Glitter and Glue (23 page)

“Do I really have to ask her? I mean, don’t parents just automatically—”

“I don’t know. You’re not, like, super-nice to her on the phone. Maybe she thinks you don’t care.”

I paused, then shook it off. “Oh, come on, that’s crazy.”

But the idea stayed with me, and the next time my mom called I asked her to come out, and she said she would look into it.

“She won’t come, watch,” I said to my roommate when I hung up.

Later that evening, she called me back with a choice of dates and flight times.

Applying her
Houseguests are like fish
rule, she came for three days. I took her to all the best places I had found to eat, to walk, to look. Pasta at i Fratelli, beers at Sam’s, scones at Home Plate. The weather was perfect. She loved it.

Back at SFO on Monday morning, I walked her to the gate, as people did in 1994.

“You’ll never come home,” she said.

“Yes, I will—”

“No. If I’d seen this place when I was young, I’d have stayed forever.”

It was hard for me to imagine my mother young. She’d never really been me, a girl out of college, looking at the map, wondering where to unpack her trunk and set up her JCPenney bedroom set.

“I’ll be back, Ma. When it’s time to buy a house …”

“No, it’s too good here.” She nodded, agreeing with herself, and then stepped into line at the ticket counter.

I never did come home to her, but I came around to her. It took ten years, two babies, and a tumor.

The first step was meeting a Yalie from Arkansas who had not traveled, did not do party tricks, and had never touched a lacrosse stick. We got married anyway, and though my mother was very happy with how the day turned out, the negotiations were tedious.

For example: “Now, have you thought about what kind of flowers you’d like on the tables?” my mom had asked the week after Edward proposed, using the officious and slightly obsequious tone of a wedding planner.

“I like gerbera daisies.” My parents’ wedding was a formal Catholic affair in early November. I memorized the album, each page its own black-and-white eight-by-ten. I can describe every shot, my mom’s collarbones, my dad’s buzz cut, the bridesmaids’ velvet dresses, the groomsmen’s wool morning suits.

“Gerbera daisies?”

“Gerbera daisies.”

After a long pause, my mom said, “I was thinking roses.”

“If you have it all figured out, why did you ask me what I wanted?”

“Because I thought you’d say roses and then I could agree and you’d think I’d given you exactly what you wanted.”

We did the same dance with the venues. Church or hillside. Country club or Moose Lodge. In the end, it went exactly as both of us probably had known it would. St. Thomas of Villanova, Merion Golf Club.

After Edward and I came home from the honeymoon, I made a new list to work through. Some of the old favorites—lose weight, read the morning paper, run a 10K—mixed with some new and exciting items, like get pregnant, which happened fast because I am stupid lucky.

I went from wondering endlessly about mothers to becoming one over a slow and almost relaxing seventeen hours involving a delicious opiate called Fentanyl. Mothering Georgia has forced on me many decisions, and by many, of course I mean millions. The first big one was baptism. The issue had come up before, loosely during the pregnancy and intermittently since she was born. I’d been baptized, as had Edward. But did we believe enough to pass it on?

Though my mother loved invoking the adage
When you assume, you make an
ass
out of
u
and
me, she did indeed assume that Georgia would be baptized, as did Greenie. The alternative was unthinkable, a break in a chain that stretched back hundreds of years. Edward was inclined to defer to Pascal’s Wager, the idea circulated by the French philosopher that if you believe in heaven and you’re right, fantastic! All that virtuous living paid off. If you believe and you’re wrong, well, hey, at least you spared yourself years of pride and sloth, not to mention killing, stealing, and bearing false witness.

My wager went:
Do it and your mother can die happy. Don’t do it and break her heart forever
.

Many months later, when Georgia was practically walking, affairs were in order. We flew to Philadelphia to baptize her in the church where we were married.

The service was lovely and brief. Georgia wore a delicate lace and linen dress that Edward’s parents sent from Little Rock. GT and Edward’s sister, Phoebe, pledged to be good and wise godparents, and through it all I cried, surprising myself and Edward, who kept checking my expression to make sure I was crying happy tears. My mother, on the other hand, nodded at me as if she had seen this moment coming for thirty-four years.

I wasn’t choked up thinking that Jesus knew my baby and that the Holy Spirit would guide her. It wasn’t the marble altar or the brass crucifix hanging behind it that got me. I cried looking at my mom and realizing how much I had come to love her and how that love had brought us here to this chapel, where a hundred parishioners were promising to keep an eye out for her granddaughter, who would grow up in California and say the Lord’s Prayer only when she was visiting her Jammy.

Pulling at the hem of my emotion was the creeping sense that it might well take until 2036 for this child in my arms to feel a fraction of what I already felt for her.

After Claire arrived, during a morning so grueling that when I think about it my lady parts clamp shut in an involuntary, sustained Kegel, we moved out of a rental flat in Berkeley and into a well-priced fixer-upper in a tiny suburb with very good public schools. My mom gave us a check to cover the last chunk of the deposit; she had plenty of money saved—
saying no adds up, Kelly
—and was no longer afraid I would spoil.

I played house, turning doors into chalkboards, making benches from plywood, sewing an ottoman slipcover that my mother-in-law joked, after a couple glasses of Pinot Grigio, “doesn’t do your living room any favors.” I started building my new life, collecting my own Pigeons for the road ahead. And I began the transition from my father’s breezy relationship with the world to my mother’s determined navigation of it.

At first parenthood was as I’d expected. Exhausting, sometimes heinous, occasionally divine. I held my children close enough to feel them breathe, laugh, swallow. Then my days got more complicated, and although there’s nothing unusually challenging about my children, I often find myself responding to their sudden and inscrutable moods, mighty wills, and near-constant arguing by turning into a wild-eyed fishwife. Some interactions are so strangely familiar, it’s as if I once starred as Little Orphan Annie and then, decades later, found myself cast in the revival as Miss Hannigan.

By way of example, here’s a memorable excerpt from a conversation with Georgia regarding her third-grade report on cheetahs:

“You missed a section, honey.”

“No, I didn’t,” she replies without looking.

“This page on reproduction is totally blank.”

“I know. I Googled it, and there was nothing.”

“Oh, I bet there are half a million pages about cheetah reproduction.”

“Not on Google, not when I put it in the nav-bar thingy,” she says, air-typing as if I’m new to the Internet and might need a little help following her.

“Maybe you spelled it wrong,” I suggest in a gentle voice.

“I know how to spell
cheetah
. C-h-e—”

“I was thinking
reproduction
,” I clarify.

“R-e-p—”

I smile even as her relentless contrariness boils my insides. “Okay, stop. When we go upstairs, I’ll do it with you.”

“But I did it already, and there are zero-point-zero sites,” she says. I don’t know which one of us is more fed up.

“I promise you there are many sites on the Internet that discuss cheetah reproduction,” I say with great manufactured calm, trying a trick that involves pretending your child is not
your
child but, rather, just
a
child,
any
child, asking for your gentle guidance. Sometimes this works.

“There are no—” Sometimes it doesn’t.

“STOP. That. Is. E-nough. E-NOUGH! Work on something else, but do not say one more word!”

“Fine.”

After Georgia storms off, Edward says, “When I first met you, you didn’t drink coffee, and you were so mellow.” How can I tell him that I was a dog in show, high-stepping with my
shiny hair and sparkly striped collar? Twelve years and two puppies later, I’m an ungroomed bitch who barks at flies.

Beneath my frustration is real fear. What if my kid lacks a handful of the critical Life Skills we’re always reading about in the school newsletter: Persistence, Coachability, Curiosity? What if there’s an iceberg hardening right now beneath this defeatism? If a child can’t find a single word online about cheetah propagation, what kind of future can she hope for? That’s why I snap and storm around and then spend long nights thinking of the most damaged adults I know and wondering if my particular brand of maternal fuckups are how they ended up like that.

My “passionate engagement” frees Edward from just about all worry. He sleeps fine. He talks to his friends about road bikes and tech start-ups and music apps. He stews about his job. Why should he fret about the girls when I’m pacing the sealant off the hardwood floors? It would be redundant.

Recently, he called with
good news!
We were invited up to Tahoe for four days with the O’Sullivans. “Our girls can ski with their girls, and we can have an adult day on the mountain.”

This was a flawed plan, or at the very least a plan that required some consideration. Ten years into our marriage, I’ve learned to push back using Fact Not Feeling. “I thought we were in a period of post-Christmas austerity. Didn’t you say we needed to get our
burn rate
back under control, build up the 529s, maybe pay down some of our mortgage …”

“Yes, but the place is free.”

“Four days at Squaw equals sixteen lift tickets.” I don’t like being the family comptroller, but apparently it’s a job that must be done.

“So are we just not going to ski, ever?”

The real problem with Freddy Fun’s Tahoe plan was that the
O’Sullivan girls skied twenty days last winter, on double-black diamonds. Our girls are what the savvy ski schools call Advanced Beginners, which meant two things:

1. Without a parent to slow her down, Claire would hop off a ski lift and fly in whatever direction the slope took her, fly with her hands high and her skis tight together, fly until she met a tree or another skier or the cliff’s edge. There was no helmet hard enough to protect her from her own recklessness.

2. Georgia, who does not like to be a beginner and will not ask for, or accept, help, would ride to the top of the mountain with the very able Maggie O and go wherever she led, even the Olympic runs, crying behind her ill-fitting loaner goggles, hating her inexperience and inferiority. Did Edward not know this? Could he not feel her insides clench like I could? God help them if anything ever happened to me.

“How are they going to learn if we don’t let them try?” Edward wanted to know. “I don’t want them to grow up scared of mountains and rivers and whatever else makes you nervous. I want them to be gamers, to be on the go team.”

“Oh, come on—”

“Here I thought I married George Corrigan’s daughter,” Edward said, playing to my identity. “Don’t tell me I married—”

“Watch it.”

I’m not sure who Edward married. Maybe the person he married became a different person. Because maybe that different person is the right person for the job. Maybe
that
person will take on the cheetah report, and protect over- and under-confident children on ski slopes, and manage the unsettling situations that often bubble up right around bedtime.

One particularly tough night, I’d broken a wineglass while I was doing dishes, and Claire was still upset that I’d forgotten to
take her down to the softball field that afternoon so she could be in the team picture, and my lower back ached, and let’s just say the day was pleading to be done.