A Mother Unmasked

While reorganizing a bedside table drawer, I unearthed the miniature book of poetry that my mother had scripted in the 1930s during her youthful girlhood. These secret compositions she had, for sixty years, sheltered inside a shoebox at the top of her closet. Holding the sonnets, the scribblings of her soul, for the first time in the eleven years since her passing, I stumbled upon the chance to revisit her meanderings. This time, I really read her thoughts, now that the ache of her absence had somewhat softened. I was enchanted by her creative ability and impressed by her choice of metaphor, but there was more: Between the timeworn, fabric cover of pages no larger than a pocket address book lay desires and regrets—and names I’d not remembered.

Some “Monk”-like, orderly desire to purge had swept over me that late afternoon. I purposefully discarded old scraps of paper with long-forsaken messages and phone numbers, ancient birthday greetings, and old cell-phone instruction booklets. The waning sun softly lit the square of carpet onto which I slid down and sat, my back resting against the bed frame. I began to thumb through the yellowed leaves of this forsaken souvenir and I felt, oddly enough, the eavesdropper into my mother’s private longing.

Like all of us females who have dabbled in mechanical musing to express the inexpressible—that angst in which wallows unrequited love, unfulfilled friendship, or forever lost cause—I had found common bond of sisterhood usually reserved for a close sibling or best friend, years ago when I’d been sifting through her wardrobe just after her death and discovered this hidden treasure I’d thought long forgotten. Had I neglected, back then, to do more than browse, caught up in the frenzy of grief and disbelief that I would never see my mother in her lovely dresses again?

Then and again now, I vaguely recalled Mama having shown me her “little volume of poetry” once when I’d been foraging through her silk dresses as a curious youngster. Behind the wonderful world of exotic shoe boxes and tucked in a corner behind old and dusty necklace beads had been a little book I’d reached for with probing fingers. Distance and years later, this time my eyes were riveted to discoveries I had not earlier noted: foreign miniscule photographs I now fingered, tiny head shots clipped from larger frames and inserted into the loosening confines of the cracked binding—the round face of a dark-haired handsome boy (who is this with the name “Bob” on the back?), the smiling visage of a bouncy girl, “Zoe” (my mother had never spoken her name), a small red feather, purple and lavender ribbon, newspaper clipping: “Three girls and two men arrested at Jimmie’s Backyard Café in Hollywood for indecent performance” (Why had she saved this bit of news?).

What cache of desire had Mama held so dear that her daughter never knew? From whence sprang the verse “Shadow Dance”, dedicated to an “M.E.R.”? As a child, I had been romance-privy only to the stories of my father—how she’d met “Billy with the curly hair” at the Balboa Bakery and decided to marry him because “even if he didn’t know what he was doing, he pretended to.” Only later, when I was in my twenties, did she tell the tale of their tumultuous separation and eventual reunion that had culminated in the marital bliss from which I sprang—decorum always in the details.

There had been early childhood’s “Willy Kiss”—whose name we used to make fun of (Will he kiss?). Then, in my thirties, there was an alcohol-induced revelation— the uproarious notion that I might have been the daughter of a pig farmer, the young man from Beverly Hills who had also loved, but lost her to the idea of my father. Never more than a few tried and true lighthearted stories. So who were these confidants of which she had written from some unclaimed corner of her heart? Where was my father in this miniature testimony titled “Memories”?

“ ‘Wisdom’ writ large across the frozen breast / Is doubtful comfort when the heart is breaking--/ What final irony is manifest / That we are scourged with thorns of our own making!”


Why had she never spoken to me of thorns? And after closing the book, I considered what few secrets I’ve held fast from my own children—what scant discretion. It’s different, of course, because they are the daughters of divorce, and hence were exposed to parental pain not shouldered by children of former generations. Very little is sacred—now that they are in their twenties and have asked me for the harsh truths, I’ve answered their insistence and they juggle it all.

And I wondered: Is this for the better? Had such intimacy been the catalyst for emotional turmoil and psychological illness with which they both wrestled for several years?

Everyone in my life knew her—Bill’s sweetheart, Kathleen’s mama, Suzanne’s sister, the friend Catherine. But perhaps a mother should be ultimately, after all, an undisclosed mystery—a puzzle whose final pieces were not meant to link until after the edges have been reconciled, the borders formed.