Chapter 3 #2
I can empathize, juggling motherhood with a career, because I do it every day.
Every time I act in my own best interest for time or sanity—staying late at the museum, working on weekends, grabbing takeout, prodding Hannah to get to the point of a story instead of listening to the beautiful cadence of her five-year-old voice—feels like a point deducted from my daughter’s childhood.
Sometimes, since Sean’s passing, I think back to moments growing up and see them from my mother’s point of view.
But right now, I can’t let her off the hook.
“What about my father?” I ask. “Couldn’t he have cared for me?”
“Maggie, you know he wasn’t in the picture. He didn’t even know you existed, and I’ve told you this before, I didn’t even know how to find him. I had nothing to go on. I didn’t even know his last name.”
This was how the story went: My mother met a very handsome European man during her first year of graduate school.
He was visiting the States for some sort of conference, though she didn’t know what kind.
Because they believed they would never see each other again, they decided to only share their first names—she was Diane and he was Chris—and no real personal details from their lives.
It was mysterious, thrilling, and made sense from a logical point of view.
If they didn’t get to really know each other, there would be no hard feelings, no attachment.
I stop pressing the subject of my father.
It’s a game we’ve played my whole life—me asking questions, Mom deflecting them, claiming how little she ever knew or remembers.
But I do question how my mother left her infant in the care of someone else for so long.
Didn’t her heart, her arms, ache for me?
I think back to that first year with Hannah; my daughter’s sweet milky scent would start to fade by the end of the workday, a siren’s call home.
How could my mother give up that time with me?
“So you let Alice raise me?” I ask instead.
“No, I raised you,” she argues. “You lived with her until you were only three years old, when I was finished with school and able to get a good job and make money and support you as a single mother. I came to visit every few months. I called every week. And she mailed me pictures and updates on how you were doing in between. It was temporary.”
I have no words, except, “I can’t believe you never told me this.”
She sighs. “Maybe I should have, looking back. But I didn’t want you to think I didn’t love you or that I abandoned you in any way. I didn’t see what good could come from telling you. I could see only the downside. So I decided it was best not to say anything.”
“So this is why you made Alice out to be such a pariah?” I say.
“I regret that now.” My mother’s voice grows soft. “But I was always afraid of you finding out the truth, so I . . .”
“Defamed her,” I blurt.
She sighs. “Looking back, yes, I guess I painted her in a negative light.”
“But it wasn’t only you,” I push. “It was Aunt Cathy. All of your sisters.”
“Well, they had their own bone to pick with Alice,” she divulges. “Alice inherited that farmhouse from our great-grandmother, Rose.”
I digest this information. My mother always acted so detached about where Alice lived, as if it was just some place she picked at random, in the obscure, rural Midwest. She never let on that it was a family home. “And they were jealous?” I prompt.
“They wanted their cut. There were developers who tried to purchase the land for an obnoxious amount of money, the kind of money that could truly change lives. But Alice wouldn’t sell. My sisters felt shortchanged.”
“So they were more than happy to join your smear campaign?” I press. I’m being spiteful, but I can’t help myself.
“No, Maggie, it wasn’t like that. At least, not intentionally.
” She pauses. “You know how it is, when Hannah asks questions about things you don’t want her to fully know, at least not yet.
You protect your children. And sometimes, you overreact.
Go a little too far. I really felt like I was protecting you from something that might hurt you. ”
She pauses, waiting for me to absolve her. But I don’t.
“It was hard,” she goes on. “Not being able to take care of you and be your mother and go to school and care for myself at the same time. You can understand that, right?”
I could, in a way, but I also couldn’t imagine leaving Hannah like that. Ever. Leaving Hannah’s side longer than absolutely necessary, especially in those first cherished years, would have felt like leaving my lungs behind. But I wasn’t my mother. I knew that for sure now.
Still, I soften. “Why Alice?”
“She didn’t have children of her own,” she explains. “And I knew her farm would be a safe place for you, away from the craziness of the world. I thought it was the best place.”
I imagine myself as a toddler running through a field of flowers on a sunny afternoon, holding a bouquet of dandelions. Carefree. But this image is quickly replaced by reality.
“So then one day, you took me home, and we never saw her again?” I ask.
Another heavy breath. “Well, I started working, teaching at the community college. And we lived in California, and it was hard to travel back to the Midwest on a regular basis. And you started school. And . . . life happened. We lost touch. And to be honest, that’s what felt right.”
It felt right to you. But maybe not to Alice. She took care of me for almost three years, and then never saw me again. “She never called or even wrote? All that time? All those years?”
My mother’s silence is again incriminating.
“She did, but you didn’t tell me,” I say.
“I acted in your best interest,” my mother offers.
And now more than thirty years later, my great-aunt has written again. But why?
We hang up, and I sit for a long time with my thoughts, wondering what the first three years of my life were like.
Could the early moments I shared with Alice on her Wisconsin farm explain the divide between my mother and me, why we are so dissimilar, why we value different things?
Did my love of food come from Alice? It certainly didn’t come from my mother.
She always saw my affection for cooking as a strange obsession.
I remember a particular night when I was in high school. She’d just come home from work.
“What’s for dinner?” she asked. She slid off her black leather loafers, and her toes looked misshapen through the feet of her pantyhose, a hole developing in the big toe.
“Shrimp pasta,” I said. “The one with the spinach and the Dijon mustard?”
She smiled. “These dinners you come up with. I don’t know how you do it.” She kissed my forehead, then sat. “Thank you for doing the dirty work.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” I said, setting the Parmesan cheese shaker on the table. “I love it.”
“Well, that makes one of us.” She fussed with her napkin. “I could just never get the timing right. And the thinking ahead, the planning.”
I sat and watched my mother take a bite. “Do you taste anything different?” I asked.
My mother looked dreamily above her as if trying to conjure a deep thought. But she seemed to come up short. “It tastes the same to me.”
“Really?” I quickly twirled my fork through the spaghetti noodles. The fresh lemon juice I added instantly zapped my taste buds. “I taste it.”
My mother shrugged. “Well, you have a more refined palate than me.”
She kept chewing in silence.
“It’s lemon juice,” I said after too much time passed. “That’s what I added this time.”
She shrugged. “Maggie, you could put coffee in this, and I’d still eat it.”
Coffee? I thought. Lemon juice or coffee. Apparently to my mom, it didn’t really matter.
Toward the end of the meal, I built up the courage to ask if I could take a culinary class called Foods the following semester instead of study hall.
Her eyes narrowed. “Foods? As in Home Economics?”
“No, it’s called Foods. It would actually be Foods 2. The teacher gave me a placement test, and I tested out of Foods 1. That’s really basic stuff like scrambled eggs and chocolate chip cookies. But Foods 2 is an advanced cooking and baking class. You learn to make some really cool stuff.”
I could see my mother biting her tongue, or rather, her inner cheek, a sure sign of her disapproval. “Uh-huh? Like what?”
“Like sponge cake. That’s the kind of cake where you use whipped egg whites, instead of baking soda or baking powder, to make it really light and spongy. And I’ll get to make spaghetti sauce from scratch from tomatoes they actually grow in the garden outside the Foods room.”
The corners of her lips turned. “Maggie, I appreciate that you like to cook, but these are exactly the kinds of classes women my age fought to get out of taking.” She shook her head.
“You have to think about your future, your career, and someday supporting yourself financially. And to be honest, colleges are going to be impressed with academic courses, with a 4.0,” she added.
“Not whether you can make a cake that resembles a sponge.”
If my heart had been a piece of paper, she had crumpled it into a ball and tossed it in the trash can. I wanted to correct her, to tell her she hadn’t listened. The cake didn’t resemble a sponge; it was airy and light like a sponge. But I knew it was no use.
The answer was no.
Now, I compare this interchange with the recipe for Alice’s zucchini bread I found online.
In the list of ingredients, the careful description of steps, the postscript, I sense Alice’s strong attachment to food.
Her recipe reads like a diary entry, and I know, even without meeting her again, that we both see food for what it really is.
Love.
I have no idea how Alice found me or exactly why she wrote, but I do know one thing for sure: I still hold a sacred place in her heart. And this time, I’m not going to let my mother keep me from following what feels right in my bones.
Not again.