I don’t know what she was watching, but something with a laugh track. And that was getting under my skin. It was beginning to feel like the worst, most irritating moments of my life came with amused onlookers.
It felt like the ultimate insult that any of this could be considered funny, even if the laughter was mostly in my head.
“Brooke?” she bellowed into our room. She always started with my name, though there was really no one else she could have been talking to. These were not statements one would make to a two-year-old.
I squeezed my eyes closed and sighed.
She kept yelling.
“You need to take Etta out more.”
I sighed again. Walked to the bedroom door.
Etta was sitting on the circular rag rug, playing with some blocks. Well, banging them against each other more than anything else, but I guess for her that’s a kind of play.
I opened the door a crack to give my mother half a chance of hearing me over the TV.
“I’m tired, Mom. I’m on my feet all day.”
“But your daughter’s been without you all day. She needs to get out. She needs to spend time with you.”
“Why do you think I’m spending all that money on day care? So she can be out all day.”
My mother was in poor physical condition. Hugely overweight and out of shape, with bad knees, hips, and feet. She couldn’t be expected to get Etta outdoors, which was another brick in the wall of my expensive day care decision.
“That’s not spending time with you,” she barked.
“I am spending time with her,” I shouted. “Right now! We’re playing!”
I don’t mean shouted as in yelled at her in anger. More like shouted as in attempted to be heard. I tried to be civil to my mother whenever possible. Two uncivil parties in that household would have been unlivable. It was so close to unlivable as it stood.
Besides, it was her house. And I was fortunate to have it as a place to land, uncomfortable a landing as it may have been.
“But she needs to go out. You torture that girl. She likes to go out.”
I almost blew my stack at that. At the pronouncement that I “torture” my beautiful little daughter. Instead I closed my eyes. Breathed. Literally counted to ten in my head.
“She’s been out all day!” I said, and left it at that.
“But not with you!”
“It’s dark, Mom. Where am I supposed to take her in the dark?”
It was only six something in the afternoon, but it was nearing winter. And it was dark.
“They have lights in the playground, you know.”
I closed the bedroom door.
My mother continued to yell in to me, but I did my best to ignore what she was saying. I could vaguely hear that it was the long story about my cousin’s little boy, and how a doctor finally intervened and said the kid wasn’t getting enough sunshine. I had heard the story before.
It wasn’t worth asking where she thought I would find sunshine at that hour. Or why she thought the day care center didn’t have any. It would only cause her complaints to veer off down a different, barely related path. You couldn’t stop her once she got on a tear like this. Only send her in new directions. Ones I had learned I wouldn’t like any better.
I picked up my phone. Opened the web browser and looked at the website for the movie theater down on the boulevard. I had seen on their marquee that they were playing a kids’ movie. The one about the talking cartoon lizards.
I did not do this because I thought my mother was right. Etta loved to sit quietly on the rug with me and play. I did it because being in the same house with the woman was driving me crazy.
I could still hear the drone of her voice—if a full-throated shout could be called droning.
There was a 7:00 showing.
“Etta,” I said. “Do you want to go to a movie?”
She turned her huge brown eyes up to me, full of questions. Her brown curls spilled onto her forehead.
She was gorgeous, if I do say so myself. She was also too young to know what I was proposing.
I did a quick internet search and brought up the movie trailer. And played it for her. The phone was turned away from me and toward her, so I don’t know exactly what she was seeing, but she shrieked with laughter, waving her arms up and down.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll go.”
“Mom,” I said. “Mom!” I had to raise my voice to be heard, even though I was standing right behind her chair.
“What? I’m watching this.”
For a woman who interrupted my every thought, she had precious little tolerance for any kind of interruption.
I walked around to the footstool of her chair and grabbed the remote, muting the TV. The silence was stunning. I’d had no idea how utterly punishing the noise had been until it stopped. It felt as though someone had been driving a spike into my ear with a mallet. I felt the absence of that pain as a wash of relief.
“Hey! I just said I was watching that!”
“Etta and I are going to a movie.”
“A movie?” From the tone of her voice you’d have thought I’d said I was going to run my daughter through a car wash or toss her off a cliff. “Who takes a child her age to a movie?”
“It’s a kids’ movie. She’ll like it. It’s funny.”
“So you want to take her from a dark, cramped house to a dark, cramped movie theater.”
I counted to ten again before speaking.
“Mom,” I said. Calmly, but it was an artificial calm. “This house is over six thousand square feet. She’s not cramped.”
“I just think you don’t know what kids need. You haven’t been a mother long enough.”
“I think I’m doing a good job raising her, Mom. Please don’t suggest otherwise. It really bothers me when you take that away from me.”
She sighed, and I knew she at least would stop attacking me on that particular front. A sigh was a good sign from her. It was a complaint over the fact that she couldn’t keep jabbing.
“Take my car,” she said. “It’s safer.”
“My car is fine.”
“Your car is a total disaster. What if it breaks down in a bad neighborhood?”
“We don’t live in a bad neighborhood, Mom. We live in a nice part of West LA. And the theater is in the same nice part of West LA. I’m not going to purposely detour through a bad neighborhood. I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
“All of LA is a bad neighborhood. The whole world is dangerous. Not like when I was a girl.”
“Funny. And yet you just said you wanted us to go to the playground in the dark.”
“Don’t speak disrespectfully to me.”
“Then don’t treat me as if I were a child. I’m not a child. I’m thirty-nine years old.”
She drew back an arrow and hit me right between the eyes.
“Well, you wouldn’t know it to look at you,” she said. “Back living at home with your mother like a little girl.”
I knew counting to ten would not do it. Not that time. So I just picked up my daughter and left.
“Wear your seat belt!” she shouted to me as we walked out the door.
I normally wear my seat belt, and I always, always buckle Etta into her car seat, in the back, rear facing. Just the way you’re supposed to do it. But one time—one damn time—my mother saw me leave the driveway without buckling myself into my own seat belt, and she just wouldn’t let it die. “Wear your seat belt, wear your seat belt, wear your seat belt.” It became a mantra. An ad slogan that goes through your head so many times you begin to push back against it. My mother can take even a good thing and make it into something I need to flat out refuse to do.