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Monday 30 April 2012

Normal


A single mother I know once confessed to me that after her kids were in bed, she would retreat to her bedroom and watch episode after episode of Grey’s Anatomy. I told her that when my newborn was sleeping, I would put on lipstick. Even in the middle of the night. Putting on lipstick made me feel like I was okay. Like all was well. Now, you tell me which is more normal.

My mother wears lipstick. Almost religiously. I’ve rarely seen her without it. We are visiting my mother, the Guppins and me. She lives three hours away (on a good-weather day) down a windy, treacherous country road, secluded on a small lake, surrounded by neighbours who also drink martinis and by moose who appear in front of your car while you are driving.

For some reason I feel visiting my mother will be restful.

My mother has a solid routine: up early, coffee, meal planning (a top priority for her),
emailing friends from what I call “command central” — the bottom storey of her split-level
retirement cottage, my daughter and I unable to intrude down the steep, slippery wooden
steps, a makeshift gate consisting of a board barring our access. She disappears to email,
stretch, shower, work on her finances. She reappears later to clean, question me about meal
preferences, tune into “The Fan” (sports radio) on her kitchen radio at top volume. Then she’s off on one errand or another in her leased Forester, down the gravel road (it’s 45 minutes to any of the nearest towns) to shop, meet friends, check to see if her broken watch is fixed, get her hair cut, do group aerobics with her girlfriends at the community hall in front of a video tape, put air in her tires. She returns hours later, exhausted, and disappears for a nap.

My mother is sporting a vivid, very familiar lipstick. When I was a kid I would pull her lipsticks
out of any one of our bathroom cupboards, trying each on, staining Kleenex, flushing away the evidence of my investigation, intrusion. They never suited me. Too pink.

“I’m so tired.” “What do you want for dinner?” “But if you stay another day what will we eat?” (a note of panic in her rising register)

Then there’s gardening, cutting the lawn, and finally a trip down forty-plus outdoor railway-tie
steps (sleek with off-gassing oil and creosote) to read on the dock.

“I slipped and fell right after warning your sister-in-law of the very same thing!”

We stay behind.

I can phone her from my cell phone. If I need to. If there’s an emergency, for example. She
always takes the portable phone down to the lake. She’s on the phone a lot.

But I don’t.

I restlessly attempt a nap with my daughter (who still won’t go more than three hours through
the night without a brief wake-up), I feed her, I try taking her outside. We manage a stroller walk
down the long gravel road, alone, quiet with nature. I teach her how to say “Nana.”

My iPhone reception is not too good at my mother’s. Gmail jams up; the Scrabble game I play with a friend in LA won’t load; Facebook is a write-off.

We bide our time.

At five o’clock my mother has a martini, maybe another. It’s dinner time; she’s really fading —
“I’m so tired,” she says weakly. “All I do is work.”

Her wineglass now wears her lipstick.

She cleans the kitchen blearily while I bathe the baby, put her to bed. I join my mother in the
living room, quarter to nine. She is good for about 15 minutes of television, then off to bed.

I pour myself a huge glass of vodka.

I scroll through the satellite listings.

Then I hear it. Coming though the wall.

“Hshhh oh ma shs ooooh you yr shhh…”

The hushed whispering.

I had forgotten. On the surface I had let myself forget.

I press the mute button.

“Draaah? Me shhh mus t daught oh re?”

I am not going to ignore it this time. I get up. With unnameable dread I creep down the hall,
slowly, one foot in front of the other, my heart in my chest. My brain experiencing a confusing
anxious terror I can’t really explain. I listen.

She’s definitely talking to someone, which is what makes it so disturbing. The floor creaks.
I stop. I lean. I make it close enough to see through a crack in her door, her reflection in the
mirror above a tidy bureau. I’ve never made it this far before. For months in the summer, when my daughter was first born and we were visiting for long stretches, I heard it through the wall between our bedrooms, thinking it was her TV or she was one the phone, not accepting the fact that it made no sense, it was midnight — who would she be talking to? — denying the abstract horror that pressed at me. It was only when she was visiting me in Toronto in my small one-bedroom apartment that I accepted what was happening. Because only a curtain separated us. And through it I heard, very clearly, a secret conversation between her and someone else. Too hushed for me to make out the actual words. Maybe I didn’t want to. For a moment I hoped she was praying.

Only my mother isn’t religious.

But on this night I actually saw her. I think she was holding a framed photograph. There was
pain in her voice. I couldn’t go any further. I couldn’t possibly — my world would shatter, I would explode into tiny irretrievable units, faced with the milky eyes of my Mad Mother.

I try to forget about it. I try to tell myself it’s normal, she misses my dad, she’s talking to him. I
think about my therapist. I remember confessing years back that I guiltily looked forward to my father dying because then my mother would finally be available to me. It took me a long time to admit this longing, this deep need, this absence.

This rage.

Two days later the Guppins and I leave, my mother out the door before us on several large and important errands, a bridge game two hours away. “I’m nervous about the drive. I find driving so tiring,” she says while hurrying out into the pouring rain, leaving behind her neatly packed lunch on the foyer bench.

I am left to pack the car alone. I put on The Jungle Book to entertain my daughter. She adores my mother, searches for her high and low, appears around corners surprising her with her word.

“Nana!”

My mother does take moments with her. She fed her on her lap one morning while I bathed.
(This moved me unspeakably.) She watches a Winnie the Pooh video with her, which my
daughter is now obsessed with.

I drop my daughter off with her dad, who is willing to take her for the night despite his busy life, his auditions, his meeting with real estate people — we are moving forward, on together, to a small Ontario town next month.

I drive home. I smoke a rare cigarette. I want to take a Xanax. I bargain with myself.

“It’s just sleep. You just need sleep and you’ll stop feeling crazy. You’ll feel better.”

I unpack the car. I put things away. I put a frozen dinner in the oven. I walk into the bathroom. I reach for whichever one is close. This time it’s a bright orangey red. I smear it across my lips. I look in the mirror.

I told him, her father, when we had a rare moment to lie together on his bed, our girl bouncing
around happily below us, I told him, “I feel so alone. Going to see my mother makes me feels so alone”.

“It’s her set pieces,” he says. “Like at Christmas. Crying over the turkey carving.”

I nod. I hold on. I think about the future, with him, with my daughter. A life together, a life a little less lonely, a little more normal.

If only I had known then what I know now.

-Drama Mama

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