There are all kinds of ways to love things – child love, partner love, friend love, animal love, sibling love, grandmother love, and then, mother love, perhaps the birth of love. I have – do – experience all of these different kinds of love, and they are very distinct from one another.
My Florence photos seemed to have touched on the idea of Mother Love, they evoke that, as does Easter, and soon, Mother’s Day. So I am thinking of mothers these days, and of my own mother, Eve. I had the most complex relationship with her, loving and yet so disturbing and unworkable. Families are often like that, I think. My mother loved me dearly, was the first person to encourage my creativity. She loved my writing and my stories. She was quite the story-teller herself and we would often make one another laugh, even at the most difficult times. She was also profoundly needy, angry, demanding and intrusive. She frightened me, and did me harm. I never got to a comfortable place with her. She never saw any home I ever lived in, and I did not see her for final years of her life. I simply could not be around her. I accept that this was just the way it had to be. I felt as if I barely survived her.
I could never meet her emotional demands, nobody around her could, and while she loved me dearly, she could never resolve her great anger and fear or face either. I understand now that none of this was her fault, she did the best she could. It was hard to see that at the time. She would have loved Maria, I think, as my mother was an artist herself, with an extraordinary eye for light, color and character. She never had any money, but she had exquisite taste and resourcefulness, and always looked beautiful and surrounded herself with beautiful things. She and my father has the most difficult relationship – they just should never have been together, I think, and she never forgave him for that – and my mother always seemed bitterly disappointed with her life.
My mother was found dead in a nursing home in Providence one morning at the age of 87, and I did not even know where she was living. I wish I could have said goodbye to her before she died, yet I simply could not have, and that was the best I could do. I did not to go her funeral and did not see her gravesite until I took Maria there last year. I told her I loved her and that I was happy and I wanted her to meet Maria. I think she wanted me to be happy, even if she could not be happy herself.
Now, as I grow up and older, I see how much she loved me and how much I loved her. Life has its own way of parceling out fate, even with Mother Love. We just could never figure it out, she and I. Yet I know she loved me in the most powerful and affirming way, as I learned after she died when I found a scrapbook of much of my writing over the years, in newspapers and books. How proud she was of me, how gifted she believed I was. Somehow, that faith got through to me, and gave me the strength to write.
I found an old photo of the two of us in a forgotten family album and I have it hanging over my computer. We are sitting next to one another, on a picnic, I think, this beautiful woman and this cute kid, smiling, happy, their connection evident, bound through time. Were life always gentle, things would have stayed that way, but life is not always like that. I owe my mother much for the gifts that I have. Love you, Mom, and I wish you could have found a happier and more peaceful life. I have.
