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I Thought I'd Miss You, But I Don't. Love, Mom
I Thought I'd Miss You, But I Don't. Love, Mom--a Memoir of Estrangement
In the midst of the pandemic, my mother died in her apartment in Manhattan. Please don’t say or think “Sorry for your loss” because I’d lost her 40 years before. I told her I was having a baby and she never spoke to me again. She never talked it over. She never told me why. She never wavered. Instead, she redefined herself as a child-free woman and went about her business, traveling the world, charging through the city to her beloved cultural events, joining the Peace Corps, making new friends—and a bevy of multicultural surrogate daughters—who didn’t know I existed.
Since her death, I have been deep in the work of writing my new memoir, I Thought I'd Miss You, But I Don't. Love, Mom--a Memoir of Estrangement. Now that my mother is gone, I've been doing archaeology on her: diving into who she was, how (and if) she faked devoted motherhood for my first 22 years, and what her life was like after she excised me. Mostly, I wanted to know why she did it and how on earth she pulled it off while appearing sane, productive, and lovely.
The book's finished, swimming in patient little goldfish circles on my computer while I wonder if I should “reimagine” it or just scrap it. The writing did its job: I understand a lot more about my mom than when I started.
My book is about New York City in the ‘60s and ‘70s, roaches, theater, choices, motherhood, Nashville, and the glorious messy trajectory of my life as an artist in America.
And the Armenian Genocide.
And metal detecting.
***Below are two short excerpts.
Con Ed
We both liked to wander in places that touched the olden tymes: unchanged villages, antique shops with frail books. Places with musty smells and gray proprietors who don’t look up when you come in. These kinds of places. That’s what makes it so sad today—that we could have done these things together for years and years, until she died. But it didn’t work out that way because I had to do what I did and she had to do all those other things. The worst thing about what happened is the waste of fun, but there I go again, imagining something that never could have been.
Am I 12? Some age like that. We have spent the last few hours down near the tip of Manhattan where it still smells like fish and where the old brick buildings aren’t yet considered fascinating. There’s a museum nearby but hardly anyone goes to it. (We tried today, but it’s closed on Sundays.) Soon, enterprising people will pump millions into the South Street Seaport. There will be stores and fake-old bars in the authentically old brick buildings. There will be music festivals with folk musicians. Historically accurate boats will pull up to the piers. This area will appear in all the guide books as a “must-see.”
But right now, it’s empty, just me, my mom, and cobblestones. This city isn’t often quiet, but it’s nice and spooky down here on an overcast Sunday evening in early June. Our legs are tired from all the walking and we make our way to the bus that will carry us up First Avenue to home. I have a secret desire that she will make cornbread and cabbage for dinner tonight and we’ll talk again about Mississippi.
As we cross another stage-set street I notice something: Consolidated Edison has been doing some digging down here who knows what for. There’s a hole in the pavement with some half-hearted fencing around it. There’s a sign that says “Danger,” but it’s small. The end of a ladder sticks out of the hole. I stop and stare at it, then walk closer to investigate. Mom stands on the corner, checking her watch. I go right up to the fencing and peer over the side. The hole is not bottomless, so that’s good.
“Can I go in?” I whisper-yell to my mom. She walks over and stands beside me.
“Look. Look in the dirt, Mom,” I say. “Is that part of a teacup? What’s part of a teacup doing in there?”
“I think this is all landfill,” she says. “From the early 1800s? Something about a fire. I can’t remember the details.”
“Can I go down?” She looks around to see if there’s anyone who might call her a bad mother.
“Sure.”
I climb over the fencing which isn’t difficult at all, step down the ladder like I work for Con Ed and do this all the time, and am soon face to face with broken stuff from a vanished place: parts of ironstone plates, the edge of a skillet, a square-topped nail, the lip of teacup. I reach my fingers into the wet dirt of Olde New York and pry out the teacup lip. I rub it on my jeans. The delicate porcelain shows part of a rose. I think of the tea and the lips and the life and the death. I fill my pockets with dirty items that had once been useful.
Later, on the bus, I feel rich.
***
Burp
“I didn’t love you right away,” my mother tells me when I am small, and many times after that. “People always talk about this instant bond, this maternal instinct. I didn’t feel it for—I don’t know, about six weeks, maybe? I don’t remember.” She pushes her hair out of her face.
I don’t answer. I’m just a little kid and I’m not sure why she’s telling me this. I sense that she’s being this thing called “honest."
My mother goes on with her story. “We had people over. They were in the living room. I had given you a bottle before they got there and I was holding you, trying to get you to burp, patting your back, like it said in the book. But you didn’t burp. You wouldn’t; and you were fussy.”
I look out the window. I fiddle with my shirt, trying to picture myself as a fussy baby.
“So, I went in the bedroom and walked you back and forth. I patted your back, over and over. I wasn’t any good at it. Alma was better at it—hell, your father was better at it but this was the weekend and Alma didn’t come on the weekends and your dad was in the other room with the guests, so there wasn’t anyone to hand you to. I was getting angry at you. I’m not proud of that,” she says.
“But then you burped! It worked! And suddenly, then, at that moment, I loved you. I could love you.”
My mother finishes her story, sighs, and goes off to do something in the other room. I climb on my bed and lay my dolls out in a particular order. And I think back, even further than the beginning. When I wasn’t in her body yet, not quite. I was circling, considering, weighing my options amid bright constellations, comets, the eyes of Gods, and broken pieces of early satellites.
And I knew, in the way light knows, that this might not work out well. I can’t say that anyone nudged me downward, but I also can’t be sure there was pure free will involved. It was kind of a mix of the two. I did agree though. I know that.
And that April—April, 1957—was my conception, my point of departure if you will, and I wound my way down to her complicated womb and settled in for the long haul.
And then it was January, 1958.
And I was born.
And she didn’t love me right away.