What Kind of Mother

By Asha Dore & Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth

Everybody falls to their knees at least once, and for me it happened at the collision of both of these facts: my mother is the person she is; I mother the way that I do. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe it was a moment my mom curated for thirty years. I had you so someone would always love me, she said.

If you’re going to leave again, please go, I said, well after my knees hit the floor.

When I was two I was hospitalized for double pneumonia, the story goes, and it stunted my growth. I’d lost so much body mass that the nurses, mistaking me for an infant, would swaddle and rock me until I twisted free. My mother preferred this version of the story, this version of me: the pissed off toddler, not the sick one.

When a baby is born, it’s like a planet, and the parents are these bright eyed gods of a world they have to govern and discover at the exact same time. Success is crucial but also impossible. Love is a feeling and a coordination of unknowable actions, and nobody taught me how to do this and it’s not like there was a fucking manual and I’m sorry, I wanted, really really wanted, I’m sorry, so so sorry, but at least you survived.

After she died, someone sent a letter recounting a time when, to impress her friends, my mother threw her 18-month-old daughter into the deep end of a swimming pool. I wailed and splashed and bobbed underwater but did not drown. The letter was passed to me like a note in fifth grade, unspoken outrage running along the generational grapevine as soon as the teacher turned her back. The teacher knew and we knew she knew. I knew she despised

long-haired girls carrying fringe purses,

unbelted waists,

laziness,

liars,

me.

Mothering or maybe loving my mother was about surrender just like prayer, and I’ve never been good at any of it. Growing up, church folks said if you don’t believe in God, rules mean nothing. Mom said, I’ll teach you every single way to love. Police officers said, Mothers discipline their children how they see fit. Youth group pastors flicked water on our faces and said, As long as you give in, you will be saved.

I heard safe. I heard, don’t fight it. I tell my kids, if you’re scared, hide before running, run before fighting, and fight if you have to. I’ll teach you every single way to fight yourself safe.

She once volunteered to adopt one I’d conceived but could not bear. And I need a baby like I need a hole in the head, she said. I wondered if she secretly hoped for a do-over, if  grandchildren might someday give me the upper hand in our negotiations: length of visitation, turf rights. Fists permitted; no blades or bats, or I stash away the children.

There was a pool of blood on the kitchen counter, more blood than you can believe, the time the horse kicked her in the face. I saw her blood but not her. She got herself to the hospital, got stitched up, and sported a scar like half a question mark on her chin for the rest of her life.

My mother did not negotiate.

I thought the fall to the knees thing only happened in the movies or maybe the final battle in a long, terrible war. That night, it wasn’t on purpose, but it wasn’t an accident. It was the snow piling up against all the doors in the house, the baby crying down the hall, the tummy bug that finally landed in my throat. At that point, I was just dry heaving. Now that I’m leaving, you care enough to cry, Mom said. I didn’t tell her it wasn’t crying just my body trying to get rid of the poison that shot through the whole family. I watched her packing and pacing. I thought: Again? Not again. Again. She shoved old boots in an overstuffed bag and said something about beating the shit out of gift horses, something about how I stopped holding her hand when I turned thirteen.

A woman lobbing a struggling toddler into deep water is the image accompanying the entry for bad mother in the encyclopedia. For all the baby music classes, the playtime on the floor, those snuffling slow minutes, hours, years of feeding each from my body, my children retain only vague impressions of me from that time, a silhouette behind fogged glass. I still hold them and hold them except when I don’t, when I need to belong to more than them. I ask the eldest if he’s ever been afraid of me. Not really, he says, but one time you yelled I can do whatever the hell I want. I don’t counter with at least I never. I imagine this sets me apart, this good behavior.

Please is the worst word in the mouth of your child when please isn’t polite, it’s pleading. Please mommy from my oldest kid in a dark bedroom, Please come back.

The morning before Mom packed, all the kids puked then napped and puked then napped. I wrapped bungee cords around my snow boots and kicked through the ice to take the train to a final exam. The roads were silent and white. I lost my feet as I stepped off the train, landed on an old break in my tailbone. A stranger kneeled beside me. Slippery world we live in, she said and pulled me up to stand.

After class and work and dinner and bedtime, the heaving started and Mom started with, I left my husband to take care of your children, and then the baby crying and my six year old awake and saying please, please mommy from the dark bedroom, too afraid to come to me.

Why did you have these kids at all? Mom asked. There was still vomit on my mouth, maybe my shirt, my shoes, my hair. Your heart only lives where you spend the most time, Mom said, and the baby coughed between crying, and please mommy turned into a snore.

I felt him killing me because he didn’t know how to be born. He preferred breathing liquid to air. It was shocking, inexplicable, improbable, what was happening inside me. I lost words, time. My mind cast me off as it does when something that threatens to destroy me comes near: It flings me into the deep until I hardly recognize what’s occurring above the surface. I curl into myself like a worm, dropping lightly until I graze the bottom, until she stops screaming, until the first, and then the second, door slams and the second one locks. Motionless in the watery sac, I let the pain squeeze me empty. Wait to grow gills.

Once, during an earthquake, I saw the floor ripple. A wave of concrete and carpet lifted my feet. That something can occur naturally does not make it right. That something can occur naturally does not mean it can’t dismantle everything that’s been built on it.

Bringing him down was a bad earthquake inside me and I sank and did not grow gills.

I’m grateful for hot meals and clean clothes and my hair pulled into the tightest bun in the world. I’m grateful that she was my Girl Scout leader and that our coffee table book was Our Bodies, Ourselves. I’m grateful for dance parties. I’m grateful for trips to the dentist and antibiotics and smooth hair and good teeth. I’m grateful for shopping trips and hot soup when strep came back every year right before Christmas. I’m grateful for all the minutes I missed, the hours I missed, the effort I didn’t notice, the fact that I’m breathing on this planet at all.

I don’t remember the nurses holding me. Or her, although she must have done it. I remember storybooks beside me on the floor, blinking up at the piano’s wooden innards, the living room window’s afternoon light skewing pea green and mustard. Always the potential of music, mostly silence. Her sending us to the pool without her. The headaches, the swollen feet. Hkehhh, the old bedroom set flickering on.

She had me on a horse before I was six, hooves crisscrossing sideways down steep hills into gullies where fresh water slipped across rocks, our heads wearing faded variations of the same bandana, back triangle flapping. In the final decade of her life she pulled a dozen or more foals out of their exhausted mothers, slick bodies steaming on the barn floor.

I didn’t want to believe in bad mothers or that the woman in the attic was actually mad. I spent thirty years calling hard impacts struggles and broken dishes mistakes. I wanted to believe that intention births effort and effort is alive and result is just a matter of perception. I wanted to believe it was impossible to be a good mother in a world where being a good woman just means being a man. I wanted to believe in trying her best and not the right support and damned expectations. I wanted to believe the church folks and pastors and policemen. I wanted to believe every woman, every mother in the world. I wanted to believe in enough and way back when and she didn’t know better, nobody knew better. I wanted to believe she was good so I could believe the way she echoes through me is not exactly good or even precious but at least not a terror. I didn’t want to believe I could be a mother and also a terror. I thought maybe, if I remember small beauties and believe in sweetness, it’ll rescue us both from the terror.

She was famously mean as a snake.

What is it about snakes and mothers? Something about temptation, something about dinosaurs, so vintage – lay the eggs, let them try to survive.

Something about cold blood, discarding. Something about original sin.

In the winter, snakes go to ground, but alligators poke their snouts through the surface of the water then fall asleep in the freeze until it melts. Something about acceptance. Something about learning to rest. Something about breathing, however brutal, however cold, just breathing, find air and do not stop breathing, however you can.

At the memorial service in my parents’ home, forty people shifted in the rented chairs waiting for someone to say something about her that sounded both generous and true. One by one, the eulogists alluded to the most undeniably true, if ungenerous, thing about her. She was a tough one. Fierce temper. A hard person to know. When I stood up to speak, my father made a joke about the notes I carried. The mourners chuckled. The clock on the mantle clicked. The tiny china horses, their legs broken off and glued back over forty years of recriminations and chalky spinach salads, waited impassively. I told a generous story about her I almost remembered. It might have been true.

Prayer pose at the top of the stairs, Mom at the bottom, still packing, pacing. I mapped the night from the baby crying, kid pleading, laundry turning vomit towels all floral and warm. I mapped the months leading up to it. I wanted to tell her, I didn’t want you to move in, to take care of my kids, didn’t want to fire the babysitter, didn’t want you to leave your husband three days after I asked my husband to leave. Mom and I had lived apart for so many years, I’d forgotten all the school presentations, vacations, driving tests, job interviews that began and ended with her pacing and packing, the sound of the front door clicking, the dogs whining at the door, watching her go.

I didn’t invite her to attend my births, or allow her to swaddle and rock my babies when they were so new they were convinced we still shared one body. She was too proud to insist.

That night at the foot of my stairs, she didn’t really want to leave. She wanted to reach me. She wanted me to turn away from my kids and exams, to reach for her, to run to her, to tear at her jacket, to tear out my own hair. I held onto my own knees and looked up at her standing at the bottom of the stairs. You’ll lose everything without me, she said. I thought, I’ve never prayed to anything before, ever. I said, Please. I said, go. I thought about how I’d have to find a new babysitter, delay graduation and job interviews and first paychecks and new budgets. If she left, I’d have to delay the whole breadwinning thing, the whole doing it all thing. I held onto my own knees. She said nothing, just watched, and I watched, and we breathed, watching, our faces like funhouse glass.

My children don’t know how to swim. They have resisted and I haven’t forced. But they are boys; their bodies will never tremble and split in the same way as mine, as hers.

Of course, that night, I said stay, eventually. What kind of a daughter would I be if I believed in bad mothers? What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t ask her to stay?