What My Mother and I Don't Talk About Page 5

  But wasn’t my mother also my beloved, my captor? Wasn’t it against her arms that I fought most viciously? Like the Spartan bride, my heart would have broken if she had truly let me go. A daughter is wedded to her mother first.

  * * *

  In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the author tells that “for nine days did the Lady Demeter / wander all over the earth, holding torches ablaze in her hands.” After that, she takes a human form and becomes the caretaker of an Eleusinian boy, whom she tries and fails to make immortal.

  My mother became a psychotherapist. She took a woman lover with long blond hair who loved us while our mother rode a Greyhound bus to the city and back with a word processor propped on her lap. The job of a therapist is to understand exactly these sorts of things. The job of a therapist is not so different from that of a mother, though it is safer. It is collaboration and it is care, but it is not symbiosis. It is not reciprocal in its need. Her patients may have been the Eleusinian children who could never be made immortal, but she helped them as I would not be helped.

  When I told her, just a few months short of seventeen, that I was moving out, she didn’t try to stop me. I knew that she didn’t want me to go. Maybe I should have tried to stop you, she has said to me since, more than once. But I was afraid that I would lose you for good.

  I try to remember. I knew that tension between us, how it could have snapped. By the time I moved out, I had already softened some. If she had objected, would I have left? No, I think, though maybe that is the wish of my adult self for that girl. Either way, I would have found the underworlds that followed.

  * * *

  Hades had agreed to return Persephone to her mother. Zeus insisted and he capitulated, on one condition: if Persephone had tasted any food of the underworld, she would be consigned to return to Hades for half of every year. Did Persephone know? Yes and no. In some versions, she thinks she is smart enough to evade him, to taste and still go home. There are so many holes in myths, so many iterations and mutations, most unstamped by chronology. A myth is the memory of a story passed through time. Like any memory, it changes. Sometimes by will, or necessity, or forgetting, or even for aesthetic purpose.

  The pomegranate seeds were so lovely, like rubies, and so sweet. In every version of the story, she tastes them.

  I didn’t start with heroin. I started with meth, though we called it crystal, which sounded much prettier than the burnt clumps of tinfoil that littered our apartment or the singed smell in the air, as if an oven had been left on too long.

  Imagine Persephone’s first season in hell. The phone calls home. I’m sorry I haven’t called. I’ve been busy with classes. I’m making such nice friends.

  My lies were half-true. I was in classes. I did make friends. I had a job and homework and a mattress in the pantry soaked in cat urine that only cost $150 per month. My mother would have paid for more. With it, she would have also bought more claim on the truth.

  When I rode that same Greyhound bus home and ate her warm food and stared over the land of my childhood, lush with life, it was like rising from some underworld to the golden light of earth. I missed it so much. I couldn’t wait to leave. That itch in me like desire, like hunger, like certain kinds of love.

  Imagine Persephone loving him. Is it so impossible? We often love the things that abduct us. We often fear the ones we love. I imagine I would find a way, if I were bound to someone for half of the rest of my life. No, for half of eternity. She was immortal. Besides, she could not even have escaped him by dying.

  * * *

  It was Christmas or Thanksgiving. My mother, my brother, and I joined hands around the table, the steaming food encircled by our arms. We squeezed each other’s fingers, pressed our thumbs into each other’s palms. That small triad, who had been so sad and so strong in my father’s absence. Who had loved each other so fiercely and still did.

  After the dishes were washed, my mother sank into the sofa and smiled at us. She was so happy that I was home.

  Should we play a game? Watch a movie?

  I need to borrow your car, I said.

  I can hardly bear to remember her face. As if I’d crumpled her heart and tossed it away.

  Where could you possibly have to go tonight?

  I don’t remember what I answered, only that she let me and how much it hurt to leave them. I pulled the front door shut behind me and something tore inside, like a cloth that still hasn’t mended. Still, the quickening as I lit a cigarette in the dark and turned off of our road toward the highway. I imagine that this is the way a man feels leaving his family for his mistress. I did feel part father, part husband. Maybe every daughter does. Or just the ones whose fathers have gone.

  * * *

  I didn’t tell her when I stopped shooting up, stopped everything. She had never known that I started. She knew what she saw and that was bad enough. You can’t crawl up to your mother from hell and not look like it. If I told her why she didn’t have to worry anymore, I’d have to tell her why she worried. I’d have to be done for good. What if Persephone had told Demeter not only what happened in hell, but that she might be coming home for good? What daughter would do that? Besides, there was so much more to Hades than heroin.

  * * *

  A year into my job as a dominatrix, my mother came to visit me in New York. She knew about my job. It was a sexless feminist pursuit. Activism, really. Or, acting, at least. Like so many times before, she didn’t challenge me.

  One evening as we were leaving to go to dinner, she spotted a harness and dildo hanging from the back of my bedroom door. I don’t think I wanted her to see it; I really was that careless.

  I know what they make you do with that, she said, her voice brave. I said nothing. To avoid the pain of it now, I think how easily it might have been for my own personal use just a few years later. That would have been embarrassing, but far less painful. But it wasn’t a few years later and it hadn’t been for my own personal use. Did she know what they “made” me do with it? Probably. I won’t imagine how she learned that.

  It wasn’t that we didn’t talk about sex. We sometimes did. What we didn’t talk about were the things I designated. The parts of me she might find illegible. The things she might have disapproved of, or simply been hurt by, or that I had no words to name.

  He’s not so bad, Mother, Persephone could have said. It’s hard to explain. It’s a whole other world down here. It’s half my home. Though I can understand why she wouldn’t.

  * * *

  Another holiday. After dinner, all of us draped over the couch, drowsy with food.

  I need to borrow your car, I said.

  Her pleading face, so pretty and so sad.

  Where could you possibly be going?

  I took a breath.

  I have to go to a meeting, I said. Then I had to explain. It was bad, I said.

  She wanted to know how bad or thought she did.

  Bad, I said.

  * * *

  I told her very little and it still hurt a lot.

  It all makes so much more sense now, she said. Her face was so tired. I wanted to take it all back.

  How much are you supposed to tell someone who loves you that much, whom you want to protect? Is it worse for them to find out later, when you are safe on the other side? I hated to watch my mother sort through the past, solving the puzzle of my inconsistencies with the pieces I’d withheld. Lies make fools of the people we love. It’s a careful equation, protecting them at the cost of your betrayal. Like mortgaging the house again to pay for the car. I was also, always, protecting myself. There were things I would no longer be able to believe if I had to say them aloud. I could only tell her the truth when I faced it.

  * * *

  Three years later, I sent her the book I’d written.

  You can’t call me until you’ve finished reading it, I said. In it were all the things I’d never told her about the heroin and the parts of that job that hadn’t felt like feminist activism or even acting. Tak
e as much time as you need, I said, hoping that she would take as much time as she needed to not need to talk to me about how it felt to read those things.

  She agreed.

  The phone rang the next morning at 7 a.m.

  Mom? You were supposed to wait until you finished reading the book to call me.

  I did.

  You did?

  I couldn’t stop. I kept putting it down and turning out the light and then turning it back on and picking it back up again.

  Why?

  I had to know that you were going to be all right.

  It was the hardest thing she’d ever had to read, she said. It was a masterpiece, she said.

  In the years that followed, she sometimes told me about the awkward things her colleagues would say to her about the book, the ways she had to explain my past and the ways that she couldn’t.

  I’ve had my own experience of it, she once said. I knew she meant that she wanted me to make room for how it had been hard for her, too. The living and the telling. I had made a choice to tell the world the things I couldn’t talk about. In doing so, I had forced myself to talk about them, though I still barely could with her. My choice revealed those things to her and simultaneously forced her to have a conversation with the world. Even more unfair, I didn’t want to know about it. I couldn’t even bear to listen.

  * * *

  Ten years later, I had a lover who lavished me with gifts and grand gestures of affection. She wanted me to always be focused on her. When I was, she rewarded me. When I wasn’t, she punished me, mostly by withdrawing. When she withdrew, I felt a touch of that old disintegration, that sickened longing. It was torment. It was a compelling cycle and one that I consented to.

  The first time I brought this lover home, she wouldn’t look at my mother. She only looked at me. At dinner, she answered questions but did not ask them. Her eyes sought mine as if tending something there. It was hard for me to look anywhere else.

  She’s so focused on you, my mother said. It’s odd.

  My lover had brought a gift for my mother, a necklace made of lavender beads, smooth as the inside of a mussel shell. In the bedroom, she removed the small box from her suitcase and handed it to me.

  Give it to her, she said.

  But it’s from you, I said.

  It’s better if you give it to her, she said.

  I knew that my mother would also find this odd. As odd as the way she only looked at me. As odd as the way my lover needed to be alone with me for so much of such a short visit.

  We’ll give it to her together, I said.

  It was tempting in the months after I left her to interpret this behavior as an expression of my lover’s guilty conscience. But I don’t think she knew enough about herself to feel guilty in front of my mother. More likely, she saw my mother as a competitor. I suspect that she feared my mother would see something in her that I couldn’t yet. My mother did anyway. Still, I loved that woman for two years. Two years during which I withdrew from my mother almost entirely. I could not see what was happening to me and didn’t want to. Like my lover, I refused to look at my mother. I didn’t want to see what she saw.

  A few times, I called her, sobbing. I had done this when I was on heroin, also.

  Do you think I am a good person? I asked.

  Of course, she said. I could feel how much she still wanted to help me. I hung up the phone. I missed her so much, worse than ever before.

  The morning that I finally decided to leave that lover, I called my mother. This time, I did not wait three years to write a book about it and then send it to her.

  I am leaving her, I said. It’s been so much worse than I told you.

  How worse? she asked me, and I told her. Why didn’t you tell me? she asked.

  I don’t know, I said. I was weeping. What if I had told you and then didn’t leave her?

  She was quiet for a moment. Did you think that I would hold that against you?

  I wept harder and covered my eyes with my hand.

  Listen to me, she said, her voice strong and unwavering as a hand under my chin. You could never lose me. I will love you every day of your life. There is nothing you could do to make me stop loving you.

  I didn’t answer.

  Do you hear me?

  III. Kalligeneia

  When I sent my second book to my mother, we had an hours-long conversation. I explained how my writing created a place where I could look at and talk to parts of myself that I otherwise couldn’t. She explained to me that this was exactly what her mode of therapy allowed her patients to do. We had talked about this before, but never in so much depth.

  A few months later, we stood in front of a room packed with therapists, at a conference my mother attends every year. She began the workshop by leading them through an explanation of the clinical model that she primarily uses in her practice and travels around the world training other clinicians in. It was impossible not to watch her. She was warm and funny and expert and charismatic. You could easily see why our mailbox filled with heartfelt cards from patients she’d stopped seeing decades ago. When she was done, I stood. I spoke for a while about how writing allows me to retread the most painful parts of the past and find new meaning there, find healing there. Then, I led them all through a writing exercise that exemplified this and drew upon my mother’s therapy model. The therapists scribbled in their notebooks and then I invited a few to share their work. As they read, the group nodded and laughed. A few people wept.

  That whole weekend, people clasped our hands and praised our work together. They marveled at the miracle of our collaboration. How special, they said. Whose idea was this?

  Hers, I told them.

  * * *

  There is an older version of Demeter’s story. As the memories of stories are changed with each telling, they are more irrevocably changed with each conquer, each colonizer, each assimilation of one people into another. This one existed before the Greek or Roman versions that we know so well and is believed to have emerged from a system of matrifocal mythology, and likely a society whose values it reflected.

  There was no rape, no abduction. The mother, goddess of the cycle of life and death, passed freely from the underworld to earth, receiving those who died as they passed from one to the next. Her daughter, some versions say, was simply the maiden version of that goddess, imbued with the same powers. Others suggest that Phesephatta was the very old goddess of the underworld, and always had been.

  It used to scare me that I wanted things my mother wouldn’t understand. I think we both feared our difference. In hiding it from her, I often created exactly the thing I wished to avoid. It’s not that I should have told her everything—that would have been its own kind of cruelty. Though I could have trusted her more. That younger version of our story, the one I have carried for most of my life, the one I have mostly told here, is also true: I hurt myself and I hurt her over and over. But like the old myth, there is another version, a wiser one.

  * * *

  It’s not that Persephone ever gets to come home. She is already home. The story is used to explain the cycle of seasons, of life. Her time spent in the dark is not an aberration of nature, but its enactment. I’ve come to see mine the same way. Like Persephone, my darkness has become my work on this earth. I return to my mother again and again, and both realms are my home. There is no Hades, the abductor. There is only me. There is nothing down there that I haven’t found a piece of in myself. I am glad to have learned that I do not have to hide this from her. It helps that the darkness is less likely now than ever to kill me.

  I can hold both of these stories. There is room for one in the other. First, the sacrifice made on the first day of Thesmophoria, Kathodos, a ritual violence. The other, retrieved on the third day, Kalligeneia, and sprinkled in the fields. The sacrifice becomes the harvest. All of my violences might be seen this way: a descent, a rise, a sowing. If we sow them, every sacrifice can become a harvest.

  As the Rome traffic heaved ou
tside the window of that tiny apartment, I stared at my phone, that dread thickening in me. I understood that I could sink this whole trip into it, spend every day punishing myself for my mistake. I didn’t have to, though. The part of me who feared our bond too fragile to withstand this blow was a young part. I had to tell her about this new story. I had to tell her that there was nothing I could do that would make my mother stop loving me. I promised her. Then, I called my mother.

  She was mad, of course, and disappointed, but by the end of the call we were laughing.

  A few days later, I phoned her from the town where her grandmother was born.

  You are going to love it here, I said.

  There is a difference between the fear of upsetting someone who loves you and the danger of losing them. For a long time, I couldn’t separate them. It has taken me some work to discern the difference between the pain of hurting those I love and my fear of what I might lose. Hurting those we love is survivable. It is inevitable. I wish that I could have done less of it. But no matter how much of it I did, I would never have lost her.

  * * *

  A year later, I picked her up at the Naples airport, and we drove down the coast to that town. For two weeks, we ate fresh tomatoes and mozzarella, and walked the streets that her grandmother had walked. I drove us all the way down the Amalfi Coast Highway and only scratched the rental car a little bit.

  As I drove, my mother held my phone up to film the shocking blue waters that rippled below, the sheer drop from the highway’s edge, the wheeling birds that seemed to follow us, and the tiny villages built into the hillside. It was terrifying and beautiful, like all my favorite journeys.