Will My Mother Look Older The Next Time I See Her?
by Audie Metcalf
The last time I felt her arms around me and breathed in her perfume was on September 30, 2019.
She’s not dead.
I’m not one of the hundreds of thousands of daughters who will never hug their mothers again because of some split second anomaly that happened on the other side of the world.
But I still get to be sad, don’t I?
The truth is, she wasn’t a great mom. But then, she didn’t have a great mom.
My mother was born on Election Day in Iowa in 1948, and she was perfect. Too perfect, maybe. Strangers approached her and my grandmother when they were at restaurants, when they went ice skating, when they went to the grocery store: is she a model? Is she an actress? Does she want to be?
And in fact, she did want to be.
And this might be where I lose you.
It’s hard to be alive in this moment in time, in this moment in history, and feel sorry for my beautiful, perfect mother being showered with opportunity.
But let me try to win you back.
Her mother never said yes. Her mother never said anything. Now, you and I might never let our kids get sucked into that world either. But we tell our kids all the things they can be. All the gifts they have. All the ways they’re special and lovable and unique.
Her mother didn’t do that for her.
Instead, she told her that her interests were silly. And that her ideas were stupid. And she listened in on her phone calls with boys from a device she hid in my mother’s bathroom. And she lifted up her skirt to check if she was wearing underwear before a date. Sometimes, in front of the date. I have to imagine my grandmother behaved this way because she also had a mother who failed her. And so on.
And so on.
The minute she finished high school, my mom ran as fast and as far as her feet would carry her. She ran to Texas for college. It wasn’t for her. She ran to New Orleans to serve martinis at the Playboy Club. But again, it wasn’t for her. When Hef wanted her for the magazine, she declined. She didn’t want to disappoint her father as he was “sitting on the toilet reading Playboy and suddenly there’s his baby girl with her boobs out.”
She lived in Mexico for a while. She learned Spanish. She got engaged. He turned out to be a bad guy. She left him. She became a potter. She grew her hair to her waist. She moved to Connecticut. She met a witty piano player who did a killer Donald Duck impression and played the shit out of Sir Duke after hearing it only once on the radio.
She married him.
A year later, I was born.
Both of my parents like to tell me they didn’t sleep for three years because I screamed day and night. They laugh about it but I also sense a tiny sliver of righteous anger. I don’t have the heart to tell either of them that my mom’s diet of walnuts and almonds was probably affecting her breast milk and making me sick. They found out about my fatal nut allergy when I was three; I was on the front lawn, my face like a balloon after touching a cutting board. I guess you guys know now, though. Hi, mom and dad.
We had a hard time. No one knew anything back then. Trauma? Childhood adversity? Attunement? Not ideas yet. At least not in common parlance. I don’t expect them to have had the language or the insight or the tools I have now as I fumble around today trying to be a parent myself.
But still.
“i don’t expect her to have had the language or the insight or the tools I have now as I fumble around today trying to be a parent myself.”
I’m 7 years old. I’m not angry about my mother making cookies with nuts and serving them to me, knowing they could kill me. I asked if they had nuts. She said, “of course not!”
I’m 9 years old. I’m not angry about her crunching up her face in disgust when she would enter the bathroom after me saying, “What died in here? That smells like your insides are rotting.”
I’m 10 years old. I’m not angry about being able to close my eyes, in this very moment in my living-room in California, writing these words on the notes app in my phone, still able to smell the slightly plasticky, almost gasoline scent of the blinds in my childhood bedroom. The blinds I would pull to the side and peek behind, my nose pressed against the cold glass, at 3 in the morning, 4 in the morning, now it’s 5 in the morning and the sky is starting to turn, waiting for her headlights to appear at the bottom of the big hill. The headlights that would tell me she was alive and ok after leaving for a date around dinnertime, her eyelashes huge and beautiful with coats and coats of Maybelline Great Lash Mascara, her skin smelling of that Nivea cream in the blue tin. Sometimes I remember a babysitter being there. Sometimes not. I can’t figure out if either answer makes it ok.
I’m 12 years old. I’m not angry about her answer when I ask her to choose between me and her violent boyfriend.
I don’t have to tell you her answer, do I?
My therapist Stefanie says she doesn’t much care about classifying peoples issues as specific disorders. She says it doesn’t matter. She explains it instead as people having emotional disorganization. I ask her: maybe my mom was depressed? ADHD? She says, who cares. Your mother cannot regulate her emotions or meet your needs.
I guess that’s right.
But now, with 540 days between us, the longest we have ever been apart, I find myself thinking of different stories.
I’m 17 years old. She hauls all my stuff to Berklee College of Music. She buys me a wall to wall carpet for my dorm room because she knows I like things my way. She does the same when I transfer to Bard College. And when I get my first apartment. She rents a U-Haul and carries all forty boxes of my books into the living room and puts them all away. And she does the same for my next apartment. And the next one. And the next one. And the next one. And the next one.
I’m 13 years old. I remember her pulling me out of school early one day, lying to my teacher’s face about some made-up doctor’s appointment, to drive to New Haven in her cherry red BMW 325i to see Robert Palmer in concert. She got dressed up like one of the girls in the Addicted to Love video. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone more beautiful.
I’m 9 years old. She introduces me to Sunday in The Park with George, the musical that would become the most profound relationship I have with any art, ever. We listen to the record so many times we wear it out and need to buy another one.
“she got dressed up like one of the girls in the Addicted to Love video. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone more beautiful.”
I’m 8 years old. I wipe out on our stone porch steps and my lower teeth pierce right through my chin. My mother makes me malted milk shakes and slurps them up in a straw and deposits them into my stitched up mouth, like a baby bird.
I’m 6 years old. She gives me my first sister. She allows me so much space and time with her. I learn to really care for someone. I teach her to sit up. I teach her to walk. I teach her to say her Rs. She lets us sneak into each others rooms at night to laugh long after our bedtimes and sleep close to each other.
Now I’m 1. She does her very best after breaking her back during childbirth with me. She uses a long claw to pick up the house because the spinal surgery prevents her from bending over for two years. Her baby cries all the time. She doesn’t know why. Her marriage is falling apart. She does her best.
She does her best.
I think about the headlights approaching that old farmhouse in Connecticut. But now, I’m looking up toward the house. The headlights are mine. Maybe July. Let’s say August, to be safe. Once I have a shot in my arm and hundreds of thousands of other people have had shots in their arms and suddenly, I can get on a plane, we can all get on planes, to see these old people who just did their best.
Will the lines in her face be deeper? Will her big, bright eyes be softer? Will her hair be thinner? When I let my bags drop on the ground, run to her in the open front door, and cry into her sweater, will she look older?
Will I?
Audie Metcalf is the Editor-in-chief of The Candidly, and lives in LA with her family. You can find more of her articles here.
