Growing Girls (29 page)

“Did you get that one?” she’ll say, calling to verify “Did you get it?”

“Mom, you don’t have to call,” I’ll say, trying to explain. “It kind of defeats the purpose.”

“But I’m excited!” she’ll say. “Isn’t this amazing? Can you believe how good I am at this crazy computer?”

I’ll tell her how great she is. How proud I am of her. This has been the classic mother/daughter role reversal. Nothing I ever accomplished was complete without my mom’s approval. I suppose it’s still this way, but now she needs me, too.

One morning she called to discuss her success at downloading a batch of photos I sent of the girls. She loved the one of Sasha feeding Emily. She spoke of printing it, even forwarding it. Another challenge! She said the thing about the computer was it got her living again. “I’m alive when I’m learning,” she said. “And there’s so much to learn about this dumb thing.”

Summers when I was home from grad school we would talk like this, about living to learn. We were so busy. She was studying painting at a fancy fine-arts college, and I was trying to write stories. I worked upstairs in the little yellow bedroom and she painted down in her studio. We would meet at lunchtime for tuna and iced tea and we would marvel at the similarities between a blank page and a blank canvas. When it came to the creative process, fear was fear, no matter what the medium. We would suffer this fact together, cheer each other
on. “Just go make a mess,” one of us would say, before heading back to our separate rooms. Scribble anything. That was the way in.

That was a million years ago. My mom stopped painting when her legs and hips gave out on her, then her eyes. My sisters and brother and I nagged for years, and she made a few efforts. She’d painted portraits of all her grandchildren, and when Anna came along she made sure to do a little picture, if only for the sake of tradition. But by the time Sasha came, well, that was after the disease that temporarily paralyzed my mom, and after the breast cancer, and after the hip surgery, after her eyes went. My mom’s health was way too far gone to paint.

“This photo makes me want to paint,” she said to me a few days ago when I sent the photo of Sasha and the lamb.

“So go paint,” I said. She made her excuses. I told her I was going up to my office to crank out one thousand words and if I could do it, she could, too. “Go make a mess,” I said.

This kind of talking is the best communication my mom and I have ever mastered. It’s the most genuine and the most productive. It’s two people fundamentally understanding one another, and fundamentally wanting to help. Maybe this is as good as it gets between a mom and a daughter. You have one subject you really excel at, can communicate about with a wink and a nod and little more than a buzz phrase, and then the rest of your talking is a lot of noise back and forth, a content-free ritual keeping you connected.

Shortly after I told my mother to “go paint,” I got the e-mail announcing that she had. It came through at about five in the
afternoon. I wrote back with a lot of exclamation points, telling her to scan the painting and send it to me. She called immediately. She said she didn’t know how to scan a picture. I gave her a few tips.

So then I got a new e-mail, with an attachment. I clicked and saw Sasha, through my mother’s eyes. She was set against a field of green, and her head was leaning in toward the lamb, a tilt that was utterly Sasha. I felt like dancing.

My mom called me right away. “Did you get it? Did you get it?” she said.

“I got it!”

“So how about me!” she said. “I can scan a picture!” She went on about the difference between a JPEG and a TIFF format and how she chose.

“Mom,” I said. “The
painting
. You painted a picture. Hello?”

“Oh,” she said. “It’s not up to my standards. But I knew you’d like it.”

I told her I loved it. I told her how proud I was of her. I went on and on trying to convince her to frame the picture, to take it around to show her friends at the retirement village.

“We’ll see,” she said. “I’ll look at it in the morning with a fresh eye. Maybe throw some darks in.”

“Well, I think you should congratulate yourself,” I said. “This is really an accomplishment.”

“Right.”

She was remarkably unimpressed with herself, or maybe I was hyping the whole deal too much, embarrassing her.

“Thank you, Mom,” I said. “It really means a lot to me that you painted a picture of Sasha.”

“You’re welcome, dear. Now leave me alone.”

“All right.”

“Everything else okay?” she said. “The girls are okay? Alex?”

“Everyone’s good. Hey, did you get my e-mail?”

“I couldn’t open it,” she said. “It was something about a dog?”

“Yeah, it was an article about a dog in Nairobi,” I said. “You didn’t read it?”

“I clicked but I couldn’t get anything to happen,” she said.

“Well, there was a stray dog in Nairobi and she found an infant in a garbage bag and dragged it back to her litter and took care of it.”

“The baby is alive?”

“Yeah, they named her Angel.”

“God must have plans for her. God was looking out for her.”

“Yeah, but what about the dog, Mom? The
dog.”

“You have always been an animal person,” she said.

“Oh, God.”

“Sweetie, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”

“The dog! How about that dog!”

“How do they know the dog really did it? Someone stood around and watched? That’s odd …”

“You have always been a cynic.”

“Skeptic.”

“Well, I don’t know how they know it happened,” I said. “But it happened. And I can’t stop thinking about the dog. It’s like a song playing over and over again in my head.”

“You have always been an animal person.”

“It’s more complicated than that…”

“I’m tired, sweetie. I’m glad about the Nigerian baby, really I am.”

“Nairobi,” I said. “And I was more thinking about the dog.”

“Well, it’s nice to hear some good news once in a while. Your father and I are so sick of all the bad news on TV.”

Right. Whatever. Some daughters are good at being heard, whereas others should have just stopped back at “Waaah!”

It’s okay. This is all okay and par for the course and everything that I’m used to. I learned long ago that my mother would never really understand me. I learned not to go to her with problems, or doubt, because she can’t sit in problems, or doubt. She has to fix things. This is probably true for most good moms. It goes back to Band-Aids. The kid is crying, you have to pick her up and make her feel better. But sometimes a kid really does need to just sit in doubt, to wonder, and sob. This wasn’t exactly what I was feeling about the dog in Nairobi. I just wanted, I don’t know, to talk.

“Hey, what about your birthday?” my mother said. “Anything special I can get you?”

Oh, jeez. My birthday was only a week away and I really hadn’t had time to think about it.

“Anything you want?” she said.

Well, I had no idea. It seemed a strangely monumental question. I’d been so busy. My life was feeling like a Venn diagram of intersecting tasks. One big mess of responsibilities. “You know what,” I said finally, “I just don’t have time to want anything.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s wonderful!”

Wonderful? To be too busy to know what the heck you’d like for your own birthday? “I’m not sure it’s wonderful,” I said. “What do you mean, wonderful?”

“If you’re too busy to think about wanting, it means you’re leading a full life,” she said, throwing out one of her maxims.

“If you’re too busy to think about wanting,” I corrected her, “it means … you’re
too busy
. It’s not good to be too busy. People need downtime. People need to remember to
play
, smell the roses and all like that.”

“A lot of people are very busy wanting,” she said.

Maybe. I wondered why she was hammering the point. Was this some sneaky way of getting out of buying me a stinkin’ birthday present? No. My mother doesn’t sneak. And she loves to buy presents.

“People spend all their time wanting more and more,” she said, “thinking that’s the answer to happiness. But
you
know that the wanting train goes nowhere. That’s why I’m proud of you.”

Oh, brother. She had me way elevated beyond my original point. This virtuous me she was conjuring was not, well, me.

“Mom, I don’t have the
energy
to get on the wanting train,” I said. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I do!” she said.

“I’m saying that in order to open the ol’ boxcar of personal desire,” I said, choosing my words very carefully so as not to be misunderstood, “I’d have to find a way to
stop
this barreling locomotive I seem to have gotten myself on.”

“You have always been so good with metaphors!”

Oh, my God! Were
we even having the same conversation?

“I never got you very many Christmas presents,” she said,
ridiculously veering off, as a mother does, to mother-guilt. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t want you kids to grow up thinking that material goods were the answer.”

“I always wanted more Christmas presents,” I told her. “I always wanted more.”

“But look at you now!”

“Oh, my God!”

“Why do you have to take the Lord’s name in vain?”

“I’m sorry.”

I gave up. Because there’s no sense arguing with your own mother over the point that you are not quite as swell as she has you made out to be. It would be like your dog trying to convince you that it’s not the most adorable little pooch to walk the face of this earth—a waste of that dog’s slobber.

This, I think, might be the main communication breakdown between mothers and daughters. The mother is programmed to see the kid as wonderful. She cannot hear the other stuff. It’s not her fault. You, as kid, are her accomplishment. You are the product of all those years and years of her hard labor. You are her best work of art.

And if you love her, really love her, you’ll give her this. You may not see the beauty. You may feel like hell. But if you love her, really love her, you’ll give her this. “Yay, me.” You’ll keep your problems to yourself. You won’t show doubt or fear or, Lord knows, any of the anger you feel for not finding your voice with her, for not being known.

And now here I sit. Here I sit wanting to be one of those mothers who have “good communication” with their daughters. I want my girls to be able to ask me anything, to wonder
aloud with me about their own adoption stories, to ask me to simply sit with them while they howl in pain. And where in the world do I suppose I’ll find the strength to become one of those mothers?
Where in the world?

“Well, you sure did a good job raising me,” I said to my mom that day, hoping to wrap this one up.

“I could have gotten you more Christmas presents,” she said. “Really, what would have been the harm?”

“Oh my God, Mom, let it go! You did a great job.”

“Thank you. But you really shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain, sweetie.”

She looks a bit depressed?
She’s full of milk, aching to be a mom. All her puppies have died and now they’ve taken away her one last hope.

“She looks a bit depressed?”
I’m saying to Betty, who is lying at my feet, curled up like a perfectly sturdy footstool. “They think she might have a …
temperature?”
I’m saying, irate and out of breath. “Can you believe this?”

“I can’t believe it!” Betty says. “It’s an outrage! It defies explanation! That poor lonely dog!”