“Which one is Gramma E?”

We are in the bathroom, Julia and I; I’m about to blow dry her wet hair. I glance up at the framed black and white photograph hanging on the wall behind me.

“You don’t remember which one she is?” I smile at my daughter in the mirror, but there’s a twinge inside. I’ve pointed her out so many times.

As she shakes her head, water droplets bounce from the collar of her housecoat and splat on the counter below. We turn to face the picture and I put my finger up to my mother – front row, last on the left, sitting down – and tap the glass.

“She’s right here,” I say. “This is Gramma E.”

Julia stands on her tip toes to peer at my mother, circa nineteen sixty-something (five? Six?) “Did you know her when she looked like this?”

I shake my head as we turn back toward the mirror. I look at my daughter’s reflection. “I wasn’t born until after that picture was taken,” I say, and I pick up the blow dryer. “That picture was taken on Gramma E’s high school graduation.”

As soon as the blow dryer roars to life, Julia starts singing. She uses the round brush as a mic and belts out a French song, the one about cousins, I think. I watch her in the mirror, the way she's watching herself as she croons.

I look in the mirror. I study my face, the arch of my brow and the dark brown eyes they’re framing. I stare at myself and think about my mother, resplendent in her white dress, pearls and serene smile, perched on the wall behind me.

You look so much like her.

Clasping the hair brush, Julia is gently swaying back and forth in front of me. Bonjour ma cousin-e, bonjour mon cousin germain. A thick head of dark hair, dark brown eyes and the exact same nose as her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother before her – she looks like me.

We look like my mother.

I stare at the two of us in the mirror. Julia is singing in to a hairbrush and I am drying her hair and missing my mother.

And that's how it goes.

17 Comments | In: life with julia, motherhood, my mama | tags: memories, mothers and daughters, photographs. | #

It’s quiet, save for the humming refrigerator and the soft, rhythmic sighs coming from the recliner in front of me. From where I’m sitting I can see his reflection in the hall mirror, can see his mouth twitch as he sleeps.

He had a series of small heart attacks last weekend. Suddenly, the strong, persistent patriarch of my husband’s father’s family was laid up in the ICU with a slew of new and unfamiliar ailments.

Suddenly, everything is different.

Being here reminds me of my mother’s last days. I’d sit on the couch with a notebook in my lap and a pen in my hand, her sleeping on the chaise lounge beneath a hot-pink afghan, and I’d write. The printed lists of  new medications, the clusters of bright orange prescription bottles dotting the dining room table and the foil-wrapped casserole dishes in the fridge…seeing those things, still so familiar, takes me back to twenty-four, the year that I spent floating, living in suspension.

He’s dreaming. In the mirror, I can see his legs jerk beneath the blanket draped across his lap. He raises his hand and waves it aimlessly around his face. A few days ago he told me, from his hospital bed, that he’d been dreaming of his wife. How he saw her in the street and ran after her, but could never catch up.  

He isn’t the man this week that he was last.

I wander throughout the house, picking up here, wiping down there. I fold a load of towels and start another one. I glance at old photos on my way upstairs, black and whites of Dave’s Italian ancestors and portraits of him and his brother as young boys, clad in checkered shirts and polyester jumpers. This place is full of history.

I am comfortable here. I knew I would be. Once again I am care giving, keeping watch; a pad of paper in my lap and a pen in my hand. I sit on the couch, my husband’s grandfather sighing away in the recliner in front of me. I watch his reflection for a long while, and then, in the quiet, I write.

12 Comments | In: life, in general, my mama | tags: family, life stuff. | #

It’s during times like this – when I’m overwhelmed and fragile, close to shattering in to a thousand million pieces – that this feeling washes over me. It’s this sharp, sudden sense of clarity, this feeling of yes, I get it. What you were saying to me all those years? I get it now. It makes me want to call her to tell her, breathless and apologetic,

I get it now.

We were at battle for so long, her and me. For years, ours was a relationship framed by a tumultuous flurry of addiction, emotion and control. We would argue and rage at one another, hurling words like weapons before slinking off to lick wounds raw and exposed. I can see myself now, standing before her, watching the smoky-blue ribbon of cigarette smoke swirl above her head. She would stare at me for a long time before she’d say, in a quiet, defeated voice,

Wait until you have children.

And I, flush with anger and steely teenage arrogance, would throw the sharpest knife I possibly could,

You probably won’t be here by the time I have children.

(Water under the bridge and all, it was an awful thing to say.)

(Those words belonged to me; I’m sorry I gave them to you.)

(I’m sorry.)

The times when she would stand in my bedroom door and watch me sleep before padding across the room to brush hair from my eyes and kiss my head, whisper her love to me. I would stay still, keep my eyes shut, my breath even. Pretend to be asleep.

I didn’t get it then.

When she was sick, nearing the end, her eyes would well up and she would stare at me so hard I wondered if she could see my soul. She’d tell me how much she loved me and I knew intently that her love for me – a mother’s love for her child – was far beyond what I, childless and soon to be motherless, could comprehend. But standing there, on the cusp of The Rest of My Life, I knew that kind of love was something that, one day, I’d understand.

And now I do.

I’m fragile right now, teetery. Things have been less mundane and more chaotic lately; I feel pulled in every which way possible, at times as though I’m barely keeping my head above water. I’m treading, I’m getting tired, and I’m wishing there were an island close by that I could swim to for a bit of a break. It all seems to happen at once, suddenly my plate is full and hello, I didn’t order all of this shit, could I get a refund? But there are no refunds, there’s just keep on going, get through this day so you can wake up and face the next. Keep on keepin’ on, girl, one foot in front of the other. One step at a time.

Its so cliché, but, you know, yes. One step at a time.

And through all of this, in the back of my mind I hear this soft little voice. It’s saying the same thing, over and over:

I get it now, Mum. I get it.

25 Comments | In: life, in general, motherhood, my mama | tags: coping, realizations, stuff in my head. | #