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The Mother I Carry With Me Why is this task so
difficult? My mother. The words come haltingly; their very sound is a muffled
moan within me. My mother. For me, so much pain seems to flow from those two
words. My sense of the sorrowful nature of life. My troubled relationships
with women. My anxieties and disappointments. My fear of going crazy. I don’t
mean that I blame my mother for all
of the difficulties of my life, but my conception of her—the mother I carry
with me, seems to have been weighted with a heavy negative load. I want to
try to get some perspective on this—get some fuller understanding of who my
mother was and how she differs from the mother I carry with me. Lately I have become
more and more aware of what a large psychic presence my mother has been
throughout my life. As I write this she’s been dead nearly twenty-five years,
but still she looms large above my life’s landscape—in all of her aspects,
for I have come to know her differently than I knew her as a child; I have
come to discover the various faces of woman within her—faces she did not show
me as I was growing up, but which have emerged as my own knowledge of life
deepens, as the distance from my childhood widens, as she becomes a more
realistic, less iconic presence. To start with
particulars: I was born on July 13, 1938 to Stephen and Nina Moramarco in St
Mary’s Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. My parents were immigrants to this
country from a small village in Southern Italy called Gravina di Puglia. My
father immigrated first as a teenager with one of his brothers. They worked
as ice deliverers and after he saved some money, he returned to Italy to
marry my mother and bring her with him to the new world. On a recent visit to
Gravina I learned more about my father and mother’s courtship from my
father’s sole surviving sister. She told me that my mother’s family, the
Toriellos, were aristocratic, condescending, and autocratic. They were among
the town’s “nobility” and absolutely forbade my mother to have anything to do
with my father, who came from peasant stock and lived on the wrong side of
the tracks. My aunt remembered being the guardian of my mother’s “hope chest”
a trunkful of linens, tablecloths, and towels that prospective brides
accumulated in those days because my mother could not keep it in her own
house for fear her family would discover it. So theirs was a West Side Story
sort of a romance, and when my father left for America, the Toriellos
thought they were rid of him, only to be absolutely nonplussed when he
returned to elope with his darling and take her back with him 4000 miles
across the sea. They settled in Brooklyn; my father and his brother started
an ice delivery business and the two bought brownstone homes one block apart
from one another. My father and mother started a family; a first son,
Federico (Fred), born around 1917, then three daughters in fairly rapid
succession: Lucretia, Nicolette, Philomena. (These births occurred after my
father returned from fighting in World War I.) Around 1925, in the midst of
the Jazz Age, tragedy strikes. The eight-year-old Fred is hit by an
automobile and killed. My mother’s life is shattered—my family is stricken.
It is a blow that resonates throughout the lives of all of my sisters as
well. (I’m just realizing—at this late date—how much my sisters’ lives must
have been affected by this event—-I never discussed it with them.) And
although I never knew the brother they always referred to as “the First
Fred,” he has resonated through my life as well. A few years ago, for the
first time I wrote about him, a short prose poem that describes his presence
in my psyche: The First Fred I can see him in the large oval photograph above my bed. I
am eight years old, looking up at the brother I never knew, the “first” Fred
killed by a rare auto in a country with few of them, thirteen years before I
was born. The picture is sepia, under convex glass. He wears a sailor suit, a
ribbon dangling at the collar. He looks like me and there are pictures of me
that might be mistaken for him. But they are smaller, less importantly
positioned. His is an icon, an altarpiece, and on Palm Sunday my mother
always slides a sliver of palm between the glass and its frame, a sacred
gesture of her enduring grief. At eight, I am also hit by a car, my mother
hysterical, pushing her toward the edge of her permanent madness. She has
three daughters, but her sons seem doomed by the machinery of the twentieth
century. I survive, the only reminder, a forehead scar tracing its indelible
mark on my skin. My mother is never the same to me. Jesu, Giuseppe, e Maria, she recites daily like a litany in the
days and nights and weeks and months and years that follow until she is in and
out of hospitals with Jesus, Joseph, and Mary offering even less consolation.
Suddenly all this makes a piece of my life—father and mother long dead, two
of my three sisters dead also, the other lost in a madhouse—and my surviving
soul drifting more and more loosely in the colossal free-floating everywhere
of the universe. Closer to the first Fred everyday. But the mother in
that poem I have avoided writing about except for a mention here or
there—never looking at her head on, never really knowing her, never understanding the deep “whys” of her sadness
and grief. She appears in a short poem I wrote about my family—a villanelle
that I constructed trying to make order of the shadows that dissected an old
family picture that was given to me by my brother-in-law after my sister
Nicky’s death. Let me include both the picture and the villanelle here so you
can see the family entire, as I knew it while I was growing up: On Looking at an
Old Family Photograph The boy in the picture, can he really be me? Nearly half a century has come and gone. Look closer, what’s in the photo you don’t see? A boy, his mom and dad, his sisters, three— A backyard, fire escapes, a house of brown stone. The boy in the picture, can he really be me? Is it true our lives are ever free? The past stays with us though its days are done. Look closer, what’s in the photo you don’t see? I look again and see a bush, a growing tree, Some lighted windows keeping that day’s sun. The boy in the picture, can he really be me? The mother’s face is not exactly filled with glee Some shadows cut the figures, every one, Look closer, what’s in the photo you don’t see? The tales of these six people are well known to me They buzz within me like a constant hum The boy in the picture, can he really be me? Look closer. What’s in the photo you don’t see? As a rule family
photographs that survive in picture albums reflect the sunnier aspects of
family life; as Adrienne Rich puts it, “What if I tell you, you are not
different / it’s the family albums that lie.” But this family picture seems
to have captured a lot of my family’s particular travails. What you don’t see
in the photo is the drama of these intersecting lives. All I could say about
my mother in that poem is that her face “is not exactly filled with glee,”
surely an understated line. Actually her face is pained, looking downward,
tilted to one side. It is the only face in the photograph that carries the
pain of this family’s sadness. Another family photo taken much earlier—long
before I was born—shows the pain has deep roots. In this one she sits holding
my sister Lee on her lap with my sisters Lucretia and Nicky seated at a small
table in the back yard scowling at the camera. The “first Fred” wearing a tie
and looking like a sorrowful misplaced waif stands behind Lucretia. Year after year, I
watched her become more and more frenzied, more and more weighted with grief,
and I watched my three sisters follow in her path, each spending time in
mental institutions, each eaten away at by the cancer that she suffered from
as well. We spoke of the “Toriello illness” in my family, the weeping melancholia
that seemed to emanate from her branch of the family—it afflicted several of
her brothers and sisters. And no doubt there was a genetic element involved
in it. But on that trip to Gravina when my Zia Maria told me the story of my
mother and father’s courtship and I began to think of her illness
differently. I began to experience what it must have been like for this woman
to be disavowed by her family, to leave them for the love of her life, to be
uprooted and travel to another continent where she did not know the language,
to be suddenly the mother of four children in a city that could hardly have
been more different from the little town of Gravina, and then, just as she is
becoming adjusted to being a wife and mother in the New World, to have her
firstborn cruelly and accidentally taken from her. And yet she rebounded from
that, and late in life—she was forty-two when I was born—had yet another son
as World War II erupted and the world seemed such a treacherous and dangerous
place. I began to think of her, not so much as a crazy woman, a sick woman,
as I had thought of her for most of my life—but instead as a courageous
woman, a remarkable woman, with amazing resourcefulness and energy. And I began
to unearth buried memories that reminded me her life was not all weeping and
moaning. She was a gifted seamstress, an excellent cook and baker, and a
marvel with a pair of crochet needles. Some of the things she made are with
me still. But I had suppressed most of these positive memories and the one
vivid memory of her sewing that remains with me is of course a negative one.
It’s somewhere around Easter time and I’m about twelve. My mother brought me
a pair of new royal blue pants, but they’re too wide at the cuff and I can’t
wear them like that because all my friends will laugh. So she agrees to “peg”
them in the style of the day and unstiches the seam from the knees down, then
tapers the width so they fit tight at the ankles. But it doesn’t come out
right. When I put the pants on they look like they’re bunched up around my
ankles, but my mother insists I wear them because they cost a lot and she put
a lot of time into them. I do wear them on Easter Sunday. My friends laugh. A voice within me as I write this keeps saying that all this
is “merely personal,” who will care about any of it but me? It says that I
should make generalizations—find the Jungian archetypes here, distance myself
from the specific details, get to the universal “mother,” the pained mother,
the frenzied mother. At a men’s gathering I attended a number of years ago
the leader asked the men to divide the room between sons of raging mothers
and sons of weeping mothers. I chose the “weeping mothers” side but only
because I had not seen much of the rage beneath the tears (or is that I only
saw the tears beneath the rage)? It occurs to me that the division of women
into these two categories is yet another way some men avoid dealing with them
as complete human beings. As if there were not joyful mothers, nurturing
mothers, ambitious mothers, and so on. Of course there are, but as men we see
only the tears and the rage, which we devote our lives to subduing,
suppressing, silencing. If only she could be calm, if only she could be
satisfied, if only she could be happy. Robert Johnson has written “If a man
has a disturbed relationship with his actual human mother, it is very easy
for him to contaminate his anima, that life-giving interior femininity, with
his mother’s demands and expectations.” Surely I have done a good deal of
that in my lifetime. He goes on, “A mother-hungry man (and that hunger can
dominate a man for his whole lifetime if he has been inadequately mothered)
can have the mother image stamped on his life expectations in areas one would
not dream of. . . . [He] can find himself facing mother in the
form of the university he attends, the corporation he works for, the church
he attends, the political party he espouses, his nation . . .” (Lying with the Heavenly Woman 77). Here I am generalizing, finding the Jungian archetypes, listening
to that critical voice—but only momentarily. Another voice says tell about
Nina—discover what her life was like. There is yet another
picture of her—one I love because I so rarely saw her like this, but when I
did it was manna, blue skies, and magenta sunsets. In this photo she is
standing with my Zia Maria in front of St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. The
picture is dated by her handwriting in back—23 Luglio, 1952. If that’s right,
I am fourteen and back in Brooklyn—not with her here in Venice. My father is
not with her either. She is jubilant in the photo, smiling, feeding the
pigeons tourist style, a bird fluttering from her outstretched hand. I
remember this trip she took back to Italy; I remember being relieved at her
going. She would never let me bring my friends into the house because she was
obsessive about order and cleanliness, and they might mess things up. Now
that she was gone I knew my father would be a soft touch and bend the rules.
I remember showing up with a group of friends and being stunned when my
father said “Just because your mother’s gone, that doesn’t mean you can do
whatever you want to.” I felt betrayed by him that day, because I had always
thought of him as an ally against my mother’s craziness. But in the Venice
photo she is not crazy, and as I said, it is how I would like to remember
her, or I should say, how I would like to conjure her at this particular time
in my life. For when our parents are no longer living, they become phantoms
in our head that still shape and direct our lives. As Robert Anderson wrote
in I Never Sang for My Father,
“Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which lingers in the
mind of the survivors toward some resolution which it never finds.” I will
probably never resolve my relationship with my mother; I still want her to be
happy, to carry that Venice smile into the rest of her life. It’s not that I
ever really felt responsible for her unhappiness, but rather that I felt
helpless to do anything about it. When she would pace up and down the first
floor of our Brooklyn railroad flat weeping and trembling, after one of what
were then called “nervous breakdowns” I could not stand to hear it or see it.
When she worried incessantly about there not being enough money, I felt like
the boy in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rockinghorse Winner” listening to the house
chant “There must be more money, there must be more money.” We lived on the first
floor of a three story brownstone house and tenants occupied the second and
third floors. During the summer my mother was in Italy, the second floor
tenants moved out, and when she returned she asked my father to move upstairs
and live separately in his own apartment. He lived upstairs with my older
sister, I lived downstairs with my mother. In this way, she explained, we
could all have our own bedrooms, and she could sleep peacefully and not have
to put up with my father’s snoring. She insisted my father take the old
furniture upstairs and she completely refurnished the downstairs apartment.
She replaced the dark, worn, mahogany dining room set with a beautifully
appointed French Provincial fruitwood. And the deep burgundy and green
living room gave way to pink and beige brocade Louis XIV sofa and chair. A
round, marble top table sat in the center of the room. This was her “good
period,” a time when she took control of things and arranged her life the way
she wanted it, but for me it meant trouble because it made the house even
more unapproachable, and she worried that things would get dirty and ruined.
For a while she seemed energized by the new arrangement, but soon the old
melancholy asserted itself again, and I remember her sitting by the window,
rocking back and forth as her face and body lost its robustness. She stared
through the wooden venetian blinds into the street and chanted her litany: “Jesu, Giuseppe e Maria.” I keep wanting to create tangible, specific images of her
and her life, but how can you create images of a phantom? The mother I’m
writing about here is the mother inside, the mother that drives with me to
work, whose voice I hear within my own, whose touch I still crave, whose
laughter I want more than money. My friend Gary Young, whose mother committed
suicide, wrote a beautiful and touching short poem about a dream in which his
mother appeared. It belongs here because it is my own waking dream about what
I want from my mother: “I last saw my mother a week after her suicide in a
dream. She was so shy; she was only there a moment. I’d called her stupid.
How could you be so stupid? Eight years later she’s back. What do you want, I
ask her, what do you really want? I want to sing, she says. And she sings.” I never heard my
mother singing—at least I can’t remember hearing her sing, which amounts to
the same thing since she exists for me in the intersection between memory and
imagination where most of the distant past resides. It’s a crowded place, and
she’s probably less happy there than she was in life, because although life
treated her erratically, it also bore her some gifts—a romantic love life,
children, a home of her own, a neighborhood with friends and relatives
nearby, a chance to travel. It’s been my tendency to stress her grief rather
than her triumphs, her weeping rather than her laughter, which, as I said, I
have trouble remembering. I don’t remember doing many things—hardly anything—with
my mother. I would go fishing with my father and uncle; my sisters would take
me to zoos and parks; I would play with my friends and cousins. Specific
memories of being in my mother’s presence during my youth are vague and
almost all negative. In early adolescence when I would come home later than I
should have at night, she would deadbolt the door so I had to wake her in
order to get in. I distinctly remember the sinking feeling of turning my key
in the lock, then twisting the doorknob and having the door not budge because
of the deadbolt. Then I would knock loudly and eventually wake her up. She
would begin her tirade before opening the door, making me wait in the hallway
listening to her ranting. Later memories are a
little clearer. Her weeping, trembling presence at my wedding (in 1964); her
pacing back and forth at my sister’s house in Long Island while my sister
prepared Sunday dinners. A particularly lucid memory is her near
weightlessness at my father’s funeral. My father died in 1967 while I was in
graduate school in Salt Lake City, Utah. I flew back home for the funeral
and I remember my mother in the funeral home, leaning over and kissing his
forehead, all the while quietly chanting her litany in Italian. She wore a
blue lace dress, not the traditional black for mourning. She looked frail and
withered—and she herself had only a year more to live at the time. But there
was a peculiar stoic dignity about her that day, and I remembered it when I
returned to New York that summer after the funeral to sell my family’s house
and move my mother and my sister (both in precarious mental health at the
time) to Long Island where they could be close to my other sister (Nicolette)
who at the time was raising a flourishing family. It was a terrible summer,
going through the house I grew up in, selling things for a song, virtually
giving away the house (it was located in the Bedford Stuvysant section of
Brooklyn and this was the year of the riots that followed the death of Martin
Luther King—needless to say, property values had plummeted). I remember my
mother seeming so displaced in the new apartment, and her furniture looking
so strange there. I would call her
regularly after I returned to Salt Lake and call my sister Nicky to ask how
Mom was doing and I was amazed to hear from her that my mother was
experiencing a dramatic recovery. Suddenly she seemed her “good” self again,
going out in the world, wearing clothes she liked to dress up in, smiling the
Venice smile again. It startled me to hear this because when I left after
selling the house she seemed so fragmented and depressed. At this time she
had just turned seventy and it was remarkable to think about her “reviving,”
getting her old creative energy back. With hindsight I look back at the trip
to Italy, the impulsive purchase of new furniture, and the rebirth she
experienced after my father’s death as related moments of lucidity and energy
in her life—and all of them had to do with her acting on her own, without
living in the shadow of my father’s life. It’s amazing to think of my own sad
and weeping mother as a woman who might have flourished in a feminist age,
but that just might be the case. Or it might not be. Who knows how much the present clouds
our awareness and understanding of the past? We reshape our personal history
to fit our temporary and fleeting glimpses of clarity about the “meaning” of
our lives, as if this meaning rested on anything more substantial than the
wind. Somehow I feel that the meaning of my life has something to do with the
meaning of my mother’s life. That her identity remained submerged to me all
the time I knew her, but that now that she’s long gone is becoming clearer
and truer to me. And then I think that this has to do with my awareness and
understanding of women, who have always been a puzzle and mystery to me, as
they are to so many men. Why did my mother show me so much of her pain and so
little of her pleasure? Or is it that she showed me both, but I only
responded to the pain? Why am I still drawn to suffering women? If a woman is
not suffering enough, or in enough pain, she seems uninteresting to me—she
seems to be not showing me her true self. If I can put a smile on a woman’s
face I feel a surge of power that I can only attribute to my powerlessness
because I could not do that for my mother. Why does a mother become all
women, and specifically the women I have slept beside, I have lived with? During my 21 year
marriage to Sheila Sobell, a Jewish girl from Brooklyn I met at a Writer’s
Conference at Wagner College in Staten Island, I constantly saw analogies
between her actions and my mother’s, although in most ways Sheila was
extremely unlike my mother. Nonetheless, I was drawn to her pain and
suffering because I could alleviate it. I met her shortly after her own
mother had died, and she was writing tender late adolescent poems about
unrequited love. She had been engaged to someone else, and that had broken
off, and I saw the sadness in her eyes and knew that unlike my mother’s
sadness, which seemed eternal, this sadness I could do something about. We
would have long late night telephone conversations filled with laughter and
energy. I could turn her pain to laughter! Exactly what I couldn’t do with my
mother’s pain. I remember how powerful that made me feel, so powerful that I
married Sheila, because I needed that laughter and vibrancy in my life. My
mother died a few years after we were married, but she loomed large in our
relationship, especially after we became parents—we had two sons, Stephen and
Nicholas. As the children grew, it became clear that Sheila and I had very
different ideas about childrearing, although to put it that way sounds as if
I’m talking about some systematic philosophies. What I mean is that because
our children were boys, I tended to identify with them rather than with
Sheila whenever she attempted to discipline them. When she insisted that
they clean up their rooms and help wash the dishes, I flashed on to my
mother’s compulsiveness about keeping the house clean and neat. When she
told them to be home at a certain hour, I remembered the deadbolt and my
sinking feeling in the hallway. And whenever she raised her voice to them,
even in the slightest way, I heard my mother’s shrieking and hysteria.
Needless to say, this took its toll on our marriage, which ended in divorce
the year our first son went off to college. Am I trying to be too rational about all of this? Trying to
create meaning and analogies in my life where there are only random events
and chaos? I don’t think so. All life flows from the mother, and if we want
meaning we need to find it there. But there is so much that gets in the way.
So much of male sexuality has its origins in the comfort of the mother’s
body, and yet the subject remains completely taboo. Men still divide up
women, if not into madonnas and whores, at least into mothers and sexual
women. We can never think of an actress in a pornographic movie, say, as a
mother. Can we ever even talk to our mothers about sex? If we are men, we
cannot. So there are silences between mothers and sons because the sizzle of
Oedipus hisses between them. I never mentioned the
word sex to my mother, and I’m sure that’s not imagination but memory. I
never thought about her in any even vaguely sexual way, though I loved her
and loved to be held by her. That she loved me as well, I have absolutely no
doubt, but I don’t think—and this I’m not sure of—I was held enough by her.
Partly because of the illness, I guess, partly because my three older
sisters—especially my sister Nicky did most of the hugging in the family.
Nicky was kind of a surrogate mother for me and when she became a mother in
her own right she did it big—seven children (five girls, then twin boys). She
became a quintessential mother figure for me, and how startled I was to learn
from my cousin Pat after Nicky’s death that she too was unhappy that so much
of her life was defined by that role. There is something inherent in motherhood that makes it both
essential and partial at the same time. It’s the fount of life, but it can’t
be the whole of life because when it becomes that, it swallows everything in
its wake. Of course, feminists have been saying this for years, but men continue
to resist the truth of it. If men want to know their mothers, they have to
face this truth. Our mothers are human beings with complex needs and wants.
They are not only our mothers. There has been a great deal written about the
need for young men to separate from their mothers, but much less has been
said about the need to understand the mother, to assimilate her sense of the
world rather than to reject it outright. We don’t want to remain overly
dependent upon our mothers, but as men we can’t attribute all of our
insecurities to the things she didn’t give us. We remain psychically
connected to the mother for all of our lives; wouldn’t it make sense to get
inside that connection? What have our mothers to give us that we have been
unable to take? Because my mother is
now within me and not out there in the world, I want to know her better. And
although she is long gone, I want her to know me better as well. So I need to
tell the mother inside of me of the one thing in life that I am the most
ashamed about, and that is that I did
not attend my mother’s funeral. This fact haunted me for years, although
the circumstances of her death conspired to make a return trip to New York
from Salt Lake City difficult at the time. I was in graduate school and
relatively poor. I had been back to New York twice in the year before her
death—once to attend my father’s funeral, and once to sell our family’s
house. When my sister called less than six months after I had sold the house
to say that my mother, right after her brief period of recovery and
lucidity, had a sudden and fatal stroke, the emotional shock was just too
much for me to handle. At that time, I didn’t have a clue about how to deal
with strong feelings or emotions and I knew that another trip back home to
attend my mother’s funeral would devastate me. But after she was gone and
buried, these reasons seemed empty rationalizations to me. They still do,
though the guilt and shame I felt about not being there has subsided. I want
her to know about how badly I felt that I did not attend her funeral, so I
whisper intimately to the mother I carry with me that if I knew then what I
know now I would have been there. If I were not so afraid of feeling then, I
would have found a way to traverse again the distance between the Rocky
Mountains and New York City and I would have joined the rest of my sisters in
expressing our family’s grief. It’s ironic that at the time I was writing my
doctoral dissertation on the work of Edward Dahlberg, a man who wrote
beautifully and tenderly about his relationship with his mother in Because I Was Flesh. Dahlberg was
raised by his mother Lizzie, a “lady barber” in Kansas City. While I was not attending my own mother’s
funeral, I was writing academic commentary on these memorable concluding
lines from his autobiography: Who was Lizzie
Dalberg? I wish to God I knew, but is my infamy that I do
not. . . . When the image of her comes up on a sudden—just as
bad demons do—and I see again her dyed henna hair, the eyes dwarfed by the
electric lights in the Star Lady Barbershop, and the dear, broken wing of her
mouth, and when I regard her wild tatters, I know that not even Solomon in
his lilied raiment was so glorious as my mother in her rags. Selah. Dahlberg ends his
book with the word Selah, which is
a mysterious Hebrew word whose derivation and exact meaning is unknown. But
it is a lovely musical word that evokes mystery and peace, like the ancient
Sanskrit Shantih with which T. S.
Eliot ends The Waste Land. So I
would like to move out of the wasteland of distortions I have associated with
my mother throughout my life and reconceive Nina Toriello Moramarco, a woman
of many facets, who I am just now beginning to know, though her body has
long since melded with the elements. One final photograph shows my mother as
I never knew her—a beautiful young woman, artfully posed by a photographer
to bring out her innocence and romantic idealism. I’ll
close with this image of her holding a white rose, looking up into the
distance and smiling. It’s time I celebrated and paid tribute to this
adventurous and complex woman from whose body I sprang into this world, whose
body conceived and nurtured my own, and who I carry with me wherever I go.
Let Edward Dahlberg’s last word be mine as well: Selah.* San Diego
State University |
*A different version of this essay appears in Bob Blauner, ed., Our Mother’s Spirits (Harper Collins, 1997).