After the recent passing of my Mom, my state of being has become that of a floating balloon set adrift in a cold indifferent sky. She was my string-holder. Now I’m like a balloon without a string, a pink one if you must know, wondering what to do now that my string-holder is gone.
It is my longing for her that led me to “the book.” When my Mom gifted me the book, I smiled and pretended to be grateful, but secretly rolled my eyes and put it on a bookshelf and never opened it again.
But I carried it around with me.
For three decades.
Here’s the thing with the book.
When my Mom gave me this Mother-Daughter book in 1995, I immediately hated it for several reasons.
The Cover: It had a picture on the front of a young girl wearing a Little House on the Prairie dress and a hat, holding a cat in her arms. My style has always leaned more towards “can-can dancer in red ruffles” than “pioneer girl wearing a dusty brown dress and a bonnet” so I was immediately repelled.
The Pictures: To make matters worse, my Mom had filled the book with hideous pictures of me in my youth. You know the kind–eyes closed, nostrils flared, a few missing teeth, an ill-fitting leotard and to top it all off, a haircut that was more “bully in A Christmas Story” than “cute little girl.” My Mom was famous for only keeping family pictures where she looked good, even when the rest of the family looked like we went out that morning for a morning bullfight and the bull won. Then again, when recently going through family photo albums, I laughed at all the blurry closed-eyes photos she had put into albums. Especially the ones where she thought she looked fat and wrote under the picture “Jenny Craig here I come.” So there you have it. The story I had always understood–that she only kept pictures where she looked good–wasn’t even true. She kept all the pictures–even the ones she didn’t like– and had the 200 photo albums to prove it.
The Memories: My Mom had answered all the prompts inside with memories I skimmed over but wasn’t remotely interested in.
But one recent Winter night, I was longing for my Mom. I glanced over at the bookshelf, remembering the book. I padded over in my pink fluffy champagne slippers and pulled it off the shelf. I laughed out loud at the terrible pictures of myself and ran my fingers across her handwriting in adoration.
Every memory became a revelation. The first third of the book is my Mom writing about her Mom, Grandma Lupe. The second section is my Mom’s memories of growing up in San Diego, and the final section is about my own childhood.
Now I read it more enrapt than a recent thriller, texting my siblings things I never knew, or had known but forgotten:
“Did you know Grandma Lupe had 5 mexican restaurants around San Diego and a Drive-Inn and Mom used to wash dishes there for 10 cents an hour?
“Did you know Grandma Lupe had 5 marriage proposals and she chose Grandpa because he was “big and handsome”?
“Did you know Grandma Lupe’s favorite musician was Jorge Negrete, a mariachi singer and Mom went to visit him when she visited Mexico?”
And I know why–she was longing for her own Mom.
But my biggest humdinger so far was yesterday’s revelation. My Mom wrote about how Grandma Lupe always wanted her to be a movie star, and that since Lupe’s favorite starlet in the 1930’s was Hedy Lamarr, she switched the last name around and named her baby girl Marla.
Crack! Lightning! What?
How could I have never known my Mom was named after Hedy Lamarr? I myself have been fascinated by Hedy for years, not only for her glamour and beauty but for her genius. Hedy acted in movies by day and invented things by night. She was an expert on radio frequencies and invented technology that would later be used for military communications and the development of WIFI.
In the book, my Mom wrote how she never wanted to be a movie star because she never liked Drama. She said the Drama department at her high school was full of “weird” students and her one main memory was when a Drama student named Dennis Hopper (yes, that Dennis Hopper) came into her classroom and pretended he was stuck on a submarine and couldn’t get off. She said he acted crazy, banging on the chalkboards and screaming.
As someone who LOVES drama and would have LOVED to go to school with someone who would enter my classroom and bang on the walls (anything to break up the monotony!), I could never understand why she wasn’t delighted by this display of excessive drama.
But my Mom liked order and stability and people who acted civilized (the opposite of me who seems drawn to chaos, instability, and wild people). She wrote in the book that she had always wanted to get married, have children, be a schoolteacher and work in a doctor’s office, all of which she did.
But even so, being my Mom, she wrote about how much she loved my dramatic flair, my passion for performing and my courage in traveling around the world by myself. She even wrote how she could never do such a thing, but then in parenthesis she said, “(maybe some day).”
I loved reading those words, and about how Grandma Lupe would especially love my glittery theater and dancing career, the costumes, the makeup, the glamour.
As my fingers traced her looping Ms and Ls, I felt a connection: Lupe to my Mom to me and now to my own daughter, Annabelle.
And I thought I should do this kind of book for Annabelle, one she can roll her eyes upon receiving. One that can sit on her shelf gathering dust for decades until she’s ready, with the hope that when she finally opens it, maybe after I’m gone, she will hear my voice and feel my own hand upon her heart.
She can be the girl lighting a candle on a snowy day, sitting on the floor of her bedroom, opening the book like it’s a sacred tome. She can read my words, trace my handwriting, maybe even hear my voice, and know my love will always wrap around her like a soft blanket.
Maybe my words will surprise her with things she never knew about me, or her grandmothers, and help her know that even if she can’t see me, I’m never letting go of the string.
And my Mom hasn’t either.
