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.
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It's Christmas Day and our family is sitting outside on the steps of our house. The landlord lives in the last house in the row, the second largest building. His is painted, with a fence and windows that have glass in them. He lives in the house with his wife, who has suffered a crippling stroke and can hardly walk, and his illegitimate daughter. His daughter is pregnant, and he is the father of the baby. The first house in this gray line of crumbling shacks is the largest and nicest of them all, home to the rest of his family, his son and daughter born of his marriage to his shrunken wife. His wife spends a lot of time in the front house, his son and daughter rarely visit the back house. I haven't seen them today, which is odd because it's Christmas and everybody visits at Christmastime. We're sitting outside because my father has returned home and in a drunken fit has thrown most of the dinner out the window, along with some glasses, a pot and plates. He has long passed from frenzy into melancholia and is now sobbing into vomit-flecked sheets. Soon he will be asleep and we may even creep out to see our friends' new toys. We have to hurry back, though, because he sleeps fitfully and has been known to awaken and start hollering for us.
None of us want him alone and drunk with my mother, and I don't want it ever to get dark because my mother will be asleep in our bed and he will insist that I sleep in theirs. As much as I try to will blessed unconsciousness, there is no escaping the base perversion the night will disgorge. But it means that he will calm toward my mother, and in that pitiful cause-and-effect pairing of the young, unformed mind, I see that I can help her, I can alleviate our suffering. I can shield my mother by having my father visit his awful intentions instead on my body. How perverse that a child should bargain for her mother's welfare with her own self, that a mother should accept this heartbreaking gift -- and that childhood should be dismissed in such a summary manner.
My father tells the same story time and again when he has had too much to drink, when reason mutates into mindless black rage. It begins with my mother leaving him just before I was born and not returning until I was 3 years old, and it ends the same way with each telling, with him sobbing and reaching for me, clumsily petting me and calling me his prize, his gold, his most treasured child, all the while spraying my mother in bespittled invective. He rails too against my mother's family, but I sense fear and something else beneath the bitter onslaught: My father is both afraid and grudgingly respectful of my grandfather.
I close my eyes and search for those early years, but there is nothing in my memory of the time spent with my grandparents, and there is an odd absence of any baby pictures in my grandparents' photo albums. The earliest images I can find show a chubby, shy child holding hands with her brother in the front yard of my grandparents' home on the Pomeroon River. In the background is the house my grandfather built, and off to the far right you can barely see the muted gleam of the Pomeroon.
I love this river, the urgent, buzzing life of its banks and this creaky dim old farmhouse wrapped in the dense, ripe promise of fruit-heavy trees. It takes us an entire day to travel to the farm: cousins, aunts, my mother, brothers and sisters, all one excitable shrieking group, and us giddy with the realization that for a week or so, the long arm of my father will not reach this far. My aunts arrive first, weighed down with bags of food and clothing, which they arrange around their feet underneath the steamer's slotted wooden benches. Once settled, they smile benignly at us, hand out sweets to clamoring hands, and we're free to run off. Which we do, up and down the narrow stairs, shoving and yelling from the bow to the lower sections, perilously leaning out over the iron rails. The day slides by in a dusty rumble of docking boats and bumpy land vehicles, until our bus rolls to a belching end on the river bank. And there is my grandfather waiting by the launch -- familiar, comforting, faded craggy gray head crinkling in our direction. He gets up and lumbers over, a stooped beloved giant of a man. We chug noisily down the river and arrive with the setting sun.
This is when I have seen my mother at her happiest, with a father she loved and a life simple in its needs, generous in its return. We feasted hugely, childish appetites burst open by days of simple farm labor and excessive play, by climbing trees, swimming in murky river water, digging through piles of dusty old magazines, chasing after complacent chickens and running screaming from imaginary tigers. Oddly, I discovered I missed my father on the journey back and was foolishly glad to see him. I came to realize this was but a vestige of hopeful childhood that faded and died in time. I couldn't make that journey to Pomeroon as often as I wanted, coming to rely instead on the embellished tales my siblings relayed back to me. My mother went many times, choosing not to see or to ignore a young child's terror at being left behind, seeking for herself the desperate relief of her childhood home.
That was the darkest time of my life, the years from my earliest memory until well after my 11th birthday. I haven't seen my father in 12 years, and four years ago I spoke to him for the last time. There were no showdowns, no violent last scenes, I just never picked up the phone again and never responded to letters. I spent much of my life trying to figure out why I was the target of his terrible abuse, and some explanations were there, but none that pointed the way to reconciliatory measures. At some point a shift must have occurred, because I stopped being angry with him -- worse, I stopped thinking of him as my father. I think I grew weary of my own internal struggles and wanted very simply to move beyond them. But the anger didn't go away; instead it shifted to my mother.
What is a parent's role? My West Indian ancestry stabs an accusing finger in my direction and swats the question away. It is the duty of the child to the parent that is more important. Your parents do for you and they sacrifice their entire lives and this is how you turn out. She is your mother! But a mother, my mother, would have taken me away from the hell of my home, my mother would have run away with me, my mother would have protected me. Instead my mother needed protecting, she sought escape and she couldn't comfort, and in the end, the child could not continue being mother to its own mother. But children need their parents, and as much as I seem unable to draw comfort and enlist support from mine, I can't ignore synthetic constructs such as Mother's Day. I will send her a card so she can display it and point to it proudly and say, "That's from my daughter in America." A small white sheet of paper, embellished with color and glitter, its safe anonymity tells nothing of the sender, but to an aging woman on the far side of the continent, it speaks of hope and reconciliation and family.
