this woman’s work

Review books

Oct 30, 2003 Family

I’m reading a review book I got in the mail last week titled Mothering Without a Map. It’s about attachment and parenting and love.

Of course reading this book makes me think about my own mom. Our relationship is not perfect but I know that my centered self-confidence is something that I owe to her and that’s a tremendously huge thing she gave me. It’s especially amazing because my mother had a childhood straight out of an Oprah book. She’s my hero. Whenever I think of our petty arguments or our frustrating value differences, I think also of her ability to mother despite having no mothering role models. Unlike most resilient children, she also had no loving adult who anchored her despite her horrific homelife. She says that books are what saved her. When she read, she says, she knew that other people didn’t live the way that she was living and she decided she wanted something different from her life.

She has always believed in me. She has always listened to me. I can remember a zillion times sitting at the kitchen table chattering on and on about my hopes and plans and dreams and her listening. She even listens now and frankly, now I know how boring I can be. I know that she thinks that I’m wonderful.

When I was 17 and getting ready to start my first year of college, we were really broke. My mom was about to sell our house (finally) and downsize. She’d clung to the house for most of our teen years because she felt that the divorce was disruptive enough. So we lived in this fairly big house in a snotty, affluent neighborhood but we had the sunken living room closed off with plastic so we didn’t have to heat it and we hung our laundry outside to dry although that went against code. (The neighbors didn’t like us.) We certainly weren’t poor and we never went hungry but buying groceries made for tense days and there wasn’t room for extras. I remember worrying about money a lot when I was a teen.

Anyway, I was using my mom’s old typewriter and had been for a long time. (My mother always took my writing very seriously. She bought me a manual typewriter when I was 8 or 9 and then gave me her electric typewriter when I was a bit older.) It would be perfectly serviceable for school. Then one day I came home from work and there was one of those early Brother word processers on the kitchen table. You know, the kind with a tiny screen where you can see what you’re typing a few words at a time. I think they cost around $500 then. I stood in the doorway and just stared at it. There was no one around and I wondered where it had come from. I had typed on one of them when I was babysitting and I loved it; I loved the clear font and the way you could call a whole story back up and let the machine type it again and again, copy after copy.

Then my mom came out from the other doorway with this big grin on her face and I knew it was for me. I couldn’t even talk. I knew how expensive those things were and I didn’t understand how she could have done it.

“You’ll need this for school,” she said brightly. “I just couldn’t resist.”

Much hugging ensued.

She didn’t just do this for me; she did this for my brother and sister, too. And she did it again and again. I have a lot of stories just like that one.

As I said, my mom could be (can be) difficult. She yelled and sometimes she smacked and sometimes she was too tired to be as loving as I wanted her to be. But she did love me and I never ever doubted that. She loved me at my most unlovable. She loved me when I hated her and told her so. And when I was a miserable, depressed teenager and I was afraid that my life would always be that bad, she held me and promised me it would be different someday, that my better life was waiting for me and all I had to do was grab it.

Is it any wonder that I like myself so much? The good mother that I am today is because of the good mothering that I had. And she did this out of nothing but her own grit and determination. I think that that is so amazing, her ability to create love the way that she has, a wondrous alchemy to make so much love out of a childhood that was so barren.

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