chapter five - visions of things past
My mother was a ghost. I don’t say that because she disappeared. Rather, she was always sort of there but not there. I have many, many memories of my mother from when I was a toddler, but I don’t ever recall hearing her speak to any of us. She was holding my youngest brother while others gathered around to see the newborn she had just brought home from the hospital. She was sleeping on Saturday morning while we were in the kitchen, making our breakfast of sugar-water and bread and butter with sugar on it. She was driving us around in the car, including that time she turned left in front of an oncoming vehicle and we ended up in the hospital. She was coming out of the bathroom naked, toweling herself off while we were gathered around the counter, munching on Vienna sausages. She was talking to the babysitter before heading out the door for work for the day. I remember all of that, but through it all she seemed to be physically present but not quite there, as if she were in the situation but not of it.
Here was a young woman who had a baby every year for four years in a row, beginning at the age of twenty-three. She did not have the time or energy to give sufficient attention to any of us. She lived far from family and could not develop a circle of friends while constantly chasing babies and toddlers, and uprooting herself to follow a career-climbing husband. Her marriage steadily deteriorated, and at the time she was pregnant with my sister, two other women were claiming that they also were pregnant with my father’s children. One was the wife of one of his best friends, and the second was my step-mother. My mother was isolated, must have felt utterly alone, and was undoubtedly depressed. She moved through our lives like an apparition.
She was a benign figure in our lives in that sense. Still, she was our mother and basically the only parent we knew until my father married my step-mother. I have no negative memories about her whatsoever, and I knew that she wasn’t a bad person. Somewhere deep down inside I knew that she loved me, and as years passed and my new home life became ever more hellish, I held onto her phantom presence to help me get through it. I was drowning in a terrible storm and had been thrown a lifesaver. The rope was long and I could not see the rescue boat through the wind and the rain, but I knew it was there, somewhere in the distance. I hung on for dear life.
