Mommy Brain

There is a question in One True Thing by Anna Quindlen: Did Ellen Gulden euthanize her mother? Or maybe, more accurately: Who euthanized Kate Gulden? You don’t get the answer until the end of the book, and yet that is not what kept me reading.

Ellen Gulden is a journalist living in New York City. She was raised in a small Northeastern college town by her homemaker mother and literature professor father. All her life, she has tried to gain the approval of her father and disregarded her mother for choosing domestic, rather than academic, life.

When she is home for a short visit, her father tells her and her two brothers that her mother is dying of cancer. He is a cold, distant man, and expects Ellen to come home to care for Kate. Because everyone has always told her that she is just like her father, Ellen believes this is so – and doesn’t think she has the heart or character to care for her dying mom. She discovers that she is wrong. Anna Quindlen has written a beautiful book – one that deals with death, family dynamics, and most of all the complicated relationship between a mother and her daughter.

The last year or so, the reality of the fact that I am in my mid-thirties has hit me. Not because I am afraid of aging – I still feel young. But because it means my parents are nearing sixty. It has become real to me that, most likely, my parents will die before I will; that I will have to deal with the grief of losing one of my parents.

In some ways, I know how blessed I am. I have a father who thinks I can do no wrong – or, at least, has made me believe he thinks so. My mother feels this way, too – but our relationship is more complicated. I still assume she has motives and thoughts that she no longer thinks or feels, and I can’t seem to help it. My heart knows she loves me just as I am, and yet I find myself cringing when she stops by and the house is a disaster, or when we have a disagreement over an issue. Other times, I disagree with her just to assert my otherness, to show that I am not my mother, in spite of the fact that she is a lovely, kind woman. Because she is a pastor and very involved in the community, I am continually told, “I just love your mom; she’s such a wonderful woman.” Who wouldn’t want to be like that? Knowing that I am different from her – less disciplined, less organized, less compassionate – at times makes me feel inadequate, at other times makes me relieved. What a strange relationship mothers and daughters have! And yet at the foundation of all of this tangled complication is the fact that I love my mom very, very much, and want her to be proud of me.

I am beginning to experience some of these same relationship muddles with my own daughter. She is ten and a half, and beginning to change physically and emotionally. No more Barbies and Polly Pockets – the last time she had spending money, she bought earrings and a shirt. She is becoming a young lady – and in doing so, is starting to assert her otherness from me. It is so hard and scary and yet inevitable.

Anyone who has a mother or a daughter will “get” this book. Just be sure to read it with tissues handy.

As a side note, not only is the story emotionally brilliant, Quindlen’s prose is beautiful:

The night they lit the Christmas trees on the green was a perfect night of its kind in Langhorne. In summer there would be those dark nights with a cool breeze blowing faintly and the passing scent of petunias in the air, nights that veered between hot and not so hot so that when you went skinny-dipping in the reservoir you would get out and then jump back in because the water felt warmer than the air.

In fall there were the sweater days, football days, when the sun shone clear but light yellow, the color of white corn, and as you walked down the street a leaf would pirouette to the sidewalk right before your eyes, almost brushing your nose, and late at night the rumble of the furnace would suddenly shake the house like a snore.

And spring, what there ever was of it, was all beautiful, the pure smell of wet and fresh and the daffodils sashaying on the green, in our yards, in hidden wild patches on the hillside sloping down to the river amid the damp grass.

And in winter there were nights like the one when they lit the trees that year, when the sky hung down like black silk punched full of holes so that the bright light behind could shine out in tiny points, thousands of them. The air burnt your tongue a bit with its cold, and the bony fingers of the bare tree branches reached up to lay hands on a full moon. It was bright outdoors, silver-bright, with the long black shadows of shrubs, houses, people walking down the sidewalk and staring up at the moon as though it was moving the tides of their lives and they could feel the ebb and flow inside them.

5 out of 5 stars