T A B L E++T A L K

Mother always said ... and it was true! Fill in the blank in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Missing Children
By Rob Spillman
Wanting a Child: When the desire to be parents comes easier than the children
(05/05/98)

Drama Queen Candidates
The best of the worst of what you did
(05/04/98)

Sex and the 7-year-old boy
By Mona Gable
How to deal with it when your 7-year-old begins making the moves on you
(05/01/98)

The foundling
By Sallie Tisdale
Adoption -- and giving birth -- taught me that biology has nothing to do with being a parent
(04/30/98)

Confessions of a teenage mom
By Tessa Souter
My son and I grew up together, will grow old together -- and saved each other
(04/29/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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________BY ROSE STOLL | A few months ago, I stopped opening my mother's letters. A small, dark event, unsettling in its simple promise, that if I wanted, I could step out of the frame of family and set aside the choking accretion of 37 years. Foolish, sad presumption, that I could hope to contain this insistent bilious seepage with such a disproportionately simple act -- or could I? I remember coming upstairs and setting her letter down, turning to take off my coat, then pausing to pick it up again. Looking with some detachment at the familiar code of the immigrant's life: the overly glued flap catching parts of the contained pages, former defense against shifty third world postal employees carried over to her North American life; a continuous row of stamps patched together from what was found in purses and drawers, then supplemented at the post office window; a steeply cursive system of addressing that ignores all postal convention. I stand there unseeing, balancing the envelope on my open palm -- then, I drop it, into the basket on my dresser. I do not have to open this. That done, and slowly realized, I suddenly have to sit down. I never have to open her letters again.

"But she is your mother!" Years of hissing relatives come to bear on my sagging shoulders. She is my mother. As she has often reminded me herself, invoking God, my dead grandparents and every Hallmarkism she can think of, and me passing from anger to weary amusement to indifference. Yet, now, I am not so sure it is indifference -- it seems to be more of a closing, born of a frantic need to survive wasted, lost years. I don't want to open her letters anymore; I don't want to listen to pages of a life endured with imperfect sons, daughters, husband, daughters-in-law, sons-in-law and other assorted relatives and people she knows. I don't want to sit through the numbing minutiae of her last fight with my sister-in-law or suffer the various ailments that now seem to afflict her every waking moment or visit the squall she is being forced into with her sisters over the disposition of my grandparents' property God rest their souls if they only knew your poor grandfather would turn over in his very grave. I am no longer willing to be a part of the frozen inert landscape into which my mother has permanently carved herself a resting place, unwilling to break free even in response to the muffled screams of a daughter whose childhood was being ripped away from her.

But she is my mother. And every year at this time I stand in front of glistening bright row upon row of drippy sentiment enrobed in slick color: She is my mother and I have to send her a card for this holiest of all retail traditions, Mother's Day.

This farmer's daughter, this tall, large-boned woman with the wide, archless feet of a person born to the soil, this person who bore five children into a violent marriage, this frightened child who shuttled between the redemptive calm of her parents home and the wrath of a vengeful husband, this uncertain adult, this woman is my mother. A mother I have held at arm's length for as long as I can remember, with whom I have never shared girlish confidences. We don't easily or at all display affection in our family. The last time I hugged my mother she was crying, because I had returned home for a surprise visit after a five-year absence. I recall how awkward I felt, how unfamiliar the physical closeness, and I remember an uncharitable thought: that the howling woman I was gingerly touching seemed to be crying less from release of emotion and more from the habit of coarse display. Because this is how she lived her life, by laying it bare to the nearest passerby. My mother kept no secrets and did not indulge in ruminative pastimes. Scandals were savored and quickly spread, illnesses were extended by detailing them to indulgent ears, decisions were by consensus of the community and weighed by the simple rubric of being able to hold her head up. And errant husbands earned one a place of honor in this society, allowing the sufferer many luxuriant hours of backyard chat with whispering neighbors.

And yet, there is the other woman, the mother who gave her insistent teenage daughter her last $20 to buy shoes she absolutely must have because all the kids in her upper-middle-class school wore them. My mother dishes up meals to a gaping family maw and retires to the kitchen ostensibly to finish some chore, but really so she can eat her own diminished plate quickly. My mother is screaming from downstairs as she tries to fend off my drunken father and there we are, my brother and I, charging to her side, ready to kill in her defense.

N E X T+P A G E: Bargaining for my mother's welfare with my own body