Motherland: A Memoir

Sometimes I pretend my mother is watching me. I use her, the thought of her, if I think I might say something or do something in a situation that doesn't require me to say or do, like a parent-teacher conference at preschool. Before I go into the classroom, to sit on a midget chair at a knee-high table and listen to a childless twenty-seven-year-old tell me about one of my kids, I might bring a picture of my mom to mind, and for a meditative moment feel that by placing her between myself and the world I will acquire the dignity and grace I ascribe to her.
But I can't hold the thought. I can never hold the thought. I see my mother sitting peacefully, with her faraway stillness, her useful hands folded in her lap, then the image fades and I say something that signals my impatience.

My mother is an idea to me, like God. And like a god she has been an ideal repository for my anger and accusations, my love and longing, for my shape-shifting images of myself. Her name was Mildred Elizabeth Lady until she was twenty-eight years old, when she married my father and became Mrs. Allan Marin. More than half her life was over by the time she shed her given names, the better half, it seems to me now, as I near the age she was when she died.

I was fourteen when my mother died of breast cancer. She was fifty. She had been sick for years but never told me so, and I didn't see her during the last months of her life, which she spent alone in California, two thousand miles from our home in Evanston, Illinois, two thousand miles from her husband, her children, and her own mother, who lived with us.

She died in 1973, before breast cancer walkathons and pink breast cancer lapel ribbons and breast-cancer-surviving celebrities splashed into the news. It was the year Nixon's criminals testified in Congress, and the last U.S. troops left Vietnam. I have come to understand the times as I will never be able to understand my mother. Most of what I know about her I learned when I researched her life as I would a stranger's. I was twenty-nine. I'd been working at a newspaper in California -- following leads, conducting interviews, tapping out a thousand-word story per week, give or take. I liked being a reporter better than working as a waitress or a secretary, the jobs that were my undergrad and doctoral prep for journalism. "What's your angle?" I was often asked by those I interviewed, usually the ones with angles of their own. The question grated. I saw myself as a fact finder, an observer. Yes, everyone has a point of view, but reporters generally aim for fairness, and libel law generally enforces it.

I slipped through the looking glass when I dug into my mother's story.

Professional decorum? I wept in every interview. Sometimes my emotions carried me so far from the job at hand that my interview subjects wrapped their arms around me and soothed me as if I were a colicky baby. Objectivity? I leapt at scraps of hearsay. This one says my grandfather hid a bottle in his desk at the factory? In an instant I reconfigured my mother's biography, attributing her fall into my teetotaling father's arms to her dad's drunkenness. Fifty people told me of her kindness before one described her as cold and selfish and confessed a wicked prank her schoolmates played on her. Get me rewrite: First I was eerily thrilled by the tidbit, as if it let me off the hook for not knowing much about my mom. Her life was a blank canvas to me because she was cold. Her fault. Then I felt sad for her -- the outcast schoolgirl cruelly tricked -- and sadder for my own schoolgirl self, who hadn't the warmth to warm her own mother. Finally I was angry at the old woman who poured that poison in my ear.

By the time I was making my first memories, my mother was in the last decade of her life. It was the sixties, and we were a suburban family of five: mother and father, sister and brother, and widowed grandmother quietly crocheting in a rocker upstairs. We opened presents under a fir tree on Christmas mornings. We shared our big brown Thanksgiving turkeys and clove-speckled Easter hams with our cousins from Chicago's southside. Sunday mornings, we piled into our Cadillac and my father drove us half a mile to the only block in Evanston that housed two stone churches -- the First Baptist Church, and the First Church of Christ, Scientist. Hers and his. I went with my mother and grandmother to the Baptists, while my father took my brother to hear the gospel according to Mary Baker Eddy.

When my mom died, our family traditions disappeared with her.

My father shipped my grandmother -- his mother-in-law -- back to Tennessee. He got rid of my mother's clothes and emptied her shelves in the bathroom. He worked long hours at his office in the Loop and traveled for business, leaving his teenage children alone with their teen troubles. He started dating.