Mother’s Day: My mother taught me how to tell my own story
A mother and daughter tell the same story about a trip to Maine. Here’s the mother’s perspective, the daughter’s is below.
I’m an only child. When I was little I learned how to amuse myself. I’d read, draw, or pretend I was a World War II soldier separated from the rest of the platoon in the woods behind our house. Sometimes I’d mix all of my mother’s lotions together in the bathroom to make “potions’’ until she realized what I was doing and came to stop me. I was inventive.
My mother is inventive, too. She’s a writer, and has made up whole worlds and lives that fill novels. Her office was (and still is) in the house I grew up in, separated from the living room by a glass door. When I would get bored—say, of rereading Little Women for the thirteenth time—and she was writing, I’d knock on one of the panes.
She’d either put her hand up and mouth “not now,’’ or she’d let me come in. Sometimes she’d stop writing to play with me. Sometimes she’d continue to work while I dug through her endless supply of pens. I’d listen to her calls with editors as they debated the virtues of a semicolon or fact-checked the quotes of an article. Her love of words seeped into my bloodstream as I lay on the hardwood floor drawing pictures of elephants.
My mom would edit my papers in high school, and I used to get furious. “What’s the point you’re trying to make?’’ she’d ask. Or, worse, “You’re just repeating yourself over and over.’’ I’d threaten to just turn the paper in as it was. “Okay,’’ she’d say. “You can do that.’’
But I never did. I’d work at it until it earned her seal of approval, or at least of acceptance.
My mom recently wrote an article about how when you become a mother, you become a character in someone else’s story.
My grandmother, who’s 93, was recently in a car crash. She’s charming, she’s difficult, and she’s a storyteller, too. Not professionally, though she should’ve been. She instead makes things up about her own life, and my mother’s life, and my life, too—though not as much.
As we sat with my grandmother in the hospital these past few days, she told us stories. She has her go-tos: How she helped the Monuments Men unearth paintings the Nazis stole during World War II, how she was once in such bad traffic in Rome that helicopters had to come and lift cars up and take them away to solve the gridlock. They’re wonderful.
“She taught me how to write, you know,’’ my mom said as we drove away from the hospital and away from my grandmother, who was looking ever smaller in the hospital gown and bed.
While the paramedics wheeled my grandmother to our car so we could take her to the hospital, she’d said, “I want to ride shotgun.’’ She winked with one of her wide, flirty eyes. She then said, “Shit, man,’’ as she tried to stand on her swollen feet.
“If you think I was hard on you, you should’ve seen her with my essays in high school,’’ my mother continued. “She taught me so well that I sent colleges an English paper I’d written about Keats instead of an application essay, and they accepted me.’’
In my mother’s article, she tells a story and wonders if I’ll someday write the same one myself. Here it is:
As the paramedics put my grandmother into the front seat of the car, my mother came out of the house with a bag of oranges so that Nana would have fresh fruit in the hospital. Then my mother walked towards the woods.
I watched as she stopped at the end of the driveway and chucked an orange as hard as she could toward the trees. The perfect non-sequitor.
“Great throw,’’ I said, as she came back towards me. She started to laugh.
“I didn’t think anybody was looking,’’ she said.
“What were you doing?’’ I asked.
“One of the oranges was rotten,’’ she said.
We kept laughing, and then she broke down in tears. I held her briefly before she got into the back seat.
I drove us to the hospital, down the same road where my grandmother crashed. We were all in the same car, but in three separate stories, supporting characters in the others’ narratives.
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