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My mother once gave six hundred dollars to a woman who cried out of United Way to pay her rent and avoid being homeless. My mother had no six hundred dollars left over. I rarely had money at all. For my great events, graduations, my 21st birthday, I still wrote to me that I would save forever, I would never charge.
He could entertain a crowd all night with his legendary stories. The time he was trying to enchant an appointment at a party without realizing that his false front tooth shone in the black light. The moment in which he forgot the word “log” and called it “rolled wood.” The moment when an important dinner was late and put on makeup in the car, accidentally using black -eyed eyeliner to align his lips. “Everyone shouted with laughter,” he said, radiant.
My mother was generous, full of love and hysterically funny.
I felt like the only person in the world who didn’t adore her. When I was a child, I noticed that the moms of my friends seemed to have control over life in a way that mine did not. These children were not late to school every day, they brought full lunches, they always had their signed task. Their moms picked them up from school in time. I didn’t have the tools to explain why, but my house felt different. The wine was part of our life, but I still did not connect alcohol with its domain effects. At that age, all I wanted was to be like other children.
It was not until high school that I felt that what was happening was more than oblivion. My mother called me once when I was with my friends, sobbing and annoying because I had not fed the dog. She is crazy I remember thinking at age 16. If I was late home, I would find her asleep on the couch and could not wake her up. In the morning, it was I who woke her up to take me to school. Something was happening with his work that he could say he was not honest with me. I began to get away from her, lonely in my observations, and angry because I had not fulfilled my expectations of what a mother should be. In my veins and thirty years, my frustration grew at the same pace of its decline. The more I drank, the less I slept, ate and worked, and the more angry I put on, until I had returned from that.
But I never discussed my anger, or her drink, directly with her. My mother always wanted us to be like the Gilmore Girls: best friends, twin souls, more like sisters than mother and daughter. She used to join me when I saw the program and comment: “I always thought we would be like that,” and I wouldn’t say anything. I convinced myself that I was doing a favor by letting her believe that we were close. If I protect your happiness, the best I could, maybe I would like to be healthy.
Instead, I would talk to her about going to West Elm to look at a carpet. He would send a text message with his suggestions for 90 -minute romantic comedies in Netflix. I pretended that the wine was not the wedge between us until the day when a doctor with blue eyes on his mask told me that my mother needed surgery to live, but that he would not survive surgery due to the condition of his liver.
“What do you mean, the condition of your liver?” I asked.
“Advanced cirrhosis,” he said. “I would need a liver transplant, for which I would not qualify.”
It turned out that the reason he bothered my mother for 20 years was valid. He had been drinking until death. But being right had never felt worse.
Because now it was too late. He had lost his whole life without saying what this doctor had said in 30 seconds. My mom was going to die that day and I had never done anything to stop him. By convincing me that I was protecting her, I was protecting myself from facing what was too difficult to say aloud.
Only once my mother and I approach the indescribable theme of alcohol. I had been trying to get pregnant for almost five years. After each disappointing treatment cycle, I would push me try again, wanting to have such a bad baby. Hardened by my anger, I asked me: why did he care? He could not be grandmother in the way he imagined a grandmother, as mine had been, someone who marched with me in the July 4 parade and hugged me so strongly that it hurt. At that time, my mother slept most of the day. She didn’t have the strength to hold a baby.
She must have seen it on my face that time. “You know I would never drink came around your baby,” he said, out of nowhere.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s good.”
That was the most honest conversation we had had and all that occurred to me was: “It’s fine. That’s good.”
In his hospital room, I studied the line in his lobes of the ears of decades of heavy earrings. I studied the persistent red dust on your feet nails. Although he hated being confronted with physical evidence of his illness, I memorized his body, knowing that it was the last time he would see her. I wanted to say something to help her die happy, but at that time, even with a lifetime among us, a life of green breakfasts on the day of St. Patrick and tomato soup when she was sick, everything she could think was: How could I let it get so bad? How could you leave me here? How is that love? He was 34 years old. I still had much of my life ahead of me, and she would not be here to see her. She felt like an option between me and the wine, she had chosen the wine.
I wanted to believe that I would not inflict that pain to my son, if he ever had one.
“You were a good mother,” I said, and kissed her hand. “Thanks for everything.”
Six weeks later, I knew she was pregnant.
Before dying, the long process of a frozen embryo transfer had begun. During the dark weeks that followed, I followed the shots, the doctor’s visits, crying to my mask while the doctor measured the thickness of my lining. My pain was so physical that I doubted that the transfer would work. When my doctor gave me the amazing and beautiful news, I called everyone in my life: my aunts, my dad, my friends. But I couldn’t call the only person who deserved to know that he had been right. I needed to keep trying. The loss of her felt like a hole that I could not fill with anyone else.
All my life, in Hello and goodbye and, often, in the middle, my mother kissed me in my whole face. Dozens of kisses in a row, suffocating my cheeks, my hair, my neck, leaving red lipstick spots on my skin. She would hug me and buzz in my ear MMMPHAs if it were something delicious. I can still listen to it. MMMPH.
My daughter is now two years old. In Good Morning and Good Night, and all day in the middle, I kiss her throughout the face. Dozens of kisses, suffocating it. His swollen cheeks, his warm neck, his soft curls. Sometimes I leave the lipstick. MMMPHTareo while tightening. I feel my mother as I say.
My mom and I will never meet as much as mothers, but now that I am one, I understand her better. I wanted him to have a baby so bad because he wanted a grandson, but because he did not want me to miss the joy he had experienced to have me. She kissed me all my face because I couldn’t believe I existed. She kissed me because I couldn’t help it. She kissed me because there is no better feeling in the world than to tell your son than you love her. If my mother couldn’t tell me the truth about some things, I am grateful that she told me that.
I can’t change the fact that my mother and I never had an honest conversation about alcohol. For the rest of my life, I will feel angry with both of us for lying to ourselves and. I will wonder if honesty could have saved it. All I can do now is to appreciate that your alcohol consumption was separated from your love for me. The other could not be erased. If my mother made any decision, it was to retain her truth to protect me from what I could not change.
“I am in heaven,” he used to say, sitting with a glass of wine in his blue chair, with an Arizona outside, open kitchen door, gas fireplace. Radiant. “I am in heaven.”
I have never felt closer to my mother than now. I’m also in heaven, I’m just alive. Every night, I put my daughter to sleep in her nursery. She hugs me in the dark while kissing her Malvavisco cheek.
“I love you,” I say with a kiss. “I love you.” Kiss. “I love you.”
With each kiss, I am next to my mother’s hospital bed. I say: we can’t come back, but I am throwing your love forward, mother to daughter.
Taylor Hahn is a writer and lawyer based in Los Angeles. She is the author of A Home for the holidays and https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678953/the-lifestyle-by-taylor-hahn/ “Rel =” Noopener “target =” _ blank “> the lifestyle.
PS: Three women describe their complicated mother/daughter relationships, and “I asked me: I drink too much?”
(Photo by Victor Torres/Stocksy).
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