Mothers, mirrors, dreams, and dirt
I’m still surprised by how much I need to mother myself. Ennui sets and I’ll think the common thought, Well, it’s beautiful out. But I’ve already spent much of the morning outside, and a day and night remains. I start to worry that I have not formulated a sufficiently independent lifestyle that I fill with activity that tempers the loneliness that has been with me since, I believe, my first moment of consciousness. My real-life mother and my eldest sister, now too a mother, tell me that as a baby I wailed relentlessly. I’m grateful to have been able to do that then, and now worry about my current, outwardly placid condition. I worry that I have designed a life so idle, so optional that I am constantly looking at my loneliness and writing about it. And my inner mother, she’s practical, she’ll go, Well, look, there’s still plenty for you to do, hours available to practice piano, to do your hip mobility routine, to go through all of your half-abandoned mail tucked in the handsome felt basket, to finish Andrew Motion’s biography of Keats and Miranda July’s perimenopause novel and D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, which you have been reading for several months, and several novels in French that would be deeply gratifying to finish wouldn’t they, especially that one by Marie N’Diaye who you so admire, and not to mention your spoken French, that could always be bettered, and what about that friend in Biarritz, if you become fluent again you two might really talk, and I’m sure he’s got plenty going on, and you’re chatty, always have been, so much so that those who know you well fret when you’ve been quiet for more than 15 minutes in their presence, and if your French gets really good you can empty the verbal tank like a Rohmer heroine, and you could volunteer, we could all volunteer couldn’t we, and surely you still have belongings in the basement to go through from when you moved into the house, and you could call back any number of people who are always trying to reach you but unfortunately tend to make their efforts during a moment of impenetrable focus or thought, both of which might come in handy here, and also you could wipe down the area around the sink, give it a good scrub, you could eat, there’s always eating, and with all the running and the lifting and the worrying and the loss of affinity for preparing elaborate meals which you have only partially clawed back after years, you could just find something and consume it, doesn’t need to be special, that would be wise, and certainly, you have that thick bound journal you can fill with the most embarrassing things that you won’t even say to your best friend, knowing that they will have a devastatingly accurate read on them that will pluck you out of your fantastical stubbornness, and wait several weeks at a time to tell your therapist, who will ask the right questions and very professionally leave it in your hands, which fumble, yes, the journal would be a good place to begin with those, and that journaling in turn might relieve some of the internal wailing, and oh, you know, if it’s a matter of avoiding the phone, of resisting even the memory of one, like how you used to all the time when you were a slightly different person, you could leave the thing charging and grab a blanket, go to the park, lie down, bring a book but, listen, you don’t even need to open it, let hours pass, look at the sky, wouldn’t that be nice, when people ask you how you’ve been spending your time you could say “I’ve been dreaming.”
She says all this, and somewhat following her suggestion I eat a raspberry-jelly donut and think about the appeal of motherhood. Or rather, of children, and that old story, how, with any luck, they might release you from the persistent self-regard. I think about my niece and how interested I am in her even in her pre-verbal stage. She’s a stunningly beautiful baby, and I don’t only think that because I love her. Her large, generous eyes are so intent, dynamic and somehow knowing. And my sister’s friends say she looks like me and I say she looks like my sister. And my other sister, I see her face pop up as I tap through Instagram stories, hers are always funny in their earnest irreverence, and, maybe for the first time, I recognize my face in her face, the face that is my niece’s face, and our sister’s face. And isn’t it enough to be interested? And to be interested enough to be a mother? For everyone to be a mother, to themselves and at least one other person who is not their actual baby? Though realistically at least 6 other people will need you, at some point, to be their mother. And when I think about my own mother, the real one, there’s one moment I never forget: I must be 13 or 14, and we are in the house in Pennsylvania, and I am lying on the couch, and you know how the ear is constantly shedding its skin, accruing a film that one must be vigilant to remove if one is to ever feel clean? This one time, that I can remember, she holds my head in her lap and wordlessly excises the dirt. This is the image. This is her.