Fury (47 page)

But it's just a close call. Eamon and I spend the morning spooked and crying, but by late afternoon the bleeding has stopped. And Monday morning finds us in my new ob's office, watching our baby's heart flicker, fireflylike, on an ultrasound screen.

After we've averted that disaster, new terrors claim me a few months later, when we see her—yes,
her—
elfin face and balled fists on the same device. “Oh, yes, our baby here is a girl,” says the ultrasound technician, a round Russian woman whose eyes are rimmed in jet-black like Cleopatra. “Here is her flower, you see? Yes, it's beautiful. Little baby girl. So cute. So wonderful.”

I spend many queasy and sleepless nights wondering if I can be a good mother to a daughter. Am I in touch enough with my own feelings not to squelch or feel threatened by hers? Can I help her to appreciate and, as Virginia Satir says, “develop” her emotional world?

I want to understand and, in doing so, free myself of the attitudes that have been passed down inadvertently through generations, so my daughter can in turn be free of the legacy of anger, repression, narcissism, self-sabotage, and abandonment. I want to have the presence of mind to see her not as a version of my grandmother, my mother, or myself, but rather for the person she inherently is and will be. I want her to be what Laurie Lee once called “a child of herself,” a daughter, whose “life is already separate from mine, whose will already followed its own directions and who was always quickly correcting my woolly preconceptions of her by being something quite different.”

One night toward the end of my third trimester I call Eamon, who is touring with his band Brakes back in England, and ask, “How can I do it? How can I be the kind of nurturing mother Virginia Satir writes about? How can I appreciate our kid's individual differences, tolerate her mistakes, and communicate openly when I've never seen that kind of family firsthand? It's like trying to rebuild an engine without knowing anything about cars.”

Oddly enough, my mom calls the next day, just to tell me that she thinks I will make a good mother.

My eyes fill. Grabbing my huge, porcine belly, I reach for the closest chair and lower myself onto it, trying to get a sense of my bearings. The sentiment is completely unexpected. And even though I've long stopped needing or hoping she might affirm that for me, it touches me hugely.

“So what kind of mother are you going to be?” she asks me.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, I mean, are you going to be the kind of strict mother who never lets her eat sugar? Or are you going to be the hippie mother who just lets her run around wild and without any rules? You know, what kind of mother are you going to be?”

I think for a moment, and then say, sniffling, “I'd like to be the mother who, no matter what, makes her kid feel seen for who she is, respected, and heard.”

“Did
you
not feel respected and heard?”

“Not always. No.”

“I'm sorry,” she says, warmly, plainly, without anger or defense. I can't believe it. I realize I was half expecting her to say,
I'm sorry you feel that way.
Or
I'm sorry, but you had a roof over your head and food on the table, and two parents bound in holy matrimony
. Or
I'm sorry, but I was ten times saner than my mother before me, and I'd like to see you try to do things better.

It occurs to me that, just as she's wanted me to strap a muzzle on my feelings, I haven't really wanted to experience hers. Most of my life I've avoided being honest with my mother for fear that it would ignite her own explosive emotions. I'm guilty of the exact same crimes I've charged her with. Yet, even as I've rejected her, I've loved her too. The fact that I've experienced both feelings simultaneously leaves room for the possibility that my mother loved me all along, even as she judged me. She might have spent years trying to change me, but she paid attention to me. If I was looking for proof that she cared, it was right there in her anxieties about me. Her nurturing instinct lay in her stringency. Like so many people in the world, her way of loving focused on training. Her affection had been there every time she said “don't.”

“What's changed?” she asks me.

For the second time in ten minutes, I ask, “What do you mean?”

“Don't take this the wrong way, but you've always been my short-fused daughter. You know what I mean. But you're so calm lately. You seem different. So, what is it? Is it because of your book?”

Again, I'm taken aback. There's no precedent for this. My mother doesn't usually ask me such personal questions. I try to think of other times she's expressed a desire to know what I'm feeling and why, but come up short.

It occurs to me that she might be asking because she's not sure how to relate honestly to her anger either. For the first time, I realize that her attempts to raise unflappable children might have been born out of the distrust she had for her own emotions.
I don't want you to go through the things that I went through!
This had been her justification for some of her cruelest criticisms when I was a kid. I see, almost in a visual image, that every time my mother railed on me for crying, getting angry, expressing disappointment, she'd been trying to rescue me from her own family—a gang of shadows that was always with her, waiting to target any weakness or insecurity. As a girl, the only “emotion” language she heard was blaming. She'd never had anyone to tell her “I'm on your side. Talk to me. Let me help you.”

I might have continued this legacy if I'd remained cut off from my emotions. If I don't stop looking for the validation I'd never had as a kid, I might later try to demand it of my children. As a mom, I want to respect and make room for my children's emotions, even if I can't always understand them. I want to do the same thing as a sister, as a daughter, as a wife.

In response to my mom's question, I tell her that once I found a little more compassion for myself—once I'd allowed myself the possibility of getting angry, not because it was always helpful, but because it was human—I started to feel less overwhelmed by the feeling. I'd also realized how much of my anger in the present was really deferred anger from the past. Once I disentwined the two, everyday aggravations seemed smaller and more manageable.

“I like what you just said about being in the present,” she tells me. “Lately, I've been trying to do the same thing.”

In late June, Eamon and I admit ourselves to St. Vincent's Hospital and emerge on an achingly clear summer evening with our daughter, Ayla—six pounds, eleven ounces of cherubic features and comedic expressions. Even shrunken, dented, and wrinkled, she has the compact energy of a coiled spring. She is bustling, lively, ready to assert her presence and be as near as possible to the world and its mysteries.

At the moment I write this, she is five months old and dribbling in her father's arms. Her blue eyes are widely fascinated. Her hands reach for any wonder within her grasp. Even on my breast, she hums to herself like a cartoon drunk and, as if pleased with her joke, flashes a teasing, gummy smile. Only fifteen pounds and she has all the energy of a nuclear reactor. Sometimes I watch her teach herself how to crawl—she inchworms across the floor on her stomach, head cocked in concentration, fingers fanned as she reaches for the object of her desperate desire—and remember an image I found in my anger research. A psychology professor named C. George Boeree wrote, “The problem is ‘out there' and anger is the build-up of energy needed to solve it. Just try to hold back a baby from crawling, and see what you get.”

Though it is not my daughter's job to give me anything, she has already given me motivation, a gift as heavy and dear as gold. For all her squeals and flailings, she's as helpless as a rock. Once or twice a night, I tiptoe into her room and check her sparrow's chest for signs of life and breath. Her every cry is a reminder that she is a creature who needs both my authority and my empathy, my voice and my heart.

Although I decide what she wears, where she goes, when she sleeps, and the like, she is still a full citizen of our burgeoning family. Still fresh from the womb, she sits hunched like an immigrant from the old country; she has her own reference points and still speaks her native tongue, but we have spent much time learning her language and getting used to her alien preferences.

She demands empathy, but then she also increases my compassion for my own mother. Whereas first I remembered my childhood as all easy, and then, later, as all difficult, my sweet girl reminds me of the small tender gestures in my own childhood. Ten times a day I find myself speaking to the little wriggler in the voice of my mother. When snatches of games or nursery rhymes come to me that way, as though by osmosis, I'm reminded that I knew affection and good intentions. My mother and my Italian
nonna
before her had loved me, and each other, in their own distinctive ways.

It has been four years since I first began working on this book—two years since the one-dimensional image that I had of my family collapsed like a stage backdrop that's lost its wooden supports. In that time, the dust has begun to settle. We are beginning to rise from the chaos.

Virginia Satir was right when she said that change is possible for everyone (even in the most stubborn of families). Even my mother, the technophobe, has learned how to text message. Most nights she dispatches a message around 8:00 P.M. Nothing major. Most are just small, thoughtful questions. “Does Eamon come home from his tour soon?” she wants to know. “Has Ayla's fever come down?” “How are you feeling?” Sometimes, instead of texting back, I'll call her, asking for some small piece of advice. Confessing that I don't quite know how to soothe my daughter in the days after a vaccine, my mother will tell me, “Of course you don't know how to make it better. No one does.”

I visit my parents at home more often. It's important to them, and, in time, it will be important to my daughter. If ever she desires to see me not just as her mother but as somebody's daughter, it might help her to remember that big house standing mostly alone in the woods, to hear the coyotes howling out at night and smell the far-off burning of birch branches and dead maple leaves.

While being more forthcoming in my anger has helped me connect to my mother, my relationship with my sister remains careful and polite. She is a compassionate mother, a more dependable adult. Every day, she bears less resemblance to the schoolgirl whose white lies and avoidance angered me so deeply when she was in college. Though she still doesn't want to talk about events past, every five months or so she will drive the forty-five minutes to Brooklyn from her home in New Jersey, bringing with her big boxes of Riley's old baby clothes for her niece.

On days when I occasionally feel wounded and guarded (they still happen), we speak in awkward fits and uncomfortable starts (
less like sisters
, I think,
and more like work colleagues from different departments
). But on days when I'm attuned to the present, I can listen and love without terms and conditions.

It's impossible not to see the girl my sister once was in Riley. Twice, while I was pregnant, I babysat for her while my sister worked back-to-back shifts at her job as a police dispatcher. And on those nights, I did for Riley what I wished I could do for my sister: I held her when she howled; I rocked her when she missed her mom; I stroked her head and tried to comfort her with reassurances that I felt certain reached her, even though she didn't yet have the words to respond.

I've discovered that it's one thing to want your child to own her emotions and quite another to experience her dissent when it's focused hotly on you. Already, in my daughter I see the puckered brow of critique, the averted gaze of boredom, the purple-faced flash of rage. Even when I can't understand the source of her Didoian laments, I try to remember that she's entitled to them. Ours is already a relationship, and from time to time she's right to turn away from the face that hangs moonlike and doting over her expanding world's terrain.

Now and again I revisit some of the ideas this book first helped me uncover or rediscover, things like homeopathy, chakrology, psychology, prayer, meditation. I've come to see them as coping mechanisms, no one less ridiculous than any of the others. In my experience they were all equally valuable in the way they helped me access my emotions, and, along with them, my own inner remedy and blocked energy, my own inner Freud and inner guru—the voice that I research and write with, the person who wants to know the true nature of the world and herself, who sensed, from the very beginning, that emotion can be the glue that connects people just as often as the cleaver that tears them apart.

Hunter was right when he said facing my emotions and asserting myself would be a life's work. But it's not without reward and small, creeping signs of progress.