The stories we carry, redux

I burrowed in over Christmas and New Year’s to write long hours, stare out windows, dive into memory’s murky seas. I’ve been working on an essay about mothers and daughters: my grandmother, my mother, myself. All of us daughters before we could be mothers, I the only one of the three without a daughter of my own.

I come back again and again to Marie Howe’s poem, read by Pádraig Ó Tuama on Poetry Unbound, and to this post I wrote during that time.

I cannot know my mother’s and my grandmother’s stories. Still, I carry them, and they carry me.


I was several years into my 40s before I could forgive my mother for being herself.

Seeing her so vulnerable now, it feels terrible to admit that, but it’s true. For most of my life, I wanted a different kind of mother. A less embarrassing, more supportive, not-so-critical one. A mother more “evolved” than mine. One whose vocabulary included words like “I’m sorry.” I was sure if my mother loved me she would “deal with her issues” so her issues would stop hurting me.

“Oh, the arrogance of youth,” her mother would say.

Lately I hear my grandmother’s voice a lot. Mom talks about her too, often in ways that imply she’s been in the room and just stepped out. Maybe she has. I like to think she’s close by, helping her girl make this transition. That’s me seeing the world through my favourite rose-coloured glasses, probably. The angst Mom expresses about a potential imminent reunion makes it clear their relationship was as complicated as ours.

But no less loving.

The mother-daughter relationship is so complex, so fraught with identity struggles and expectations, met and unmet. Layers of hurt and disappointment, fears of not being enough, not being accepted and loved just as we are. On both sides: mother and daughter.

I’m grateful — that’s too small a word — that Mom and I came to peace with each other and our relationship before we landed in this bizarre terrain. She doesn’t remember I’m her daughter most of the time now, but she remembers we love and trust each other.

I was watching her sleep the other morning as I listened to Pádraig Ó Tuama read Marie Howe’s poem “My Mother’s Body” on Poetry Unbound, On Being’s new poetry podcast, which has arrived in my life at the perfect moment.

I love the way Ó Tuama talks about the poem. About “all the ways we carry people who have tried to love us, and maybe the person succeeded, or maybe they didn’t, but nonetheless, we carry their story into our own surviving.”

I like to think I know my mother’s story. Her mother’s, too. But I don’t. Not really. How could I?

Yet I hope to carry their stories into my own surviving.


My Mother’s Body

by Marie Howe

Bless my mother’s body, the first song of her beating
heart and her breathing, her voice, which I could dimly hear,
grew louder. From inside her body I heard
almost every word she said.
Within that girl I drove to the store and back, her feet pressing
the pedals of the blue car, her voice, first gate to the cold
sunny mornings, rain, moonlight, snow fall, dogs…
Her kidneys failed, the womb where I once lived is gone.
Her young astonished body pushed me down that long corridor,
and my body hurt her, I know that – 24 years old. I’m old enough
to be that girl’s mother, to smooth her hair, to look into her exultant
frightened eyes, her bedsheets stained
with chocolate, her heart in constant failure.
It’s a girl, someone must have said. She must have kissed me
with her mouth, first grief, first air,
and soon I was drinking her, first food, I was eating my mother
slumped in her wheelchair, one of my brothers pushing it
across the snowy lawn, her eyes fixed, her face averted.
Bless this body she made, my long legs, her long arms and fingers,
our voice in my throat speaking to you now.


It would be easy to focus on everything lost between Mom and me in the years when I couldn’t forgive her for being herself: her flawed, sweet, wounded, beautiful, loving self.

I’m just grateful she forgave me, long ago, for being myself.


Originally posted March 12, 2020

8 Responses to “The stories we carry, redux”

  1. Sheila Peters

    So glad you spent Christmas hunkered down with your wonderful thoughts, Leslie. The poem is stunning and, of course, got me thinking of my own mother.

    She was someone everyone loved, remembered her even from their first grade when she taught them, recognized her, came up to her seventy years later. Her living long enough to go to their funerals.

    But she was an indecipherable puzzle to her kids – always loving and welcoming, but somehow distant. She could keep herself to herself, as my grandma used to say. Not really an attribute our generation has!

    Reply
    • Leslie

      Thanks for reading, Sheila. My mother too – and her mother even more so – kept herself to herself. That’s part of what I’ve been writing about in the essay I’m working on, and how, in Mom’s case, the dementia at the end of her life cracked her defensive walls and let me see a bit of what she’d been keeping to herself. I’m so grateful we had that time to know each other, even a little, outside of our mother-daughter constraints. It was liberating and enlightening.

      Every warm wish.

      Reply
  2. Joan Conway

    “Still, I carry them, and they carry me.”

    So many paradoxes in life. And holding it all within the beauty and grief.
    Thanks you for revisiting this and sharing it.
    Joan

    Reply
  3. judith

    Some of the simplest, sweetest, deepest thoughts I’ve read in a long time.
    Thank you, dear Leslie

    Reply
  4. Theresa

    I look forward to what you write, Leslie. I think of my late mother’s life as a textile that I’m still unfolding, discovering areas I hadn’t known, mysteries that haunt me. And in the way these things happen, I’ve found the names and a little more about her birth parents, things she’ll never know. We carry each other, I guess, sometimes reluctantly (on my part), but it’s also a necessary burden.

    Reply
    • Leslie

      It is a necessary burden, Theresa, you’re right. Thanks for reading, and, as always, thank you for your writing.

      Reply

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