* * *
One of the other times they let my mother come home, I was on the staircase with my knees between the balusters and she was in the kitchen wearing her swooshy sweat suit like always, this time in turquoise. She was screaming at the top of her lungs about I don’t know what, I just remember that she looked like a demon in the body of a giant Barbie doll with the kind of bird’s-nest hair your Barbie gets when you brush it too much. She was yelling at my dad who was on the other side of the doorway just out of sight. He never yelled back, not once. I remember that more than feeling scared, I was curious. How could someone yell so loudly and channel so much anger? Each shout built momentum like a snowball that keeps gathering more of itself as it rolls downhill and nothing can stop the avalanche it becomes. She was interesting to me like the movie Fantasia is interesting. It just keeps building with no clear narrative or rules. Colorful, cacophony mommy, so helpless and so powerful.
I was hungry and wanted cereal but I didn’t dare go down there to the screaming zone. So I just stared at my mother from my staircase perch. I was frustrated that I couldn’t exert my childlike urges when she was around. When a little kid is hungry it is her right to demand attention until the hunger is solved. But with my mom around, I had to be a quiet pair of eyes with no needs. Most young kids are only concerned with how the world makes them feel, but I saw the world as a place I needed to navigate in a more thoughtful way. To me, it felt more sad than unfair. Because as I watched my mom in that moment, I realized, she could not handle her shit. I felt, for the first time in my life, sad for another human being. And when you feel sad for someone it’s very hard to resent them, even if they’re hurting you. But it’s also impossible to admire and look up to someone you feel sorry for.
My dad taught me to view my mom with compassion. He explained that she wasn’t the boss of herself. I knew that also meant that she was not the boss of me. How could she be? A role model is supposed to be someone who knows more than you, someone who is a step beyond where you are. My mother was not a step beyond. She was not anywhere in my vicinity. Even though I was curious about what it would feel like to receive love and attention and affection and guidance from her, at the same time, I knew that she wasn’t going to be able to do that for me. Nor was she someone to imitate. I was still desperately curious about her, but I knew it was best not to get too close. And this made me feel fundamentally different from other little girls and their moms, orbiting each other like a planet and its moon as they walked down the bike path behind my house to feed the ducks. I saw then that I was going to have to be my own planet, or maybe an asteroid floating free.
* * *
The third memory of my mother is violent and terrifying and I try not to think of it very often. It must have happened sometime after we shared the cigarette. I remember going into my parents’ room unannounced, as kids often do. The bedroom light was off but the bathroom light was on. My parents’ bathroom had those round bulbs that make you look like a movie star and the light spilled out into the dark bedroom, beckoning me to investigate. I crept forward…and there, in the mirror above the sink, I saw my mother glamorously illuminated. She was making a back-and-forth motion with one arm and she was very focused, with her attention completely centered on what she was doing, as though she were a concert violinist playing a slow, passionate solo underneath a spotlight. It was almost beautiful. But I tiptoed closer and saw that she wasn’t holding a delicate violin bow; she was gripping a mean-looking metal saw with a wooden handle and a long triangular blade with big rusty teeth and raking it back and forth on her own body. There was a gaping bloody gash where her arm met her shoulder and I could see her muscles and bones, pulpy and dark, as she sawed. She cut through her own flesh as steadily as if she were carving a giant undercooked pot roast. Except she wasn’t carving a pot roast, she was sawing off her own arm. This was and still is the most violent and sad thing I have ever seen. The older I get, the sadder this memory makes me—not for me, but for her.
I knew that what I was seeing wasn’t right. My mom wasn’t showing any signs of pain, which was confusing to me because I knew that blood meant pain. I spent a lot of time playing outside and I’d taken my share of bad falls. When you bled, it meant you were hurt and then you cried. So why wasn’t my mom crying? I stood motionless, processing. I couldn’t look away.
Then she turned around and saw me. She caught me catching her. Who was in bigger trouble? I knew I was seeing something I shouldn’t and I wondered what kind of trouble I would be in for walking in on this. She stopped sawing for a moment but she didn’t seem upset that I was there. She didn’t even seem surprised. I can’t remember ever seeing her act surprised, which is a quality I now associate with a sane person—the capacity for surprise. My mom and I have the same thick eyebrows and hers were not curved up in astonishment, angled down in anger, or drooping sideways with sadness. They were completely flat.
“What are you doing?” I asked. I knew what she was doing, but I also didn’t know what she was doing.
“Don’t tell your father,” she replied, holding a flat stare for a beat before returning to her task.
The gears in my head whirred. My mother gave me an order, but even as a four-and-a-half-year-old, my instincts told me this was not right. So I ran. I used my legs intentionally and purposefully for the very first time to save my mom’s life. I ran down the hall and found my dad. What’s strange is that I cannot remember what happened after that, not even the moment I found my dad. I only know I was a big fat tattletale and she didn’t die that day so I must have found him in time. My dad has always been there when I needed him.
After she was taken to the hospital, I tried to make sense of what I had seen. My dad never talked to me about this experience, maybe hoping it would fade on its own like a bruise, but it didn’t fade and we never talked about it. The only point of reference I had was from Saturday-morning cartoons. There is a Looney Tunes trope where Bugs Bunny or Yosemite Sam or the Big Bad Wolf will use a saw—the same kind of wood-handled, triangular saw my mom used—to sabotage another character in some mischievous way. I remember the saw made an appearance at least once in every episode. So when I recognized the same cartoon saw in my mom’s hand, my four-year-old mind experienced a reality warp where the line between the cartoon world and the real world was shattered. If things that happen in the cartoon world can happen in real life, I reasoned, then anything is possible. I understood that of course cartoons were not real, but my mind stretched in both directions like Silly Putty: If the most unimaginably terrible things are possible, like your mother sawing her arm off in front of you, then the most magically good things must also be possible, like, well, anything. That day, I saved her life, but I also had to save my own. I chose optimism. Life never serves you the lessons you need in the way you might imagine you’d receive them, but the lessons are nonetheless there, even if they are embedded in blood.