It's moms all the way down

I think a lot about my mother: is she going to call me? why does she like my sister better? how did she keep the house so clean, divorced with two girls and working as a supply teacher? how did she get to be so headstrong, born in 1944 and counseled to be either a secretary or a nurse, because she was smart? The little bits of information she casually drops indicate the untapped mine of stories: Did she ever tell me about the time her date was chased by the cops? While they both were riding a motorcycle? Top speed through a cemetary? And they crashed? No, Mom, you didn’t.

I think, too, about my mother's mother, Munchkin's namesake: every time I call my daughter to me, every time I giggle her name, or sing it to her, my family history extends out beyond us. I was an adult before I learned that Granny’s father early exited the picture and her mom (my great-grandmother) remarried. She was dead before I knew that my Pappy had cheated on her serially--and she cheated right back, making sure he knew it. I think she had a (half?) brother. I'm not sure. I do know that she loved to sunbathe, and would entertain us at the cottage by putting maraschino cherries in her belly button to feed to the chipmunks.

It amazes me how much of my mother’s inner life is a closed book to me, and one generation further back, how sketchy even the simplest details are.

Once, when I was in my early twenties, my mom handed me a red hard-bound notebook. It was some sort of stamped faux-leather, a nice size for holding onto, with lined brownish pages all full of her handwriting. I was shocked to discover it was a diary she kept in the early 1970s, when she was married to my dad and living in Toronto, and when they moved to Even Further the Hell Up North where I was, in due time, born.

I read it. I gave it back to her. We didn’t speak of it then and the subject has never come up in the decade since. I wonder sometimes if I hallucinated it: Mom’s pain and rage at discovering Dad’s infidelity; the removal from Toronto and relocation nearer to her own family in Northern Ontario; their apartment in the new town; Dad’s flying lessons and business trips; an awe-struck account of her pregnancy and of my very early infancy. In the diary she was a young woman, a wife, a person struggling to find her place, a soon-to-be-mother experiencing the happy anticipation of a family of her own, a budding feminist who fought to retain her dignity in trying circumstances. Not at all the woman I thought I knew.

I wonder if Munchkin will be curious about me the way I am curious about my mother. I wonder if my blog will be around for her to read, a sprawling digital archive of my stories and pictures and observations and my amusement among friends.

At this point, I feel like I want to remember for both of us: if I can capture the details of what I remember from before, if I can write while I live what is happening now, will we understand each other better? Or will I smother her with my version Of Everything? Or will I surprise her—look! Mom was a person, too!—so that she looks at me, at us, with new eyes, too, the way I looked at my mom after reading her diary? Right now, what I'm holding to is that even as we are so very different, my mother and I, she as practical and self-sufficient and well-adjusted as I am melodramatic and talkative and introspective, still, we are both, in our ways, diary-keepers.

It's not much, but it's a start.