Three Days Between the Worlds

Which Should Have Been the Last Time But Wasn’t

The photo of us that was in the paper.

My mother, my beautiful mother, was a smart cookie, valedictorian of everything from high school to nursing school, and even Mother of the Year. It was in the paper. Was that before the alcohol abuse and the beatings began? I can’t remember, but she made her first, and probably most serious, suicide attempt shortly after that picture was taken in the Haverhill house, which we moved out of when I was four.

I remember it as my fault. We lived in one of my grandmother’s rental houses, across the street from her windows. Grammy was a birder, meaning she always had binoculars at the ready. She was my dad’s mom and never thought my mother was good enough for him.

I was playing with our blonde cocker spaniel, Vicky, in the front yard. My mom had wanted a puppy, but when she locked eyes with Vicky - stuck in a bathtub with all those incessant, needy babies sucking the life out of her skelleton, she rescued the mom. For two weeks, my mother, on her belly, offered bits of food to get Vicky to come out from under the bed and join the family. That day, when I saw Vicky squat, I pulled my bathing suit to one side and copied her. I was a dog, too. My mother loved dogs; my mother loved Vicky. The next thing I knew, I was lifted by my right arm while my butt was being swatted toward the back door. Gramy had seen me and wanted to know what kind of animals she was raising over there.

After that, Mom was in Baldpate, a psychiatric hospital. That night, as the story goes, my father jolted awake at 2 a.m., certain that my mother was dying. The bed was empty. He ran to the bathroom like the hero he was, and found her in a blood bath with her wrists slashed the correct way. He called an ambulance. I remember the day we kids, and Vicky, were allowed to visit her at a picnic table on the grounds. She couldn’t get enough of Vicky.

I judged her harshly when I was a child, and worse when I was a teenager. One day, you’d come home and she’d be in the garage with the vacuum hose in her driver's side window, another day it was ground up wine glass in a bowl with oyster crackers. Sylvia Plath had nothing on my mother. I thought everything she did was a gesture, a pathetic cry for help, more drama for her audience of one, her best weapon in her war with my father. Who paid attention to these bids for attention? No one in my family indulged her. That’s for sure.

In the 1950s and 60s, when she was being hospitalized, professional psychiatry was in its brutal toddlerhood. You didn’t want to be a woman in the hands of those doctors in those days - perhaps in any days, perhaps, not even now.

Over the years, she would be repeatedly hospitalized against her will. My dad didn’t know what to do about her suicidal gestures. I’m sure it was a wrenching dilemma. Still, part of me wonders how much of the corrective was punishment: “Perhaps you need to go back into the hospital… I can call Dr. Sweetzer…”

She endured being thrown in a padded room without clothing for days at a time while people peered through a high window in the door making notes on clipboards, long series of electric shock treatments that left her unable to remember the way to our house though we lived in one-horse town and there was only one road, and hydrotherapy, where she was zipped under a canvas up to her chin in a cold bath and left to scream her head off. Just shut up, indeed. Fortunately, lobotomy was a bridge too far for my dad, though it was the miracle cure for depression, anxiety, aggression, and that useful catchall, non-conformity. I’m sure that treatment plan was floated. It makes me think of Rosemary Kennedy with such sadness.

Even after more than two decades, there was never a clear winner in the battle of the titans. My mother never “Just shut up,” and my father, no matter how much violence he applied, could not dominate her. The battle ended when they were 45, and he died, perhaps by suicide. Since she survived the marriage and he did not, I guess she won. But really, everyone lost, not just my family, though we lost a lot. All of society lost, and all of culture lost, too.

By the time I was an adult, she had gone back to school to become a psychiatric nurse, and then a therapist who specialized in re-mothering schizophrenics, the ones nobody else wanted. Having spent decades on an array of psychotropics herself, she began by weaning her people off as many meds as possible, because in those days, doctors just threw Molotov med cocktails at the problem and hoped the patient would be quieter. My mother loved her patients, advocated for them, and manipulated their doctors to detoxify their medication schedules to the lowest effective levels. She was great.

How do I know all this? A year before she died, I was on my way to a silent retreat at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. I flew in from LA a few days early to spend time with my mother. In the weeks before that trip, I prayed and prayed for grace. I was afraid she’d open the door as drunk mom, and I’d have to call my brother, whom I hadn’t told I was coming, to rescue me. But when she opened the door of her retirement mobile home at 1 a.m., she was 100% present - she had been sober for days, perhaps weeks. When I crossed the threshold, we embraced, just therapist mom and silent retreat Susan.

The next morning, at 7 a.m., she chose coffee. A window opened, and all the prayers I had ever uttered for grace, peace, joy, and love lifted that double-wide tin box off the ground and slipped us between the worlds. We entered the cave of the heart, rolled a boulder across the entrance, and didn’t emerge for three days. We bore witness to one another out of time and out of mind. We fell into love.

I told her my whole story, and she told me hers. Her eyes were as vast as a newborn’s, and mine were too. We talked all day, skipped lunch, went out for dinner, and talked again until bedtime at 10. The next day and the next went the same. Nothing was off limits, and though there were many tears, nothing stung. We simply told each other the truth. What an awakening. So many things had been hidden from me, of course. I’d been a child. I bared my pain, confessed all the ways I’d acted out, and the harsh judgment I’d held of her, and she witnessed me like the therapist she was. When she spoke, I witnessed her from deep silence, the silence that heals. After that, I left for retreat and stayed in silence for 10 more days.

After high school, when teenage Mom went off to study at Massachusetts General Hospital, her mother, a school nurse, looked at my grandfather, a factory worker, and told Mom to “find a doctor to marry.”

She didn’t, and her mother never forgave her. She married a rebel without a cause, the milkman, working for his stepdad, who came to her back door once a week. He was passionate, conflicted, and handsome, a bad boy who just needed someone to love him. I love bad boys, too. As a high school teacher, I’m drawn to them. I spent my young adulthood dating them. I’m glad I never married one, though.

On their first date, he was terrified he’d gotten another girl pregnant. Fun date. She said he cried. Oh no! Bad boy tears. Kryptonite, for smart girls. In my career as a high school teacher, I’ve seen it so many times, but my mom was strong and determined. Undeterred, she moved to Boston and entered nursing school, where she was taught to stand at military attention when a doctor entered the nursing station.

Upon graduation, at the top of her class, she signed up with a non-profit to go to India, where she felt she could do the most good. Perhaps because she rejected him, he pursued her. Heady stuff, that. On one knee, more kryptonite.

This sent Mom to the hospital chapel. Kneeling before the altar, she wasn’t getting up until she had an answer: marriage or service. Eventually, a light beam came through the stained glass window and touched her heart. She heard the voice of God. One of her children would change the world. Her greatest service was as a mother. It’s not lost on me that this particular god always wants that particular sacrifice from women. But perhaps it was only the tyranny of DNA, which, like a god, only wants what it wants, no matter the human cost. I, like Sharon Olds, want to say, “Stop./ don’t do it.” I want to thunder over the voice of God, “you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of.” But like Sharon Olds, I want to live. The results are in now. Even the youngest of us is past 60. We are all profoundly ordinary. The eldest is gone already—no world changers.

This should have been the last time I saw her. She was ready to die, and I was ready for her to. We had closure. Not many people get such a gift.

But the summer before my mother died, a few days before Mother’s Day, I flew home to visit with my husband and son to celebrate her 75th birthday. But I was met with the other mother, the messy, drunk mother I avoided like the plague. When we pulled up to take her to breakfast, I approached the glass door to knock. Her charpei rumbled alarm barks from deep in her chest. Mom was passed out on the couch, naked and spread-eagled. The dog didn’t wake her, but she moved her arm. I called, “Mom.” No response. I got into the car and said to my husband, “Not today.” He nodded, and we drove away. My flight home was that afternoon.

I never even thought about calling an ambulance, though in retrospect, maybe I should have. She was in terrible decline physically and refusing to see a doctor. But once, a few years before, my mother had jumped out of an ambulance after an incident with her car. She was terrified those EMTs were going to commit her again. As they were lifting her into the ambulance, she bit one of them and got away. She was arrested for drunk driving and ended up in jail instead. After that, my brother stole her carburetor.

Both versions of my mother, drunk mom and therapist mom, were true. And now, 20 years later, I can honestly say I love them both. After a post-death visitation from my dad that was so filled with love and forgiveness, I wanted - no, expected - my mom would visit me, that I’d know the moment she died. I’d dream about her at least. But no. She’d been dead in that trailer for two days before my sister in law found her, and I’d had no idea. I’d gone blissfully about my days as though nothing had happened, because for me, nothing had.

It was hard to reconcile that at first. She never came, never said goodbye, not even in a dream—just gone. But I couldn’t let her go. I went into deep meditation. Into that vast, silent lake I love so much. I dropped pebble after pebble: Mom. Then more insistently: Mom. I sat and sat until I finally heard a sharp, “What.” It wasn’t a question.

I sputtered a little. Took a breath. “Are you all right?” meaning, now that you are dead.

She answered, “Of course,” and then she was gone.

We’d already had our moment and I was behaving like one of those needy puppies sucking on her until her bones were hollow. Even in death, she had no patience for that. The other day, I watched a documentary about Sally Ride, and it made me wonder if my mother would have been better off if she’d been born a lesbian. That was tough sledding, too, but maybe better for her than a house full of kids. I wonder how many generations have been robbed of brilliance like my mother’s. Over the centuries, I wonder how many women weren’t allowed to be themselves, and what that has cost all of us.