Love Letter

I couldn’t throw away my mother’s phone book.  The impulse to save is, I think, linked to my superstition about wrecking spiders’ webs.  Although some of the people listed in that book didn’t visit her even once from the time she fell and then kept falling (“I’ll wait till your Mom can go to restaurants” was the excuse one “close” friend made), most of them were very loyal.  Was I loyal?  A letter that turned up, saved in that phone book, addressed to me, typed on onion-skim typing paper and photocopied, gave me pause.

            “Dearest Mary Jo,” (Mom was rarely this effusive) … Dearest!  “It was pure joy to hear your voice Friday morning.”  Pure joy?  My voice?  “I had not worried that you were safe, but it certainly was reassuring to know that you were really safely at the university.”  The emphasis on safety is Mom through and through.  “When I got home last Saturday, it was a very lonely feeling to think of you so far away.”  I’d been living at home for the latter part of the summer of 1993, having given up my apartment in Boston and preparing to leave to teach in Ankara, Turkey.  I was thirty, and on the couple of occasions when I had to live at home for any length of time at that point in my life, I always got physically sick.  I never figured out why.  But from this vantage point, any sickness or ambivalence I felt then is completely forgotten.  What I remember vividly is Mom packing the two duffel bags I was allowed to take—for a whole year!  She packed those bags as carefully and tightly as a bird weaves grasses together to make a nest.  Cowboy boots were filled with socks and underwear and extension cords.  A small computer printer, clothes for teaching, books and papers, and even a box of oil paints, were arranged masterfully.  I held the hefty bags inches off the floor and stood on a bathroom scale in the front hallway of the house, checking to make sure they did not exceed the airline’s baggage weight limit.  Checking in at Logan Airport in Boston, I had to surrender the oil paints.  I remember handing them to Mom, who was always encouraging me to draw and paint.  I remember feeling a lump in my throat.  “I’ll keep them for you, honey.”  Like everything we had no room for.  Mom saved and kept all safe.  I don’t remember being overly emotional at parting.  Mom stood with my sister, Jennifer, and my then-boyfriend, Michael, and later she would tell me with a certain amazement, “I couldn’t believe how easily you got right on that plane.”  In truth, it was never easy.

            The letter goes on to detail the adventure that Mom, Jennifer and Michael had after they left me at the airport.  They explored over-priced antique shops on Beacon Hill, and a homeless man hit Mom up for a cigarette.  She offered him the one she was smoking, which he took gladly, so as not to have to open her purse.  She’d warned me about that very thing as well as not walking on frozen lakes, not being near water in electrical storms, always unplugging toasters and coffee makers, and not forgetting to call home.  That was Mom, but before she was a mother, she had wanted to travel and had even applied to teach school in Japan.  It’s possible, though I don’t remember her saying anything of the sort, that I was fulfilling a dream she’d let fall by the wayside.  “It was a very lonely feeling to think of you so far away.”

            I hold the pages of onion-skin, and I remember the manual typewriter vividly.  I can even see her sitting at the end of the kitchen table where she always did schoolwork or wrote bills, with a cigarette burning in a nearby ashtray and a cat at her feet.  Oops.  Scratch the cat.  Near the end of the letter, she tells me that “Mr. M is enjoying himself outside on a true fall day; I’m watching him as I type.”  This was Mohammad, a cat I’d adopted during my graduate school years.  He’d suffered a leg injury a few years before I went to Turkey, and it just seemed better for him to go home to Mom and the yard rather than stay in a basement apartment in Central Square, Cambridge.  Mom even started sleeping downstairs on the couch to let my cat in and out at night.  That arrangement became permanent; she never returned to her bed upstairs.  “I love you very much.  Mom.”  I fold the letter up, and sadness washes over me.  Did I really appreciate this love?  Was I even aware of it?  Oh, Mom it is a very lonely feeling to think of you so far away.

            The initial take-away for me was that I should stop doubting the love of significant others.  I regretted falling under the influence of a series of therapists—each one tried to get me to criticize Mom for her failings.  “I just respond to what you bring in,” said my latest one, when I weakly protested that Mom was the only mother I had, and I loved her.  Mothers are human beings in an impossibly demanding role.  Easy targets.  I know because I am one now.  I am nearly 56 years old, and over the long haul of a mother-daughter relationship, each of us goes through so many changes.  Mom had to start over many times in her life, after losing a husband, after starting to teach school again in midlife, after realizing that she needed friends, after she retired.  She needed the same kind of loving attention a young one needs.  Life cycles.  People do not stand still.  While I think my husband is right and that I did tend to revert to the good girl role when I went home, so what?  If I never felt I'd won her approval, is that her fault or mine for not trusting that it was there all along.  “I love you very much.  Mom.”  I contemplate the letter and the photocopy, and then I realize that it is possible Mom never sent this letter.  So even if I have difficulty receiving and believing, maybe Mom got distracted or self-conscious.  Maybe I got a phone in my apartment and called her.  Maybe the words were never sent, never said.

            On the walk to St. Mary’s Franklin Street to Mass this morning, I walked and sweated and thought about how horrible it is to be constantly preoccupied by doubts about love.  Did Mom love me?  Does Paul?  Does my daughter?  More importantly, did or do I love them?  As I worried the subject of love like a King Lear or an Othello—tragic—I was stopped along my physical and mental path by a brown rabbit.  A miracle.  He let me get very close to him and never jumped sideways into the thick brush along the stream.  We regarded one another.  I spoke, he stirred as if listening.  I stepped, he stepped--forward not sideways, as if showing me the way I was to go.  Walking past him carefully, I said, “have a good Sunday, bunny.”  Funny  that I felt so blessed and even loved, not by the rabbit, but by a force of goodness that gives us natural and worldly answers to our questions if our eyes and minds are open. That little moment reminded me that I know love every time wild humans come close, when they let us look into their eyes and speak a word to them, and when they go on their way.  The truest, deepest, most real loves have not ever been and probably cannot be worded.  Maybe love is pheromonal or a product of rhizomes in the roots (as it is for trees that know and attempt to assist their grove-mates).  Maybe love is as simple as the urge to look and listen to an other, to help, to seek out, to rejoice when the spouse returns at day’s end or the teen daughter from a late date.  Safe and sound. I know my mother loves me, and I love her dearly.  It’s natural for reactionary thoughts to arise in our minds.  They ripple the surface, but we shouldn’t let the impulse to judge events, information, and people as either good or bad, right or wrong, loved or unloved cause a tsunami that will surely shipwreck us.  We have to ride the waves, enjoy them, and trust the deeper currents.   When a little brown rabbit didn’t flee from me, I realized that belonging is love.  And I belong to the rabbit as my dear ones belong to me and all of us to the loving Creator.  And Mama, dearest Mama, maybe I imagined it, but when that rabbit looked at me, you felt a little less far away.  Love.  Mary Jo.