Left Neglected

Chapter 25





It’s Monday morning, and my mother is clearing the dishes from breakfast. I had steel-cut oatmeal with maple syrup and strawberries and a latte, and the kids and my mother ate scrambled eggs, bacon, English muffins, and orange juice. My mother is a firm believer in a hot and hearty breakfast, which is news to me. I grew up on Cocoa Pebbles, Pop-Tarts, and Hawaiian Punch.

I’ve been learning a lot about my mother since coming home from Baldwin. She also believes in saying grace before dinner, in wearing slippers or socks and never shoes or bare feet in the house, that all laundry needs to be ironed (including towels and underwear), that everyone should get at least fifteen minutes of fresh air every day regardless of the weather, that the kids have too much “stuff” and watch too much TV, that Bob is a “good man” but he’s “working himself into an early grave,” and that God has a plan. With the exception of the obsessive ironing, I agree with her opinions and ways of living (even if I haven’t been living by them myself) and am surprised by how alike we are.

But in all that I’m discovering about her, I have little sense for what she believes about me, except that she believes that I need her help. I find myself wanting to know more, studying her for clues, unable to ask, like I’m back in junior high school, gaping at the back of Sean Kelly’s head in homeroom, wondering in my unbearably awkward silence if he likes me. Does my mother believe that I’m a good woman? A good mother? Is she proud of me? does she believe that I’ll fully recover? I wonder.

And the more I learn, the more questions this seems to un-earth, especially about the past. Where was this woman during my childhood? Where were my rules and hot meals and ironed clothes? I wonder if she knows how many hours of The Brady Bunch I logged, how many bologna and mayonnaise sandwich dinners I ate alone in front of the TV and without saying grace while she stayed sequestered in her bedroom and my father worked the night shift at the station. Why wasn’t I enough for her? I wonder.

Mount Cortland weather this morning is reporting high winds and all summit lifts closed. Even though this wouldn’t affect Charlie and Lucy on the beginners’ slopes, we’ve decided to lie low and stay home today. I assumed they’d be dying to watch a movie or play a video game, since they haven’t done either since the car ride up on Friday, but they both want to go outside to play in the yard.

“Snowsuits, hats, mittens, boots,” I say as they race each other into the mudroom.

“Where’s the beach stuff ?” hollers Charlie, referring to the bin of shovels, pails, and castle molds as suitable for playing in snow as they are for sand.

“Everything’s already outside,” calls my mother. “Charlie, hold up! Your vitamin!”

He swishes and clomps in his suit and boots back into the kitchen and dutifully swallows his Concerta.

“Good boy. Off you go,” says my mother.

We watch them out the picture window. Lucy, wearing one of her many sets of fairy wings over her coat like a backpack, is collecting sticks into a red pail. Charlie runs out closer to the woods and starts rolling in the snow. Meanwhile, Linus is cruising around the coffee table in the living room, still wearing his feety pajamas, clicking magnetic trains together.

“I’ll take Linus out for some fresh air in a few minutes,” says my mother.

“Thanks.”

She sits down in the chair next to me, to my right, her favorite place to position herself so I can be sure to see her. She holds her mug of herbal tea in her hand and flips open People magazine. I have yesterday’s New York Times in front of me. I’m searching for page C5, a continuation of the article I started yesterday from the front page about the cost of the Afghan war. I can’t find it.

“I know you have this thing about the Sunday Times, but there are easier ways to get the news and practice your reading.”

“Tell me you’re not saying People magazine is news.”

“I’m just saying. You could be done reading this today,” she says, turning the page for emphasis.

She doesn’t get it. It’s not about reading simply anything or taking the easy way out. It’s about reading what I normally read. Reading the Sunday Times is about getting my life back.

“You won’t know anything about Angelina Jolie after reading all that,” says my mother, smirking.

“Somehow, I’ll survive,” I say.

Still smiling from her little joke, my mother opens a clear plastic pillbox, pours a handful of white and yellow pills into her palm, and swallows each one with a separate sip of tea.

“What are those for?” I ask.

“These?” she asks, shaking her pillbox. “These are my Vitamins.”

I wait for further explanation.

“They’re my happy pills. My antidepressant medication.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not me without them.”

In all this time, it never occurred to me that she could be clinically depressed. My father and I would tell each other and anyone who asked about her that she was still grieving or having a hard time or not feeling well today, but we never used the word depressed. I thought her lack of interest in what was left of her family, in me, was her choice. For the first time, I consider the possibility of a different story.

“When did you start taking them?”

“About three years ago.”

“Why didn’t you go to a doctor sooner?” I ask, assuming that she needed them long before then.

“Your dad and I never thought of it. Our generation didn’t go to the doctor for feelings. You went for broken bones or surgery or to have babies. We didn’t believe in depression. We both thought I just needed some time to mourn, and then I’d be able to put a smile on my face and carry on.”

“That didn’t happen.”

“No, it didn’t.”

In all my limited experience with my mother, our conversations have always skimmed the surface and gone nowhere. It’s such a small thing, to hear my mother admit what has never been in dispute, that she wasn’t happy and never carried on, but her candid confession encourages me to continue the conversation, to dive into our big and murky water. I take a deep breath, not knowing how far down the bottom might be, or what I might bump into along the way.

“Did you notice a difference when you started taking the pills?”

“Oh, right away. Well, within about a month or so. It was like I’d been existing inside a dark, polluted cloud, and it finally lifted and floated away. I wanted to do things again. I started to garden again. And read. I joined a book club and the Red Hat ladies and started going for walks on the beach every morning. I wanted to wake up every morning and do something.”

Three years ago. Charlie was four, and Lucy was two. Bob was still passionate and dreamy about his start-up, and I was still working at Berkley—writing reports, flying to China, ensuring the success and longevity of a multimillion-dollar company. And my mother was gardening again. I remember her vegetable garden. And she was reading and beachcombing. But she wasn’t trying to reconnect with her only daughter.

“Before I started taking the medication, I didn’t want to wake up in the morning. I was paralyzed with What-Ifs. What if I’d paid closer attention to Nate in the pool? He’d still be here. I was his mother, and I didn’t protect him. What if something happened to you? I didn’t deserve to be your mother. I didn’t deserve to live. I’d been asking God to let me die in my sleep every night for almost thirty years.”

“It was an accident. It wasn’t your fault,” I say.

“Sometimes I think your accident was my fault, too,” she says.

I stare at her, not comprehending what she could possibly mean by this.

“I used to pray to God for a reason to be in your life, for a way to know you again.”

“Mom, please, God didn’t conk me on the head and take away the left side of everything so you could be in my life.”

“But I am in your life because you got conked on the head and lost the left side of everything.”

God has a plan.

“You know, you could’ve simply called me.”

And not involved God and a debilitating brain injury.

“I wanted to. I tried, but every time I picked up the phone, I froze before I could finish dialing. I couldn’t imagine what I’d say that would be enough. I was afraid you must hate me, that it was too late.”

“I don’t hate you.”

These words slip from my mouth without conscious consideration, as if I were responding with a pat reply, like saying Good after someone asks How are you? But in the next quiet moments, I realize that these words are true and not simply polite lip service. In my complex web of not-so-admirable feelings about my mother, not one strand is woven from hatred. I study my mother and notice a palpable change in her energy, as if her baseline level of nervous vibration dials down. Not off, but considerably down.

“I’m so sorry I failed you, Sarah. I live with so much regret. Not watching Nate more closely, not getting to him before it was too late, losing all those years with you, not getting on antidepressants sooner. I wish these pharmaceutical companies would make an anti-regret pill.”

I take in this sincere wish and study my mother’s face— the worry lines, which are really more like worry trenches, dug between her eyebrows and along her forehead, the sorrow in her eyes, regret etched into every feature. Some future FDA-approved, prescription medication isn’t the cure for her pain. My mother doesn’t need another pill in her pillbox. She needs forgiveness. She needs my forgiveness. And although I don’t hate you and It wasn’t your fault came as ready, honest offerings, I know they’re only palliative at best. “She’s not ugly” isn’t the same as “she’s beautiful,” and “he’s not stupid” isn’t the same as “he’s smart.” My mother’s cure for a lifetime of regret lies within the words I forgive you, spoken only by me. I intuitively know this, but some part of me, old and wounded and needing a miracle cure of its own, resists this generosity and won’t allow the words to leave my head. And even then, before they can be spoken, they’d have to make the long journey from my head to my heart if they’re to earn the sincerity they’d need to be effective.

“I feel regret, too,” I say instead, knowing that the weight of a young sister’s remorse must feel infinitesimal compared to a mother’s, a speck of dust resting on my shoulders compared to an entire planet on hers. “I still miss him.”

“I do, too. Every day. And I’m still sad. But the sadness doesn’t swallow me whole like it used to. And there’s joy now. I see a little of Nate from when he was a toddler in Linus, and I see lots of him in you and Charlie. It heals my soul to witness pieces of him still alive.”

I watch Linus pulling a dozen trains linked together around the edge of the coffee table. I was only three when Nate was Linus’s age, and I don’t remember enough about him, either physically or in personality, to see a resemblance in this moment. I wonder what it is that my mother sees. I look out the window and see Charlie playing off in the distance, building a mountain out of snow. I remember Nate’s sense of grand adventure, his determination, his imagination. Charlie has all of those traits. And so do I.

“What about Lucy? Do you see any of Nate in her?”

Lucy is still playing close to the house. Her mittens are on the ground, and she’s sprinkling glitter onto several nests assembled out of twigs and rocks and pinecones, presumably homes for the woodland fairies she believes in.

“Nope. That adorable little nut is a one-of-a-kind.”

We both laugh. I like the sound of my mother’s laugh. I wish she’d found these pills when I was a kid, that I wasn’t learning the sound of my mother’s laughter at the age of thirty-seven and at the price of a traumatic brain injury. I look over at her pillbox. It suddenly occurs to me that she took many more pills than should be prescribed solely for depression. What else could she be taking medication for? I wonder.