November 7 Friday roundup

In the podcast this week, I explore what elections can and can’t do, and celebrate the Tuesday voting results, which suggest democracy can mount a defense. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you’d like to check out the linked material or the written post from Tuesday, you can read it here.

To give us all a break, Fridays here are usually given over to non-political topics. And it’s been a while since I’ve shared anything from my oddball West Virginia childhood. So today, I’ll tell you about my mother and me, and our first blizzard together.

Across her life, my mom has often struggled against herself to find herself. This effort has been exhausting to everyone around her, but most of all to my mother. She’s past that particular struggle now—or perhaps it’s simply defeated her. Her dementia has made her believe she’s everyone and no one. For more than two years she was the Queen of England. Many times, she’s been her own mother, though sometimes she’s still just herself.

Two weeks ago, I got a late call from the nursing staff at her dementia facility, saying my mother was unresponsive. It seemed to be some kind of a coma, and they couldn’t wake her up. The charge nurse wound up calling 911, and they wanted to let me know Ms. Mauzey was on her way to the emergency room. I got there around 10:00pm. While I was sitting next to her bed, waiting to see if she would wake up, I was thinking about the strange calls she used to make herself, though she’s long past calling anyone now.

The phone always seemed to ring in the evening, my mother’s voice giddy on the line, asking me to visit her. She’d figured everything out, she said. She was finally ready to be happy.

She made the same call every year or two, forgetting she had done it many times before. I wanted her to be happy; I went to see her. By car or plane, I made my way to West Virginia or Ohio, to Michigan or Texas.

I began to think of my childhood as a box of photographs that had fallen into the mud. She was asking me to agree on which memories we would rescue and which we would leave behind. She’d always wanted to be a good mother. She was still trying to find a way to have been one.

Sometimes, telling a story about herself, she would return a piece of my childhood to me. When I reached the age of twenty-three—the age she’d been at my birth—she told me about our first winter together. We were living in Rhode Island. My father, who joined the Navy during the Vietnam War, had gone to sea. Meanwhile, she’d moved into base housing with my two-year-old brother and me.

I’d been a difficult baby, allergic to formulas and only able to drink water the first week or two of my life. The initial crisis had passed, but mothering hadn’t gotten easier.

“I remember you were crying,” she said, “and your brother started screaming. I knew that if I stayed there a minute longer, I was going to hit one of you. I laid you down in your crib and put your brother in the playpen and closed the door.”

She asked a neighbor to come and watch us while she went to see the base doctor. He told her not to worry, it was completely normal—all the women went to pieces when their husbands were away. He gave her a prescription for Valium.

She’d tried to tell him it was worse than that. She had no idea how to manage two children alone, far from everyone she knew. She’d been going through the motions but felt terrified. She didn’t know how to be a mother. He shooed her out the door with the prescription.

In the end, she couldn’t bring herself to take the pills. Instead, she imagined she would leave. She could stay with her father, or maybe with her mother, and somehow get help where she’d never found it before. She loaded my brother and me into the car and drove us from Newport back to her home state of West Virginia during a snowstorm. The drive was nearly twelve hours—part of it in darkness—through Connecticut and New York then Pennsylvania and Maryland.

My grandfather had told her that it wasn’t safe, that she shouldn’t come: “When you end up ass over teakettle off the side of some mountain, don’t expect me to get you.”

Like many of us, my mother couldn’t always be relied on not to tell a story tilted toward what she needed it to do. But I recognized my grandfather’s voice in her words. He spoke with that cadence in a particular way, breezy but blunt and clear about what he wouldn’t do for you.

Later, I looked up the records of that snowstorm in newspapers from early 1969. Twenty inches of snow fell along parts of her route—even more farther north. Nearly a hundred people died. If anything, she’d underplayed the magnitude of the blizzard.

Her own mother had abandoned her as a baby. She was always trying to tell me that she wasn’t like that. Whatever we wound up having to go through with her, she never would have left us. She wanted me to know she was the kind of mother who would drive through a blizzard for her children.

Everyone has a story about how they made their way into the world. Mine is about how my mother carried me from danger to danger, until I could barely survive her love. The snowstorm is the story of the first time she saved me. The person she was trying to save me from was herself.

[You can read another story in this series here.]

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