Living in my mother's heart

How do we get so far away from our parents? How do they get so far away from us?

There was a time when I think I didn't talk to my mother for two or three years. I up and left my husband which somehow translated to up and leaving my mother. If I were to be perfectly honest, I up and left everyone. When I started to put it all back together, after being pretty damn close to completely out of control (as if I had ever been in control) everything had changed.

My mom was my champion. I grew up in upwardly mobile middle class suburbia with two working parents; I was of the first generation of the latch key children. I was difficult and prickly and either unwilling or unable to fit any particular mold. Most of my childhood was solitary. My mother has a PhD in something or other. I have nine million credits toward two completely separate degrees and refused to graduate with either.

It was the mothers of the South Glastonbury Pony Club who made sure I had a suitable pony or a horse. It was my mother who made sure I kept the horse. It was me who let the horse go when we moved to Fairfield and couldn't find a stall to rent for under $600 per month (this was in 1981!) It was my mother who called at 3 AM from Seattle to tell me she had two arab quarter crosses and was bringing them home to me rough broke. I was twenty and had been horseless for four years. I finished breaking and did the rudimentary training. It was my mother who fine tuned the babies. It was me who put my husband on the horse and my mother who made him get off. It was me who, pregnant at 22 with a pathetic income, marginally employed husband and unfinished degree, wanted to buy a house in Fairfield County. It was my mother who came up with a way to buy the farm and a way for me to work out how to keep it.

And we moved in lockstep for eight more years.

It was me who was headstrong and walked off the path. It was my mother who narrowed the path.

There was a point in time, when I was introducing my mother to my possibly third husband when she looked at me and said, this is just a side show, you know that, right? All she wanted to know was that I wouldn't be having any more babies. Not that I couldn't take care of my babies, just that I couldn't stay with my husbands. When I told her my eggs were dead as doornails and he'd had a vasectomy she said I could keep him for awhile if it made me happy.

Strangely enough, after she got done being mad at me for leaving him, she hated my first husband and horsenapped my horse right off his farm (he was holding my horse hostage, in a way, so that maybe I would come back). I still have this brand new equestrian saddle bought just for that horse that never got broke in. He was my last horse and that saddle is still in my house. That horse is not.

She accepted that my second husband was completely inappropriate but maintained that I'd made my bed and needed to lie in it; we're still Calvins at the root. She chastised me for leaving him in the same breath that she asked how I could live with him. If I tell her that I struggle in my third marriage she tells me to give ultimatums and when I laugh and say, this is perfectly normal adjustment of two people from different backgrounds with multiple children learning to live together she tells me the world is ending.

She lives on a farm and I live in a swamp. I am not concerned about the rodents my rat terrier ferrets out from under the deck or in the swamp. She tells me, in all seriousness, that they carry the plague.

My mother cut the road through Burma in the corporate world. Her father cut the real one with the real Calvary (you know, like with horses) in WWII. She is for sure his daughter. My mother wrote code in her sleep and navigated the treachery of women in the workplace, with a career and a family. My mother wrote poetry and stories in the closet of her mind and showed them to no one. I found them in a moment of kismet and have never let them go. I painted larger than life murals of dragons and forests on my bedroom walls. My mother cried when I didn't go to art school.

I wear my mother's shoes and remember never to cry in public. I irritate her beyond belief when I don't follow the same rules because the world has shifted. My mother looks at the application programming I do and pronounces it hogwash. I remember to thank God that my mother explained binary when I was twelve and I never forgot. She's a crazy cross between unwilling and recalcitrant St. Louis debutant and horse whisperer. She is happier with dirt under her nails and fourteen dogs in the house. I write thank you notes on engraved paper because it is the right thing to do given my current circumstances. My mother wants to know where the hell I ever got that idea and would rather I ran the stationary off on my printer.

When I was bleeding a slow death into the sheets and convincing my husband it all would pass, it was my mother I called all the way in Ohio and told about my white fingers and blue gums. It was my mother who kept me on the land line and called my Connecticut doctor from her cell phone and ordered me to the hospital immediately. I was running on empty and maybe four hours from dead.

She wants me to be safe.

I cannot be safe and alive at the same time.

It is an uneasy peace but it is peace all the same.

It is my mother I want when I am unbearably sad.