Editors’ Note Feb. 6, 2024: Originally published by Under the Sun in its 2010 print issue, the editors are pleased to reprint this essay that appears in Marcia Aldrich’s new book, Studio of the Voice.
She and I (a Field of Force)
by Marcia Aldrich
Daniel Torobekov
Breathless
I should have known what I was up against, what the future held, right then. I should have known that whatever step I took with her, in whatever mood, with whatever intention, whether reward or punishment, whether acceptance or rejection or simple love, would prove futile. She would be who she was, and there would be no changing her. There would only be the spectacle of my thwarting her.
All was revealed in that moment many years ago, had I been able to understand its meaning.
She was playing with a boy named Sam, whose house she had never visited before. I had arrived to pick her up, and Sam’s mother, with whom my husband had a slight professional acquaintance, walked me around to the back. There in the sandbox were the children, absorbed in play, constructing their dreams with plastic shovels and buckets and toy dump trucks. The other mother and I paused in the grass a few feet away, exchanging stiff pleasantries until the time should seem right to disentangle Clare and get her round to the front of the house.
After five minutes or so, the moment came. “Honey, it’s time to go,” I began.
She was pouring water out of a bright blue bucket into a moat surrounding a sandy castle. Her motions implied only that she was having a good time. There was no indication that circumstances permitted human communications of any sort. I was about to repeat my sentence when, working at the moat exactly as before, she uttered the word “no.” It was almost disembodied. There was no shading to it, nothing of the delicate, high vaults in the cathedral of social bonds. It could not have been more blunt.
Sam, sensing a dangerous fray in the making, pulled himself smaller. He kept pushing his little truck across the sand, but the motion had lost all spontaneity. He lifted his eyes to watch my next move.
“It is time to go,” I said more firmly.
More firmly still, and now with the feeling of a complete person behind the word, she repeated, “No.”
Sam’s mother looked on, piqued. I imagined that the scholar in her was curious to see how I would handle a tough challenge. Sam, I was made to feel, would not do such things.
The forced politeness of the situation was a python squeezing the air out of me. I had to keep up the social chatter while I burned with a caustic compound of shame and anger.
I tried a brief stage of cajoling, just enough to allow me to consider my options. Cajoling is rarely a successful mothering tactic and always humiliating. Assuming a posture of supplication, the large person shrinks before the child. Stature is not easily regained. Nor can one with aesthetic pleasure look on a parent who begs in a desperate, high whine. This much I knew, and vowed to avoid the mistake, especially before this older woman who had initiated the play date and had worked out the arrangements with my husband. With a certain noblesse, she had brought in a child to play, like a Pip summoned to Estella in Great Expectations. It was a command performance, really, and my mothering was under unusual audience scrutiny. As a first-timer, I believed the whole globe stopped to watch every time my daughter challenged my authority, while the voice of the maternal world-soul whispered, What will she do? Indeed, I did not know what I would do or should do now. I stood paralyzed while a roundtable of experts assembled in my head to debate the best course of action.
Part of me wanted to get back in the car and go home without her. Part of me wanted to slap the other mother for standing smugly in her own yard with her own son who did not have to be removed from his sandbox against his will. Part of me wanted to become enormously large and strong and simply forklift my daughter out of the sandbox from where she glared at me. Into the car we’d go, never to be seen again in these climes.
After a survey of tactics, I settled on forklift manqué. I attempted to lift her from the sandbox so as to set her on her feet in the grass. Since I was not enormously large and strong, however, and lacked all conviction, she writhed out of my grip and bolted with stunning speed out the back gate and into the alley, running with resolute abandon toward the cross street. I hurried after her in maternal terror. Before I could overtake her, she reached the street. If a car had been passing, I could not have prevented her from dashing in front of it. This is a crucial point. Let me repeat. I would have failed to save her.
When I did catch up to her, I grabbed her roughly, swung her over my shoulder, and walked back down the alley, where the woman and her son were watching, in their alarm and aversion displaying a marked family resemblance. I pretended to make light of the escapade.
“Oh, my daughter, she’s a breakaway,” I joked, following up the witticism with a bit of tattered laughter. I walked around the house to the car parked in front; she was still flung over my shoulder. Sam and his mother followed, watching from their impressive set of front steps as I harnessed my child’s unwilling body into her car seat.
I drove two blocks, pulled over to the side of the street, and wept.
Thus was the essential dynamic revealed: I could not make my daughter do what she did not want to do. She possessed more raw and undivided stubbornness than I possessed power to conform her will to mine. Further, the mother-daughter drama would not be private, but would be played out on a vast public stage.
If I could paint this drama, a rendering of my imagination, it would be nothing cold or impersonal, abstract or cubist, but a style in which emotions are expressed sculpturally, as in Christina’s World by Wyeth. The painting would capture the distance between mother and child, the space at the heart of their bond, a depth no one can fathom and no one can bridge. This field of tension would define mother and child, more important than either of them individually. Let’s look at this canvas. She and I are fields of force, pushing and pulling against each other across its space. All else is cut away, even Sam and the mother whose home it was. The sequence that led to pursuit, and all that followed, are external to the tableau of the defining moment. The viewer’s eye is drawn first to the daughter, who strives toward the cross street at the end of the alley, her head flung back to see how she is pursued, and then to the mother, lunging out of the backyard gate into the darkening alley, her stricken face in profile, a Gothic convergence of weights and strains upon a slender pier. The angle of view is raised a little from the pavement, close to this alleyed world and gaining a purchase. The painting merges to a single field, with two poles of pursuit and flight, of mother and daughter, of she and I, forever panting and forever young, respectively, as Keats would put it, and forever with the space between.
The Peaceable Kingdom
Mother is the most powerful word in the English language, I think. Mention mother and my hidden nerve leaps in a dance of sensation and memory. My mother’s face in youth, pictured in photographs, was a face to launch a fleet of ships, a face I wanted to see emerge from a wall of fog, a face I wanted to hang my life on. But by middle age my mother’s face was stern and disapproving, and one look sent me whimpering to my room. Fear and beauty, beauty and fear: mother.
This has been a long and clutching story in my family. My mother had a mother and her mother a mother before her, and none of us wanted to be like her own mother.
When my daughter was very young and trusting, she thought I was something I wasn’t. She thought I was a mother, first, last, and in between, for the role of mother swallows the woman—from the daughter’s point of view. She just assumed I was her mother because she found me in the house sleeping next to her father in the marital bed. Why would I be in the bed next to her father if I wasn’t her mother? She assumed I was her mother because I told her I was and she took me at my word. She did not question who I was. She did not search my face for resemblances to hers. From time to time she may have dimly sensed that something I was doing or saying didn’t fit the mothering she saw elsewhere, but she did not question what a mother was, and the moment of doubt lifted off as quickly as storm clouds dissipate in a southern sky.
But later she changed. And I wasn’t prepared. She started watching me, trying to get at who I was. She started to sense that I was not born a mother, was not a natural-born mother, and that I was not always as she found me. She sensed there was something else about me, some non-mother past underneath the mother topcoat. She started measuring me against other mothers and saw to her displeasure that there was more to me than a mother. At the same time, I began to fail to live up to her measurements of what a mother should be: I was not a creature with wings that doubled as cookie sheets. Previously it hadn’t occurred to her that I didn’t sew her Halloween costumes like the other mothers on the block, like the mothers she watched on television. I didn’t own a sewing machine, or even a needle and thread, standard mother equipment. She noticed that I didn’t attend the neighborhood coffees convened on weekday mornings because I worked outside the home. I didn’t have a special dish to pass at potlucks because I was a lousy cook, and I wasn’t cheerful when hauling out the trash like the other mothers, who waved enthusiastically at each other from their respective curbs.
In elementary school I let her walk home from school even though rumors circulated about an ominous Chevy lingering by the schoolyard. Unlike the other mothers, I wasn’t convinced girls had more to fear from strangers than people closer to home. I was not always up when she left for school in the morning. Sometimes I was hung over. Sometimes her father got her ready. Sometimes he even braided her hair. I read books at her soccer games, off to the side of the shouting parents. Often I agreed to bake cookies and then forgot. I felt guilty, but did the exact same thing the next time I was asked. While she sensed the differences between me and other mothers, she didn’t question me. The other children didn’t question their mothers either. Not yet. The critique of the traffic of mothers hadn’t started yet.
By the eighth grade she was openly evaluating my character. She no longer accepted me at face value. Was I consistent, did I contradict myself, did I practice what I preached? Did I have an accurate sense of myself? When I left the house, without announcing my purpose, where did I go, she wondered. Once I became a mother, my previous life became a secret I couldn’t reveal. I had to preserve the illusion that I was always as my daughter found me, a born mother who didn’t have a life worth mentioning before her daughter arrived. I pretended I had been a good girl, a saint, who never earned a C on my report card or made my mother cry. Sometimes I was on the verge of telling her how difficult I had been at her age, but I didn’t.
She did not subject her father to the same scrutiny. He was given a free pass. She regarded me suspiciously and went through my drawers, bags, jacket pockets. She thought that I was someone other than who I seemed, someone who had secrets—because she did. That I lived a life other than the one she saw—because she did. If she watched me closely enough, I would give myself away. She sniffed me like a bloodhound on a fugitive trail. I increased my vigilance.
When I became a mother, I thought that the watching would be finished, or if not finished, that I would be the one who did the watching. My mother watched me and was unhappy with what she observed. I told myself, when I became a mother, that I would not watch my daughter as my mother had watched me. No eyes would bore into her soul. I would not regard her with suspicion. I would not attempt to enter her every thought, mood, and desire. I would give her privacy. More important than keeping her fed, clothed, and attended to, I would give her a room where she could sit on the bed for dreamy hours, staring out into trees.
This has been a long and clutching story in my family. My mother had a mother and her mother a mother before her, and none of us wanted to be like her own mother.
When my daughter was very young and trusting, she thought I was something I wasn’t. She thought I was a mother, first, last, and in between, for the role of mother swallows the woman—from the daughter’s point of view. She just assumed I was her mother because she found me in the house sleeping next to her father in the marital bed. Why would I be in the bed next to her father if I wasn’t her mother? She assumed I was her mother because I told her I was and she took me at my word. She did not question who I was. She did not search my face for resemblances to hers. From time to time she may have dimly sensed that something I was doing or saying didn’t fit the mothering she saw elsewhere, but she did not question what a mother was, and the moment of doubt lifted off as quickly as storm clouds dissipate in a southern sky.
But later she changed. And I wasn’t prepared. She started watching me, trying to get at who I was. She started to sense that I was not born a mother, was not a natural-born mother, and that I was not always as she found me. She sensed there was something else about me, some non-mother past underneath the mother topcoat. She started measuring me against other mothers and saw to her displeasure that there was more to me than a mother. At the same time, I began to fail to live up to her measurements of what a mother should be: I was not a creature with wings that doubled as cookie sheets. Previously it hadn’t occurred to her that I didn’t sew her Halloween costumes like the other mothers on the block, like the mothers she watched on television. I didn’t own a sewing machine, or even a needle and thread, standard mother equipment. She noticed that I didn’t attend the neighborhood coffees convened on weekday mornings because I worked outside the home. I didn’t have a special dish to pass at potlucks because I was a lousy cook, and I wasn’t cheerful when hauling out the trash like the other mothers, who waved enthusiastically at each other from their respective curbs.
In elementary school I let her walk home from school even though rumors circulated about an ominous Chevy lingering by the schoolyard. Unlike the other mothers, I wasn’t convinced girls had more to fear from strangers than people closer to home. I was not always up when she left for school in the morning. Sometimes I was hung over. Sometimes her father got her ready. Sometimes he even braided her hair. I read books at her soccer games, off to the side of the shouting parents. Often I agreed to bake cookies and then forgot. I felt guilty, but did the exact same thing the next time I was asked. While she sensed the differences between me and other mothers, she didn’t question me. The other children didn’t question their mothers either. Not yet. The critique of the traffic of mothers hadn’t started yet.
By the eighth grade she was openly evaluating my character. She no longer accepted me at face value. Was I consistent, did I contradict myself, did I practice what I preached? Did I have an accurate sense of myself? When I left the house, without announcing my purpose, where did I go, she wondered. Once I became a mother, my previous life became a secret I couldn’t reveal. I had to preserve the illusion that I was always as my daughter found me, a born mother who didn’t have a life worth mentioning before her daughter arrived. I pretended I had been a good girl, a saint, who never earned a C on my report card or made my mother cry. Sometimes I was on the verge of telling her how difficult I had been at her age, but I didn’t.
She did not subject her father to the same scrutiny. He was given a free pass. She regarded me suspiciously and went through my drawers, bags, jacket pockets. She thought that I was someone other than who I seemed, someone who had secrets—because she did. That I lived a life other than the one she saw—because she did. If she watched me closely enough, I would give myself away. She sniffed me like a bloodhound on a fugitive trail. I increased my vigilance.
When I became a mother, I thought that the watching would be finished, or if not finished, that I would be the one who did the watching. My mother watched me and was unhappy with what she observed. I told myself, when I became a mother, that I would not watch my daughter as my mother had watched me. No eyes would bore into her soul. I would not regard her with suspicion. I would not attempt to enter her every thought, mood, and desire. I would give her privacy. More important than keeping her fed, clothed, and attended to, I would give her a room where she could sit on the bed for dreamy hours, staring out into trees.
Now I feel like my mother, and it frightens me. I recognize in my responses to my daughter my mother’s responses to me as I became an adult, a transformation she believed I managed badly. I didn’t like how she handled me. I almost want to say manhandled me. And now I am perpetuating that handling upon my daughter. The same tones of accusation ring across the generations, with the same result: my daughter finds me wanting. She compares me to other mothers, who are more understanding, generous, lenient, open-minded, tolerant, and playful. Before this roster of luminaries I am deflated, and I retreat with hurt feelings. I feel strange need of protection around her, as if everything about me is under attack—the way I look, eat, talk, drive. She has an insatiable need to tear me apart, in order to build herself up, just as I needed to protect myself. It is a ritual that must be enacted over and over: to belittle the mother. I offer a wealth of opportunity.
Now I can imagine how my mother felt. She defended herself against me with identifiable strategies. Disengagement: she withdrew her interest and then her affection, which resulted in a brittle and remote demeanor. Preemptive blows: she’d strike before I had a chance to hide or prepare, to put me on the defensive. When those strategies failed, she’d engage in full-scale invasion, as if she were fighting for her life. She erected a hard containing wall of self-righteousness and blamed me for everything that had gone wrong between us. She reconstructed history with supreme creative will.
I recognize all of these techniques in myself. I’m gripped by anxiety because my job is to guide my daughter to adulthood, to keep her on track, to pull her away from the fires of self-destruction. Yet it is her calling to tear up the tracks and ignite the bonfires. I have sometimes flipped into invasion, as my mother before me did. After all my attempts to stand apart from her, my mother lives within me.
Sometimes I think it would be better if mothers and daughters lived in a herd, not a house, and were at an early age turned out to pasture with other mothers and daughters, and that over the course of a few seasons daughters wouldn’t know who exactly had borne them, and mothers wouldn’t know who exactly they had given birth to, and no one would know whose head she was butting up against, whose call she was following or not following, that there was more than enough of everything to go around, and that the only thing devoured was a deep-green gathering of grass.
Toy Savannah
It is late summer, and my daughter is leaving home to live on her own. She is my first child, and she is vacating the premises she and I have called home for nineteen years. This is an old story, even a cliché. Right now the newspapers are full of such stories. There is an article listing five easy strategies to cope with the “change”; the article avoids the word loss as dentists do pain. Turn this departure, the author advises, into an opportunity for renewal and adventure. Okay, here is my story of adventure and renewal.
We have not been getting along for the months she has been living at home since her return from Europe, where she traveled for half a year after graduating from high school. We have pretty well torn up the feelings between us and settled into bitter silence, with scattered arguments and patches of wrath.
Arguing over what, you might ask. You know, the usual stuff, like treating our home like a hotel and I’m maid service and cook (“At the Four Seasons,” I tell her, “at least you get tips”). Never putting gas in the car or cleaning out the paper cups and candy wrappers that litter every trip. Coming in at four in the morning or not at all. Playing loud Phish and Grateful Dead over and over. Receiving thirty-five phone calls a day from friends who expect me to take accurate messages. Being generally rude, hostile, and unhelpful. Calling me out when I ask her to clean her room after the wreckage spills into the hall, making passage to my study treacherous. Announcing she has decided not to attend college and instead plans to move in with three boys, waitressing until she saves enough money to follow Phish on next summer’s concert tour.
We have both counted the hours in anticipation of her departure. She says, “Well, you won’t have to deal with me much longer. I’m moving out in a month,” or in two weeks, or in ten days—you get the idea. And I taunt right back—“Yes, and it can’t come a moment too soon.” My anger burns so brightly it dims all the stars in my firmament of love.
She packs for days, throwing out bags and bags of what she has accumulated in her nineteen years. She drives off to the Public Works Department with a load of waste and comes back with some piece of furniture she found on a curb. Our garage is a sad collection of ripped and broken chairs and couches, all in a mustard color. Assembling the furniture of her new life, she is feverish with excitement. She even finds a Grateful Dead wastepaper can at one of the garage sales she prowls.
It is Saturday morning, a lovely day with a sun of beaming hope, and Clare is carrying boxes down from her room, loading them into the van, and driving off to her new residence. I feel everything rise that I have pushed aside, pushed down, and pushed under. While she and her brother deliver a load, I visit her room. The drawers of her desk, formerly so full they wouldn’t close, sit open and clean; her closet rattles with empty hangers. I can see the floor for the first time in months. The walls are bare except for the picture hooks. The rugs are packed. The bed that I slept upon until I left home, the bed that I passed on to Clare and upon which she slept until now, is stripped of its comforter and pillows. The room is emptied of life. And not as a child might take a few things away to college. She has dismantled her place. She has gone through her life and thrown out the past. She knows she’ll never be back. This will never be her primary residence again, the place she calls home.
She will never sleep on that bed again. She is going to make another home for herself, on her own terms. I have not allowed myself to see that she is making the end of childhood.
If I had confronted her departure in stages, I would have been devastated by increments. Now that my anger is abated, I find an empty room and a departed daughter, and a sheet of glass shatters.
The story continues thus: this is what I did with my opportunity for renewal and change. I sat down in a chair and wept until my eyes hurt. I poured myself a shot of vodka. And then I started to clean. Not her room. I wasn’t ready to clean her room. I started cleaning the kitchen, the parts I clean only in desperation—the oven, the refrigerator, the sticky blinds on the windows, the cabinet shelves, the legs of the kitchen table. Then I poured myself another shot of vodka, this one larger, grasped my Formula 409 cleaning spray, sat down at the kitchen table, and sobbed.
I contemplated the filth under the table, but instead made a key decision to tear off the old shelf paper and replace it with clean paper I had bought some time ago on sale. Even in the best of times, measuring is something I don’t do. Even when I’m sober, patterns are like maps of madness for me. But here I was with my half-drained bottle of vodka, eyes mere slits of weeping, trying to put down shelf paper. My son walked into the kitchen on his way to a bowl of ice cream and said, “Oh no.” I had gotten the first sheet of paper folded in on itself and stuck to me. In shape it did not resemble the drawer it was supposed to fit. Taking pity, he unglued me from the paper. “I don’t think you should be doing this right now,” he said gently. Nonetheless, I struggled forward and managed to lay paper on a few shelves and in one drawer. The paper had ripples, not the smooth fit advocated in the instructions, and ran up jaggedly the sides of the drawer and over the front lips of the shelves.
I contemplate the cabinets and drawers and say, Mothers and daughters . . .
Two weeks after her departure, I am inside Barnes and Noble, waiting in line to pay for my books. I look out the window. There she is—the tallest of three girls walking away down the street. She was always the tall one emerging at the end of the school day, a giraffe in a toy savannah. The other two girls have their hair pulled back in buns. She alone wears her hair loose and wild.
I pay my bill in a hurry and go out onto the street. They are striding forward with purpose, moving farther and farther ahead, too far for me to catch up. Clare can’t hear me as I call after her. Will she look back over her shoulder, I wonder. Not today, I think. The street traffic streams past in a continuous wash while I stand rooted to the sidewalk, unable to step backward or forward.
At first—in the store—I hadn’t recognized her. She was just a girl walking with other girls. By the time I saw it was my Clare, she was gone.