Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me

by Adrienne Brodeur

In our family, being right trumped being truthful.

it is not the smoke and mirrors that trick people; it is that the human mind makes assumptions and misunderstands them as truths.

I have known my mother only as the person she became after Christopher died: a mother who had lost a child. Who might she have been before?

On Maui, I often felt as if I were watching a theatrical performance of my life from the last row of a distant balcony, observing this carefree and freewheeling girl played by me.

I thought about my own life so far: prep school, Cape Cod, an Ivy League education on the horizon. The privilege of it all embarrassed me. What could I possibly be escaping?

Daily, I placed myself in situations a hairsbreadth away from real danger, some part of me embracing the notion that a misstep could chart my future as much as college ever would. And it was the tension between wanting to escape my old life and getting caught in my new one that kept me careening from one small town to the next in search of God knows what.

Peter had succeeded where I’d failed. He’d put a healthy distance between himself and the madness. He’d managed to grow up, get the girl, and move on, whereas I remained stuck in the scrum of our childhood.

Even then, as a freshman in college, I still clung to the notion that somehow I was my mother’s favorite, more beloved than Peter or Christopher or even Ben. For better or worse, that was who Malabar was to me, the most central and important person in my life, even if I wished it were otherwise. For as long as her love affair had been going on, for me, the “we” had always been my mother and me. Not Ben and Malabar. If Ben was everything to my mother, then what was I? Was I not worth living for too?

“Loneliness is not about how many people you have around. It’s about whether or not you feel connected. Whether or not you’re able to be yourself.” I was at a loss for words. Was Malabar not being herself when she was being Malabar? “You know what I mean,” Kyra said, breaking it down for me. “The lonely feeling comes from not feeling known.”

“You have no idea how much you can learn about yourself by plunging into someone else’s life,” Margot said.

I knew that children who’d been neglected emotionally, as my mother had been by her parents, often formed attachments to objects instead of people. Malabar had been raised by an alcoholic and domineering single mother, so it came as no surprise that her possessions meant everything to her. This necklace symbolized her mother’s love. I understood it; in fact, I felt the same way. My mother was about to give me her most treasured treasure, and the very thought of it made my heart nearly burst. Finally, I would have material proof of her love.

“Let everything happen to you / Beauty and terror / Just keep going / No feeling is final.”

My mother looked glamorous in her shimmering blue-green dress, but it was not indomitable Malabar who was before me. It was my childhood mother, the woman who used to comfort me and tuck me in at night. I had almost forgotten about her existence. I’d been the grownup in our relationship for so long—the one who advised and consoled and did the holding—that I didn’t remember what it was like to be held by her. But here was my mom, hugging me, the woman whose soft neck I used to burrow into as a toddler, hiding behind the curtain of her auburn hair. For one brief moment, I was the daughter again.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —ANAïS NIN

we would meet at the café adjacent to her bookstore, where she’d offer literary fiction as antidepressant.

But I also found my depression tedious—tedious to live through, tedious to explain, tedious to be around. I was bored by my own relentless loop and felt sure I was boring everyone around me.

“You have to remember that your mother is unaware of what she’s done and always will be,” Margot continued. “If you’re waiting for an apology or gratitude, don’t. You have hard work ahead. You need to forgive her and move on. Happiness is a choice that you have to make for yourself.”

I thought my mother loved me in the same way that I loved her: with singular and blind devotion.

We were not, as I had grown up believing, two halves of the same whole. She was her own person, as was I. And I knew that every time I failed to become more like my mother, I became more like me.