Mothers, Sisters, Daughters - Part Two

family ties, old and new

illustration by Micheal Linog

Three years ago, in another spring that had the trees speckled in yellow-green buds, two pivotal conversations in my life began. When my oldest daughter was growing into her own little personality, and a third baby was on our minds, we invited my mom to move to Charleston from Connecticut. She was thinking about retirement. We were thinking about caring for aging parents.

While we pushed around ideas about living with my mom – an extension on our house; this neighborhood or that – we also began the conversation of having another family as big as ours move into our house. Tamara, wife, and mother of three, as well as cousin to Tony, and niece to Lola, probably hadn’t considered that moving in meant inheriting not just my kids, but my parents as well. The decision to merge our lives was an exercise in listening to what the Spirit says. It’s the practice of living what we believe. And it hasn’t been easy.

A few months after the Bartletts moved in, my mom’s purchase of her house down the road went through. That same month, Tamara’s mom, Joyce, moved into our house after a seizure caused a bad fall. A whole side of her body, from cheekbone to ankle, was black and blue. Tamara, who had an infant, nursed her mom back to health. She said those first few weeks when her mom was so weak she needed help getting on and off the toilet, were the best they’d ever had together.

I didn’t know Tamara or Joyce well enough at the time to recognize that a kind of restoration was taking place in front of my eyes. Though maybe I should have known that for Joyce, who still lives steeped in the shame of having left her family, deciding to move into our house with her daughter and grandchildren was a seismic shift in her life. I watched Tamara begin to receive the same healing I was hopeful for with my own mom.

While Joyce’s strength returned, I watched her heart retreat. Some old friends came around. Her medication was constant trouble, leaving her unsteady, unable to sleep, and with a host of other side effects. She stayed with us for a few more months until our full house, loud with kids, and busy with bodies from sunrise to sunset, got to be too much. She had her strength back and, it seemed to me that maybe she wanted her life back too. Our way of living so closely and constantly with one another is tiring. It was the same retreat my own mother would make shortly after moving here.

Joyce, who’d moved into my house when Theo was just a few weeks old, had occupied a big place in those first quiet months. Tamara and I both had infants. We were tired and trying to figure each other out. When Joyce told me she was leaving, Tamara was out of town. I wept like she was my own mother. Tamara, hardened, used to being left, thought I was crazy, naïve maybe, to respond like this. I think I was crying for myself too. I think I was realizing that being left wrenches the heart out of joint. And there’s no telling if it will ever go back.

My Mom had never remarried after getting divorced fifteen years ago. She moved close to us after her dad and closest companion both died. When I allow myself to consider it, her loneliness wraps itself around my lungs and makes my throat tighten. I feel anxious and sad. We wanted her close to her children and grandchildren. We wanted her to be a part of us. I wanted to give her back what I’d taken.

When I chose boarding school, I seized an opportunity to individuate myself. This breaking apart was from my family first but solidified the idea that separations of this kind are good. My current understanding is opposed to the individualism that has flourished into a kind of morality for us moderns. You grow up, you leave your parents, you get to work, and then you have your own family. I think it’s all a farce to who we are as people, as socially dependent organisms who are uniquely weak and unequipped to sustain our own lives at birth. Unlearning this is difficult and messy. It’s a lesson I want to learn for myself, and one I want to teach my daughters.

When she was still between her old home in Connecticut and her new home on Johns Island, my mom revealed that she was dating a man from our area. They were talking about marriage. That relationship ended. Then when she moved here for good, she met another man and soon intended to marry him. The second time, the news winded me like a punch to the gut. Though she’d drawn nearer, her absences and silences grew heavier, stretched longer, and this new man in our lives remained a stranger.

The week before my mom’s wedding Joe and Jacob brought home forty chicks. We’ve learned that when you buy chicks, you get a few extra. Sometimes baby animals die and there’s not much you can do about it.

When we saw that we had a weak chick, we didn’t leave it in the group with the rest of them to die. We plucked it out. And this is how it ended up in Tamara’s care, who took on the role of chicken mom.

Tamara has rescued multiple dogs in her life. She learned from her dad and has an affinity for weak animals that is borne from the neglect and abandonment she faced as a child. If she sees weakness, every atom of her body is pulled toward it. It was with this drive that she took on the challenge of the weak chick with all of herself.

She diagnosed her and determined a treatment plan. She nursed her for days, keeping her in a separate box. She mashed up her food with water. She bought vitamins. She held her in a towel for hours so the tiny thing could nap comfortably. When things were starting to look up, Tamara named her chick Anai, meaning God is gracious.

Tamara has an innate understanding of animals and their experience and needs. It’s so foreign to me that I want to call bullshit. But then there’s the chick, getting stronger, attaching to her, and receiving a name. She came back to life and strength. I could never do it as Tamara did. It’s the same thing she did for her own mom. The same thing I’d hoped to do for mine.

My mom’s wedding weekend came and went. My family passed through town, and we visited with many of them. I chose not to attend the wedding. I stayed with Tamara. I stayed with Emily. Noah was cluster-feeding that weekend. I spent many hours on the couch, nursing her and weeping. Every quiet moment turned into tears as I watched an invisible knife cut away the very thing I’d been hoping for. I watched the boxes leave my mom’s house down the street and head toward her new place an hour away.

When Tamara moved in, I wasn’t sure it was right. I didn’t understand how living with someone whose life and experience were opposite my own could be so necessary to my growth. Tamara is a woman with many words, and somehow my silence can crush her. She comes from a line of women who grew up poor on this rural southern island. My mom is from suburban New Jersey where she grew up with all the middle-class comforts of the post-war boom. My family took foster kids in, and Tamara grew up scared that child services would take her away.

But this is where we came from. Our stories matter. Where they intersect and where they depart. These women who raised us are essential to our lives and to our children. They’re essential to our healing.

So here we sit, Tamara and me, it’s breakfast and the seven kids we share are hungry. There’s a sick chick to take care of. We are different, and our differences empower us to love more fully. If I can learn to interrupt Tamara, to get a word in, and she can learn to draw out of my silence the deep, unseen things of my heart, then anything is possible. Then our moms can learn to be with us, and us with them.

The veil over my story is being pulled back. No woman is an island, no matter how easily that tale is written and lived. No decision I make is separate from my children and grandchildren. I’m not separate from Tamara, who might have closed her heart to the reality that a baby animal was dying in her house, instead of nursing it back to life. She held up its weak neck to help it eat and drink. While I watched her, I realized that she could do this for me too. That she is doing it for me. This is the kind of care, the kind of mothering I need. And I, in turn, can do it for her.