Her planted garden (2018)
Last year, my mother and I visited her extended family in Illinois. One of her cousins had a blank sketchbook. He gave each person a page in the sketchbook and challenged them to draw a pig with their eyes closed and without taking the pen off the paper. This is the pig my mother drew.
This is the pig I drew, and it wouldn’t have been much better if my eyes were open.
A painting of hers hangs in our house now—a thin, vertical rectangle of young trees in early September. I was maybe two years old when she painted it. She had set up a playpen in our backyard. It was a collapsible wooden fence which opened accordion style and corralled me inside. On this particular late summer day, she set herself up inside my playpen and hired a babysitter to take care of me outside it. I spent most of the time holding the bars and watching her at the easel. This was the last painting my mother ever did, and I feel guilty when I look at, hanging between two lamps above our piano.
Until I was eight or nine, my mother talked constantly about the creative process—how to start, when to stop, and many other lessons I can no longer articulate. And she was helpful. That was my formative experience of her. She was so helpful. I had clear, detailed visions as a child, and I was extremely passionate about what I imagined. I loved to make things, but what I could actually make was never what I envisioned, and I struggled with intense, overwhelming fits of frustration. But my mother was skilled at listening to my projects. She knew exactly when to intervene and exactly how much to help. Taking from my hands whatever I was about to hurl to the ground, she would examine it and ask me questions. Then a tweak—a dab of glue, a quick line, a nail in a different place, and I was back on track and working quietly again.
She made beautiful things and made things beautiful, but form and color and texture were ultimately not conceptual enough to hold her attention. Her aesthetic became increasingly abstract and increasingly interior during the course of my early childhood. It was the age of the feminine mystique—the age of women wearing makeup and jewelry as they served dinner to their families—and she became a mother in 1961, probably close to when it peaked. It was also the age of Freud, and my father was training to be a psychoanalyst. Housework didn’t interest her at all and neither did shopping. Home for her was in our heads, and so homemaking became cultivating who we would become. This was her planted garden.
In the project of tending this garden, my mother was deeply dependent on my father. He was still her opening door. Raising three children requires two points of view—and two backs and four hands. He had a depth of human understanding that she needed. She could open the door herself now and see the complexities of our emotions and follow our evolving states of mind, but it didn’t open as easily without him.
He found you where you were. Once he found you, he joined you. And once he joined you, he knew what to say or do to lead you forward. Here is an example in a series of stills from an old family movie. We are guests at his brother Joe’s house for Christmas, and something has happened. My sister Mandy is upset. However serious it was before, it is passing now, and she seems committed to showing an emotion she no longer feels or feels as strongly.
Success in parenting requires planning. Each child requires a different plan. Each plan requires a different conversation, and for each of these conversations someone needs to find that child. What is happening behind those eyes and between those ears? But you also need to find yourself. Am I doing this just because it was done to me? Am I ignoring what everyone else sees about this child? Trained to manage the dynamics of a therapeutic session, my father knew how to reflect on himself and his impact on other people. He also knew how to help my mother do the same, although he wore his training easily and shared it gently.
Inside this controlled space, she helped us in precisely the right way at exactly the right time. This is my youngest sister Emily.
At dinner, she sat in a highchair between my parents. One night we had vanilla ice cream. Two years old then, Emily dropped her spoon on the floor. While my mother bent down, Emily picked up her ice cream. She contemplated the ball in her hand as if it were an enormous squirt of shampoo. Then she washed her hair with it. She was only thinking about how it would feel on her head until she saw everyone laughing. This was like a revelation to her, that she could make her entire family laugh. The next night she did it with spaghetti and meat sauce. She just dumped the bowl on her head and started working dinner into her hair. I remember my mother not reacting right away but watching and thinking. She saw how much it meant to Emily that she could make us laugh. On the third night, she put a shower cap on her head and that ended it. If Emily couldn’t feel her hair, she wasn’t interested in washing it. For months afterward, whenever we had spaghetti or ice cream, the shower cap came out. We would laugh all over again while Emily sat beaming beneath it.
My mother brought this level of care and control to many of the small challenges that shaped the first half of my childhood. I remember slipping away from my sisters and finding her in the kitchen one Christmas morning. I was eight. The presents were opened, and I asked to know the truth about Santa Claus. As a kid who spent a lot of time in my own head, this was an important question. She didn’t just tell me. Instead, she gave me agency and ownership over this transition. She sent me to the encyclopedia to look up the entry on Santa Claus (“a mythological figure”). I read it on a chair near my sisters while they played with their presents.
Her planted garden was a controlled space. It was also a confined space. And it wasn’t entirely her own. She was changing during this time—becoming increasingly interested in the world outside those walls. There is a cliff in New Haven called East Rock. A river runs around the base of it, and there is a park and a marsh along the river. The path that led to this bridge started at the end of our street.
When we first bought the house, Interstate 91 was under construction, and the original plan was to put the river in a culvert and run an eight-lane connector around the rock, right through the park, and out to the suburbs. My mother joined a group fighting this. They won. But the planners added an exit that ran the suburban traffic through our neighborhood. Then the traffic commissioner in New Haven refused to add traffic lights or stop signs. My mother fought him for years about this, weathering his scorn, while also organizing an arts program in our elementary school. She and my father started to argue about how much time she spent away from home.
A family of three children has three different family histories. There are many reasons why, but one of them is that our parents are themselves evolving. The couple who reacts and responds to their first child changes before their second child reaches the same age. Interests shift and so do needs and expectations. Circumstances can change dramatically. What to an outsider seems like the same trip is in fact three distinct experiences, as if we all sat facing a different direction in a car. There were two and five years between my sisters and I. Our mother was a different person as I turned six and then eight and then twelve, and so on to college and beyond. My sisters had that different person when they were younger, and we were each different ages when she became a single parent.
