Last week I asked some of my friends about the worst things their mothers ever said to them (and in the interest of fairness, the nicest things their mothers had ever done).
Best thing is a no-brainer. When I was six, my mother took me on an Amtrak from Chicago to Los Angeles to visit my aunt and take me to Disneyland, which was all I wanted as a child. I barely remember Disneyland, funnily enough, but I remember that train trip: three or four nights without a sleeper compartment. We ate snacks and read to each other from Peter Pan and slept in our upright seats covered in a giant old fur coat that my mother called her “mystery mink.” Everything about it was magical. I think it was the one time she was the mom she thought she was, or wanted to be. After she died I inherited a massive photo album just from that trip. I’m so glad both of us had that.
[The Ungrateful Son, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1777]
But I think turnabout is fair play, and one must from time to time examine the thankless child with that same critical eye! We can’t all be blameless, and all our mothers terrible. The odds are against that numerically. Surely we’ve flung a disagreeable remark their way from time to time.
So this week I asked the same group about the worst thing they’d ever said to their mothers, and the nicest thing they’d ever done for them.
AUDREY
Once, to break the silence of the only time I ever refused to speak to her (I held out for like five weeks?) I told her in a letter that all I had ever wanted was to make up for every bad thing that happened to her, so there’s that. Maybe 18 months later, for my last birthday with her, which I did not know would be the last, I went to this very expensive chocolate shop in the Ferry Building and picked out a few for her. She was really happy that I picked ones with notes of tobacco and coffee, because she loved smoking and drinking coffee.
Whatever the worst thing I ever said to her was is obscure to me. I was really too afraid to talk back to her — she once cornered me by my bedroom door and tried to sound very casual as she asked me why we didn’t fight more; weren’t teenage girls supposed to fight with their mothers? I did not tell her the truth, which was that she was terrifying. Said I didn’t know why.
The precipitating event of us not speaking to each other was an absurd fight that she picked with me after I had driven a great distance to pick my brother up from a hurricane shelter in another state.
