Four Memories of My Mother


I used to feed the ducks that lived in the lagoon behind our house. My dad went with me sometimes, but most often I went alone--the lagoon bordered our backyard and it was easy for me to slip away. My favorite day to feed the ducks was Saturday, which was when moms and daughters were out in force. I'm sure other people were out there, too, but I have always cared most about moms and daughters.

Moms were aliens to me, foreign creatures I could only see outside of my home. I'd observe them from my vantage point atop a pile of wood chips as they walked down the bike path along the lagoon's edge. Obsessively watching those women was a compulsion stronger than being glued to Saturday-morning cartoons.

The moms would always walk with a bag of stale bread in one hand and their daughter's small hand in the other. I so badly wanted to experience that feeling of having my hand held by a woman who was walking half a step ahead of me. Wherever she was going, we'd head there together. A little girl's understanding of the world revolves around her mother, but I could only ever watch from afar. Observing the moms and daughters felt like looking at the moon through a telescope: I could see it was there, but I was not there and never could be. Can you miss something you never had?

I liked to watch how the moms talked to other moms, acting as translators if their kids wanted to add anything to the conversation, always so understanding of each other, nodding and smiling and laughing. I thought maybe my mom didn't realize she could have gone to the park to find people to talk to.

Today, I imagine all little kids as potatoes, wondrous nuggets of raw potential just waiting to be shaped by their mom-chefs. Whether your mom tenderly styles you into a Hasselback dish, tosses you in the microwave, or is totally absent, she is going to affect you. My mother took her own life before there was much time for her to shape me into anything. I was four years old, almost five. The greatest legacy she left me was her suicide. I try to imagine what it feels like to be washed, dried, peeled--to be turned over under warm water, then pushed gently into an oven and checked on every now and again. But it is another thing entirely to never be touched at all; to be left alone in the cabinet to sprout eyes and fend for yourself.



Before she died, my mother was in and out of my life like a jack-in-the-box. By the time I was four years old I knew she was sick, I just didn't understand quite what that meant. At that age, "sick" meant a sneeze or maybe an ear infection. It had easy-to-spot symptoms and was cured by taking gooey sweet red medicine. But none of that applied to my mother's mental illness. Depression is an invisible injury. Back then people generally didn't understand that depression is an injury like any other. Depression is something that you have, not something that you are. The stigma around depression begins with the way we talk about it and the way we label it. But I didn't understand this as a kid. I was looking for sneezes, but all I saw were screams.

My mother had to be kept in a special place, locked up, safe from herself. But even there she was not entirely safe. According to her medical reports, she once lit her room and herself on fire. The orderlies caught her and she did not die that day. What do you need to feel inside to light yourself on fire? Do you feel fire inside that you need to get out, or do you feel nothing inside and so maybe lighting your hospital bed on fire and lying down in it is the only thing that can make you feel something? I was brought to visit her the way you'd visit someone in jail, in a highly controlled and scheduled way, but I don't remember anything other than the sterile white walls and fluorescent lights.

My mother was deeply mysterious to me. In my mind's eye she was very tall, which is funny because I later learned she was well under five feet. I'm actually much taller now than she was, but even so, in all of my imagined scenarios where I meet her again she is still somehow taller than me. She used to wear swooshy nylon sweat suits with matching pants and a jacket. I cannot remember her ever wearing anything but these matching sweat suits. When I wear matching sweat suits now, it is a secret nod to her.

Sometimes my mother was allowed to come home. This was a highly anticipated event in my family. It meant she had demonstrated enough outward-facing progress to be released from the asylum. Even as a toddler I could tell it was a very big deal. It's a special occasion! But when my mother came home it never felt like she belonged there. I remember knowing in theory how moms and daughters were supposed to embrace and feel at ease with each other, but I was never able to actually achieve this with my mother. I don't remember ever hugging her. I'm sure she sensed this awkwardness, too, which must have made it even harder for her to come home--especially when it meant coming home to my brother and me, two little potatoes who were growing and transforming wildly, always one step more evolved than the last time she saw us. I imagine that she must have felt increasingly alienated from us and maybe even started thinking that it would be better if she were gone.

Even though her goal with suicide might have been to disappear, there are things about her I will never be able to forget. I have four memories of my mother, and three of them are bad. They sit in the back of my mind all the time, like a lady on a green velvet chaise longue who mostly blends into the background but will sometimes wink and wave at me to get my attention. There is a part of me that likes that at least she is still something, even if I remember she is there at all the wrong times. I am learning, slowly, to simply wave back.



In my earliest memory of my mother, she's leaning against the doorframe of the office in our old house wearing a red edition of the nylon sweat suit and smoking a cigarette. I still think of her anytime I smell cigarette smoke. My dad never told her not to smoke inside the house, even though I could see it bothered him. I figured that she was allowed because she was special. She stood in the doorway staring into nowhere, totally motionless save for the cigarette. Her hair, which was short and curly, absorbed the smoke around her. She looked like a movie poster to me, grainy and glamorous and ethereal, not all the way there. People have a certain demeanor when they're smoking cigarettes. Their hands are occupied and so is their mouth; they are not able to hold your hand or kiss you.

My mother and I were home alone--my dad tried to be there to supervise as much as he could, but sometimes he had to leave. This was always a roll of the dice for him, since he never knew what she was going to do next, ever. Her behavior ranged from compulsively buying things, like several life-size wooden parrot statuettes that she hung throughout the house, to crashing our family's minivan (possibly on purpose). Thankfully, I was not in the car when she wrecked it, but they found the toddler car seat dangling upside down because it had not been secured properly. She was like a natural disaster and my dad was on alert all the time, never sure when her next episode was coming and how severe it would be--all the while balancing a full-time job, taking care of my brother and me, and managing my mom's care while keeping her condition a secret. Her stays at home always ended abruptly with her needing to be committed to some hospital, whether it was the psych ward or a rehab clinic or I don't know where else.

My mother was mesmerizing to me. I watched her smoke her cigarette and then I walked up next to her, almost close enough to touch her.

Almost close enough to feel the swooshy nylon against my skin. And then, all of a sudden, she came to life. She looked down at me as though I were a problem she didn't quite know how to solve. It wasn't mean but it wasn't nice. It was almost curious. She paused, took a puff of her cigarette, and then did something I don't remember her ever having done before: She reached her arm out to me. The caramel-brown mouthpiece was inches from my lips, and just out of focus was the bright hot point with smoke tendrils curling up to the ceiling. I understood she was offering me a puff. She didn't make a big deal of holding the cigarette in front of my mouth. It felt casual, almost like an accident--except it wasn't. I immediately felt special. The rules did not apply to us. I was her daughter and she was sharing something with me that had touched her lips and soon would touch mine. I felt like I was included in an exclusive thing that I had only ever seen her doing alone.

She held the cigarette to my mouth and I did what I had seen her do. I inhaled shyly, watching her as I did. The smoke was curiously harsh, like nothing I'd ever tasted before. I was used to soft things like chocolate milk and macaroni and cheese. I sensed that what was happening was not normal, that we were breaking a rule, but still I did it. I wanted her to love me more than I wanted to be good. I wanted her to include me. Who behaves crazier, a mentally ill person or a four-year-old who desperately wants her mother's love? When the most important person in your life is floating away like a ghost, you seize any opportunity you can to feel a connection with her. So of course I smoked the cigarette, even though I knew that smoking was B-A-D bad.



One of the other times they let my mother come home, I was on the staircase with my knees between the balusters and she was in the kitchen wearing her swooshy sweat suit like always, this time in turquoise. She was screaming at the top of her lungs about I don't know what, I just remember that she looked like a demon in the body of a giant Barbie doll with the kind of bird's-nest hair your Barbie gets when you brush it too much. She was yelling at my dad, who was on the other side of the doorway just out of sight. He never yelled back, not once. I remember that more than feeling scared, I was curious. How could someone yell so loudly and channel so much anger? Each shout built momentum like a snowball that keeps gathering more of itself as it rolls downhill and nothing can stop the avalanche it becomes.

I was hungry and wanted cereal but I didn't dare go down to the screaming zone. So I just stared at my mother from my staircase perch. I was frustrated. When a little kid is hungry it is her right to demand attention until the hunger is solved. But with my mom around, I had to be a quiet pair of eyes with no needs. Most young kids are only concerned with how the world makes them feel, but I saw the world as a place I needed to navigate in a more thoughtful way. To me, it felt more sad than unfair. Because as I watched my mom in that moment, throwing a tantrum and screaming, I realized, she could not handle herself. And I felt, for the first time in my life, sad for another human being. And when you feel sad for someone it's very hard to resent them, even if they're hurting you. But it's also impossible to admire and look up to someone you feel sorry for.

My dad taught me to view my mom with compassion. He explained that she wasn't the boss of herself. I knew that also meant that she was not the boss of me. How could she be? A role model is supposed to be someone who knows more than you, someone who is a step beyond where you are. My mother was not a step beyond. She was not anywhere in my vicinity. Even though I was curious about what it would feel like to receive love and attention and affection and guidance from her, at the same time, I knew she wasn't going to be able to do that for me. Nor was she someone to imitate. I was still desperately curious about her, but I knew it was best not to get too close. And this made me feel different from other little girls and their moms, orbiting each other like a planet and its moon as they walked down the bike path behind my house to feed the ducks. I saw then that I was going to have to be my own planet, or maybe an asteroid floating free.



The third memory of my mother is violent and terrifying and I try not to think of it very often. It must have happened sometime after we shared the cigarette. I remember going into my parents' room unannounced, as kids often do. The bedroom light was off but the bathroom light was on. My parents' bathroom had those round bulbs that make you look like a movie star, and the light spilled out into the dark bedroom, beckoning me to investigate. I crept forward . . . and there, in the mirror above the sink, I saw my mother glamorously illuminated. She was making a back-and-forth motion with one arm and she was very focused, with her attention completely centered on what she was doing. I tiptoed closer and saw that she was gripping a mean-looking metal saw with a wooden handle and a long triangular blade with big rusty teeth and using it to harm herself. There was plenty of blood. This was and still is the most violent and sad thing I have ever seen. The older I get, the sadder this memory makes me--not for me, but for her.

I knew that what I was seeing wasn't right. My mom wasn't showing any signs of pain, which was confusing to me because I knew that blood meant pain. I spent a lot of time playing outside and I'd taken my share of bad falls. When you bled, it meant you were hurt and then you cried. So why wasn't my mom crying? I stood motionless, processing. I couldn't look away.

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Excerpted from Bravey (Adapted for Young Readers): Chasing Dreams, Befriending Pain, and Other Big Ideas by Alexi Pappas
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