LOVE DOGS by Sammie Downing
My mom turned 60 the first week of COVID lockdown. The whole family Zoomed together for the event. It should have been a moment of solidarity – all of us joining to celebrate life in the midst of so much death. But I could tell that, alone in her apartment, a week into isolation, my mom was lonely. The conversation was stilted and awkward and she hung up early. I was so angry with her that day. We gathered to support you! We’re doing the best we can! At least try to be happy! I wanted to shout at my mother. After the birthday call, I returned to making dinner with Lily and wrapped my arms around her shoulders while she stood before the stove. Those first few months of the pandemic, an inexplicable rage flooded my cheeks whenever my mother cried on the phone. I was short with her and never stayed on the line for very long.
* * *
I’ve never been a morning person. Especially not at 15 years old in the middle of February before dawn. My sister and I would sit by the electric fire in our grandmother’s living room, each fighting for purchase in front of the flames. The house was dark, and we’d eat our oatmeal in silence while our mom worked in the kitchen. She had one specific playlist that we liked to call “Mom in the Morning.” First, the light piano intro and then the trumpet of Louis Armstrong’s “You Go to My Head.” Even without being in the kitchen, Frankie and I knew that just around the corner our mother was swaying with her eyes closed, maybe with her hand on her chest, to the sound of a horn more emotive than a human voice.
* * *
My mom and I are on a cross-country road trip for the first time since I was in high school. I’m 31 years old and recently broke up with Lily, my partner of four years, and my mother jumped at the chance to accompany me on my move from Denver, Colorado to Olympia, Washington. She’d asked to come with me several times, but I had deferred. Maybe next time, I kept saying. I’ll keep you posted. But in the end, I gave in. I let her come home with me.
* * *
I have spent years defending loneliness. I moved to an old cattle station on the other side of the world and cried my eyes out, alone in the dark, with only the deer and the possums to hear me, and while I was there I wrote preachy online blog entries declaring If you say you’re lonely you’re treated like a leper! But we were born lonely and we will die lonely!
After I returned to the States, I spent years pining after Lily, who was always traveling and never home. I anxiously walked around barbecues and parties saying things like, To be human is to be lonely!
But my mother’s loneliness rankled me. Each time she declined a friend’s invitation to coffee or went to bed at 7 after a long day of teaching, I wanted to scream, Don’t you see how small your world is becoming? Can’t you see this loneliness is all your fault?
* * *
On the drive, somewhere near Salt Lake City, my mom and I decide to pause our audiobook and I put on a playlist of all the songs she listened to in the kitchen on those cold February mornings. I once jokingly described this genre of music as “mom rock” to a friend.
As we pass the glimmering white steeples of Mormon churches, Del Amitri powers through the speaker. It’s “Driving with the Brakes On.” My sister and I loved the end of this song. We’d skip almost every other song on their record and sit in front of the speaker as if it were a TV. As if we could see this couple driving together through the night. My sister and I just waiting for the crescendo. It takes three full minutes for the song to really kick in. There are a lot of fake-outs. You keep thinking they’re going to break from their pattern – the cheesy ’90s synth that sounds like maracas. The lead singer is describing sitting in the car next to a woman as she lights up a smoke. He wants desperately to change course, but she’s in control. My sister Frankie and I lean forward. They really make you wait for it. But then, there it is! The release! A melodic, effusive zenith where the singer states that he will never leave her alone.
No matter where she was in the house my mom would gather around the speaker with us to hear those words. It was like our siren song. As a kid, I never understood that the lyrics were describing a couple dealing with the aftershocks of an abortion. I just thought it was about a man who loved a woman so much he was willing to go wherever she wanted to take him, even if it was a place he didn’t really want to go. He was by her side forever and only if the world collapses could he ever leave her.
* * *
After we broke up, I was devastated to lose the apartment Lily and I had shared together. I went around the house photographing everything that made our house ours. The note by the back door that she wrote long before I ever met her that read, Please check to make sure door is latched and locked! The sticker on the fridge that read, Judy, as if the fridge were expressing her autonomy. Hi, I’m Judy! Our plants that I carefully trained to grow toward each other from opposite sides of the room.
On the drive to Washington, somewhere between Grants Pass and Hood River, I talk to my mother about the last time I heard Lily’s voice. It was like hearing my own voice for the last time. No sound could be so familiar, so resonant.
My mother nods.
We had so much potential! I say as my mom watches the river and the golden hills beyond.
Honey, I know. Believe me, I know, she said. But you can’t build a life on potential.
* * *
When I was 12, I got into an arts magnet school where I studied creative writing. I spent all my time writing angsty poetry about my homeless father. Ruminating about where he was, if he was safe, whether he still loved us. After one set of assignments, my teacher, who had gray hair down to her belly and glasses that made her look like an owl, returned my assignment and said, Why don’t you write about the one who is still here?
* * *
My aunt performed Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” at my father’s funeral. He had died of pneumonia after going on a binge and falling asleep in the freezing rain and choking on his own vomit. She sat center stage and sang. Frankie and I always associated Springsteen with our father. We rummaged through everything he left behind in our attempt to look for clues about what sort of man he was. He had a lot of cassette tapes. We knew they were his because we recognized his handwriting by heart. His tapes said things like, The Complete Bruce, and Bruce, One, 2, Three. But “Born to Run,” to us, felt like his anthem.
After the funeral, my mom said quietly, You know, your dad made those tapes for me. I was the one who liked Bruce Springsteen. My sister and I listened to Bruce so much to get close to our father when really, we were getting closer to her. She never corrected us. She let us believe it was him we were really looking for.
* * *
I was angry with my mother for wanting my father back. I kept trying to break off contact with him, and yet she was always inviting him to the house to play cards or watch movies on Sunday afternoons. It made me uncomfortable when my father, weather-worn, burnt by sun in summer and cold in winter, would sit on our couch and pretend he’d always been there. He told stories about his childhood on a loop because no one wanted to talk about the shelter he’d been kicked out of last. No one mentioned the gnarled veins at his elbows – the scars of many plasma donations. We ignored his smell and hugged him anyway.
On Sundays, my mom seemed unbearably happy to have us all with her. As if she wanted nothing more in life than to serve us guacamole. Her insistence on pretending we were still a family baffled me. Especially when half the time my father never showed up and we were left watching the clock, terrified that maybe this time he was really gone for good.
* * *
Lily and I were together for four years. There were no children. No dogs. Not even a betta fish. And even though I knew in my heart that we weren’t working, leaving our home, Judy, and the toy shark over the toilet felt so impossible, I delayed my departure for many months. Walking away from my family – and she was my family – seemed to require a Herculean effort I was incapable of mastering. And yet my mother, who shared two children, a dog named Molly, and 13 years with my father, filled me with rage because of what I considered her irrational inability to let go.
* * *
I was having dinner with a friend recently and I said, Sometimes I feel like my mom wants me to be her boyfriend. I don’t mean be her boyfriend like literally but be that person, you know?
Yes, my friend said. Only the children of single parents ever know what I mean.
* * *
Things I love about my mother:
She loves the color orange. No one loves the color orange. Everyone else loves blue. When she texts me, she sends me orange hearts.
She’s done tarot since before I was born and she pronounces it TA-roh, like Thoreau instead of ta-ROT.
* * *
My mother helps me clean my new house. I’m in the bedroom organizing clothes and occasionally I see her down the hall, headphones on, as she dances around the kitchen. She’s listening to country, I know. Sometimes she sings but because she’s bad at remembering the lyrics to songs when she sings along, her voice is only sounds and rhythm and never words.
* * *
Lily had to travel for work all the time. When she returned home, I demanded her stories. Where had she been?! Who had she seen?! What made her laugh?! What was the first thing she saw in the morning and the last thing she saw at night?! I was ravenous. Starving like someone who’d been lost on an Arctic expedition and had just been rescued. I didn’t care if it was too much at once to be healthy – I couldn’t just eat a little – I needed it all! I needed her everything! Lily is a very private person. I’d known that since the beginning. She’d gone to great lengths to create a life that was all her own. She wanted the first thing she saw in the morning to belong only to her. While logically I respected her privacy, her separateness drove me crazy. It felt like an insect below my flesh that I couldn’t root out but could feel burrowing deeper within. I resented her inability to share her stories with me.
I am complaining about this distance to my mom on the front porch of my new house. We’re drinking coffee and watching hummingbirds flicker through these new bushes, this new state.
My mom turns to me and says, You know you’re pretty secretive, too, Sam.
As if she can sense my defensiveness, she continues, I feel like our relationship is always on your terms. I have to play by your rules. If you call, I answer. But I can never call you.
* * *
It’s true. I hated my mother’s need to know everything about my life. When I first started dating Lily and began spending the night at her house, I was still living with my mom in her one-bedroom apartment and sleeping on her couch. I lied to my mom and told her I was staying with a friend. It made me feel safe. Powerful. What a rush it was to control information! To dole out only the stories I wanted. I cruelly enjoyed the knowledge that my mother always wanted more than I could give her. I found safety in the distance between her desire and my ability to give.
* * *
A few years ago, I found out my father was working at a day shelter a few blocks away from the apartment I was sharing with my mom. I was terrified of running into him by accident. Because neither of us had a car, we walked the same streets. I decided to visit him. Break the ice. 118 When I came through the front door, my father was sitting at the front desk answering phones. He looked younger than I’d ever known him to look, and I wondered how that was even possible. The bulbs of his cheeks bloomed into a full smile when he saw me.
He turned to the woman in the office and said, My daughter is here, can you watch the phones for a second? I heard him say, my daughter, and I felt a rush, an electric buzz in my blood. He took me on a tour of the shelter: the kitchen, the TV room, the food bank. I felt the eyes of every man in the room, and I realized I could have been anyone’s daughter; I could have been anyone’s lost child wandering in off the street saying: I’ve been looking for you.
His pride and joy was the Little Free Library he’d helped build in the garden out front.
The neighbors, they don’t like us too much. This is our way to give back, he said. His hands were in his pockets, his smile unbearably boyish, painfully triumphant. I felt myself getting sick. I want to love this man, I thought. I want to be here for him. But I was also filled with a buoyant rage – how dare this man, my father, give so much to anyone who isn’t us? I was offended by his job and the fact that he showed up on time to this little building on the corner of Emerson and 18th. I couldn’t bear the fact that he was reliable, happy, and dependable for this community but had never been those things for us.
* * *
A few days after we arrive in Washington, my house is still in disarray. My mom is sleeping on the mattress on the floor of the living room. We trip on boxes and trash on our way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
My friends invite us to their house for dinner and it is a relief to leave behind the chaos. They have a garden so large it might as well be a farm. At the base of a sloping green hill a river runs through their land. They call their property Moon River. At dinner we start talking about “Moon River” the song, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Louis Armstrong.
My friends ask my mom about her COVID experience. Outside the window, swallows dive for early summer mosquitos. A fawn and her mother eat grass at the edge of a small wood, nearly out of sight. My mother tears up and puts her hands to her chest and says It was awful, and I can hear the trauma in her voice. She tells my friends about what 119 it was like to learn to teach online as a 60-year-old woman close to retirement. She describes the difficulties of wrangling children who were unable to focus and the inexplicable loneliness of going months on end without a hug or even someone to sit with on the couch and watch a movie.
As she tells her story, I am so sorry I feel sick. I’ve never once asked my mother about her experience as a single woman during COVID. I avoided speaking to her about it. During COVID, I had shamed her for being alone, for being single, for letting her life grow so small she only had her daughters, sisters, and her mother to lean on. And I had done it because I was ashamed to have left her alone.
It feels too late to ask my mother about her experience now – two years later, when I am moving to another state and leaving her behind once again. I am afraid to ask because I am afraid to hear her answer.
* * *
There is a day shelter in Denver that paid for a massage therapist to visit and offer free ten-minute massages. I asked the director of the program about it once and she said, More than food, more than a place to stay, the most important thing I can give the people who come to our door is human touch.
Some of these men, she told me, go years without anyone so much as shaking their hand. We’re not meant to live without feeling another person’s skin. It’s dehumanizing.
My father was homeless for close to twenty years and while I always made sure to give him a big hug whenever I saw him, one hug every few months is not enough to make you feel like a human. My mom went months alone in her apartment without anyone to hold her hand.
* * *
I like to joke around and say that I was unfortunate to have been raised by a poet because I am ashamed of being overly sentimental and romantic and I want something to blame it on. But the truth is, as a kid, I loved the fact that Mom wrote poetry. I wanted to be a poet too. While most kids rode to school listening to KOZI 101.1 or MIX 100.3, Maroon Five and Matchbox 20, my mom, Frankie, and I listened to Coleman Barks read Rumi on cassette. Oh, to be 11 years old again and serenaded by a poet on a winter morning! Oh, to feel the leather 120 seats of our green Volkswagen Beetle icy on my thighs! All she had to do was press play and the sound of a sitar and Coleman Bark’s dulcet tones would immediately transport me – I was not a sixth grader prone to shingles and hives, no – I was a whirling dervish ready to break into wild, ecstatic movement!
I loved every poem except one. My mom often rewound “Love Dogs,” so we could really let the words sink in. God, she loved that one. I’ve heard it so many times I could probably recite it in my sleep. In the poem, a man is crying out for God and never hears anything back. Frustrated, he goes to sleep and in his dreams he is visited by a spirit who tells him that it is his longing and his grief that is God’s response. It is his hunger that brings him closer to the union he so craves. There are love dogs no one knows the names of. Give your life to be one of them.
I hated that poem. Fuck those dogs. If I call and no one answers, I’d better call someone new. I often asked her to skip it.
Because you asked me to skip it, we’re going to listen to it twice! she’d say. We’re going to listen to it until you understand.
I get it. Some dude is supposed to call out to God over and over again and no one will ever know his name and he’s just going to die some invisible guy who never gets what he wants.
She’d smile at me and turn up the volume. You don’t get it. But you will one day. And then I want you to come talk to me.
What sort of mother, I wondered all those years ago, my nose to the frosty glass, lets a poet tell her daughter to give her life up to waiting?
* * *
It’s easy to say, at eleven years old, that you’re never going to wait for love. But it’s an entirely different thing to love someone as an adult and be willing do almost anything to make that love stay. I knew early into my relationship with Lily that our needs were not aligned. Our second year together she traveled for months on end. From July to November we saw each other for a few days, sometimes just a night, before she was gone again. I wanted her to call me at the end of every night when we were long away from each other. I wanted that tender coming-together at the end of each day. I wanted to face the world side by side. But she was busy, and her work required constant atten- 121 tion. She often skipped lunch! There was no time to call or text more than a simple I love you. At the end of the night, she went to sleep on a bus with people sleeping an inch away from her feet, an inch away from her head. There was no privacy! She couldn’t share her day with me. I’d have to wait.
She told me that no one in her profession had the time to call their partners. No one in her role would let their partner visit. Once, in a petty rage, I texted people who worked the same job as she did and asked them how often they called their partners. Every day, they all said, if I can! Sometimes it’s tough and I can’t manage it. But I try! Do they visit you? I asked. Of course! they all said.
I realized that our problem was not one of time or scheduling. The root was deeper and much harder to address. I needed her attention, her time, her stories. And she needed space. She needed me to let her go and then let her come back to me, without questions or demands – just acceptance. I wanted our relationship to be a river that flowed consistently – always present, sometimes flooded with energy, other times meandering, quiet but still active. Lily wanted us to be like the tide: long bouts of exposed dry earth and then a sudden rush of water.
Okay, I told myself, I can do that. I’d rather be a barren shore waiting for you to come home to me than a place you never returned to at all.
* * *
While my mom helps me move into my new house, I can’t find my speaker because it’s lost somewhere in the unopened boxes. When my mom and I clean, we continue to each listen to our own music. I am in the living room sorting through books and my mother is in the kitchen wiping down shelves.
We moved countless times when I was a child, but the room I remember most from every house is the living room. I think this is because on chore days my mom would blast one of her favorite CDs and Frankie and I would use the red Dirt Devil on the sofa cushions and chairs. My family is not a very clean family, so I’m not sure why I can remember watching my mother clean every house we’ve ever lived in while we all danced to the Phenomenon soundtrack or Faith Hill. But maybe I remember these moments more than the rest because it was just so fun to dance with my sister and my mom and make the feather dusters our microphones. We could tear the house apart and put it back together again.
Years later, in my own house, even in my own headphones, I still play Faith Hill’s album Breathe while I clean. My favorite song is “If I Should Fall Behind,” and it’s arguably the most melancholy piece on the record. As a kid I would hit the back button over and over again so I could hear it on repeat. It was only a few years ago that I discovered it was actually written by Bruce Springsteen.
* * *
I sometimes like to say that my mother hasn’t dated anyone since my father. That is not true. She has dated two men. I just like to exaggerate.
After my mother moved out of our grandmother’s house and was living in a condo that was filled with light, she met the second man. The condo used to be a convent and the doors were arched and there were altars built into the walls of the 700-square-foot space. Frankie slept on the pull-out couch in the living room. I slept at my grandmother’s house about a mile away. It felt like my parents had separated – my mom and my grandmother – and they each had custody of one of us kids.
The man was a musician. Like Lily. Like my father. A guitarist this time. I could tell my mom liked him, and I wanted to be excited for their connection. She invited me to one of his shows at a dive bar on the outskirts of Denver. It looked like he was still wearing the same jeans he wore when he was 22. He lived in an apartment and worked as some sort of technician for a cable company. Everything about him seemed stilted, like he had stopped maturing in his twenties. But my mother was happy, so I wanted it to last. About a month into their relationship, they went to my mom’s favorite hot springs and someone took their picture on the steps of their rented trailer. He came by a few days later to pick her up for a date. My sister and I sat on the couch and my mom showed all three of us the framed picture. She had placed it on the mantel. I thought I could see him shrink from her when she showed us all the picture. Even I, 21 and inexperienced with dating, knew that after a few months of getting to know someone you should never put a framed picture of you and the object of your desire on the mantel. He broke up with her soon after, saying he didn’t find her attractive, but he still called her when he was anxious and alone and she still answered and spent hours on the phone calming him down. My mother was always doing that, caring for the people who never cared for her.
In retrospect I want to tell this dude to eat dogshit. You’re a man with a dead end job who’s been living the same life you’ve lived since 1982 but you think you’re hot shit with your monthly jamfest at a dive bar with stale tortilla chips. My mom has raised two children on a teacher salary and despite our disagreements, no one could ever discount that my mother has the biggest heart. Which one of you is more attractive? But at the time? I was furious with my mother about the mantel picture. Didn’t she know her need was too much? Everyone could see her need on display.
* * *
For years I tried to negotiate my need for connection with Lily’s need for space. Over the years, I tried to pare my needs down to the bare minimum. I negotiated with myself nightly: if I couldn’t have a daily phone call, then perhaps a phone call every three days would satisfy my hunger. But my need for connection seemed to always clash with her need to be fully present for her work. Her days were long, sometimes ten hours or more, and she didn’t have the energy for a phone call. I understood this. I wanted to honor her space. And yet I’d still be filled with jealousy when I saw her hanging out with her coworkers at the end of her workday on social media. You can connect with them, but you can’t connect with me?
I tried to be someone I wasn’t. I tried to be the woman who doesn’t need the reassurance of my partner’s voice. Every night I crawled into bed longing for her and hoping that despite all evidence, tonight she would call me before bed, just to hear my voice before she fell asleep. I convinced myself that my needs were too much, so I corked this geyser within. I tried to train myself to accept what I was being given. Come on kid, you can do it! But my need felt to me like one of those carnivorous plants in Jumanji. Ka-pow! I cut the head off one plant only to have it reappear, violently raising its snake-like head.
After years of watching my buried needs wreak havoc, I decided that, no matter the effort, no matter the want, these needs were never going to go away. If anything, they were only going to cause harm. I mustered all my strength and told Lily that I needed more – I needed for us to be present in each other’s daily lives. I needed our commitment toward a shared dream. I needed an assurance of connection, despite distance and work and our independent goals.
And after I shared my needs with the woman I asked to marry me, the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life, she said: I don’t think I can be what you need.
I was devastated. See? I wanted to shout at myself. You want too much! This need in you is grotesque.
* * *
Each spring, my mom shepherds sixty 9-year-olds to perform at the local Shakespeare festival. It takes months of planning. First, the scenes are assigned. Then casting. Then my mom, the literature teacher, leads her little ones through their lines. I love attending the festival at the end of the year and watching these children, costumed and smiling, look at my mom with excitement before they take the stage. I love how proud she is of these tiny humans as they swoon – Oh if I were a glove upon that hand, let me touch that cheek! My mom tries not to direct the tragedies. She prefers Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The world is a sad place. I don’t like to dwell, she says. Growing up, we only watched romantic comedies. Happy endings only.
* * *
In my new little house in the woods, my mother helps me build my bed frame and I bemoan my inability to properly use a wrench.
See, this is why I need a partner! I joke. I need someone who knows the difference between righty-tighty and lefty-loosey.
My mom looks at me seriously, not the least bit annoyed that she is standing right in front of me, helping me learn the difference between righty-tighty and lefty-loosey.
You’re going to find someone, Sam. Someone who actually wants to be here with you.
I fiddle with washers in my palm.
I’ve watched you these last few years, she says softly. You weren’t happy, Sam. Let yourself be open to something new.
I was happy! I protest. When she was with me, actually present with me, I have never been happier!
But, my mom says gently, handing me the wrench, how often was she really there?
20% of the time, I say.
It’s a long life, she says, to live 80% of your life waiting for someone to come home.
But I’m going to be 40! I joke, trying to move the conversation to safer territory and because our family quotes When Harry Met Sally like other families quote Corinthians. Jesus has nothing on Nora Ephron!
In eight years! my mom quotes back with a smile.
But it’s hanging there like a big dead end! I pretend to swoon and my mom smiles before she leaves me with my half-finished bed.
Is that what you did? I want to ask her. Spend 80% of your life waiting for Dad to come home so we could all be happy again? Which one of us is more afraid of me becoming like you? And yet, despite my fear that I’ll spend my whole life as a dog waiting for my call to be returned, I can’t seem to do anything else.
* * *
When my father died, I think everyone thought my mom would finally be released. Instead, my mom was filled with a grief 20 years in the making. A grief she felt ashamed to feel engulfed her.
I hated my mother’s grief for my father while he was alive. I wanted her to find love! To be happy! To go to bed every night in the arms of a man who came home to her, served her breakfast in bed, and listened to Rumi in the dark. Instead, she loved this man who broke her heart daily. After my father died, she said to me, I don’t know where I fit, I’m just the ex-wife in everyone else’s eyes. I divorced him, why do I get to be sad?
You divorced him because you had to, Mom. You divorced him to protect us.
I can’t imagine having to grieve in secret. During my breakup my mom had been there every step of the way.
* * *
Nearing the end of her visit, I ask my mother about the lawyer from the mountains. The first man she “dated” after my dad. Her face gets solid. The way it does when I ask her about things she doesn’t really want to talk about.
When I was in my late teens, my mother reconnected with this man, who she had known in high school. He was a lawyer and lived in the mountains. After they reconnected, he sent her the song “Buckets of Rain” by Bob Dylan and she played it for me.
Isn’t it beautiful? she asked. Not the most common Bob Dylan song.
It is beautiful, I agreed.
He was moving and my mother offered to help him move. She met him in a town named after a gun. I remember being happy for her. The next day I got a phone call from her. She was coming home early. Could I pick her up from the train? She sounded panicked and I could tell she had been crying. I barely remember the car ride back from the station except that I was too terrified to ask her any questions and that her face was still red from crying.
What happened? I ask my mother now, years too late.
He was moving, and so I offered to help, she says. Like I do. I went all in. But when I got there, it was too much. He hadn’t packed. We had to move a dryer that was infested with rats. I was overwhelmed. I was physically exhausted.
I know that my mom is probably sharing only a fraction of the story. But I can picture it. A mountain house in disarray. Rats in the dryer, rats at her feet.
He came to hug me, she says, and I, I just didn’t reciprocate. I was too overwhelmed, and it just triggered something in him. He snapped. He berated me. He told me I was a terrible person, filthy. All sorts of rotten things. He wouldn’t stop. I had to leave. I felt unsafe. He tried to block me from leaving. He threatened me. On the way to the station, he never stopped berating me.
My mom says berate – he berated me – as calmly as she can, as if it were benign, as if she were saying he chided me, he criticized me, but she is saying berate – as in to condemn vehemently. I hate to think about my mom, alone in the mountains, a man barring the door, keeping her inside a dark house filled with junk and infested with rats. I hate to think about my mother, who only wanted to help, who only ever wants to help, condemned vehemently.
But that’s what I do, my mom says. I give too much. I don’t do very well with boundaries.
No, I say. This man doesn’t seem like a person worthy of your gifts.
Yes, she says with a small smile. If I could only find someone who gives back.
* * *
I spent so much of my life trying to align myself with my father – seeing him as the hero – because I believed he was powerful. He left us – his life was one of action and decision. And my mother? I saw her as the woman he left behind but who continued to wait. He was Odysseus and she, Penelope. He faced Scylla and Charybdis, lay in the beds of nymphs and witches, while she wove a shroud every day and tore it apart every night. In my mother’s story I saw a life of passivity and pain and in his, I saw power and freedom. I’d flattened my mother and father into characters. The actor and the one acted upon. The one with needs and the one who was needed. Better to be the actor! To be devoid of needs! I ran from her because I wanted to put as much distance between myself and her pain as possible, in order to protect myself. It was simple: align yourself with the one with the power and you can never be hurt. If I abandoned my mother, if I rejected her need, then I would maintain a semblance of my power. But, like my father, I left the one person who loved me best. And while I shunned my mother, scorned her loneliness and her need like the Odysseus I so wanted to be, in reality, I’d become my own Penelope, alone in my room, looking out to sea and waiting for my love to return to me.
When my mom shares the story of the mountain lawyer, I think about how much love my mother has to give and how few of us have ever returned the favor. I’d flattened my mother until she became the face of a coin. Heads and I’d follow in her footsteps. Tails and I’d be free. There was no dimension to her life in my eyes. She was simply an adage, a bedtime story, a moral – This is how you end up alone. This is what it looks like to be left behind.
But what are my mother’s needs, really? To have her husband stay sober and put their kids to bed every night? To bring her coffee in bed? To visit a man in the mountains and help him move and at the end of the night be given a back massage while they watch a movie? To date a man who loves her for her goofy, orange-heart-loving self, and put their photo on the mantel so they can grin out at the room, loving and loved? What about my mother’s needs are too much? What about her desires are worthy of scorn? Are her needs truly too impossible to meet?
I wonder if my mother and I are mirror images of each other. Not because our need is a vast, limitless, hungry monster that can never be satiated like I always thought – something to be caged and starved. What if it was safer for me to believe my mother’s needs were too much than admit that we both deserved to be loved? My mother couldn’t control my father any more than I could control Lily, but I thought that I could control myself. If I applied limits to my desires, stymied and fettered my wants, then perhaps I could make love stay. But what, I wonder, would we do if we ran for someone and they ran toward us too? What if we were just two people with normal human needs and there was better love out there for us if only we accepted ourselves and owned our desires? What if, in the end, there was nothing wrong with us?
* * *
My mom is sitting on the couch in my new home, and I ask her to play some music. She pulls out her iPhone and we sit there for hours as she plays James Taylor.
I love the way my mother listens to music with her whole body. She closes her eyes and often puts her hand to her chest or her throat and rocks back and forth. She doesn’t listen to the songs from the “Mom in the Morning” list of my childhood anymore. Her new playlists are all songs that make her happy. She puts on a song called “Caroline I See You,” which is presumably about James Taylor coming home to his wife after a tour. She’s standing on the stairway and a little angry at his late arrival. I’d never heard this song before but I am strangely moved by its simplicity and its refrain: I see you. I watch my mom listen to this song and I feel grief well in my knees and ribs. There is so much I will never know about my mother.
I’d wanted so desperately to know everything there was to know about Lily. I wanted to live inside her mind so I could understand her desires, her greatest fears, her most tender memories. But I’ve never shown any curiosity when it came to my mother’s life. Instead, I’ve come to her when I need to voice my insecurities and she always stays on the phone with me for an hour or more just to calm my anxieties. I think about what she said, If I could only find someone who gives back. I have given my mother so little attention. Sure, I can’t be her boyfriend or the husband she lost, but when have I ever called to hear about her day and to ask about her students or her piano lessons? When have I ever asked her about her childhood with genuine interest and not because I am looking for some greater understanding 129 of my own life within hers? When have I ever looked at her and been searching for something other than myself?
I look at my mother on my couch in my new home, her pants grubby from dusting my kitchen walls and cleaning my cupboards and I think to myself, She is the true love dog. It’s not about begging at a closed door and demanding to be let in like I thought when I was a child. It is about the desire to connect and draw closer. It is about keeping your heart open when all the world suggests it is better to keep yourself closed. It is saying: Love. Love for the joy of it, and that is enough.
* * *
After my mother leaves, I go on a date. I am nervous. We’re sitting on a beach overlooking lavender islands and grey water. My date grabs my hand and my sweat smears against her palm and she asks me why I became a writer. It should be a simple question. People have asked me this all my life. I’ve always said my writing came from my father. He was a storyteller. He told us about angels saving him from near death as he cliff-jumped in Indiana. I swear I could feel her hands around my ankles, he’d say. I missed the rocks by just this much!
On this beach, next to a woman I don’t know but whose presence already brings me comfort, like the light against water at dusk, I hear my mother’s voice in my head – You can’t build a life on potential.
So I tell her the truth. I think the first time I realized I wanted to be a writer was when my mother read a poem that she wrote about love at my aunt and uncle’s wedding.
I was six years old. I can’t remember if my parents were separated for the first time that year or if that came later, but I do remember the cream dress my mother wore that day, and the pale hat that shielded her face from the sun. I remember her words: In the beginning, beneath my chest lies all so radiant full. I can still picture it, how she put her hand to her breast, right below her neck, the way she does when she listens to James Taylor. My heart a blossomed sunflower turned openly towards the sun in you.
I remember sitting on the edge of my white folding chair staring at my mother as if she was someone I had never seen before. I remember how her normally quiet voice was steady and strong and carried through the crowd on the wind.
Sammie Downing is the author of the novella The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs (Half Mystic Press, 2019) and the chapbook Wound Light (Bottlecap Press, 2022).