Glitter and Glue

by Kelly Corrigan

The five of them are not so much a family as its components, like Evan’s Scirocco broken apart and spread out on the driveway. It’s a complex machine requiring a level of coordination between connection points that not everyone is capable of. Maybe it will run again. Maybe it won’t.

My mom’s a pro with aches and ailments. Unlike funks and malaise, physical problems draw her near. The lure of the fix. If she were here, she’d stick a thermometer under my tongue, check my swollen glands, jot down my temperature, give me two aspirin, and make me gargle warm salt water, all the while talking in the sugary lilt of a nursery school teacher. Before leaving me to rest, she’d spray Lysol around the room to kill every last germ, slather Vicks VapoRub under my chin, and wrap my neck in a piece of Egyptian cotton about the size of a tea towel that she keeps for just such occasions. I miss her, or I miss that part of her. I always do when I’m sick.

The next morning, it’s official. The nurse asks how many times I’ve been on antibiotics in the past couple years, and I’m not sure. “You don’t know?” she asks, like, How old are you? Twelve? My mother would know. She’s read all about antibiotic resistance. People are too damn quick to take drugs, and someday they’re going to be mighty sorry, and that’s not going to happen to her kids, not if she can help it. She writes all our prescriptions in a book that she keeps in her top desk drawer so she can put her finger on the information in two seconds. The nurse rephrases her question. “Do you recall taking any antibiotics in the past three years?” I say no.

Work is their answer to the grief that keeps pounding to get in. No doubt that appealed to my mother, who considers action infinitely superior to analysis. Button up the kids, tidy the house, get dinner on and off the table by seven, that’s the ticket. Examine? Share? Feel? I’d rather do time at Montgomery County Correctional.

Some families are at their best camping, others making lasagna or playing charades. Ántonia’s family blends together breaking land, driving cattle, harvesting crops. For my family, it was working the sidelines at lacrosse games and playing a card game called 99 that provided the ideal forum for trash talking. For the Tanners—and my mother—it’s managing illness. Filling prescriptions, treating symptoms and side effects, keeping the house quiet, these are things they’ve done together, and it shows. They know how to care-take, and in taking care they are able to do things they otherwise can’t: touch, collaborate, indulge. Even if, just like when I was young, all that gooey tenderness hardens as my temperature returns to normal, I saw it, I know it’s there.

My mother has zero interest in exploring mortality—that’s what noon Mass and rosary beads are for—and considers anything beyond the headline “My brother has a health issue” to be hanging out private family business.

Something about this strikes me as a key to the story of my mother and me. She often said that I was a different person for my father, that I’d do anything for him, without an ounce of backtalk, as upbeat as a Miss America contestant, and that by the time he got home at night all the fighting was over, so he never knew what it took to get me to turn off the TV or take out the trash. She also said, Lemme tell you something, Kelly, you changed me a lot more than I changed you. I didn’t know adults could be changed. I thought they were finished pieces, baked through and kilndried. I never understood that when we fought my mother was having actual emotional reactions. I assumed her behavior was a front—a calculated show—designed to yield the best and safest possible kid.

After a couple of months’ suffering at Milly’s mercy, still smarting from today’s rejection by Martin, I see that, sturdy though my mother was, she must have been gutted by the sound and sight and sheer vibration of her rabid daughter roaring, I HATE YOU! I HATE YOUR GUTS! I HATE YOU FOREVER! I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments, but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day.

I wanted to pretend I had a different mom, a zippy mom, the kind who worked all week on my Halloween costume, who set aside a whole day to help me become someone adorable and snappy, who used up all her expensive flashbulbs on me and my friends, instead of a relentless pragmatist who gave me a ratty pillowcase to hold my treats along with a warning about how long I would be grounded if I wasn’t in this house by nine P.M. and not one minute later.

Outside on a chair, a thin blanket across my thighs, I crack open my book, thinking about my mother and the many moments of my childhood when she tucked herself away somewhere, enjoying what she called a party for one.

Of course, maybe there’s nothing about any of us that doesn’t in some small way touch back to our mothers. God knows, every day I spend with the Tanners, I feel like I’m opening a tiny flap on one of those advent calendars we used to hang in the kitchen every December 1, except instead of revealing Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus, it’s my mother. I can’t see all of her yet, but window by window, she is emerging.

It’s not until after I put her to bed that night that I can bring myself to think about my mother and the reams of things she did for me that could and should have softened me. What is it about a living mother that makes her so hard to see, to feel, to want, to love, to like? What a colossal waste that we can only fully appreciate certain riches—clean clothes, hot showers, good health, mothers—in their absence.

Though if my mother ever has a fatal disease, my brothers and I will have no say whatsoever. For that matter, neither will my father. She will not allow us to be the ones to withhold her medication, turn off her respirator, let her die. As far as she’s concerned, those decisions are hers alone, and she’s made them, along with every detail of what happens after. At her funeral, someone talented will sing “Ave Maria,” the long version. There will be a program, but no photo. Between her birth date and the day she died, there will be an extra long dash, because Let me tell you something, Kelly, it’s what happens in the dash that matters. She will be cremated, unthinkable as the process is, and the ashes from that fire will be spread in three places: the woods near our swim club, the backyard at Wooded Lane, and the beach off Thirty-fourth Street in Avalon. She will be let go peacefully into the hands of a God who knows her full name and every hair on her head and who will deliver her to the field in heaven—the green, green grass of home—where Libby, TJ, and Slugger wait for her with her brother, Tommy.

“Did she work?” “No. Not in a job.” “My mom liked to say she never knew a woman who didn’t work all damn day,” I reply,

After letting Pop live in that image for another moment, I say, “I hope I’ve done an all-right job around here.” “I’ll tell you one thing. This is the happiest Evan’s been in a long time.” Old people and their hyper-calibrated radar. They can’t hear a word, and they can barely get out of their chairs, but they’ve got six or seven other senses, scanning, collecting, decoding.

Mothers are everywhere. Blame evolution. Or Freud. Or the network executives who can’t stop re-creating June Cleaver and the greeting-card executives who can’t stop promoting Mother’s Day. Blame mother-of-pearl, Mother May I?, or that camp song that starts “Hello Muddah.” Blame Disney’s stable of stepmothers and godmothers and dead mothers. Blame the Old Lady in the Shoe and her teeming brood or Joan Crawford or Madonna. Blame Mothers Goose and Hubbard, Superior and Teresa. Blame Mr. Mom or the Queen Mum. Blame the metaphor-makers for Mother Tongue, Mother Nature, Mother Lode, Mother Ship, Mother Earth. Pin it on whoever you want, but let me tell you, it’s not easy to get from sunup to sundown in this world without bumping up against a mother-something.

But even if by Christmas Evan has to help them remember the name of their first nanny (It starts with a K …), I’ll always be able to see their faces coming up through the pool’s surface, or wrapped in a bath towel, or asleep on the arm of the gold velvet chair in front of the television, and hear the sound of Martin saying Crustinsashus, or Milly saying revolting, or both of them saying Keely, and remember where I was when I opened my first Mother’s Day card and learned the one thing I do not have in common with an emu and absorbed the complete lyrics of Beauty and the Beast. I’ll know it was the Tanner kids who pointed me back toward my own mother, hungry to understand her in a way that I clearly didn’t yet. They put her voice in my head. They changed her from a prosaic given to something not everyone has, but of course none of this matters to them. They’ve got errands to run, and then, maybe, sundaes.

After I strap into the jump seat, the captain asks who I like in our presidential election, and once we get a conversation going, he slams our policy in Iraq and asks what the riots in L.A. were all about. I’m tempted to roll over. I don’t understand much about either topic and I know not everyone loves us. We’re too unionized and make bad soap operas and love a liability waiver and generate our fair share of pollution, intellectual and otherwise. But it’s my home, and not just because I grew up pledging my allegiance and taking tests on the Electoral College and Pearl Harbor. It’s in me, running through me like my mother’s blood. “The thing about the U.S.,” I say, “is that it’s messy, and complicated, and flawed as hell—but it’s also amazing.” “I suppose that’s right,” the pilot concedes, rewarding my defense of the motherland in a way he’ll never appreciate.

I walked through the back door of Wooded Lane on the afternoon of my parents’ Christmas party, an event my mother hosted begrudgingly with my father, who never could understand why they didn’t have people over more frequently, i.e., weekly.

“You have to go, Mom. Especially Australia. It’s so awesome,” I said, knowing full damn well that she’d probably never go to Mexico, much less all the way the hell to Australia.

My mom pushed back from the table after about ten photos. She had seen enough. “The good news,” she said as she rose, “is that you got home safe. Anything could have happened out there, Kelly.”

“A month ago I was in Fiji!” I whined to my mom that evening. She laughed. She couldn’t help it. Three bucks for four hours in a closet was squarely in the funny category.

My mom did not come—not that weekend, not that year. Cross-country travel is no casual thing, and we were seeing each other back east for weddings plenty. My roommate’s mom came three times in the first year. After one of her visits, I said to my roommate, “I’ve been here for fourteen months, and my mother literally never even mentions coming. I mean, you’d think she’d want to see where her child was living.” I wasn’t afraid to phrase things dramatically; blame it on five months of Santa Barbara. I wanted to take my mom to my office and introduce her to my manager, a strange and loving woman who fancied long fingernails, scarves, and dirty jokes. I wanted to take my mom for a burrito, surely her first, and show her all the fleeced boys in their hiking boots. I wanted to drive her across the Golden Gate Bridge with the top down. “What does she say when you ask her?” my roommate said. “Do I really have to ask her? I mean, don’t parents just automatically—” “I don’t know. You’re not, like, super-nice to her on the phone. Maybe she thinks you don’t care.” I paused, then shook it off. “Oh, come on, that’s crazy.” But the idea stayed with me, and the next time my mom called I asked her to come out, and she said she would look into it. “She won’t come, watch,” I said to my roommate when I hung up. Later that evening, she called me back with a choice of dates and flight times.

Applying her Houseguests are like fish rule, she came for three days. I took her to all the best places I had found to eat, to walk, to look. Pasta at i Fratelli, beers at Sam’s, scones at Home Plate. The weather was perfect. She loved it. Back at SFO on Monday morning, I walked her to the gate, as people did in 1994. “You’ll never come home,” she said. “Yes, I will—” “No. If I’d seen this place when I was young, I’d have stayed forever.” It was hard for me to imagine my mother young. She’d never really been me, a girl out of college, looking at the map, wondering where to unpack her trunk and set up her JCPenney bedroom set. “I’ll be back, Ma. When it’s time to buy a house …” “No, it’s too good here.” She nodded, agreeing with herself, and then stepped into line at the ticket counter.

Mothering Georgia has forced on me many decisions, and by many, of course I mean millions.

I was crying happy tears. My mother, on the other hand, nodded at me as if she had seen this moment coming for thirty-four years. I wasn’t choked up thinking that Jesus knew my baby and that the Holy Spirit would guide her. It wasn’t the marble altar or the brass crucifix hanging behind it that got me. I cried looking at my mom and realizing how much I had come to love her and how that love had brought us here to this chapel, where a hundred parishioners were promising to keep an eye out for her granddaughter, who would grow up in California and say the Lord’s Prayer only when she was visiting her Jammy. Pulling at the hem of my emotion was the creeping sense that it might well take until 2036 for this child in my arms to feel a fraction of what I already felt for her.

My mom gave us a check to cover the last chunk of the deposit; she had plenty of money saved—saying no adds up, Kelly—and was no longer afraid I would spoil.

I began the transition from my father’s breezy relationship with the world to my mother’s determined navigation of it.

At first parenthood was as I’d expected. Exhausting, sometimes heinous, occasionally divine. I held my children close enough to feel them breathe, laugh, swallow. Then my days got more complicated, and although there’s nothing unusually challenging about my children, I often find myself responding to their sudden and inscrutable moods, mighty wills, and near-constant arguing by turning into a wild-eyed fishwife. Some interactions are so strangely familiar, it’s as if I once starred as Little Orphan Annie and then, decades later, found myself cast in the revival as Miss Hannigan.

After Georgia storms off, Edward says, “When I first met you, you didn’t drink coffee, and you were so mellow.” How can I tell him that I was a dog in show, high-stepping with my shiny hair and sparkly striped collar? Twelve years and two puppies later, I’m an ungroomed bitch who barks at flies.

My “passionate engagement” frees Edward from just about all worry. He sleeps fine. He talks to his friends about road bikes and tech start-ups and music apps. He stews about his job. Why should he fret about the girls when I’m pacing the sealant off the hardwood floors? It would be redundant.

This was a flawed plan, or at the very least a plan that required some consideration. Ten years into our marriage, I’ve learned to push back using Fact Not Feeling. “I thought we were in a period of post-Christmas austerity. Didn’t you say we needed to get our burn rate back under control, build up the 529s, maybe pay down some of our mortgage …” “Yes, but the place is free.” “Four days at Squaw equals sixteen lift tickets.” I don’t like being the family comptroller, but apparently it’s a job that must be done. “So are we just not going to ski, ever?”

“Are you mad at Georgia?” she asked me. “Yes. I’m frustrated. The bickering makes me crazy. And I’ve talked to Georgia—” “What did you say?” “The same thing I always say: Leave It Alone. Walk Away.” She broke into a sob. “It’s okay, Claire. I’m just saying—” “It’s not that!” she snapped, winding herself up in a way that racked me to watch. “Claire, honey, what is it?” I readied myself for a confession. When she finally spoke, her voice was very small. “Do you love one of us more than the other?” “No, do you think I do?” “Yes!” she spat out, the deepest possible betrayal in her voice. “You think I love Georgia more than I love you?” “No,” she sobbed, confusing me. “I think you love me more than you love Georgia!” To her mind, this was the most unforgivable treason; this violated a fundamental maternal vow.

“Hey. So, did you—did we ever—okay, so Claire said the most disturbing thing last night. She said she thinks I love her more than I love Georgia. What am I supposed to do about that?” “Well, I’ll tell you,” she started, “you do your damnedest to keep things even-Steven. And I mean everything: presents, sleepovers, eye contact. Your brothers once fought over tube socks. I’d put them in their stockings and GT ended up with an extra pair and I swear to God, it almost ruined Christmas.” “It’s gonna be a long ten years.” “Ten? I still keep lists. Loans, visits, babysitting … You never stop tracking that one.”

I gnawed on the fact that in addition to helping the girls parse the world and all its awful truths—time goes only one way, things end, affections wax and wane—I was the sole distributor of the strongest currency they would ever know: maternal love.

It may be that loving children, radically and beyond reason, expands our capacity to love others, particularly our own mothers.

My mom’s behavior in the hospital astonished me, the way a seasoned newscaster, usually so stern and unflappable, can shock you with a show of emotion. She begged me to make them stop all the poking. Just getting the needle into her vein made her weep. Look! Look at the bruises. There was a nurse she thought wasn’t listening to her. The original doctor, who she liked, had not come by again, and she wanted to make sure her case had not been transferred. A new doctor, who did not shake her hand or look her in the eye, said that if they were unable to get control of the infection, they would have to “at least consider” amputation. I could see, and damn near feel, the terror coursing through her. I stood close to her and agreed with everything she said. Those nurses are rough. That bruising is crazy. This food could not be more disgusting. Whatever she felt, I felt with her. I did not try to dissuade her; I had learned that from my own Pigeon, Betsy. It’s our job to be on their side, she told me, referring to both our children and our parents.

When she got emotional, my father assured her, with uninformed optimism, that everything would be fine, while I asked the doctors hard questions and took notes. Our roles were set: my dad made the staff like us, I made them answer us. With my mom’s powers disabled, I was the glue to his glitter.

She seemed old in the hospital bed, older than I was ready for, at risk. Her skin was thin, her cheeks and neck creped. Family life wore her down. The daily mash-up of tiny, stupid tasks, like roasting chickens and finding the other sneaker, crossed with monitoring rivalries and developing emotional circuitry and soothing when possible, all the while allowing some pockets of time to feel your own feelings and pursue your own pursuits—it’s a lot to maneuver. But what compressed her into an old woman, what made her bones heavy and her joints stiff, what used her up, wasn’t the labor. It was the bottomless worrying and wanting and hoping.

I don’t give them false praise or cheap feedback, and the thought of my girls being rejected makes me more angry than sad. I read the notes I find in their pants pockets and the journals tucked in their dresser drawers. I fret over things long after Edward clicks off his reading light and goes to sleep—croup, melanoma, insecurity, precocious puberty. Raising people is not some lark. It’s serious work with serious repercussions. It’s air-traffic control. You can’t step out for a minute; you can barely pause to scratch your ankle.

She doesn’t need to hear any of this, but here I am, five years later, overflowing with things I want to say, more every day. And lucky me, she is still around to talk to. The trick is, she won’t sit still for a lot of blah-de-blah. She knows I love her, appreciate her. She was doing her job, best she knew how, and that’s enough of that.

I want her to know I have learned the difference between pampering and love, adventure and life experience, mothers and fathers. I see now what she did for my dad and me, how she let our relationship stay simple and uncomplicated by drawing the fouls and taking the hits. It was her gift to me as a girl in the world, and I will give the same gift to my daughters. I want her to know that I have seen how the light changes over the course of the day and I know that the rooms that start cold get warmer. I’d tell her that I know now that there are no daughters who never embarrass, harass, dismiss, discount, deceive, neglect, baffle, appall, incite, or insult their mothers. I want her to know that although I vote for Democrats and cry easily and still spend all my money going to places no one ever needs to go, I hate shopping and cooking and I have never used a douche. I live within my means and worship my girlfriends, especially the ones who play cards and rag me about keeping the thermostat set too low. I don’t long for other mothers anymore; I don’t even wonder about them. I was meant to be her daughter, and I consider it a damn good thing that she, of all people, was the principal agent in my development.

I want to tell my mom that I admire her, the quiet hero of 168 Wooded Lane, the way she marched head-on into each uncertain moment, changing as the circumstances demanded, like finding a good-paying job at forty-eight with three kids in college. Even though I don’t always know what she’s talking about or why something bothers her or what’s making her smile, it doesn’t matter, I don’t care anymore, I love her. It’s like a good book: You don’t have to be able to decode every passage to want to hug it when you finish. Although I spend my Sunday mornings with The New York Times and a latte, I want her to know that sometimes, when I do go to church, I kneel in the pew and cry behind my hands. I don’t know what that means, except I am overwhelmed with feeling, and that feeling has something to do with her. I want her to know that I’ll take care of her, even when it’s not pretty or easy or cheap. Of course I will. The mother is the most essential piece on the board, the one you must protect. Only she has the range. Only she can move in multiple directions. Once she’s gone, it’s a whole different game.