the unlikely role of caretaker. I believe he loves her as much as he is capable of the feeling. But he does not accept any guilt for Mom’s breakdown, and often counts her illness as another way in which she has made life difficult for him.

Only a few years into their marriage, my mom and stepdad stopped acknowledging their anniversary. There were no gifts, no cakes, no date nights. It was always just another 4th of July, just another Independence Day.

My Mother’s Twin

When I was little, my mom would go out a couple times a month to play bridge with a bunch of girlfriends at my godmother’s house. Though infrequent, I dreaded these outings. A worrier by nature, once the sun set I started to imagine worst-case scenarios. What if she got in an accident on the way back? Mom was a notorious nervous ninny behind the wheel, and I was convinced that her too-tentative method of merging would be her doom. What if she got mugged walking to her car in my godmother’s sketchy neighborhood? I whipped myself up into a panic that was somewhat quieted by two (okay, maybe three) “check-in” calls to my godmother’s house. But the angsting did not subside until I heard Mom’s key slide into the lock of our side entrance. Until that moment, I stayed awake, vigilant, as if encouraging my gut churn would keep her safe. I prayed silently and obsessively, like a mantra or a compulsive tic: “Please, God, let her come home. Please, God, let her come home.” These moments made clear that Mom was the only real thing to me. I wasn’t comfortable with anyone else. If she died, where would I go?

One of these evenings my hand was hovering over the phone for another check-in call when it rang.

“Hey there! How’s it going?”

“Oh good, I was just about to call again. When are you coming home?”

“Wha-- ? Oh no, honey, I’m sorry. This is Lynn.”

Lynn is mom’s identical twin. When they were little, they dressed in matching outfits and white-blonde pigtails. Even they can’t always tell who is who in old photographs. As an only child for most of my adolescence, I was captivated by Mom’s twinship. She and Lynn spoke almost every day. They often had the same dreams. In elementary school, they would switch classes, each pretending to be the other. They also have the same voices — the same timbre, the same slightly Southern cadence, the same hearty laugh. This wasn’t the first time I’d confused Lynn for Mom on the phone, but the audial illusion never ceased to surprise me. And freak me out a little.

If Mom dies, I used to think, 99.95643 percent of her DNA will be living in Boise, Idaho. I imagined how much it would hurt to hear Mom’s voice on the line, the false hope it might inspire, if Mom died and Lynn called me.

In addition to sharing most of their DNA, Mom and Lynn display matching personas. Exuberant, optimistic, easy to laugh, and quick witted, being in their joint company felt a bit like watching a sitcom. They were two halves of the same brain, a near-constant stream of mirth and/or argument. Though their twin lexicon was heavy on inside jokes and shared experiences, you were never excluded from their banter. They seemed to be aware of how fun they were as a pair and wanted everyone plugged into the experience.

Lynn’s presence validated my unconventional relationship with my mother. Growing up, I somehow knew that Mom wasn’t regarding me as other moms did their daughters. She spoke to me like an adult and often didn’t shield me from adult realities. I’ve long said that I was raised to be Mom’s friend or confidant, but remembering how she was with Lynn, it’s obvious that I was filling the void of her twin’s absence. Even when they weren’t getting along, Mom and Lynn were always close, but they haven’t lived in the same state since before I was born. Being a twin was in Mom’s bones, and physical distance didn’t stop her from feeling like one half of a whole. The relationship she nurtured with me was informed by her twinned experience, the imprint of her sister a blueprint for every relationship she had.

Mom and Lynn turned 57 on Saturday. With Mom in a Florida nursing home and Lynn now living in Nevada, they are still separated by several states. Over the years, Mom’s dementia has rendered them singletons. Lynn is bravely if not reluctantly redefining what it means to celebrate a birthday, one that is no longer shared with a functioning other half. Though Lynn will never replace my mom, she has been an unexpected gift in my grieving. Over the past five years as Mom has rapidly deteriorated, Lynn and I have become closer, sometimes talking a few times a week, sharing and comparing stories about Mom, providing updates on her condition. Lynn has become a surrogate mother to me, and her likeness to mom — in both looks and humor — is a comfort I can’t articulate. We are bridges between the sister and mother of our youths and the memory she is becoming. As more years pass since the last time Mom was able to speak to me on the phone, Lynn’s voice on the line is less a copy and more an original. I see distinctions in their personalities that I didn’t detect before. Her voice lets me remember my mother’s, the voice that was imprinted on me, and allows me to speak to it as I learn to let it go.

Origin Story

Last week, my son, Henry, turned four. Before he was here, before he was even conceived, he was my obsession. I hit 27 and itched all over to be pregnant. Because that was the next step. Marriage, job, cross-country move, house, baby. I would like to say that my biological clock was chiming with some evolutionary imperative to make Life, to mark up a tabula rasa with all the wisdom that was lovingly bestowed on me or wrenched from my own lived experience. All of that is more or less true, but the nut of my baby fever was boredom. I'm not a terribly ambitious person, but I'm not comfortable with stasis. I come alive when something is on the horizon that requires me to plan accordingly. The promise of a baby would scratch all those planning itches. So I became hyper-fixated, which, coupled with getting off antidepressants, set off all the attendant neuroses. My petulant pessimism convinced me that I was barren, that I would miscarry, that I would conceive a child with a severe disability. My head went round and round like this until one morning, steeling myself for another one-line strip, I got two. For a little while, I sloughed off the anxiety and allowed a tenuous happiness to wash over me. But the problem with being a chronic pessimist is that eventually, experience bears out one of your many worst fears, and then the naysayers in your head feel validated. Then came the blood.

Faint pink smears on a square of toilet paper and I was histrionic and hysterical. Sort of outside of myself, repeating, But I wanted this so badly, as if the wanting it should have proved to the universe that I deserved it. I wasn't grieving the loss of any thing. How could I? I had no frame of reference, wouldn't dare compare the feel of holding friends’ babies or caring for infant siblings with actually being a mother. At this point, I think I was mourning the delusion that I could will my desire into reality. Like all good control freaks, my unconscious mind---my lizard brain, perhaps---was sure that my vigilant and incessant worrying would somehow protect the fragile thing inside me, that sleepless nights and tense muscles would hold it fast to the wall of my uterus.

I awoke the next morning hopeful that the bleeding had subsided but was defeated at the toilet, where I slipped the saddest, most sorrowful of maxi pads into my underwear. My GYN checked me out, said it didn't look good. She instructed that when I began to pass tissue and when the discomfort progressed from mild to severe cramping, I should call her. So I drove home and soaked through a pad and onto my jeans. With my husband out of town, I asked a very good friend to keep me company, to sit with me on Tissue Watch, as I maybe waited to birth pass the promise of my first child. In retrospect, there should have been fewer tears and more cigars.

I spent the remainder of my husband’s business trip moping around the house, vacillating between self-pity and self-loathing because I had friends who had gone through this, and all had been much further along in their pregnancies. When we got the positive test result, we'd decided not tell friends or family until I'd passed the 12-week mark. This seemed prudent and reasoned, as if losing it before then would be so much worse if we'd shouted the news from the rooftops. I understand now how stupid that is, the folly of believing that staying guarded would protect me from pain when things didn't work out. I was still wrecked; the only difference was that no one knew it.

I made the long commute to work one morning and managed to mostly put it out of my mind. I let my thoughts drift with the music, daydreamed while driving on autopilot in that scary way where you awaken periodically with no memory of passing a certain exit or mile marker. The AM radio station played a Bob Dylan cover of "You Belong to Me," and I finally articulated what I'd lost: something that was mine, physically and psychically, in a way I could only previously relate to my own mom, now effectively gone. I was losing an imagined motherhood, some abstraction of maternity that, until my own child surfaced to color it with our new, shared experiences, was rooted in my own memories of childhood and the feeling of belonging to someone.

It's a weird thing to mourn a son before he's born and a mother before she's passed.

So I waited for my body to catch up with the GYN's diagnosis, working in bed while I incubated a doomed thing. But the tissue and the pain didn't come. For a week I bled, felt the telltale bloat and sore, puffy pulpiness of a bad period. I saw the GYN again, this time thankfully with my husband. She inserted the ungodly probe to take a look at my insides and directed our attention to a gray, grainy screen and the well bottom that was apparently my uterus. She indicated some dark spots at the top of the screen, which looked very much at home in the alien landscape. These spots were pockets of "old blood," and as she adjusted the probe and the angles of view, more spots were visible. Next she pointed to a marble stuck to the bottom right wall of the well. This, she explained, was the yolk sac and inside, the embryo. About six weeks along, she determined. She drew on the screen with her pinky a faint but discernible line — the fetal pole — and circled a pulsing valve that resembled the open/close/open/close of fish lips out of water. Surrounded by dark clouds of old blood, the embryo remained intact. If the blood were to dislodge the sac from the uterine wall, I would miscarry. But if not, all would be fine. She suggested we remain guarded, a caveat I could now openly scoff at, but sent us home with an 80 percent chance of a complete and successful pregnancy. I imagined the tadpole inside me looking out a bay window, lazily watching a stormy sky floating, benign, overhead.

Last week I watched what was once a continuous flow of bright red blood devour a frosting-laden piece of Dora the Explorer cake. He fidgeted unconsciously while cramming bites of yellow cake into his bow-lipped mouth, which is also my mouth. The marble that held fast to my interior wall, watching storm clouds float overhead, wears size 4 muscle shirts, homemade superhero capes, and pink tights. I'm thankful he held on, got to experience a shift in the weather so that he could shed his tiny clothes and jump into the fountain at Peninsula Park, shrieking at the cold and armed only with his favorite Spiderman underwear. I'm thankful that, for a brief time, he belongs to me, and that he will pass on that sense of belonging once given to me.

All My Stories

Last year, the major networks shuttered their daytime soap operas. No more stolen babies, no more evil twins, no more iconic love stories between women and the men who once — like, a really long time ago when a whole different writing staff was in charge — raped them (yep, look it up). Despite their problematic stereotyping, absurdly contorted storylines, and frequent displays of amateur acting, I miss those daily hour-long escapes to Pine Valley and Llanview, where the drama was completely predictable and utterly engrossing. Soaps predated reality TV in their associations with cheap, empty-calorie, lowbrow entertainment. But as reality TV fans can surely attest, there’s a fabulous frivolity to the daytime story, a deliciousness in the tawdry soft-core sex scenes bathed in enough diffuse light to power a Barbara Walters clone farm, and a comfort in the constantly rehashed, recycled storytelling. I began watching soap operas with my mom when I was a little girl. I knew even then that the torrid love affairs and dynastic greed were totally inappropriate for my age, but I looked forward to our afternoons curled up on the couch together, talking over the dialogue to guess which plot twist the heavy-handed foreshadowing pointed to next or to revel in the epic on-again off-again romances of Luke and Laura, Nico and Cecily, and Tad and Dixie.

The soaps and many of their principal actors followed Mom and I from Atlanta to Tampa after my parents’ divorce. During the school year, I’d be home by 3pm so Mom and I could watch General Hospital together. I remember coming home one day and rushing to the living room to catch the unfolding saga of Bobbie and Tony Jones’s daughter, BJ, who was in a tragic school bus accident and pronounced brain dead, but whose healthy heart could now be transplanted into the ailing body of her sister, Maxie. Mom and I wept as we watched Tony hovering over Maxie’s chest, listening to the heartbeat of his dead daughter in the body of his now healing daughter (seriously). The scene plucked at some unrealized ache in both of us, a glimpse into the void of a parent without a child, a child without a parent. Of one of us without the other.

But the soaps and I go back even further. As the story goes, when my mom was eight months pregnant with me, she was watching All My Children, following the machinations of the grand dame of daytime TV, Erica Kane. My mom pondered the persona of Erica Kane and decided that she wanted her daughter to be tough, to make her own way in life, and “to be a bit of a bitch.” With this spark of (perhaps misguided) feminist empowerment, Mom made Erica Kane my namesake. Though Erica Kane’s “bitch” never really took root in me (try as I might), it did articulate Mom’s grasp of what it meant to be a successful, independent woman. As evidenced by her nine marriages, men were both necessary and ancillary to Erica Kane’s success. They were footholds in the mountains she climbed, but it was her strength and ambition (and over-the-lipline lipstick application) that got her to the top. Mom had no designs on beauty industry domination; all she wanted was a patch of happiness, a home and a life that she could be proud of. But on some fundamental level, she could not conceive of attaining that without a man as her stepping-stone. Lipsticked, bejeweled, and manipulative as they were, women like Erica Kane did offer an image of female empowerment, a glamorous diversion that surely helped many a bored housewife survive the tedium of rote domestic chores, fostering daydreams of international espionage, big hair, and a smoldering passion for . . . anything.

Luckily, there were other, more fruitful moral tales to be learned from the daytime serial:

1. When someone dies but the body is not recovered, that person will be back with a new identity and a score to settle.

2. If a murder is committed as a result of self-defense, don’t lie about it. This will only lead to an agonizingly drawn-out blackmail plotline when your nemesis learns of your crime, only to be resolved when said nemesis dies in a) a motorcycle accident, b) a natural disaster, or c) a shootout on a bridge wherein a body is never recovered (see number 1).

3. Relationships are complicated. Especially when you’re drugged and taken advantage of and then lie about it to your significant other, to whom you vowed on your wedding day, dressed in a sarong in a Hawaiian cave, to never withhold secrets from.

4. Villains can always be reformed, but the good don’t go bad — they go bat-shit crazy.

5. As a general rule, there’s a 75 percent likelihood that you have a twin but don’t know about it and that said twin will appear one day really pissed that you got everything he/she didn’t, and then he/she will dump your ass in a well and assume your identity.

6. The truth will set you free, so stop trying to cover up your black-market baby.

Sadly, number 4 proved true for my mom, too. Bad guys were always evolving into good guys on the soaps (see above re: the rapists-turned-lovers plotline). For the writers spinning yarns for the same popular characters year after year, this seemed a natural progression. By complicating the villains, trading in their black hats for gray ones, the producers got more bang for their actor bucks. Sometimes popular good guys went bad, but only by way of losing their minds. Their goodness was constantly putting them in peril, and you can only be dropped down a well, suffer amnesia, or be thought dead so many times before losing your grip. Mom was undeniably one of the good ones who suffered too much for one lifetime. Perhaps retreating inward was the only way to go.

So silly and apparently unprofitable (despite scores of awkward product placements) though they were, I miss the soaps and the life lessons they taught me. I miss characters with names that should be reserved for pets or rock formations, like Lucky and Ridge and Jagger. I miss the strange familiarity of turning on the TV years after watching these shows and seeing the same people looking slightly older, like aunts and uncles who visit every few years. I miss the writers’ random forays into paranormal plotlines and demon exorcism. Mostly, I miss the passing of another relic of my innocence and the person I shared it with, the person who knew all my misadventures, indiscretions, and affairs. The one person who knew all my stories.

Talk to Her

For my mom’s 57th birthday, my husband, two-year-old son, and I flew to Florida to see her. Mom’s early onset dementia had progressed to the point where she couldn’t carry on phone conversations, so I made the arrangements with my teenage brother. When I tried talking to her, Mom’s light, trilling laugh would fill the receiver at odd intervals, often when I was mid-sentence. Even when she seemed to understand what I was saying, she’d become tone deaf to the easy rhythm with which we’d always talked on the phone. When it was her turn to respond, she’d go silent.

“Mom? You there?”

“Huh? Oh! Hahahaha . . . what?” And so on.

My little family and I met Mom and my brother at a sports bar. A pub probably seems like an odd place to visit your delusional parent, but any strange behavior from Mom was unlikely to stand out much in the busy, boozy atmosphere. The three of us sidled into the booth alongside them, my eyes already nervously ping-ponging to the large flat screen TVs. Since moving to Colorado in 2006, I only saw my mother a couple times a year. Each visit yielded a new milestone of degradation: first the loss of simple math skills, resulting in embarrassing customer service transactions. Next the inability to complete complex thoughts; she’d get stuck on certain words or phrases that opened like rabbit holes in her brain. Then walking was replaced by slow assisted shuffling. It became increasingly hard to meet her and really look at her, to take in the latest changes. So my eyes flitted around her like a hummingbird, knowing that the moment I rested them squarely on her, they’d fill with tears.

Mom smiled broadly and laughed easily. My brother ordered for her, cut up her food. I watched her pick up her iced tea several times, bring it to her mouth, and then, suddenly confused, put it back down. She mistook a small plate for a coaster and almost spilled the drink. She tried to participate in the table conversation, but couldn’t follow our exchanges. Instead, she interjected with unrelated half-statements and musings that were clearly better formed in her head.

“Yeah, that’s okay, Mom. Eat your potatoes,” my brother would say.

Mom held my son, Henry, several times and seemed very taken with him. At one point, she looked at me sweetly, softly touched my cheek and said, “Yes, yes, darling one. ”

Her attention turned away from me and back to some inner conversation.

These flashes of recognition and engagement were rare. Before we had a diagnosis, Mom had become savvy at hiding her inability to recall people. If you approached her smiling, she’d smile right back and chirp a cheerful and familiar “Hey!” She knew my face, but if I were to ask, “What’s my name, Mom?”, she’d get flustered and give up. She did better with simple yes/no questions, eroding our once fluid phone rapport, which slipped easily between self-analysis and questions of spirituality to piss-our-pants giggle fits. I tried brainstorming creative ways to flesh out our exchanges, but after a series of yeses and no’s and nervous laughs and responses that trailed off, I’d awkwardly wrap the conversation.

“Well, I guess I’ll let you go . . .”

Things weren’t supposed to go this way. Mom and I had one of those mother-daughter relationships that made for successful WB shows. Think Gilmore Girls, only with fewer witty classic Hollywood references and more Ab Fab quotes. We were close to a fault, the line separating “parent” and “friend” not merely tenuous but nonexistent. I imagine being pulled from the womb and handed to her and, after a moment of gazing at me adoringly, her saying, “Kid, have I got some shit to work through with you.”

I was raised like a sister. My earliest memories are of mom and me, snuggled up together in her queen-sized bed, eating bonbons and watching totally age-inappropriate prime time television. My parents divorced when I was four, and Mom remained candid with me about the life choices she made, often conferring with me as if I were an equal partner in the decision-making. It wasn’t in her to shield me from life’s uncomfortable gray areas, areas we found ourselves navigating often. As a parent, I now understand that this was irresponsible of her. But it wasn’t her aim to make me grow up too fast. She just couldn’t fake perfection, couldn’t pretend that she knew all the answers. She needed a sounding board. She respected my intelligence enough not to sugarcoat the facts and how they might affect me.

Growing up, Mom was my best friend. Of course, she could irritate and infuriate me in that special way that everyone’s mother can, could unravel my rational self and replace it with my feral toddler jerk. But I came to her with everything, and she always managed to impart some new truth about myself, about relationships, about life in a way that was both hand holding and honest. We could fight like guests on Maury, lobbing insults and foul language at each other one minute and the next, sloughing the anger entirely to discuss mundane concerns like tonight’s dinner and whether this skirt looked okay with that top. As I approached high school graduation, she joked that if I left the state, I’d find her hanging on the wing of the plane sobbing. When I imagined my future, mom was always part of it. She’d take care of my 2.5 kids while I worked and live in the mother-in-law suite attached to my sprawling ranch house with an open floor plan.

When I did leave home for college, long phone conversations became a salve for our sudden separation. I instigated many a tortured phone call wherein she gave me articulate, surprisingly wise advice about boyfriends, breakups, and English papers I had procrastinated on until the last minute. With barely a high school education and zero interest in reading anything besides Southern Living magazine, she’d listen calmly as I tried to refine the thesis for my paper on Gwendolyn Brooks.

These conversations ran the gamut of emotions: I cried, she laughed. We shouted obscenities at each other. I got frustrated when she wasn’t getting some paper topic I was wrestling with. Sometimes she hung up on me. Five minutes later, my phone would ring.

“Stop acting like a jerk and explain your goddamn thesis again.”

The dementia gradually made our exchanges staid and polite. Less stress inducing, perhaps, but vanilla. With the exception of random flashes of recognition, I am unfamiliar to her, and her grandchild is a sweet stranger. We are something I never thought we’d be: distant. I sometimes regret our past fights and my bad behavior, but I don’t regret the fireworks sparked by our tempers flaring, of being known for the neurotic, critical shit that I can be and being loved anyway.

Well, I guess I’ll let you go . . .

But she’s already gone. I can’t pinpoint when exactly I lost her. After years of telling me everything — too much, even — she didn’t prepare me for this. For not talking to her. For becoming a mother without my mother. For a me without her.