I write about dreams, mother-dreams.
She died January 21st, 2023.
I do not weep for her.
I weep for me.
one.
They say to write down your dreams the moment you wake up.
I dreamt that my mother and I shared the same mother, and that we occupied a space of unreality— maybe a video game, or a tv show, or a board game. This is all I remember, because I resisted writing it down.
If my mother and I shared a mother, that would not surprise me. My father always referred to my mother as a child. And so, I referred to my mother as a child for a long time, too, never considering what that said about me, or my father.
Maybe my father saw my mother this way because she possessed a joy unbridled, like a horse careening across a plain, tossing its head, heeding no shouts, eluding looping lassoes, until it collapses in the wild night as the stars blink above eyes drooping from a glorious gallop in the sun.
Maybe he saw her as a child because of her world-shattering temper tantrums. Spinning like a top, gnashing her teeth, illogical cursing —”fuck, fuck, shit, bitch, fuck, shit”— a raging torrent that sometimes-included flung objects. Like nature’s cataclysms, however, the fury would evaporate inexplicably, leaving silent ruination in its wake.
My mother was four feet eleven inches tall. When I was nine, ten, eleven — my mother and I fought like siblings. Sometimes we shared blankets on the couch and kicked each other beneath them like battling sisters. Sometimes we pulled each other’s hair, our heads bowed and pointed at one another like rams locking horns. Other times we scratched each other’s hands and arms. She had the advantage, there, though, because she had long fingernails and I bit mine.
Well, she had more than that one advantage.
If my mother and I shared a mother, she failed to discipline us properly.
two.
I dream I spoke to my mother, and she looked the way she did in a photo that I still have.
In this photo, my mother sits next to an old friend of mine, in front of a chess set of brown and black marble. When she died, I tried to save the set. The pieces had been carved from some kind of glassy quartz and imbued with shades that matched the board. Over the years we dropped the pieces so many times that their corners broke off, leaving behind raw, wounded, white edges. I kept the board but threw away all the pieces except two — the black knight and the black queen. They sit on my windowsill right now. I often pick them up and rub my thumb over them, worrying the rough and the smooth.
My friend’s bright scarlet, plunging top, pale skin, and dyed jet-black hair in the photo invokes fairy tale girls— perhaps Snow White, or the lesser-known Rose Red. My mother has white streaked hair in a short, plain bob, wears a plaid scarf wrapped tightly around her neck, and an old cable knit sweater that she reserved only for home. Because they’re playing chess she wears her glasses. She almost never wore her glasses in photos.
It’s an odd picture. They both look very grim and dour. I don’t remember why they looked like that. Maybe the game had been a struggle. My mother could never quite remember what all the pieces did, sometimes forgetting the L-shaped movements of the knight, or the difference between the bishop’s diagonal power and the omnipotence of the queen.
I had seen the friend in the photo a handful of times over the years. The first time my mother saw her after I moved away she exclaimed,
“Oh, you look great! So beautiful, so beautiful!”
My mother repeated this praise many times, such that I soon felt she wanted to make sure I heard her. My friend beamed, tossed her high pony, and tilted her head like some fucking winsome coquette from an 18th century novel. I could say and do nothing to ward off the frenzy of compliments my mother bestowed upon her—to do so would have revealed my jealousy. So, my mother bludgeoned me with her love for my friend’s beauty until even she grew tired of her own voice.
Between my infrequent visits home my mother sent me letters. Once, she wrote that I needed to stop eating meat. Another letter told me that I needed to eat only grass-fed beef. She sent me a machine to suck up all the impurities in my face. Other packages contained shirts with high necks and long sleeves, or clothes three or four sizes too small for me.
I’m not sure she ever told me I looked beautiful. When I was younger, she told me I was pretty a few times.
But, back to my dream.
In my dream, my mother appeared exactly the way she did in the photo. Exactly.
I said,
“I am still the baby, I am still the baby who wants her mother, but you didn’t love me, or maybe you couldn’t love me.”
I think I added “maybe you couldn’t” to the dream, later.
“Maybe you couldn’t” cracks open my heart; it’s a gift to her, the seeing of her, even though she never saw me.
I don’t think I actually said, “maybe you couldn’t.” But truth doesn’t exist in slumber.
Back to the dream.
She replied,
“Okay, I understand now,” or it might have been, “Okay, I think I understand now.” She nodded as she said these words and looked just the way she did in the photo— the reflection in her glasses obscuring her eyes, her mouth flat, chin angled up a bit, almost in defiance, but of what, I don’t know. Her dream voice offered nothing less, and nothing more, than this acknowledgement.
three.
One night, my mother awoke to me calling her into my bedroom. When she entered, she saw me sitting up in bed. I pointed to an empty corner of my room, saying,
“There are flowers for you mommy. There. Get your flowers.”
And then, I assume I went back to sleep.
I wonder about this dream, if I wanted to give my mother a gift that I could not when I was awake, because to give the gift, to acknowledge a need, would manifest her vulnerability in the sunlit world, and that would reveal the edges of an annihilating truth that neither she nor I wanted to know.
Maybe my mother has always resided in my dreams, alive or dead. Since I remember so few of them, perhaps she never existed at all. I think she was an apparition. Surely my husband and my boys would tell me that she lived, that they saw her, spoke to her, knew her.
I’m not sure that they did.
My mother precedes and follows me across time, and I cannot escape, trapped as I am in my three-dimensional body, while hers traverses whole universes.
An incomplete list of objects taken from my mother’s house after she died:
a shiny, foot-long, pink ceramic pig
a Thai general’s two-sided business card
i don’t know what happened to him
a painting of water lilies in a stained frame
a Buddhist temple charm
there were more, but my father threw many away
my baby shoe with a dead bug inside
my high school yearbooks, dirty and discolored
my father was going to discard those, too
a backgammon set in a cracked leather case
a tiny porcelain Siamese kitten with chipped ears
there used to be three or four of these, but I lost and broke them
a faded paper bookmark that says, “to mommy from Maureen”
a letter in cursive from my piano teacher
i quit the piano too early
a worn book of Scottish clans and tartans
a box of her scarves, scented with mildew and lavender
i gave every single one away
a creased picture of the sister I had not yet met
letters written in Thai, on blue, translucent paper
i can’t read these.
a copy of the lyrics to Danny Boy in her handwriting
a Thai Christmas card.
Early mornings I mourn you, a loss that stretches across both ends of time. No moment exists a priori because you have always been there, and I fear you always will.
I can rid myself of the objects you gifted us, sweep them off the desks and shelves and fireplace mantle. I can tear through my children’s bedrooms, grabbing carved wooden birds, replicas of 1950’s toys, endless elephant figurines, photos in and out of frames, books on meditation, Thai cookbooks, buddhas of every size. I can toss them all into a trash bag that bulges with the sheer volume of the items you launched through space at me, like the wooden spoon that flew from your hand on Valentine’s Day, splitting my lip into swollen, bloody fruit.
Then I remember that no more gifts in brown-wrapped paper boxes will arrive. The sentimental spouting has dried up. I have smashed the contrivances of a life you and I never lived. So, when I wake one morning, expecting the heaviness that squats upon my chest every day, I sit up with ease because that brutish beast is gone.
Memory freezes you in a haze of your own making. I am not your jailer, watchful and guarding. I have risen and left, for there are meals to cook, children to send off to college, and books to write.
You are the one who will never break free. That’s your prison, the infinitude.
