Why moms are weird, p.22
Why Moms Are Weird, page 22
At the bottom of the box, I find the tiny pink journal I had in the fifth grade. This was during the time Dad was home and Mom was working at the bank.
The first entry in the diary is dated January first, of course, where I boldly declared I would write in my diary every single day of the year, chronicling my growth as a preteen. The next entry isn’t until the end of March.
MARCH 25. DEAR DIARY.
I had a half-day at school today. Dad was in bed when I got home. He said he was sad, so I went to sit with him. Mom works late at the bank and Dad misses her even more than I do. That’s what he said. And when I asked why Mom has to be so late at her job he sounded like he was crying. He told me I’m a good daughter and we talked about what we should have for dinner. I got scared because I could tell that he was sad and I don’t want him to be sad. Jami spilled an entire box of cereal on the kitchen floor and Dad didn’t get mad at her. I’m so sure! She’s so lucky. I love Patrick Hart. Please don’t tell anybody, Diary.
Lylas, Belinda.
My parents were sad, so I was sad. My mom was gone and my dad was lost and I started eating. This isn’t to say my parents are to blame for my weight problem. It just means I’m starting to figure out the time line of my own unhappiness.
“I need you to take me to the doctor.”
Mom’s standing in my doorway. The sound of her voice makes me gasp. The diary tumbles to the floor, and I’m on my feet in a second. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I’m getting my cast off.”
“Ma,” I say, trying to figure out what to say while the words are coming out of my mouth. “I’m sorry about last night.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want to talk about it now. I’m still angry with you.”
“What did Gregory say?”
“He dumped me.” Then she looks down at the carpet. My mother has finally run out of words. I’ve done this to her.
“I’m really sorry.”
“Well, I shouldn’t have lied to him. Or rather, I shouldn’t have kept all of the truth from him. I thought I was protecting him.”
“He’s just mad, right? He’ll come back. He loves you.”
Mom grabs the doorknob, as if to brace herself. “Sometimes that just doesn’t matter,” she says. “I’ll meet you in the car.”
Painkillers.
Mom gets her cast off, only to find the cut she got from dropping the knife on her foot so long ago has gotten infected. Her bones have healed, but her skin has turned a disarming purple and green color, with angry streaks of darkness radiating out, looking almost as painful as it must be.
“I guess I had that coming,” she tells me. “It’s been hurting for weeks, but I didn’t want to say anything. I was worried they’d make me keep this on longer. I just want my life back.”
The doctor writes her a prescription for pain medication, and orders her to stay off her foot.
Back at home, I help Mom to the couch and set her up like she would when I was home sick from school—lots of pillows, all the remote controls, a stack of DVDs, and some chicken soup. I’m trying to be careful around her. Everything I do is an apology.
“At least the painkillers will make my heart stop hurting,” she says.
“Oh, Ma.”
I put in one of her favorite old movies. A few minutes in, I notice she’s crying.
“You okay?” I ask.
“This movie’s so old,” she says. “Like me. I’m so old.”
“You’re not old.”
She reaches out and pulls a strand of my hair.
“Ow!”
“Look at this,” she says, her eyes straining to focus on me. “This is a gray hair.”
“It is not. Watch your talkie.”
“It’s gray. I’m old enough to have a daughter with gray hair.”
“Stop talking about me getting old.” I settle back into my couch groove and try to focus on the movie, where Cary Grant is muttering something charming.
“You know what I figured out?” Mom says, her voice getting lower, her slack muscles making her speech slur. “I was afraid of Gregory. I thought if I loved him back like he loved me, then he’d leave. He’d leave or die. I lost him once before, and I didn’t want to do that again.”
She’s talking about the letters. I can feel my fingers start to tremble as I ask, “Lose him, how?”
Mom closes her eyes, swallows hard. “I knew it was real when I loved Gregory so much I felt like nothing I could do would ever be good enough. People die and go away; it doesn’t mean it’s not real love. There are all kinds of ways to love someone. Gregory loved me in a way I’d never been loved before. He waited for me.”
She pauses for a long time, one hand frozen in the air from when she was gesturing.
“Ma?”
“I miss Gregory,” she says, and then falls asleep.
Mea Culpa, Non Pater.
The drive to Gregory’s is confusing. There are all these turns and dips I’m not prepared for in his little sports car. I can tell I’m repeatedly grinding the gears. I know I should feel guilty for causing damage to his car, but each time the car shudders, it feels indescribably justified.
I find him in his workroom.
“Hi,” I say. “I need to apologize.”
Gregory’s bent over Jami’s statue, gingerly trying to shift it onto a wooden plank.
“Here,” I say, joining him. Together, we lift it easily.
“Thanks.” He turns away from me, putting his focus on a workbench. I can tell he’s just keeping his hands busy.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” I said. “It wasn’t nice of me.”
“No, I suppose it wasn’t,” Gregory says. “You were mad at your mother. I get it.”
“She really misses you,” I say.
“What do you think of Jami’s statue?”
The finished product is a towering mass of metal, found objects, sparkles, and power. There’s something new about it every time I look.
“Do you think she’ll like it?” Gregory asks.
“I know she will.”
“I’m going to drop it off at your house, but I’m not going to come in. You give it to her for me, for her birthday tomorrow, would you? Sort of a good-bye gift. Your sister’s a nice girl.”
“I wanted to tell you why I had the dinner party,” I say. “I think I found some letters. From you. From when I was little?”
Gregory’s face goes through several changes as he stares at me. First he’s confused, and then I notice the smallest jump of the skin on his forehead, his scalp sliding back. I can see his brain putting together the past few weeks, realizing why I’ve been behaving as I have. “Jesus,” he finally says. “We’re not having this conversation without a drink.”
We go inside and perch awkwardly at his kitchen island, both of us tracing the lines in the wood with our fingers.
“Man, you scare me,” he admits.
“Me?”
“You make me feel like I’m about to be in trouble. My knees are actually shaking right now.”
I don’t know if I’m supposed to apologize for that.
“It was easier meeting your sister, because she’s so like your mother. I felt I knew how to talk to her right away. But you’re different.”
“Not really.”
“Yes, you are. I feel like you know all my secrets.”
“I know some of them.”
Gregory nods, peeling at the label of his beer with his thumbnail. “Your mom helped me through a rough time,” he says. “When my parents died. It was in the news, people were calling my house, asking me to go on television. It was a bad scene. I found them. Dad killed my mother and then did himself. No note. I don’t know why.”
“Wasn’t it with an ax?” I ask. “How did he do it to himself?”
“It wasn’t pretty,” he answers.
We all have these moments when we feel our problems are so enormous and massive we’ll never be able to crawl out from under them, but I have never had to even entertain the notion of finding my slaughtered parents, knowing that one of them did all the carnage.
“I had just gone through my second divorce,” he tells me. “I started working late, because nobody could bother me at the office. And your mother would sit in that break room and listen. I’d talk her head off, late into the night, about all kinds of things I hadn’t thought of in years. Not just about my parents, but myself, old relationships, places I’d traveled. She has a way of pulling a story out of you. You know?”
“I do.”
“I guess it’s only natural that I started having feelings for her. She made me feel. I don’t like feeling anything, but she made me feel like everything I was feeling was okay. So I thought it’d be okay to feel that I was in love with her.”
He leans his forearms on the counter, pulling his body tightly against the wood, as if to protect himself. I notice his hands, and how he fidgets in a way that looks like he’s constantly checking to make sure he still has all ten fingers.
“What’d she say?” I ask. “When you told her.”
“She tried to stop me. She told me that once I said something, I couldn’t take it back, and it would permanently change our relationship.”
I flash back to Zack and me in the backyard, how I was recently given the same warning, but from a man who wanted to put his mouth on mine. I’ve been so sure what my mother and Gregory went through was nothing but wrong, and now here I am not only identifying with their story, but I’ve got way too many similarities to have any right to judge them.
Gregory wipes his palms across the countertop. I can see traces of his sweat on the wood. “But I’m stubborn,” he says, “and when I want to say something I’m going to say it. So I told her that I loved her. She stood up, put her hands on her hips, and said, ‘I’m really going to miss our talks.’ I didn’t see her again for almost fifteen years.”
I’m trying to imagine my mother, who would have been just a little older than I am, hearing a man confess his love for her in a break room of a bank. She’s got two kids at home and a husband, she’s trying to make a living to raise a family, and with three little words, she decides to quit her job and never see this man again?
At first it sounds very heroic, that Mom didn’t want anyone to come between her marriage and her family. But she must have felt something for him, too, or this doesn’t add up. Just because someone has feelings for you doesn’t mean you quit your job and go back to raising a family. It seems so rash.
So, I understand. You can fight it, you can rationalize it, and you can pretend to ignore it, but you can’t stop love. You can’t help whom you bond with, and the need we have for each other. All you can do is try to handle it with respect, and ultimately do the right thing. Mom and Gregory weren’t trying to hurt anybody when they fell for each other. But Mom knew she’d made a commitment, and went back to her home. Zack keeps beating himself up for having feelings for me, and because of that he needs to know if I’m reciprocating enough to do something about it. But I don’t want him to. Just like my mom wanted to keep her family together, I don’t want to be the reason Zack loses everything he’s made of his life.
If I get to decide what love is, for myself, in how I want to love others, then I can keep the kind of love I have to offer from being destructive. I know it can work, because it’s what my mother did, so many years ago.
“You sent her letters,” I say. “Because she told you to go away.”
Gregory covers his face. “I always thought she burned them the second they arrived. I never thought she’d keep them.”
“She didn’t tell you she still had them?”
“No. She must have kept them to remember how much she hated me for making her have to walk away. She warned me, but I didn’t care. I wanted her to know I loved her. She needed to know she made me feel those things.”
“She didn’t stay gone.”
Gregory looks me in the eye. “I lost a lot of time not being with her. Years I can never get back. Years I would rather have spent with her.”
“Those were years she was with me and my family,” I say. “I know you needed her, but we needed her more.”
I watch this sink in for Gregory. He nods. “I can’t believe you found those things,” he says. “You must think I’m a scumbag.”
“I did. I don’t think she kept them to remember why she told you to go away.”
Gregory looks hopeful. “No?”
“No. I think she kept them because she loved you, and didn’t want to forget what she meant to you.”
His throat clicks as he swallows. Just above our heads, there’s a wall clock humming.
“When your father died, she tracked me down and called me. Said she was in so much pain that she started thinking about me, that I was the only person she could think of who knew about the kind of pain she was feeling. I told her to start talking, and I listened.”
“When was this?”
“Years ago. I think your father had been gone for about six months. She didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know where she should live, or what she should do with all of his belongings.”
Gregory’s telling me things I already know. Mom barely moved in the months after Dad died, living off his life insurance policy. I never knew what it was that made her suddenly get out of the house, put on clothes again, and look for a job.
“You really helped her,” I say.
“I just listened. She did all the hard work. It’s probably my fault she started collecting all that crap in her house. Every time she felt better about buying something stupid, I encouraged her to do anything that made her smile. I know she hid everything in the basement and the garage for a while, but I guess it got out of hand this year.”
“She probably felt guilty about seeing everybody, and just couldn’t stop buying.”
“Or she really likes having boxes of weird shit. Some people need lots of things.”
“Did you start dating right after that?”
Gregory shakes his head. “I was worried she thought I was trying to take advantage of her. Then I realized I’d gotten my wish, to have your mother back in my life, and I was wasting it. So I invited her to come see me in person again. Scariest question I’ve ever asked. I knew it would change things between us if we saw each other again, once the safety of the phone was gone. We still waited a long time before we got together. I thought I had waited out all those other men she distracted herself with. I didn’t mind. Because I was sure when she finally came to me, if she did, that it’d be forever. I’d be done.” Gregory stretches out his legs. “I guess I was wrong.”
“You weren’t.”
“I’m not enough for her.”
“You are,” I say. “I think she’s scared.”
“Well, so am I.”
“Come talk to her. Work it out. Will you take that statue to my house now?”
“You just called it your house,” he says.
“That’s weird, isn’t it?”
He laughs. “Yeah, a little.”
“Gregory, I’m going to be a wreck until you two get back together.”
He nods. “Well, this is all about you, isn’t it?” His voice is deadpan, but I know he’s joking. He reaches out his hand, and this time I take it. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s go see if your mother still wants me.”
Surprise.
That night, Gregory and my mother stay up in her bedroom, talking. I’m in the living room, waiting for Jami, who hasn’t been home in days. She called three hours ago, to say she was borrowing Charles’s car and is on her way home. It is almost two in the morning, and there is still no sign of her. So, here’s where I tell you about regrets, because when we wait up all hours for someone we love to prove that they were just being idiots and not lying in a heap of bloody bones in a ditch, we tend to think about ourselves.
I regret never sneaking out of my house. I never did it growing up. Not once. Never skipped a class, never climbed out of a window, never had to find a way back into my home when I saw that my parents were awake in the living room at an hour when they’d normally be fast asleep. That was always Jami’s job. She took on the role once she figured out I was too busy being the Good Kid. Jami was a natural at being the Bad Kid. Mom and Dad would be so furious with her blatant lies and obstinate breaches of their parental rules that they would have no idea how to punish her. They’d constantly change their minds. It would go from being grounded for two weeks to getting all of her CDs taken away to losing her television privileges to getting a stern warning. All in one day. They knew that no matter what they did to punish her, she’d either make up enough excuses and lies that they’d repeal the sentence, or she’d be so miserable during her home incarceration that they’d let her go to the mall, and once she was gone for an afternoon it was as if she had never been grounded in the first place.
She knew how to play them against each other, too. Jami can find your button, your most sensitive area, and she pushes it until you’re begging her to leave you alone, until you’re apologizing to her for whatever it is you did to her that made her do that bad thing. You’re the bad parent. You’re the bad sibling, the bad teacher, or the bad boyfriend. Jami can get anyone to feel guilt over her mistakes. She’s such a good person at heart you refuse to believe she’s capable of some of the things she does. You also assume she wouldn’t have done it if she didn’t need to. Then you feel bad for not loving her enough, for not giving her enough.
I hear her car crunching through the gravel driveway. My heart begins whipping up an angry monologue. I run outside. I’m running, like when we were kids in trouble, and I’ve got to tell Jami so we can come up with the perfect excuse so she doesn’t get grounded.
“Where have you—” is all I get out before Jami’s whipping her head toward me, indignant, a lit cigarette dangling from her lips.
