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Sometimes I pretend my mother is watching me. I use
her, the thought of her, if I think I might say
something or do something in a situation that doesn't
require me to say or do, like a parent-teacher
conference at preschool. Before I go into the classroom,
to sit on a midget chair at a knee-high table and listen
to a childless twenty-seven-year-old tell me about one
of my kids, I might bring a picture of my mom to mind,
and for a meditative moment feel that by placing her
between myself and the world I will acquire the dignity
and grace that I ascribe to her.
But I can't hold the thought. I can never hold the
thought. I see my mother sitting peacefully, with her
faraway stillness, her useful hands folded in her lap,
then the image fades and I say something that signals my
impatience.
My mother is an idea to me, like God. And like a god
she has been an ideal repository for my anger and
accusations, my love and longing, for my shape-shifting
images of myself. Her name was Mildred Elizabeth Lady
until she was twenty-eight years old, when she married
my father and became Mrs. Allan Marin. More than half
her life was over by the time she shed her given names,
the better half, it seems to me now, as I near the age
she was when she died.
I was fourteen when my mother died of breast cancer.
She was fifty. She had been sick for years but never
told me so, and I didn't see her during the last months
of her life, which she spent alone in California, two
thousand miles from our home in Evanston, Illinois, two
thousand miles from her husband, her children and her
own mother, who lived with us.
She died in 1973, before breast cancer walkathons and
pink breast cancer lapel ribbons and
breast-cancer-surviving celebrities splashed into the
news. It was the year Nixon's criminals testified in
Congress, and the last U.S. troops left Vietnam. I have
come to understand the times as I will never be able to
understand my mother. Most of what I know about her I
learned when I researched her life as I would a
stranger's. I was twenty-nine. I'd been working at a
newspaper in California—following leads, conducting
interviews, tapping out a thousand-word story per week,
give or take. I liked being a reporter better than
working as a waitress or a secretary, the jobs that were
my undergrad and doctoral prep for journalism. "What's
your angle?" I was often asked by those I interviewed,
usually the ones with angles of their own. The question
grated. I saw myself as a fact finder, an observer. Yes,
everyone has
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