At the springs, Anna and I lay down a blanket on the grass and splay out our imperfect bodies. I tell her about what I’m writing, and she talks about Alice’s new Montessori preschool. We don’t share the same language anymore, but we are both trying to learn the other’s vocabulary.
I wonder if our lives will track closer after I have a baby, and she once again becomes the mentor she was to me in my younger days. Then again, I may never have a baby, and I feel all right with that. So many women my age are torn up over the question mark of motherhood, but on this topic—if nothing else—I feel a total zen. I don’t know what comes next. It’s like a novel whose ending I haven’t read yet.
The sun is hot, and pools of sweat start dripping down our bare bellies. We walk out to the spring and touch a toe in the water. It’s bracingly cold. A short diving board leads out into the middle of the murky pool, and we stand there like kids, hunched and laughing, our skin covered with goose bumps.
“You go,” I say, nudging her, and she says, “No, you go.” And we giggle until she gathers herself up, serious now. “OK, do you want me to go?” And I nod. So she walks out on the platform, like she always has, and jumps first.
ONE SUNDAY MORNING, my mother and I are having coffee. We’re still in our yoga clothes, sitting on the empty patio of a café. Out of nowhere, she says, “I’m just so glad you’re sober.”
My mom didn’t say much about my drinking for a long time, and now that the subject is out in the open, I feel uncomfortable dwelling here. The words can make me feel stuck, branded. I’m four years sober now. When do these pronouncements end?
But I understand my mother needs to give voice to these feelings. She is an emotional blurter. In the middle of family dinner, she’ll say to me and my brother, “I just love you two kids so much,” and it’s like: OK, but can you pass the chicken?
My mother stares at her teacup, getting a contemplative look in her eye. “I wish I could have been there more for you when you were a little girl,” she says, and her green eyes turn watery.
“Mom, stop,” I say, waving off the emotional charge of the conversation. “Don’t you like who I am?”
She nods that yes, she does.
“Do you think you screwed up so badly that it requires all this apologizing?”
She shakes her head that no, she doesn’t. She tries to explain gently, what I might not understand: the impossible hope of parenthood, the need to shelter your child from pain. It’s hard to live with the mistakes, she says. She wishes she’d been better.
I do understand. We all live in the long shadow of the person we could have been. I regret how selfish and irresponsible I’ve been as their daughter. How many things I took for granted. My mother’s constant emotional nourishment. My father’s hard work and unwavering support.
I have lunch each month with my dad now. He is different than the man who raised me. Looser, funnier, and more engaged, faster with his smile. He still reads the newspaper every day. Watches the evening news. There is so much more kicking around in his head than I ever gave him credit for. Just because someone is quiet doesn’t mean they have nothing to say.
One afternoon, we start talking about drinking. My dad quit ten years ago, worrying the alcohol would interfere with his medications. Though he’d never been much of a drinker when I was a little girl, by the time I was in college, his consumption had crept into the armchair-drinker red zone. He could put away a bottle a night without realizing it.
Because he quit so easily, and without complaint, I assumed it wasn’t a big sacrifice. But he tells me that’s not true. It had been rough. He still misses it all the time. “I would definitely say I have alcoholic tendencies,” he tells me, and I look at him. Once again: Who are you?
In the four years of my sobriety, he has never said these words to me. Alcoholic tendencies. I continue to be startled by how much of my personality derives from him. My self-consciousness, my humor, my anxiety. I may look and talk like my mother, but I am equal parts (if not more) this man. What else has my dad not told me? How much more has he kept inside, because no one ever thought to ask? And do I have enough time to dig it out?
I’m aware of the ticking clock. My mother loses her keys too often, and she forgets what she’s saying in midsentence. My dad loses his balance when he stands in one place too long. Neurological problems in his feet. One evening, his legs give out while we’re standing in a line, and he slumps to the ground right next to me, as though he’s been shot. I can’t help noticing the effects of aging are an awful lot like the effects of drinking. Loss of balance. Loss of consciousness. Loss of memory.