It’s snowed again.
I barely noticed it this morning, and I forgot that the drive to the train station last night took place in the soft snowfall, the flakes glistening in the headlights like diamonds. We’ve had so much of it lately. We’ve had more water this year than we’ve ever had before, for as long as anyone’s been keeping track. When it falls softly in the hard cold it’s easy to be surprised by the amount.
Now that she’s been gone a good three months, I’ve begun to understand my mother in a way I never could before. There was something wrong in the way we related to each other but I always had the sense that it was determined, unchangeable. Fixed, failed reactions to a persistent reality that wouldn’t change. That the variables in the dynamic had been set in place and they would not be moved, no matter how aware we became of the motives. And they were fixed, that’s a certainty. I spent almost all of my life angry at my mother for what turns out to be good reason–but I couldn’t see how helpless she was until she was gone. I couldn’t see how helpless everyone was until she was gone.
Christmas eve I counted out dinner plates with my brother, we were trying to determine the number we’d need for his family, my family, parents, and his guest. ”We need nine,” I announced, and my brother thought a second before saying, “No, we need eight.” I corrected him, “Nine…count them out: four for us, four for you and your family, and one for…”
“I know what you’re doing, but we need eight,” he said. I was still counting my mother in the “us”, even though she wasn’t there. It’s an old habit I can’t break. Now that she’s really gone it’s occurred to me how much I missed her when she was here, how much I needed her when she was here but I had to do without her. How angry that made me, for so long. How I could never get past that anger, long after I became “an adult”, even long after I could see how desperately she tried to make that up to me. How much she needed me and how impossible it was for me to respond.
I let that anger rule over everything. I have trouble determining where it starts. The first time I knew it was there I simply walked away from home. I was barely old enough to walk, but I climbed and kept moving. There were a number of instances when I was a schoolgirl where I just walked. I’d walk out of my house and into the street and into the city, it would be hours before anyone knew I was gone. I took myself out of school and out of family life and out of whole days this way, and it was rare that anyone would notice. It was the only way to take myself out of feeling furious. The only way to make myself think of something other than what I was contending with at home, why no one could seem to stop it. By the time I got to be 12 years old it was so painful that physically removing myself was the only way I could cope. I was completely broken, and I knew my mother could see that. What I couldn’t see was how badly she wanted to change that but could not. How sorry she was for not acting, not being able to act. I never forgave her for that, not for the trying, but for the inability. I never saw it until now and now it doesn’t matter. Blame is such a stupid thing–all it does is confirm your own poor judgment. Whatever it was I needed her to do for me, she needed me to do for her. We were both limited, both blind, both paralyzed. Anger was just a dumb animal response I wish I’d been smart enough to see past.
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