Mothering Without One of My Own

I’m driving southbound on I-25, just north of Denver. The mid-day, mid-summer sun is harsh and I squint, scanning the horizon, while my young daughters nap in their carseats. The girls and I usually live in the Midwest with my husband, their dad, but we are in my home state of Colorado for the summer. We’re staying with my aunt sometimes, my dad now and then, my sister mostly. Solo parenting is exhausting, and traveling all the time with two children under the age of three can be excruciating. I’m doing it because I have to find my mother.

I look for clues in the homes of my family. At my grandmother’s house I scour old family albums, analyzing every expression on my mom’s young face for hints about who she was, who she became, and, most mystifying of all, who she would have been now. I beg my dad to remember something, anything, about my mom as a young mother or their experience of parenthood in general, but memory is not his forte and neither are the trivial, if vital details of raising young children. Sometimes my sister can fill in holes or inaccuracies of my memory, but the limits of her experience of our mother are much the same as my own. Besides, my sister just had her first baby, and while it feels good to have a compatriot in the trenches of motherhood, she is, as I was, completely engulfed in the haze of keeping a newborn baby alive and well.

I am looking for my mom in Colorado, because I know she’s not in Ohio. I’m looking for my mom, but I know I won’t find her, not really, because she’s been dead for fifteen years.

When you give birth, if you can feel, what you feel is your body splitting open. You feel your insides flattening, your body stretching and ripping, every single bit of strength and effort concentrated on the biggest and most wonderful undertaking of your entire life. And then, through the flames of pain, a child: a head, a jumble of limbs breaking loose, a rush of fluid and a sudden, brilliant release of pressure. There’s nothing like nine months of pregnancy to drive home the point that your body is changing, and yet in one instant you become a mother and suddenly your body is the least of it. The world you knew before vanishes, the person you were before gone with it. Nothing can prepare you for the experience of coming face to face with your child, and I find even now that the first thing I wrote after my first daughter was born is still the truest thing I can say about it: there are no words for this magic.

Still, my bottom hurt (a lot), my nipples wouldn’t stop bleeding, and figuring out how to care for a newborn was completely consuming. And then it turned out that being a mother to a toddler was also consuming, and then being a mother of two was the most consuming thing of all. So it was, with all this consuming going on, that I failed to realize that when I split open to let the baby out on that unseasonably warm October evening, something else broke loose, too.

At first I could only identify the shift as a problem with physical place: Ohio was the problem. The dreary winters, proximity to my well-meaning but overbearing in-laws, even the predictable kindness of Midwestern strangers. Colorado was the antidote, the land of sunshine, mountains, and my own family legacy. I clung to this conviction as I packed our bags, and keep clinging until, a few weeks into our summer, I realized the thing that was missing in Ohio is missing in Colorado, too. And that’s when it hits me, driving eighty miles an hour down the highway that the problem isn’t geographic, after all (but spend the month of February in Ohio and you’ll see why I thought that was it). The problem is that in becoming a mother I had lost mine all over again.

Searching for my mom takes a heavy toll, and solo parenting makes me tired and irritable. I am perpetually folding and unfolding the stroller, feeding children and changing diapers, putting babies to sleep and retrieving them when they wake, each task I accomplish immediately creating the need for its opposite. We spend most of our time at my sister’s house: my sister, her husband, their newborn baby, my two girls, two dogs, and me all under one small roof. We step on each other’s toes and hurt each other’s feelings, because we are human and because we don’t have enough room or sense not to. But when I wake in the night to nurse my baby I can see the soft glow of the lamp in the living room, where my sister sleeps on the couch next to her newborn daughter’s bassinet. Sometimes we are sitting up nursing babies together, separated by a wall instead of a thousand miles. Sometimes I can hear her quietly singing “Over the Rainbow” to my niece, a song our mom sang to us. My sister and I take walks, our babies in strollers, dogs at our sides, chatting casually as though we are neighbors in real life and not just unconventional housemates for the summer.

In watching my sister parent I see myself in the early days of parenthood: the same singular focus, same propensity for anxiety, same quickness to chastise our partners. As weeks turn to months I start to notice something else. Her body is changed by the birth of her daughter, but it’s more than that. Something is slightly different about how she wears her hair, the clothes she chooses from her closet, the way a watch sits on her wrist. Her way of simply being feels more natural. Sometimes I look at my sister and see our mom, partly a physical resemblance, but mostly some other intangible quality I can’t quite put my finger on.

Summer comes to an end and the girls and I go back to Ohio. My dad drives us back, and when I drop him off at the Columbus airport, I cry. I sit in the silence of our own house, so much space to ourselves after staying in spare bedrooms, and the loneliness is oppressive. I am exhausted from the travel and parenting, but also from the endless searching. My time in Colorado feels like a failed pilgrimage: I have traversed thousands of miles, reached the outer limits of my physical and emotional endurance, and yet I have turned up nothing. My mom feels as lost to me now as she ever has.

One night several months later I nurse my almost-one-year-old to sleep, running my fingers across the bridge of her nose, the curls of downy soft hair behind her ears, her plump cheeks. There is nothing sweeter than the sound of a sleeping baby, the breaths light and somehow heavy at the same time, airy like a wind instrument, rhythmic. Part of me itches to put her down so I can start to tackle the always-daunting list of things I should do, but I stay a little bit longer because I realize there are not very many times in life when you can sit and hold a sleeping baby. Your own children are not children for long, in the grand scheme of things, and the next sleeping baby I hold may well be my own grandchild. If I am luckier than my mom.

When I do at last put the baby in her crib the toddler is ready for bed and asks if I will rock her, too. She is changing so fast, not a baby anymore but sometimes I can tell she misses the comfort of being one. To watch your children grow is to witness a thousand rebirths and deaths: who they were, who they are, who they will be. I settle into the chair with my sleepy child, her long hair spilling over one arm, long limbs over the other. She rests her head on my chest and something in me stirs. It’s not a specific memory but a deep sense of the way things were: years of moments all stacked together, a collective sense of the physical shape of my mom’s chest under my cheek and the lightness I felt when I had her to rest on.

I can’t find my mom in Ohio or Colorado or anywhere else, because the only place she is anymore is within me. I remember reading that halfway through pregnancy a female fetus has developed all the eggs in her ovaries she will ever have. My would-be daughters, two microscopic oocytes among millions, were created when I was in my mother’s womb, like the Russian nesting doll my mom saved from a family trip when she was in high school. I will never know the delicious comfort of calling my mom when I am drowning in the daily tasks of mothering small children. She will never come over to my house and say, “take a nap, I’ve got this.” I cannot ask her how she dealt with a two-year-old’s illogical tantrums or a one year who still won’t sleep through the night. But I can feel her hands in mine as I soothe a crying child, her laugh echoing in mine as I find the hilarity in the many disasters of living with unpredictable small children. And I can call my sister, a soul mate forged in the same womb I once occupied. She can share her own stories of mothering her daughter, a daughter who was once an egg in the same womb as my little eggs. My sister, her daughter, my daughters, me: we all have something in common. We come from the same magic.

American Landscape

The woman sways back and forth in a warped wicker rocking chair outside of an old adobe house in the Southwest. It’s golden hour, all the more golden in New Mexico which is not called the Land of Enchantment for nothing. She is not young anymore, the kind of flawless youth that makes every feature appear beautiful behind her, but nor has the look of wisdom settled in her features. A couple years shy of forty, the woman has always preferred the company of quinquagenerians and sexagenarians; ages at which the facade of youth falls away, ages at which most everyone has experienced loss. This woman, Sulie (short for Ursula), is both alone and never alone. She is a mother; the child sleeps soundly in the little adobe house, a girl, golden hair stuck to her forehead and cheeks with sweat, this child always is warm when she sleeps no matter the conditions. There is no father, but they don’t lack for company.  There are animals, those they feed and house and those that prowl and slither and soar around them. There are industrious hens, taciturn barn cats, benevolent ovines, a loyal hound. And also: rattlesnakes, coyotes, hawks, scorpions, jays, deer, bear, mountain lions—these animals are inspiration and fear, comfort and thrill for mother and daughter.

The shadows are long this summer evening, the sky painted like the favored watercolors of the daughter: pinks, purples, turquoises.  Sulie loves this chair, even as it falls apart before her eyes (and under her). Sulie’s mother loved this chair, too. The faded floral cushion is her mother’s taste, and therefore something Sulie treasures. Miles of high desert and mountains stretch before her as she rocks, and also behind her, in all directions. To her west, the behemoth Dawson Ranch, 500,000 acres belonging to the most powerful family in Northern New Mexico. To her north the peaks of the Sangre de Cristos, almost always capped in snow, a compass. To her east the ridges dissipate, little by little, until they become mesas scattered through desert, the kind of land where nothing is easy. And to her south, 150 miles down a ribbon of highway, the oasis of Santa Fe. Beyond that: Albuquerque, Truth or Consequences, White Sands, and then, finally, Cuidad Juarez and Mexico.

Throughout her twenties Sulie lived in a city, working a meaningless job, everything an adventure. The seedy neighborhood she lived in a badge of honor, the number of dates she went on in a week a good opener and a good way to make it clear she intended no kind of future with any of them. Until her parents’ accident. Only days later, Sulie packed a duffel bag and left the house she had shared with an aimless assortment of roommates, got in her station wagon and drove south, a route she’d memorized in bored agony as a child. She drove to Northern New Mexico, a place she’d grown up spending summers as a kid, just like her mother had before her.

Built in the thirties, the house was made of red clay adobe walls, gnarled pine floors. It was a little house, much too small for refrigerators with ice dispensers or behemoth sectionals with cupholders and outlets. No, this house belonged to a different time, and for that reason Sulie hated it as a teenager and craved it now. There was a barn too, as big as the house, all of it encircled by adobe walls. It was modest, but the true value lay in the land it sat on. Fifty acres, located in a valley at the edge of the Sangre de Cristos. A river ran through the property, just down the hill from the house. Water here was more valuable than gold, and the sum Sulie’s grandfather paid fifty years ago could not have accounted for the warming of the world, the chalky dust and the greedy ranchers and the suburban neighborhoods covering hundreds of thousands of acres in an arid southwest that could not keep up with the demand. And so this property, with its outdated house and its river of gold, was a place Sulie’s grandfather had loved more than the idea of retirement, a place where her mother rode a pony called Tomato, the place where Sulie’s parents had been married, the place she and her sister imagined themselves princesses and cowboys. It was the place she returned to when her parents were lost to her, because she knew they would be here.

She was both right and wrong, and the house had been more rundown than she’d remembered. A decade of traveling the world had left her little time or interest in returning to the dusty town in New Mexico, and her parents had become immune to the signs of disrepair. Her parents were nowhere, the house was cold and smelled faintly of sulfur, the closest neighbors miles away. Sulie was well and truly alone. And yet, her mother especially was here, somehow in the walls and the rocks and piñon trees, but most of all in the animals. The hawks were her, the bees were her, the deer with their big brown eyes and long eyelashes. They were all her, and Sulie realized right away she would be staying. 

Sulie’s parents had died in a spring snowstorm, and it was as though the weather the rest of that dark spring reflected Sulie’s grief. A car accident, both of them snatched away in a matter of minutes. Seconds, probably. The sun had not shone in the weeks following the funeral, an aberration in the sunny Southwest. A few days after Sulie had arrived at the adobe house she became restless. She’d packed a sandwich and headed out on her own, hiking without planning, working her way across the ridges to her West. At first, her mind wouldn’t quiet, but eventually the rhythm took over: crunch of her footsteps against the rock, sidestepping cactus, wind so loud it became difficult to think and her mind finally let her be. It was meditative. So meditative that she’d later wonder how long the lion had been watching her. Her mother had always told her by the time you catch sight of a lion you can bet it’s been watching you for a good long while. 

The shift was impossible to articulate, but Sulie’s body tensed, paused. Primordial prey response deep in her bones, hair on end, goosebumps. A shift in the sedimentary rock to her right; a rock falling? She snapped her focus without moving her body, another skill she’d learned from her mother: never run. She saw his eyes first, so—not a rock. Pale green, like sage, ringed in gold, pupils round and startlingly not at all cat-like. And the strangest thing happened when she locked her gaze with the mountain lion: she stopped shivering. She felt warm, calm, safe. He’d been crouched but when she looked at him he stood, so that their eyes were level. Neither of them moved, but Sulie sensed in him a relaxing of his muscles even as he stood still. It felt like an understanding, a communion, the greatest gift she’d ever received. 

Finally, he lay down quietly, not a crouch, but on one hip, relaxed. The sun broke through the clouds and the wind took leave of them so that Sulie found herself wanting to stretch her body across the warm rock under her feet. Her rational mind knew it was crazy, but something deeper in her still felt safe, at ease, more herself than she’d ever felt before, so she sat down facing the lion, back against a rock, legs outstretched. She smiled. The cat put his head down on his paws, watching her. 

The next thing she knew she was cold, the sun having recently set. She’d fallen asleep. Remembering, she started: where was the lion? She couldn’t see him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t nearby. She’d felt sure he didn’t mean her harm when she’d been with him earlier, so sure she’d been lulled to sleep. And yet—her mind raced, reminding herself her gut couldn’t be trusted. She scrambled up, began making her way back to the house, spinning in a full circle every few steps to be sure he wasn’t hunting her. It was a cold, dark, long hike back to a cold, dark little house. She lit a fire, wrapped an old navajo blanket around her shoulders and sat staring at the leaping flames, trying to make sense of what had happened. That night she dreamed of a girl with golden hair, green amber eyes, a girl with a spirit as wild as the lion’s. When she woke she knew she was pregnant. It defied logic, but perhaps this was the way it was meant to be for her. Sulie was meant to stay, to make a home for the baby that was coming. She never told anyone the story, never explained she knew it simply wasn’t possible her child was the result of one of her brief flames. It was easier to let people think what they wanted; and anyway, it didn’t matter: what difference, really, did it make it if the girl was the result of a mystical conception or a five minute encounter with a disappointment of a man? The truth was, either way, she was Sulie’s child. 

The egg that became the girl called Winnie was formed when Sulie was still in her mother’s womb, a tiny cell that had laid quietly in Sulie’s ovaries as she learned to walk, played jump rope, rode ponies, kissed a boy, graduated high school, got drunk, fell in love, fell out of love. And it was that egg that eventually would begin to grow, the mysteriousness of the conception not making it any more magical than any other conception that ever was: the sheer odds stacked against any one of us ever coming to be. And it was in Sulie’s womb that the child grew, the cells multiplying, making flesh and bones and veins and hair, eyes and lips, and even eggs cloistered in tiny, tiny ovaries. It was Sulie who felt this little being swim, flip, hiccup. Sulie’s body that doubled, clutched in pain with labor pains, the incredible muscles of Sulie’s uterus moved the baby to the birth canal; the strength of Sulie’s vaginal canal opening, the fire of the life coming lighting Sulie to her core. Sulie’s hands that caught the child as she emerged, Sulie’s chest she laid upon, eyes big, but quiet. Sulie who nursed and woke and slept with this tiny baby, Sulie who now listens to the child sleep as she rocks in the wicker chair and the sun sets.