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Sparkle (1)
Emmy, you only met my mother once. You were three months old when we flew across the country to San Jose last December, so that you could meet your maternal grandmother for the first (and last) time. I was really nervous as a first-time mother, travelling with a baby so young, but I knew this was an important trip, and just how much my mom wanted to hold you and rock you.
My mother passed away last February, after a nearly nineteen-year battle with breast cancer. As the anniversary of her death approaches, I have been thinking about her more and more.
We have nicknames for the other grandmothers in your life – “Baba” for Dada’s mother, and “Savtah” for my stepmother. I keep struggling with what I should call my mother when I talk to you about her in the years to come. “Grandma Sandy” sounds weird. I never called my mother by her first name, so referencing her by her first name now seems inappropriate. I feel sad that we never had a chance to create a term of endearment specific to her before she passed.
My mother was incredibly creative and talented, and encouraged my creativity from the time I was very young. With an expert hand, she taught me how to sew, how to crochet, how to bead, and how to cook. For one of my sister’s pre-teen birthday parties, she helped all of the party attendees make cloth puppets. After my sister and I watched Grease and became obsessed with the fashions of the 1950’s, my mother helped us make ourselves poodle skirts. She would often make us decorate-your-own-pancakes, and would ask us to help her bake bread, cook spaghetti, or help make omelettes for Sunday brunch. My mother also encouraged me to climb trees, participate in school plays, and spend a summer learning archery. And she loved dancing to music, just like you, Em. My mom loved strong female singers, like Janis Joplin and Bonnie Raitt. She would be a regular at folk festivals, and could always be seen up front, by the stage, dancing fervently to the music.
But I want to tell you about who my mother was as honestly as possible. My relationship with her was never easy because, truthfully, she wasn’t an easy person to have a relationship with. My mom had had a difficult, tumultuous relationship with her own parents, and that had deep-reaching repercussions in how she dealt with other family members. Because she had never received unconditional love as a child, she was never able to provide it to others. As a result, my mother’s love was opinionated, judgmental, and certainly came with conditions.
She was also periodically manic, and because she never sought treatment, the frequency of her manic periods seemed to increase as she aged. There would be months where she would wake up at three a.m. and leave the house to go on a shopping binge that our family couldn’t afford. She would sometimes wake me up at 4 o’clock in the morning so that I could do laundry or take care of some other chore that could obviously have waited until a normal waking hour. During these times, she was a walking powder-keg, just waiting for a random spark to set her off so she could explode and channel all the energy bubbling inside of her at something. During these times it was nearly impossible to love her, because she was so angry, and had little love to give. I constantly felt like I was walking on eggshells, trying just to make it through the manic period, waiting for the time when a sense of relative normalcy would return to the house, and the threat of her anger would somewhat dissipate.
When my mother got diagnosed with cancer at the age of 44, life changed for the family. After six months of intensive chemotherapy that threw us all for a loop, my mom announced she would be leaving my father, and no longer wanted to make motherhood a priority. Nasty divorce proceedings ensued, and I distanced myself from the whole situation. I was devastated, and so angry at my mother. I couldn’t understand how, after getting a prognosis which predicted a 5 year-survival likelihood, she wanted to spend LESS time with her children, rather than more.
Subsequently, my mother and I had many years of sporadic communication, both because I wanted to limit my relationship with her after being so
