family reserve
My mom has come and gone, leaving behind a thin line of ash, smoldering a silent advance between us.
She arrives in the July heat of summer on my stoop in Brooklyn--laden with luggage, dressed in khakis and a visor--and my heart presses against the kind of dense and difficult love a now grown person has for their own, aging parents. In my apartment, inside the small structures of me, we are fine. I am still enough of the daughter she remembers, the daughter she needs me to be, the daughter she wants to keep the groundswell at bay. She eyes my dining room table, asks is this one that (my mother in law) bought you? and I say yes, it is, biting back from wanting to remind her that she’s seen the summer before. Her hands glide over it slowly and she breathes in deeply, looking up and around and I see, for a miniscule moment, the resentment wedging itself quietly in.
Later on, in the Hamptons, at my mother in law’s house, things fall apart. My mother in law is buying us furniture for our house--beautiful, stunning, priced astoundingly--and we are solidifying the order. As I sit on the phone with the office back in New York I watch my mom leafing through the pieces we are ordering, her eyes a hard mixture of envy and awe and I suck my own air in quickly, trying only to straddle the line with grace.
We fight like I am once again a child, a teenager, as she can render me fourteen again with one look. On Long Island, in the lush country of New York’s elite, she becomes sullen, quiet, pouting and passive. By the time we migrate to New Hampshire she is piecing and biting, tossing angry interjections with the deft flick of her voice--though she will admit to nothing, proclaim vehemently that it's all in my head (I’m not angry, you’re angry! I’m not upset, you’re upset!) and that nothing (nothing!) is wrong, she is fine, FINE. I’m fine. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m fine. Nothing, from my likely choice to have prenatal ultrasounds during my theoretical pregnancy to the way I fold and put away my sheets, escapes her disapproval. Willow comes two days later to save me, her own mom in tow, and we sit up late at night, toes touching, talking about the enormous and searing sadness only our moms can make in us. I am thankful for the dilution they bring into the concentration of contempt as much as I am to have another witness to the event, a ballast against the wind.
Even as it unends me I know many things and all of them at once. I know that when she comes to me like this I am not an adult of my own, I am once again fourteen and raging against my curfew, her choice to ground me, her chronic disapproval. I know that she is a human made up of much envy and regret, that she tends to see in sharp focus her own collection of dissatisfaction. I know that she always wanted the life I have stumbled into, that she always thought she would marry an Ivy League professor, have a warm wooden house, living and breathing, as she sees, so easily. I know that all she wants in life is her own house, her own yard, and that bringing her to mine is cruel in a strange and unspeakable fashion. I know that she could never admit that what she is really thinking is that she deserves more, more than what she’s capable of seeing her life as, more than she has, more more more. I know that she is grappling with sharp and untenable emotions that she is not proud of. I know that somewhere, hidden up and folded inside, she is happy for me--relieved--that I have landed on such solid footing. I know that my own, intimate insight into those darker pieces should galvanize me against some of her more caustic tendencies. I know that I should be the adult I am every elsewhere when I am with her. But instead when she is with me she will always and only be my mom, that I will always and only want to her to be proud of me, happy for me, uncomplicated, just like that. I know that I want her to not be her own, actual messy human self; that this is impossible, unfair. I know that, despite all I know, I too want more.
