Letters To Ourselves

My mother sits at the kitchen table, her hat and boots still on, her chair dragged at an awkward angle to the corner of the table so that she has to reach to write her letter. We have just returned from a shopping outing, the first time we have gone shopping together in years. She doesn’t look up from writing.

She is writing to me. It is one of many letters she will write to me while I am visiting. I will be the one to put these letters in the mailbox, a strange, time warpy feeling, sending ahead what is present, soon-to-be past, to myself in a place where I am not but soon will be. My mother does not have a cell phone or lap top.

Writing is primarily how she communicates with her friends, family and former teaching colleagues. Years ago, she had a stroke. This spring, she spent weeks in a cardiac care unit and then a rehab facility. Some days, I receive two letters from her with her bright orange “K” stamp for her first name and a mélange of stickers, some from bananas, some from a Lakota tribe in South Dakota where she sends annual donations. 

“Why do you write, mama?” I ask. It is not lost on me that I have resorted to calling her mama, the most babyish form of mother, the easy mash of syllables, my own children’s very first word. My obvious need for her to be who she still is and also can no longer be. My childlike sense of betrayal and sadness that she is changed.

When she gazes at the ceiling, I see the light glance off her cataracts. She tells me it is her desire to magically transport beloved friends and family to where she is and reassure them that she is okay after her hospital ordeal. Why not just call them? I ask. She smiles. She was a teacher, the very best sort of teacher, who challenged her students to dig harder for the truth.

She gestures to the radiator on the floor where she has stacked a Webster’s Dictionary on top of an old copy of Swann’s Way, both propped up by a three-pound weight and a pair of patent leather flats with the TJ Maxx sales price still stuck to the sole. “It is,” she says, “my being able to think about important experiences, turn over the experience in my mind and find the right words, the best words to express the feeling or the anticipation of a feeling.” 

I leave the kitchen and head into the dining room where I dig through china and liquor cabinets to find old photo albums. There are photos of my father’s grandparents, Russian immigrants, posing for a portrait for a Chicago newspaper. There are old daguerreotypes, faces in which I can begin to see my son. In one photo, my mother gathers her three kids into an embrace. She is wearing a denim jumper that is nearly identical to the jean dress I arrived wearing.

When I text the picture to my children, they respond, “Whoa!”and “You look JUST like grandma!!!” The 10-year-old me in the photo makes me gasp. How had I forgotten my favorite shirt, buttery yellow but washed to an Easter egg pastel with the decal of “Staying Alive” from the Bee Gees song. The words are done in bubble letters, a style that strikes me now as quintessentially 70’s.

I remember the tackiness of the decal as it went through the wash again and again, how an edge would come loose, and I could either rip the whole thing off or keep jamming it back into place. I remember the hiss and burning smell of that iron press in the tee shirt shop as I stood in line with my parents choosing from the wall of decals to create my own unique shirt. I borrow my mother’s cheaters to get a better look at my own little face and then my mother’s.

She was gorgeous, drop dead, head-turning gorgeous. She was also strong-willed and impatient in ways that I still think of as mostly good. Always hurrying, striding a full city block ahead of us, my father sighing, “There she goes,” sounding crushed that she could so easily leave us all behind and never look back.

When I look up from the photo, mother is at the kitchen sink. I am startled to see her suddenly old. Her snowy hair is tweaked into Heavy Metal spikes where she slept on it funny. She is frowning antagonistically at a measuring cup and slopping flour where I just swept. Her shirt slips off her left shoulder and I can see the blocky outline of the pacemaker edging her skin. Her arms are splotchy with liver spots and the purply bruises which cannot manage to heal from the pokes of IVs. She is baking my favorite, date bread. 

She is here. She is the same woman in the photograph. And she is not. Just as I am the same little girl longing to dance to the Bee Gees outside the privacy of my room, and I’m not. I am not even the same person I was when I bought the denim dress. I cannot believe that my cells have not imploded and reconstituted in a new way.

Surely my father is a different person from sitting hours, days, weeks by mother’s hospital bedside, alone and terrified, returning home to an empty house in the dark, standing at the microwave while he heated his dinner of Cream of Wheat, lying on his side of the bed and imagining he could hear his granddaughter on the other side of the country whispering prayers for him and his wife. We are changed. I am a different mother as my mother is a different mother. It is neither of our fault. 

Sometimes I tease my children, when they and I are in a silly mood. “What happened to my baby?” I ask gripping their shoulders and staring into their eyes like I might penetrate to the small self still nestled within, like the Russian Matryoshka dolls.

Maybe this is what I am doing what I sit down later to write about my mother’s letter writing, to cup the teensiest doll, the very first who is solid to the core, the first one to disappear and never be found again when the children were done playing and restacking these dolls. It is this connection to our selves, our need to touch this first and second and third and fourth  and …. selves.

We seek an audience, a conversation with these selves. We seek to commune with the multitude of selves, listening and articulating these selves to ourselves. The writing is a righting of these selves, a restoration to wholeness. And it is an act of creation: this is who I am in this moment in this kitchen, on this planet. I am here. I am alive.

“And what if no one gets the letters or the recipient doesn’t write back?” I ask my mother. She is cutting up an old Audubon calendar to send to my husband who loves birds. She pauses and accidentally hacks off the wing of a Belted Kingfisher.

The letters addressed to me are already stamped and stacked on the George Forman grill on the counter. In them she has written how much joy my visit brought her, how she replays our shopping trip and the sequined dress she wishes she had bought for me, the sweet potato fries at lunch and how she will revisit these memories and experience these pleasures all over again.

In reading her letters, I will be reminded of the brave, stubbornly optimistic and joyful woman my mother is and how her love for me is unchanged.

 “The letter is an end in itself,” my mother finally says. She is still smiling. “It is a reassurance to myself that I’m not going to be alone.”

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing