Numbers About My Mother

It’s August and it’s San Francisco so it’s cold. While I’m walking home from work there’s a call from a Portland number I don’t recognize. I answer. It’s a friend of my mother’s, phoning to let me know that my mother has tried to kill herself, that she’s at a hospital in an induced coma. I slump onto a cement car stop in a parking lot and listen to the details, dig in my purse for a pen, turn the phone away from the wind, write down the hospital’s name and the room number, watch people walk down Polk Street on their way home or to happy hour, thinking how normal they all look, how careless they act while my mother is in a coma. Her friend says she’s not sure how bad it is. I try to figure out how to phrase my question correctly, politely: “You mean she might die?” but I can’t think of how it’s supposed to be said, how a person asks this of a near-stranger regarding her own mother, so I don’t ask it.

My mother is 57 and I am 32. This isn’t the first time she has tried to kill herself. The other time was when she was 32 and I was seven. Back then, she was a single mother of four kids — my three brothers and me. She’d been married twice, divorced twice. We lived in a little house that my brothers and I came into and went out of with impunity while she slept days, worked at a bar nights. The house had two bedrooms and one attic. One of my brothers was still a baby, not yet two years old. That’s a lot of numbers for one paragraph. Here are some more:

Number of brothers I didn’t get to see anymore when my mother gave up custody of all of us and we went into foster care: two.

Number of families, total, my brother and I lived with before graduating high school: seven.

Number of years old I was when I re-met my mother: nineteen.

Average number of times my mother and I talk on the phone per week: three. We’re close, like best friends sometimes. We talk about everything, almost. But then. We’ll never be close enough. We don’t talk about the difficult things. We don’t talk about the days when we were a family of five. I don’t ask her what number of times she had to put her signature on what number of lines, what number of forms she had to fill out to let go of all four of her children. One? Five? Twelve? How does that work?

The mother I know now is a very small, mellow person who wears feather earrings and three or four rings on each hand and gauzy scarves and a denim jacket with a big peace sign on the back, and sometimes when we talk she seems very old and wise, and sometimes she seems very young and simple. Her cell phone ring tone is “All You Need Is Love.”

I don’t call her Mom. I don’t remember what it felt like to call her that. I write it in cards, but when we’re together I can’t think of a comfortable way to address her, so I don’t call her anything.

Although. She is a lot of things. I look just like her, and sometimes when I’m leaving a friend a voicemail or giving a stranger directions on the street, I have to stop, startled for a second, because I’m intonating my words in the exact same way she does.

All these years later, and now she's tried it again. It comes as a shock, because I hadn’t thought ... I don’t know what I hadn’t thought. I try to pinpoint it. I’m still sitting on the car stop in the parking lot, and it seems important to decide, before I get up and continue my walk home and call the hospital, why exactly my mother doing this has come as a shock. I come up with: I guess I just thought she was happy. Well, not in an ecstatic-to-be-living-in-the-world sort of way, but in a regular way — she crochets barefoot sandals, she has a garden — that just-enough sort of happy that prevents people from wanting to die. That’s the kind of happiness I had been envisioning in my mother’s life, I guess. Tomato-and-corn-garden happy.

by Melissa Chandler, The Hairpin |  Read more: