“I do not go further and say that we as men and women owe anything to the woman who did this for each one of us severally. We owe nothing. But to ourselves we owe an intellectual recognition of the fact that at first we were (psychologically) absolutely dependent, and that absolutely means absolutely. Luckily we were met by ordinary devotion”
“A mother’s love is a pretty crude affair. There’s a possessiveness in it, appetite, even a ‘drat the kid’ element; there’s a generosity in it, and power, as well as humility. But sentimentality is outside it altogether and is repugnant to mothers.”
from D. H. Winnicott’s The Child and the Family: First Relationships
When I started writing about my mom, I was afraid of what I’d find. I was afraid I’d find hurt I hadn’t felt before. I was afraid I’d find memories that shifted the already strange terrain on which she and I meet. I was afraid I’d find proof of her apathy or sadness or regret. I was afraid I’d find that our connection, when examined, would be severed completely, another umbilical cord cut to define mother and child.
What I found was my own ache for more tenderness from her, her unsentimental ordinary devotion, and the ability to hold both of these things in the same place.
What I found was a baby book she kept for me.
The entries are spartanically spare, a quirk of my mother’s writing in general, but span seven months in much more detail than the version penned for my younger brother. Her erratic observations of me as an infant surprise me. She doesn’t note the things I’d like to know: her feelings, the minutia of my development, her assessment of my emerging personality. She notes sleep patterns and who babysat and where we went those first few months of my life.
When I first read these matter-of-fact entries, I was disappointed. Children always want their mothers to dote on them, to articulate their uniqueness, to situate them at the center of everything. But my mom focuses her attention on the facts. Sometimes she leaves me out entirely.
But on a second read I noticed something fluttering around the edges. A softness that makes me ache.
Here, even in the most straightforward entries, she is trying out referring to herself as “mom.”
When I asked her to send me photos of the book for this project she laughed, “I probably only wrote about what happened. You know, logistics.”
She knows that I wish she talked to me about more than logistics. Maybe I’ve even said as much, but the life route-talk is what she’s good at. At various points through the years I’ve read this as callous avoidance. The times she’s changed the subject when I start to get emotional. The practical negotiations of when I could tell my grandparents about my divorce. The silences that read as disappointment, disagreement, or distance.
But when you put it together, when it is laid out so bare in a baby book, I can see that the logistics talk is an extension her affection.
This is true beyond just she and I. She loves all of those around her with the ferocity of a director, always situating things for the next shot, allowing those of us lucky enough to be loved by her to show up and play our parts without much thought to the production happening behind the scenes all the time.
To this effect, my mom is always moving. She jokes that she is incapable of doing just one thing. There’s always something cooling on the counter to be put away, a stack of papers to be sorted and thrown out, a phone call or thank you note to be checked off the list. On the eve of my thirtieth birthday, it strikes me as an impossible maintenance, a life reliant on momentum.
I resisted most forms of teenage rebellion, but in adulthood I’ve swung as far away from the well-maintained life as possible. I burned through my meager life savings on a move to New York and a divorce. I am embracing an art that doesn’t pay and supplementing my income by waitressing. I am working on meditating and doing just one thing at a time. My rebellion comes in seeking a life of abstraction, reflection, and creation. A life that demands stillness.
But I know this freedom is beholden to the structure and consistency that is my mom's practical magic.
It’s funny what we think we will want to remember. For decades I've kept journals to document what I thought I’d want to know later. In my earliest journals, I trail off often. I’d go too long between entries and get bogged down with trying to fill the imaginary readers in on the happenings of my days since I last wrote. I’d tire of writing about classmates’ birthday parties, weekend road trips, and sleepovers. On many pages, the writing stops mid-entry.
When I started a journaling practice in college as a performative act to embody the manic-pixie-English-major, I wrote in poetry to process the tidal waves of feeling that seemed to wash over me daily. On rereading these entries, the melodrama of undergrad woes plays out in predictable and unmemorable colors.
As an adult, I write morning pages, like the rest of us attempting to follow the path of The Artist’s Way, but when I read my journals back they never seem to document the things I actually wanted to remember. I go looking for specific incidents that I recall vividly and fail to find them mentioned at all.
In my baby book, my mom does the same. She notes locations, attendees, and details that strike me as irrelevant thirty years later.
And, like my own journals, the entries in my baby book are written in a number of different pens. I imagine my mom picking up the closest pen, sometimes purple, sometimes green, sometimes basic black, looking at the calendar or scrunching her eyebrows to pull the date from memory, and starting each entry.
I imagine her feeling the same pang of guilt after not writing for a few days or weeks and making up for it in paragraph summaries of the weeks she missed
I don’t remember Sherri or James or much of Wilma. I don’t remember my baptism or first taste of squash. I don’t remember the family lunchtime routine. And I don’t wish I did. What I wish I remembered is how my mom felt about me, the daughter that made her a mother.
It is rare to spot sentiment or raw sincerity in my mom. She runs complicated predictive calculations of social contracts in her head constantly. She hedges her sentences with “Well…” and ends her stories with a fading “anyway…” in case anyone listening grew bored during the telling. She knows how to arrange herself in the scene of someone else’s life as a supporting character.
The product of this calculation is my mother’s quiet kindness. She is beloved by most and liked by all. People consider her a confidant without requiring the same divulgence from her. I learned this kindness from her and it keeps me up to my ears in people who thank me for listening, for letting them discuss things weighing on them, for showing up to their birthday parties.
In most of my memories, my mom is not a supporting character but a shadow one. The scenes narrated in this collection were pieced together from the sensation of her presence, from bits of information that came to me in daydreams and revisionist history. She is present, always present, but often too neutral to clock.
In contrast, my dad vacillates between being my hero and my antagonist. He is fully drawn, a character in his own right, a brightly burning star around which my world revolves. But my mom is more like the moon, made of the same stuff as I, tied to me in a way neither of us can shake, moving things inside me via her gravitational pull instead of direct heat.
She will hate that my memory works this way, but I am incredibly grateful for it. When a daughter remembers her mother in vivid detail, it is often in the narrative of wicked witch or absent angel. My mom is neither of those. She is a woman skilled at holding space for the autonomy of others. And she has given me the gift of space since my gestation in her body, the first act of gracious space holding many of us experience, an ordinary devotion.
In the baby book, a shift happens in the entries in July. Up to this point, everyone—my mom included— is referenced by name like characters in a script. But on July 7th, my parent’s anniversary, she begins writing as if I am narrating.
In this entry I am enjoying the movie, participating in their celebration, becoming an entity in my own right. Though I have little motor skills, I am afforded agency, an assumption that I could choose to watch or not watch a screen, the beginning of a self outside of my mom.
The entires snap back to third person narration—Grandparents Reynolds took Allison to Enid for the afternoon—but a permanent shift has begun, and my mom’s entries in the fall narrate my experience outside of her.
It is a crude affair, this narrative calculation. I am no longer a character in her story or some third-person version of it, but a narrator myself, spending time in scenes in which my mom has no lines.
There is no sentiment in her shift, but reading it stirs the sediment deep in my gut.
It is true that a mother’s love is an ordinary devotion. Many of us are all born attached to ones that raise us and all are wholly dependent on their maintenance and stage magic to keep us alive. As someone lucky enough to have this process go by without note, I have arrived at adulthood unsure of how to untangle my dependence and my desire for independence.
I came to these essays looking for something to guide me, for the clamps around the spot of the cord that I should cut, for clues to my mom’s sainthood or villainy. What I found was the space between my mother and me. What I found was an ache for her tenderness that needs to be met with my own ordinary devotion. What I found was the irreversible course of my own growth that demands I am untethered from my mom.
What I found was a line in the baby book where my mom already began to work this out for herself.
