A Bad Daughter’s Dream

It is the stories of reconciliation that are told over and over--the birth mother reunited with her child given up for adoption, the long-lost found, the feud ended--and not the stories of leaving. But what if you leave forever and never look back? What if you never think of your mother, even on Mother’s Day?

I used to have a dream of leaving my family entirely. In the dream, my past was erased and my future limitless. The dream started with my parents’ divorce. I lived with my mother afterward, moving with her from Hawaii to New Jersey, and she conveyed to me, implicitly, that each of us was on her own. Even at 13, that seemed fine to me. I believed in divorce; I had learned from it. The life you did not want, you simply could leave. I went off to college at 17, intent on forgetting her; a rocket jettisoning its extraneous part. She could break; I would remain intact. She could fall to Earth; her alcoholism, her affair, her anger and paranoia. I would live in the sky: study philosophy and walk in Harvard Yard.

In service of my dream of leaving, I performed all sorts of literal destructions. By the end of my time at college, there was not a trace of my mother in my life. I still live now among the spaces left by my cuttings out then. I do not have a photograph of my mother. I do not have a word she wrote (she was a teacher) or a dress she wore (her early-’70s Hawaiian muu-muus) or a thing she touched (her copies of Norman Mailer, of Gore Vidal).

I used to have a dream of leaving, and then my mother started dying. While I was in law school, the diagnosis came--early onset Alzheimer’s disease. My mother was forced to leave her job as a teacher. She lived alone in an apartment she’d inherited from her own mother, became obese, drank, lost most of her vision. At 50, she was already old. When I called, she was incoherent, speaking in the fragments of sentences that, as an English teacher, she once had corrected. Finally, when she turned on the shower one day and couldn’t remember how to turn it off, a neighbor called the police. My aunt, her sister, swooped in to rescue my mother, putting her in a nursing home in the West.

Then my aunt asked me to come live near my mother and help care for her. But I refused. I would not even go to see her. And I did not send her anything, even during the time when she still could read and see. I feared becoming her, going back to the life in which I was trapped with her--and I feared all this so powerfully that the fear crippled me.

I used to have a dream of leaving, and this is what I lost to it: my fidelity, my integrity, my veracity, my verity, my heart. This is what I gained from it: my life and my freedom. The dream had its own rules and one of them was that I could never return to my mother--to her anger, to her alcohol, to her dissolution and her disease--even when she was dying. I followed the rule so well that when I finally did come back to her, she was dead to me and did not know I was in the room.

Later she really died, long after her mind had died within her. Her death was also a disappearance, for it seemed that she left no trace. She never had a will and did not have a wake and does not have a grave. And so I will never come by her grave on Mother’s Day to speak with her as if she were alive. There is no part of the Earth that is set aside for her. Here, instead, is all that is left of her: slides containing her brain tissue that I keep in a box. Someday, they will help me know whether I will die of the disease that killed her.

I used to have a dream of leaving and it was only that, a dream. My mother’s dying hung suspended in my life, like the man-o’-wars of my Hawaii childhood, small jellyfish that float in the waves, dripping a clingy blue tail of plasm from a transparent bubble. One would sting me just when I’d forgotten the possibility that it might be there. Then she died, and all I could think about was her. For two years, I wrote about her. The cost of the speech I never gave at the funeral she never had was a book.

After all the years of lying and omission, erasure and deception, I began to write about us both compulsively after she died. At first, I wrote without chronology or logical sequence, as if the emotions had an order of their own. When I cleaned the writing up later, I made it into a novel, still dodging the truth. Later I stripped all the fiction out. The true part of what I had written was the only worthwhile part.

Did I love her, after all? I wonder if it matters, she stayed so deeply in my mind and heart. I wonder if it matters, but yes, I did. The connection may be more visceral, more indissoluble than those that good daughters have with good mothers. I still feel defensive about my need for self-preservation--the only good part of badness. Yet equally I feel regret for what was lost. So I will think of her this Mother’s Day and every day I live. I don’t dream about leaving anymore; I dream, with equal impossibility, of coming home.