Mothers are a genre of/for daughters, with Ada Limón
Two weeks ago, I saw my mother’s heart. Not the lopsided fist of middle-school anatomy textbooks, or the pinched cloud of its popular symbol. Her actual heart. Up close on the EKG monitor, my mother’s heart was the shape of rolling hills. A landscape of squiggly yellow lines; tendentiously rising in the left, and staggering towards the right. Maybe the heart belongs more to geography; than to biology, or poetry. Or maybe the hearts of mothers are a discipline of their own.
Out of surgery and still under the effects of general anesthesia, my father and I sat in the hospital room, cups of home-made coffee in our hands, watching her breathe. My mother, his wife- the same human, and yet not. He was awkward and fidgety, in the way men are, when the loves of their life are unconscious. I watched him pace around the room, tuck her feet into the duvet, lovingly raising a little sand dune. He went out and smoked the cigarette that we don’t talk about anymore. His nervousness was soothing to me- there is an elastic bubble of tenderness that my parents have held each other in, and no one is allowed inside; not even their own kin. I’ve had a lifetime of practice looking in; and am always comforted by my proximity to their deep, unrelenting solidarity to each other. Except on cigarettes.
I’ve often struggled to see my mother as a delicate being. When she was twenty-four, she made a difficult choice of eloping and becoming estranged from her family. It wasn’t really a choice after her mother put her on house-arrest, to keep her from seeing my father, but it was the first instance of her following her heart. Those rolling hills. Whenever I heard close friends of my parents narrate the rather exciting story of their runaway wedding; with surprise twists and special appearances, I sensed my mother’s discomfort which she blanketed with hospitality. Please, the food is getting cold. You haven’t eaten enough. Would everyone like a round of tea? I noticed how she still felt guilty about her singular act of resistance, that had defined the course of her life. I never wanted to hurt my parents. I felt defensive about my father, whose eyes moistened with glee at these recantations. It’s like it was yesterday. She didn’t say it and I didn’t ask, but I didn't see her as the heroine of her own love-story.
I also find it hard to imagine that the woman sleeping in the hospital room, is the mother of my childhood. There was a hardness to her that seems smudged out in the dimly lit room, her body hooked to intravenous tubes filled with antibiotic fluids. She looks nothing like the woman who, some fifteen years ago, forced me to drink plain, cold milk at six a.m., made me repurpose my sister’s old schoolbooks and uniform, and kept my hair short like hers so she wouldn’t have to braid it. She never cooked, and my lunchbox was always two slices of buttered, white bread. She was economical in her approval of the things I got right, and clear in her disappointment of the things I couldn’t, of which there were many. My mother liked structure, cleanliness and efficiency. I was impulsive, messy and sentimental. We forgave each other nothing.
We are still different, my mother and me. But I have only recently started lamenting the steady drip of harm inflicted on our relationship through our collective insistence on distinguishing our selves from each other. And how deeply exhausting it is. How in moments of deep defeat and orange rage, I looked at her and said- ‘I don’t ever want to be like you.’ How often we stood on the edge of each other’s aches; and side-stepped them; refusing to consider that maybe our beliefs about each other were not as certain as we pretended. How we tripped each other; setting expectations we knew the other couldn’t meet. In a world where everything was uncertain, we offered each other the anchoring of long-term adversaries. The world could collapse, we will never be on the same page. Individual, yet implicated. Like lines of a well-structured poem.
In ‘The Raincoat,’ US poet laureate Ada Limón, writes about mothers and hospitals and spines and song. This is a good point to admit that I am entirely convinced that Ada poems my heart. She takes a genre and makes it a verb. I read her words repeatedly and offer them to friends, saying- here’s my whole heart. Somewhat selfishly, I like thinking, Ada and I have the same heart, and it’s a poem. Here is the poem, in full-
When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five-minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say that even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.
What I love most about this poem (and indeed all of Ada’s poetry) is the rendering of big feelings in small moments. Her scenes are utterly inhabitable; they start in the middle, and end in the tender. The tenderness is fleeting, and therefore crucial to narrate. As a researcher, I am only now beginning to notice, that the longer my gaze rests on the subject of my inquiry, the softer it becomes. Sustained attention has always dilated the foci of my curiosity, than narrowing it. I suspect that Ada’s early outlines of her mother were also hard, that she too, is reckoning with how her narration softens, through her tenure as a daughter. A reminder that generosity isn’t a predisposition, but a permission. To keep looking, knowing that kindness will emerge.
In this poem, I see Ada, and also the ‘young daughter’, caught in a storm with her mother. I see the mother ‘take her raincoat off and give it’ to her child. I see the tenderness Ada writes; and imagine the arguments she leaves out. I remember the PVC smell of my first pastel pink raincoat and how often I came back soaked from school, because I hated and never used it. My mother would be livid at the sight of my uniform, dripping wet and piled on the floor, when she returned from her work in the evening. I would yank the raincoat, which didn’t make a good case for itself (it was smattered with teddy-bears who held umbrellas over their heads) under her nose and demand that she smell the awful plastic, and not force me to wear it. She always backed down when I did that. She knew the stench well, and also how hard it was to quell it. Money has a distinct odor, and its absence has one too.
I learnt that money wasn’t a naturally occurring substance because my mother let out the secret in exasperation, each time my sister and I conjured up a cause. A school fete, a friend’s birthday party, a new dress in the ‘good’ store, a summer vacation to tell our friends about. Do you think it grows on trees? It was a question that allowed no follow-ups. On the last Wednesday of every month, I saw my parents hunch over a sky-blue notepad, and go over their expenses. They rubbed their knuckles and furrowed their brows. It always ended with them realizing that there was nothing extravagant about their spending. They were never plucking leaves. One Wednesday, it ended with my father saying, Let it be, one tin of coffee is not going to make a difference. My mother religiously drank cold coffee before leaving for work each morning. I remember, because amidst all our differences, she always let me have a sip. A caffeinated ceasefire. I don’t remember when she stopped. She switched to tea, but retained her notepad. The tin of coffee went with our secret moment of tenderness. It did make a difference.
My mother is a curator of chores. For herself, and for everyone around her. On weekend mornings, my father and I play a little game where each time we get up and walk across her, she conjures up a task out of thin air. In her eyes, there is always something in our home that needs to be straightened, fetched, rearranged, bought, discarded or dusted. At thirty, living in my Scottish home, I now see that women often think up and execute chores to steady ourselves when we feel a little wobbly. On days I find it hard to begin, I write to my closest women that I am going to start with laundry. We all agree that there is nothing quite as anchoring as a sixty-degree wash cycle. As an immigrant woman, I am learning that I will never run out of chores. Tasks indeed grow on trees. Each time I make lists now; of groceries, visa documents, outstanding bills, and Home Office emails, I think of my mother. My notepad isn’t the same colour as hers, but my worries often are.
Scotland is the first country my mother has seen, outside of the one she was born in. I had severely overprepared for her arrival- in the way that daughters do- and she still found little things that needed tweaking in my home- like mothers do. I wanted her to enjoy her first international holiday; to look at the North Sea, sit in the diffuse sunlight of Scottish October, bite into the hearts of Fife strawberries. Instead, she surveyed my home and asked very specific questions- Why do you put lit matchsticks back in the box? Why don’t you buy the bigger size of milk bottles? Do you read all these books that are lying about at the same time? Why are all the lights yellow? I was indignant, and proud of my home. Can you please just let things be as they are, this is how I like it. We argued in a different country, about the same things. We also walked, went to the cinema, hosted friends and laughed over fish and chips. She discovered a love for flat beaches when the tide is far out, and brewed chai for my friends, letting them beam new stories from my life into her.
Visiting her cousin in London, she sent me pictures of another raincoat. Big and beige, with deep pockets and flappy trims. It looked like a quilted spacesuit. I wrote her back Please don’t buy this. She did buy it. My father and I laughed at her insistence. She quietly repeated all the features the salesperson had told her. When she was leaving, I told her to take it with her because I would never wear it. She made a few appeals to me about the cold rain in Scotland. I was unmoved. You shouldn’t have bought it. Finally, Please keep it here. You don’t have to wear it, I can use it when I come back. We have been living in different cities since I was fourteen and she was forty-five. The promise of a future visit gets us both in the gut. I flattened the beige cloud and tucked it under my bed. It’ll stay there. Three weeks of the old colliding with the new, and she left. It felt like we were making important memories every moment, but seeing her off was also an exhale. I lowered my body; exhausted from hosting, into a bath, and tried to light a candle. In the matchbox, the lit matches were arranged neatly next to fresh ones.
In another poem, Ada writes about feeling islanded from her mother.
The original fault was that I could
not see the lines of things. My mother could.
The cruelty of seeing our origins as fault lines. The necessary work of looking back, insisting on different, kinder stories. I live not more than a thousand feet away from the sea. My mother fell in love with the vast beach, but disapproved of the oyster and cockle shells I bring back and lace the shores of my furniture with. She likes things to be in place. I carry places in me. It is possible to share worlds without worldviews. To take someone to swimming lessons without knowing, or maybe knowing exactly, that they will someday move next to the North Sea.
Mothers are a global genre for the holiday season. Over Christmas break, a friend in Germany writes to say that her mother is driving her insane. A close friend’s grandfather takes seriously ill, and his Irish mother instructs him to fly home, but to get his beard trimmed first. Another friend misses her mother while decorating the Nordmann fir; how her Greek mother would have insisted on ‘fluffing’ it up so it doesn’t look like the tree is frowning. My sister in Bombay; is disheartened that her year-old daughter refuses to wear the mistletoe shoes she bought her.
One of my favorite political thinkers, Jenny Edkins, laments how she never considered her mother as an intellectual ally, and the impatience she felt about her lack of interest in reading novels or even a newspaper. And yet, on the day after her mother died, she found her reflection looking back at her in the mirror. Cheryl Strayed once wrote a gorgeous essay, about losing her mother, ‘the love of her life.’ The lament is sealed within her advice. I think about what she wrote, very often, and how when mothers give us coats, they are giving us their way into the world.
One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life. Say thank you.
As I’ve written elsewhere, I think lamenting is not a regretful posture, but an imaginative one. I don’t know what the last gift my mother will ever give me, but I think about it a lot. I have it on good authority that as daughters, we keep finding gifts our mothers left us- in old wardrobes, in cleaning rituals, in ghostly reminders to dust the lampshade. I am always taken aback by the kind of rage my mother still arouses in me, like stepping barefoot onto the pins of an overturned plug. It’s always the small things, but they always bring up big feelings. I think about how guilty I (will) feel about being skeptical of her choices, deeming them “too puffy, and possibly even too warm.” As hard as I try, I am sometimes the young Ada in the car, the Cheryl mocking the warm coat, the Jenny exasperated about being too intelligent to be understood. I wonder how we simply cannot hurt our mothers without hurting ourselves. I wonder more, if our mothers feel that too. I wonder most, if we forgive each other the hurt we are yet to cause.
When she was in her thirties, my mother often distinguished me from herself, through the (ha)bits she disapproved about me. You’re so untidy, you couldn’t be my daughter. I can’t believe my child would pick a fight at school. How did you come to be so impatient; it cannot come from me. Now, in my thirties, she takes deep pleasure in noticing how we are the same. You are also living alone in a different city for your work. You also care about how your home looks. You look exactly like I did at this age. I still resist the easy comparisons, but I wear them. I like that generosity is a slender bridge. You can step onto it from both directions. When I long-look at my mother, she long-looks at me too. We linger. We tread gently, and keep our pace tender.
Like Ada, I am only now becoming aware, of the ways in which my mother paused her life, in order to build mine. She woke up at 4:30 a.m. to take me to swimming lessons before school, enrolled me in art classes over the summer, taught me how to bake just the one plain cake she knew how. I feel protective of her younger body, and ask her relentlessly about it. The cold coffee, the box of fancy hair clips, a full set of Mills & Boon novels- my mother has been several women in her lifetime. When I see her own mother pick faults in how she refuses to dye her silver hair, how she became too soft for love, how she didn’t grow up to be as successful as her brother, I feel the same seething rage. The pointy poke of plug-pins. I want to lash out and tell my grandmother that her daughter is doing her best, and has the kindest heart in the world. That she once told me she loved to laugh, but was disciplined out of it. My mother looks at me and shakes her head. Don’t say anything. It’s okay. Some mothers need more time to build bridges to their daughters. Some daughters are more patient than (m)others. They can withstand the rain.
A friend and I have our final dinner in my Scottish home, before he leaves for the Netherlands. It is pouring outside; the clouds crying so we don’t have to. Amidst third helpings of shallot pasta, we decide we want prosecco. Sadness can be in company of celebration. Tesco is only an eight-minute walk up from mine, but he did not bring a jacket. He selects one of mine from the coat rack, and I watch the sleeves stop long before his arms. I speak carefully. I might have something that fits, but you have to promise not to have a big reaction. I coax the big beige cloud from under the bed and his slender frame puffs up in it. We stand in quietness for a few seconds. And then laugh uncontrollably. He looks like a ridiculous, tall latte. As I put on my shoes, he trots about in the raincoat, claiming that he’s now a working mom from Amsterdam. I drive my kids to school in my Volvo SUV, and I’m an architect. No organic materials, glass and cement only. He stays in character for as long as he wears the coat- mostly to make me laugh. We know how to slip into the skins of mothers on rainy days. We also know that the afterglow of joyous friendship can keep hearts alight.
I touch my mother’s slightly cold hand, and then her forehead, calm and unconscious. The doctor had said she would wake up soon; but in that moment, she looked so serene, it was hard not to wonder if she would. So small and fragile. Weightless. An entire ecosystem on a hospital bed. Her eyes yawn under the thin covers of her lids, and she tugs at my hand, with the softest of squeezes. A drowsy tear glides sidelong, quietly into her ear. Even her tears know not to make a scene.
I cherish this moment so much; I want to make a home in it. She will wake up in a minute, and instruct me to straighten the crease of her covers. She will want me to hold up a mirror so she can pat down her shampooed hair before the doctor comes back. She will offer the snacks she diligently packed in her hospital bag, to her visitors, telling them she’s feeling perfectly fine. She will want to be quietly upset about the unacknowledged cigarette. She will insist on returning home until the doctor relents. I will drive carefully on the quiet night roads; with precious, pink cargo, asleep in the back seat.
Tomorrow, I’ll take her to a wellness store where she will buy her first expensive face cream, a gift for being kind to her compromised body by having the surgery she had pushed for months. I will see her eyes become gleeful when the sales assistant tells her it has figs in it. She will ask me if she also needs a toner. I will say, No, no one needs expensive water. She will understand.
I know, that our tenderness is fleeting. I know, it's all we have. The rolling yellow hills of her heart, and mine. Like Ada, I want us to keep marveling. When it rains, I want us to be under the same raincoat. One, that smells of figs.
