'When my children were born, the need to understand my mother’s life, and what it could have been, heightened. It was as if she alone could solve the mystery of early motherhood’s unmoored days.'
The author and her mother in 1984. Photo: Kate Ristow During the last few years of her life, my mother didn’t bother with the wig she wore when I was small. Her skin was gray, and she was so thin that her ribbed cotton leggings were loose around her thighs. She wore patterned head scarves and thick sweaters and a collection of medals tangled around her neck. They were saints, mostly, but she wore other relics, too: a moonstone, a small tarnished bell.
I was 15 when my mother died. The physical reminders of life were the cruelest at first: sweaters and sneakers and scarves, teapots, books, a stick of blush, the only makeup I ever saw her wear. Later, it was the people, her friends, who loved her so much, her sisters, the kids she worked with in the school intervention program. I was never allowed to know who they were, though I often did. We lived on an island. Our school was small. Anyway, I would have known by the way they looked at her.
When my children were born, the need to understand my mother’s life, and what it could have been, heightened. It was as if she alone could solve the mystery of early motherhood’s unmoored days. I wondered where she would be, for example, if I were to call her in the middle of the afternoon. Where would she be standing? What would she be holding? Toward the end of her life, she started painting.
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