“It’s not about Sam, Mom,” I said, and then added, in a burst of unintended honesty, “It’s about Chuck. And me. It’s just, the baby situation—it’s been really rough on us.”
My mother shook her head, no, banishing my words from the table. “But I just have a feeling that everything is going to be fine, sweetheart.” She reached across the table and put her hand on top of mine. “I’ve been meditating on it, did I tell you that? Channeling my positive energy your way. You two are going to get your baby soon, I just know it. I mean, those tests you did, they weren’t a-hundred-percent-without-a-doubt conclusive.” She patted my hand once, definitively, as if this had settled the question. “Maybe you should come with me to my next meditation group session? It might help with the stress. Maybe stress is the real reason you aren’t conceiving!”
It took all my self-control to prevent myself from pushing my chair back and throwing my napkin on the table. Meditation. Sitting silently, doing nothing, emptying your mind: exactly the kind of inaction that Dr. Cindy always preached against. How was that going to change my situation?
“No, it’s OK, Mom,” I said, keeping my voice bright, straightening up and taking a bite of spinach salad to prove to her how OK I was. “I’ve got something of my own. I joined a new group, a self-help movement for women. It’s pretty exciting, actually.”
My mom’s face lit up. “You did! That’s great, darling. What’s it called?”
“GenFem.” I wondered if it was a bad idea to tell her, if I’d given away the keys to a vault that I should have kept locked. What if my mother wanted to join? Would I want her there with me?
But it didn’t matter, because my mother seemed uninterested. “Hmm, don’t know it, but I’m glad for you, sweetheart, really glad. You need something to believe in. It’s too hard to do this all by yourself.” It was unclear what she meant by this, but I didn’t ask her because she was signaling the waiter for more Pellegrino and clearly didn’t want to elaborate, didn’t want to know any more about my pain than I’d already told her.
I found myself thinking of my one-on-one session with Dr. Cindy a few weeks back. We’d been discussing my mother and her chronic dabbling with new philosophies, when suddenly Dr. Cindy pressed a knuckle to her cheek and cocked her head at me. “Your mother, a real piece of work,” she murmured. “Maybe it would do you both some good to get some space. Have you considered that she might be toxic, just like your sister?”
I stared back at her. “What do you mean?”
“All that New Age stuff she believes in—or pretends to believe in, I should say—how has that ever helped her? All it has ever done is enable her to be blind to the reality right in front of her eyes.”
“It’s true. But she’s still my mother,” I protested.
“I’d argue that your real mother is the person who opens your eyes to yourself,” Dr. Cindy pushed back. “Anyone can give birth to and raise a child, yes, but the true maternal figure in a woman’s life is the person who helps her learn how to identify her core issues, resolve them, and redirect her life. Be her best self. And only once you’ve achieved those three critical things are you truly capable of being a good mother yourself.”
And so now I wondered, had my mother ever, really, helped me achieve my best self? If anything, hadn’t she always avoided taking responsibility for my emotional growth altogether? Would a good mother have moved her twins to Hollywood at age nine, ignoring the signs that one of them hated the whole concept of being an actress? And later, when Sam and I started trading identities, hadn’t she just looked the other way and pretended she didn’t notice? Surely my mother had known, just as I did, that Sam was flirting with substance abuse; and yet she’d done nothing about that either, until it was far too late.
All those parenting books my mother read, all those books on healing and meditation and spirituality. Why hadn’t she spent less time looking inward at herself and a lot more time trying to actually see each of us?
If you looked at it this way, Dr. Cindy had been more of a mother to me lately than my actual mother.
Maybe I do need some space, I thought as I stared at my mother across the table. Maybe I need a clean slate, for a while, just so I can see myself clearly. And I lifted a forkful of spinach to my mouth, gritting my teeth as I swallowed, thinking of the greens slipping their way through my body, weighing me down like an anchor.
27
I SPENT THAT AFTERNOON working on the centerpieces for a fiftieth birthday party, a thousand dollars’ worth of pale pink roses in gold vases. I’d always enjoyed this part of my day—the quiet hours spent patiently pinning flowers into sprays, trying to achieve a balance between delicate and solid, prickly and soft. I created beautiful objects that made people happy on their special occasions, and that had always felt less like a career than a privilege. But that day everything felt off. The roses, despite being delivered just the day before, weren’t very fresh, and were curling at the tips despite my best efforts to revive them with sugar water. The paint on the vases was chipping. The centerpieces were several inches shorter than the client’s specifications, no matter how I rearranged them.
I headed out in the delivery van nearly an hour late, with no time to address the piles of paperwork that I promised myself I’d attend to. Five years in, and my business was still only barely scraping by. I loved the buckets of flowers brimming with possibility, the blank canvas of a vase, the clouds of sweet fragrance and the dark taint of earth just below, but I was dismal as a businesswoman. Dr. Cindy said that I’d undermined myself by choosing a career path at which I was doomed to fail. “You should consider selling your business and becoming a Mentor when you hit Level Ten,” she’d suggested, a prospect that both thrilled and terrified me. Was I ready for that kind of a commitment to the Method? (But if not, why was I pursuing it at all?)
I dropped the flowers at a modernist compound up in the Montecito hills, with a vanishing pool that looked out to the sea and a Richard Serra sculpture gracing the front garden. The client, deep in conversation with the caterer, was too distracted to notice the lackluster height of her centerpieces. I left the flowers and then drove back to my house, planning to stop in for just a few minutes before heading back out to a GenFem meeting.
I was in the kitchen, weighing out my carrot sticks, when I heard a thump above me, the sound of something heavy being scraped along the hardwood floor. I followed the sound up the stairs and found Chuck in the office, digging through the closet. Sports equipment and luggage were piled on the floor next to him, golf clubs tangling with duffel bags and tennis gear. A tube of neon green tennis balls rolled drunkenly across the room and stopped just at my feet.