Paula McLain

The Mother I Never Had

I have had six or eight mothers, depending on how finely you mince the definition, and though the woman who gave birth to me is simply one figure in that difficult mix, she set everything else into motion and therefore looms largest.1 I was four when she vanished. No note, no tearful good-bye, just poof, she was gone. She was 25—a young 25—and though I now assume her life was sad, frightening, and essentially hopeless, at the time my two sisters and I couldnt begin to fathom2 her motives. We were simply left staring into the black hole of her absence.

For the next decade and a half, we bounced around like pinballs3. My father was unreliable—in and out of trouble, in and out of jail—and so others stepped in. We stayed first with our grandmother, then with a single aunt, and when no one in our family could commit to our long-term care, the three of us were shunted into Californias foster-care system4. Because we rarely, if ever, knew why we were leaving any situation or where we would land, dislocation and bewilderment became the standard.5 Helplessly, we entered strangers homes holding garbage bags full of our clothes.

My sisters (one older, one younger) and I never really talked about what was happening. For my part, I fixed all my energy on the perfect family that I assumed was out there somewhere, waiting to embrace us.

Years later, when no such family had materialized and my disappointment threatened to overtake me, I spun my strategy 180 degrees.6 I decided the only way to survive was to give up my fantasy for good. I stopped watching the horizon; no one was coming to save me. When I aged out of the foster-care system, I swore that I would fashion myself a solid, reliably good life. I would become the mother I had been endlessly denied, loving and lovable, poised to kiss and bandage, bolster and encourage.7

Easier said than done. At many points during the 17 years Ive brandished apron strings, Ive been flat-out schooled by my past.8 Parenting without having had positive role models is harder than I imagined. Of course, I had other types of models, so to speak: One foster mother was cold and controlling and never touched me if she could help it. Another was overwhelmed and mostly absent. A third really wanted a baby, cooing and gurgling and precious, not a shell-shocked schoolgirl.9 When I look back at my childhood, I think of it as war duty, the time I did in the trenches10. Not all of me made it out alive.

My most treacherous period as a parent was the first year or two, the rookie stage, when I didnt know just how much torque my history could wield.11 I was 27 when my son Connor was born. Old enough, I thought. Older than my mother was when she hightailed it12 away from me. And, besides, I wasnt her. Safe and sound in my first marriage (or so I believed), I had a well-feathered nest. All the baby books were indexed and crossreferenced.13 I thought I was ready.

The practical business of parenting wasnt the problem. Connor was a good infant. He slept well, breast-fed like a champ, splashed adorably in his bath.14 One afternoon I snapped a photo of him in his bassinet, napping in an onesie with red and blue stars on the tush, knees tucked toward his belly, thumb nuzzling his perfect nose.15 That picture breaks my heart. Present tense. It breaks my heart now. At the time, I didnt feel much of anything when I looked at my son. Or my husband, or the television, or the fireflies crisscrossing my yard on a summer night.16 I had expected to feel awash with maternal love and contentment.17 Instead I felt empty and sad.

“Youve got a case of the baby blues,” my obstetrician said when I fell apart during a checkup.18 She told me to get more rest and to phone her office if I thought I needed medication. Maybe I should have called her; Im still not sure. Postpartum depression was most likely part of what was going on with me—but there was another piece of the puzzle that had little to do with hormones.19

When I looked at my son, who was totally dependent on me to meet his every need, I was abruptly brought face-to-face with my mothers leaving. The thought that kept running through my mind wasnt intellectual but visceral and raw:20 I had been her baby. She had held and fed and dressed me—and she had left me anyway.

I had never come to terms with21 these feelings. I didnt cry for my mother when I was a girl, and I dont remember missing her. Neither of my sisters ever mentioned her name. It was as if we had separately and collectively erased her. Even when I was in full fantasy mode, imagining the family that would rescue me, my mother never appeared as even a minor character—and I certainly never pictured her coming back for me. Maybe I had already fully recognized that she would never pull herself together enough to return. Or maybe I wanted her to return so fiercely and completely that I couldnt bear to wish for it.

At 27, I didnt understand to what extent I was still a terrified little girl clutching a garbage bag—I only knew I couldnt cope. I wanted to be a perfect mother and to give my son a flawless childhood, but that pressure became immobilizing22. If I lost my patience, for instance, or couldnt soothe23 him instantly, I felt like a failure. My moods swung wildly on any given day. Although my husband was understanding at first, he eventually became concerned, then impatient, then furious. He hadnt signed up for a morose24 and barely functioning wife. He wanted me to get back to my normal self. The problem: I had no idea who that was.

First I moved to the couch, then to a friends house, and then left for good, taking Connor—by then a toddler—to a town a few hours away, where I attended graduate school.25 We lived on student loans in bare-bones cinder-block family housing.26 My days were a blur of macaroni-and-cheese and Hot Wheels,27 of pausing in the middle of a term paper.

The move and new challenges helped bump28 me out of my depression for a short while, but my improved state of mind didnt last. Connor and I looked nothing like the dream family that had carried such tremendous weight in my childhood. That image was even more powerful now that I feared my choices were leading me further and further away from it. How could I give Connor a happy childhood if my own happiness was never within my grasp?

I began to spend whole afternoons in the bathroom crying. During commercial or Lego29 breaks, Connor would come to the door and knock lightly. “What are you worried about, Mom?” I sobbed harder. I had no words for how I felt. But I feared that I was making a hopeless snarl30 of our lives. That no matter what I did, Connor and I were going to end up back where I had started, in a landscape filled with chaos and desperation.

When I look back, I can see that I wasnt depriving Connor of anything vital; he was loved and cared for. But at the time my expectations threatened to topple me over like an oncoming avalanche.31 I wouldnt feel safe from the gnawing32 worry that I would one day become my mother and repeat all her mistakes.

A few months later, Connor and I were in a drive-through line waiting to order hot-fudge sundaes, the car warm and idling as a light snow fell.33 I looked across the parking lot at a drugstore and thought about buying a big bottle of aspirin and killing myself. The urge came bloodlessly, without any emotion at all, and that scared me the most. I didnt want to die. And I couldnt leave Connor without a mother.

I asked for help, a real departure for me. I phoned friends until I got the name of a good therapist, and it was then that I began to unpeel the painful layers and grieve for my girlhood for the first time.34 Becoming a mother had reopened scarcely healed wounds and plunged me back into the trauma35 of my early years. No wonder I felt so broken—I was.

Unfortunately, even the best therapy doesnt fix you up good as new36. From my late 20s to my late 30s, I watched as my friends morphed into parents, buying minivans and bottle systems and diaper bags that seemed to do everything but fly.37 By the time Connor was about 10 (and seemed pretty well-adjusted, too, amazingly), I felt a longing to give parenting another go.

It wasnt a simple matter. The part of me that wanted marriage and more children was in conflict with the part that was out-andout38 terrified. What if things got as bad as they were the first time, or even worse? I thought. And then I forged ahead anyway.

I was 38 when I remarried, and within months I was carefully charting my basal temperature.39 When I mentioned wanting to get pregnant to my gynecologist, he raised an eyebrow and proceeded to deliver dire statistics about the odds of conceiving at my age.40 Ultimately, I got lucky—so lucky.

In 2004 my daughter, Fiona, was born in the middle of a lightning storm. Outside, branches seesawed41 and telephone wires swung wildly, but our birthing room was dim and quiet. When she drew her first breath, it was quiet, too. She looked at me with eyes that belonged to a baby owl. She seemed to know everything about me already and to be saying, with her gorgeously arched feet and the small shells of her ears, that she would take me as I am.

The next day, as my new husband snored on a cot in the corner of our hospital room and my baby owl slept in my arms, I watched a TV special about Aron Ralstons ordeal at Blue John Canyon.42 I was transfixed by his story and felt a strange kinship with it.43 Ok, I had never been pinned for days under a boulder or amputated my own arm or rappelled down a canyon wall.44 Still, I related to his will to survive. My mother had given up on me; at times I had considered doing the same. But I was still here, thrumming45 with a desire to live—and so was my family.

Two years later, after more charting and even more ominous46 statistics from my gynecologist, Beckett was born. Connor was 13 at the time, and as I handed him Beckett, squirming a little under his blue-striped hospital hat, I said, “You have a brother. What do you think about that?”

“Weird,” he said. But he was smiling.

It is weird to be potty47 training one son and lending the other my car, but its wonderful, too. Somehow Ive managed to create the family Ive always wanted. Ive had to work hard, building from scrap metal48 and making it up as I go along much of the time, but my children are three of the most remarkable people I know. The old anxieties threaten me at regular intervals, but facing them down helps diminish their potency—and strengthen mine.

When I ask Connor what he remembers from those years when we were on our own, he recalls only good things—this treasured toy, that favorite book, a trip to the petting zoo with friends. You know, typical magical childhood stuff.?

1. mince: 細(xì)分；mix: 混合體，此處指所有充當(dāng)作者母親角色的人；set sth. into motion: 也作put sth. into motion,使某物開始運(yùn)轉(zhuǎn)或工作；loom large:顯得重要（令人擔(dān)憂，很難回避）。

2. fathom: 理解，領(lǐng)悟（復(fù)雜或神秘的事情）。

3. pinball: 彈球游戲（一種在機(jī)器上玩的游戲，通過控制桿擊球到規(guī)定區(qū)域而得分）。

4. foster-care system: 指將家庭遭受變故、失依、失養(yǎng)或遭虐待等事情的兒童及少年安置于符合的家庭寄養(yǎng)的一種做法。

5.居無定所和惶恐無助已是家常便飯。dislocation: 搬家；bewilderment:困惑。

6.materialize:發(fā)生，成為現(xiàn)實(shí)；overtake: 控制，壓倒；spin: 使旋轉(zhuǎn)。

7. poised: 準(zhǔn)備就緒的，已做好準(zhǔn)備的；bolster: 增強(qiáng)，激勵(lì)。

8. brandish: 揮舞；flat-out: 完全的；school:v. 教育，培訓(xùn)。

9.另外一個(gè)寄養(yǎng)家庭的女主人是真的想要個(gè)小孩兒，但是她想要的是一個(gè)還在咿呀學(xué)語，嬌嫩無比的嬰兒，而不是一個(gè)倍感惶恐的學(xué)校女生。coo:（鴿子等）發(fā)咕咕聲；gurgle:（嬰兒喉中）發(fā)出咯咯聲；shell-shocked:慌亂的，焦慮的。

10. in the trenches: 在戰(zhàn)壕里，形容處于危難時(shí)刻。

11. treacherous: 有潛在危險(xiǎn)的；rookie:新手，生手；torque:轉(zhuǎn)矩，扭轉(zhuǎn)力；wield: 施加（影響）。

12. hightail it: 趕緊跑，快跑，倉皇奔逃。

13.in d ex:給書加索引；cross -reference: 通過互見指引。

14. breast-fed: （嬰兒）母乳喂養(yǎng)的；adorably: 惹人喜愛地。

15. bassinet :（嬰兒的）搖籃；onesie:嬰兒連身衣的一種，嬰兒的雙腿露在外面；tush:〈美俚〉屁股；tuck:把（兩腿）蜷曲；nuzzle: 輕觸，輕擦。

16. firefly:螢火蟲；crisscross:在……上交叉往來。

17. awash:充滿的，充斥的；

maternal:母親的，母性的。18. baby blue: 〈非正式〉產(chǎn)后抑郁癥；obstetrician: 產(chǎn)科醫(yī)生；fall apart: 崩潰；checkup: 體檢。

19. postpartum depression: 產(chǎn)后抑郁癥；hormone: 荷爾蒙，激素。

20. visceral: 出于本能的，發(fā)自內(nèi)心的；raw: 原始的。

21. come to terms with: 與……達(dá)成妥協(xié)，讓步于……。

22. immobilize: 使停止，使不動。

23. soothe: 撫慰，安慰，使平息。

24. morose: 悶悶不樂的。

25. for good: 永久地；toddler: 蹣跚學(xué)步的孩童；graduate school: 研究生院。

26. bare-bone: 必要的，少得不能再少的；cinder-block: 空心磚。

27. blur: 一片模糊；macaroni: 通心粉；Hot Wheels: 一種小孩子的玩具汽車。

28. bump: 顛簸前行。

29. Lego: 樂高積木。

30. snarl: 混亂，一團(tuán)糟。

31. topple: 使倒下；avalanche: 雪崩。

32. gnawing: 折磨人的，令人痛苦的。

33. fudge:（通常用糖、黃油、牛奶或奶油和巧克力制成的）乳脂軟糖，奶油軟糖；sundae: 圣代冰淇淋；idle: （機(jī)器）空轉(zhuǎn)。

34. therapist: 治療專家；unpeel: 剝開。

35. trauma: 心靈創(chuàng)傷，痛苦的經(jīng)歷。

36. (as) good as new: （狀態(tài)）像嶄新的一樣好。

37. morph:使變成……；bot tle systems: 指“奶瓶”；diaper: 尿布。

38. out-and-out: 十足的，徹頭徹尾的。

39. c h a r t :記錄（某事物）的變動；basal temperature: 基礎(chǔ)體溫。

40. gynecologist: 婦科醫(yī)生；odds: 機(jī)會，可能性；conceive: 懷孕。

41. seesaw: 上下（或前后）搖動。

42. snore:打鼾，打呼嚕；cot:輕便床（尤指折疊帆布床）；Aron Ralston: 阿倫·羅斯頓，美國登山愛好者，2003年在Blue John Canyon攀巖探險(xiǎn)時(shí)遇到意外，右臂被夾在石縫中無法動彈，支撐5天后自己割臂自救，最終生還。

43. transfix:（由于驚恐等而）呆住，驚呆；kinship: 類似，近似。

44. boulder: 巨石；amputate: （手術(shù)中）切除；rappel: 繞繩下降。

45. thrum: 連續(xù)輕叩。

46. ominous: 不祥的，不吉利的。

47.potty:（小孩子用的）便盆，小夜壺。

48. scrap metal: 廢金屬。