Beautiful Things About My Mom

When I think about my mom, some memories of her give me a smart shock, like grazing a knife edge in a sink of water. They make me wince. They make me shake my head quickly, as if by shaking my head I can shatter the images and send them back in pieces to the recesses they came from.

They are memories of her standing just inside my bedroom doorway, sheepishly asking me why I’d emptied the bottles of vodka she’d stashed under her bathroom vanity. They are memories of me grabbing the wheel from her and yanking us back into the correct driving lane on the highway. They are memories of me driving at reckless speeds to see her in the ICU after learning she’d overdosed on medication for the first time. They are memories of me turning off the stove burner late at night, of feeling hot shame creep up my neck when I had friends stay over, of no lights coming on in our house to ward off the creeping dusk. Almost all of them are of her wobbly gaze looking through me, not seeing me or the chaos of my adolescence, leaving me to work out the formulas all on my own.

My mom is an alcoholic. She is long divorced by my dad and estranged from myself and my brother as well as her own parents. Her history as an alcoholic is now a deeply etched one, with DUIs, job losses, relapses, and other countless troubles being larger pockmarks along the way. As I grew up, her manic depression and anxiety spread out and lay over her like the heaviest of blankets. One by one, family gave up and bowed out. I was the last one to leave her underneath all of it, unable to help and unable to watch her suffocate anymore. Finally, emotionally drained and cynical, I turned my sights toward a fresh start at college and she left the state with a nameless boyfriend. It’s now been almost seven years since we’ve seen each other and our few online interactions have been strained at best.

I’ve lamented once or twice to the people closest to me that I don’t remember anything good about my mom, but that’s more-so a selfish complaint I have in vulnerable moments. She was, and is, a woman of astounding intelligence and many talents, and that simple truth constantly competes with my most sour memories for control over how to feel about her. This is never truer than on each passing Mother’s Day when I find myself dwelling a little too long on old dog-eared pictures of her or otherwise regurgitating ugly, bitter thoughts. I only truly start to feel more at peace when I force myself to remember beautiful things about her that on all other days I’ve shamefully forgotten.

For instance, her handwriting was always impeccable and so very hers — tall, sweeping, as exact as a typeface — and she used to occasionally cook me Cincinnati chili for dinner, which is by trade both sweeter and spicier than regular chili and which I haven’t eaten since childhood (but still regularly crave). She loved listening to Kenny G. An entertainment hutch in her bedroom had a pull-out drawer where she kept some of her favorite movies: “An Affair to Remember”, “Gone with the Wind”, “Sleepless in Seattle.” Needless to say, she was an unapologetic romantic, like me.

My mom was (and probably still is) the best gardener in the neighborhood. The southern side of my childhood home, never viewed by anyone but our family or wandering deer, was brought to bursting life each spring and summer. She coaxed ruby red roses up a painted trellis and grew huge peony bushes that unfolded in colors so pure, so pastel, that I’d greedily pick the whole lot and bury my face in their softness until their tender leaves fell off and scattered. On the weekends we’d drive to local nurseries and I’d run wild through rows of tiny trees while she selected her newest beauties.

Every Halloween, my mom would sew me incredible hand-made costumes. At age 11, I was a court jester in a glittering midnight-blue jumper and marched up and down each neighborhood block to the tink-tink-tink of the golden bells attached to my cotton-stuffed jester’s hat. At age eight, I was a princess dressed in a shining, satin, bubblegum-pink gown. She painstakingly ringed the hem, the cuffs and even the cone-shaped hat with a rainbow of jumbo-sized rhinestones. At age six, she dressed me as a señorita in a white dress zigzagged with rickrack and a sequined sombrero. My costume was featured in the newspaper that year, and by my mother’s equally divine scrapbooking skills, I still have a grainy clipping of me sitting cross-legged in the school hallway, clutching my heavy sombrero and looking sleepily away out of the frame.

My mom was beautiful. Her smile, punctuated always by real laughter, is my smile: so wide and so unyielding that my eyes sometimes squint shut to accommodate it. Her brown eyes are also my eyes, modest in color but bright. I’m sure people would still say I’m truly my mother’s daughter if we were to stand side by side tomorrow, but her delicate nose and dark hair and pale, freckled skin set us apart. I’m also a head taller.

My mom was a fantastic piano player. I can’t conjure up a memory of watching her play, but I can think back to a related moment in time, in the living room of the house I grew up in. In my short snippet of memory, I’m almost too young to remember anything at all. The walls are bursting with their peachy hue and the natural sunlight spilling from the row of living room windows is so bright that I can see small bits of dust dancing in the air to a slow, clean, simple tune that my mom plays just out of frame. I’m insignificant in the moment, but the full color of that afternoon light and the song she plays (dum da dum dum, dum da dum dum…) feels so precious.

My mom sold the piano when we moved out of my childhood home several years later. I think there came a certain point she could only see the ghost of herself sitting on the bench, touching each key, folding and unfolding song sheets. As it all fell apart we were both living ghosts there, belonging somewhere else but deeply unsure of how and where to go.

Like so many people who come from splintered homes, it’s easy for me to filter good memories of my mom and her best qualities until they blur at the edges and flicker like an old video reel. But those memories are a salve to the hurt I still carry; they need to be coaxed out, tended to, sewn together, stirred to life, written down. They make our separation easier to accept because I know these beautiful things still exist in her and that they will always fight for who she really is — part of which is a mother who, despite all obstacles, loved me deeply.

I love you too, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.

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Quase todos concordam comigo, eu tenho praticamente tudo que eu quero. “Poema” is published by Gustavo Caetano.