What about love?

This essay was first published November 4, 2024. It will be included in my upcoming book of collected essays (no publication date yet).

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It was after dark on the road back to Cortland from Cincinnatus. It might have been 1984, or 1985. Mother was driving us home from a visit to her high school friend Susan, who live in a ramshackle, leaning 19th century house in the deep country. You had to know to spot the break in the milkweed and brambles to find her driveway, and the house was hidden behind the overgrown foliage at the end of a twisting dirt lane through the woods.

Susan heated her house with the wood cookstove on which she prepared meals. It was a Victorian cast-iron stove with curved feet and six movable surface plates. Watching Susan turn out perfectly cooked pancakes and eggs on this so-very-manual device fascinated me.

Mother and Susan would drink coffee and play cards, laughing uproariously. Sometimes I’d be allowed to hear, or even participate, in the risqué jokes. I knew things at 10 or 11 that made me funny to adults, but I couldn’t let them know all the things I knew. Because then what made me amusing would turn and make me bad and punishment would come.

Many years later, Mother would scuttle that friendship by having an affair with Susan’s son when she was old enough to be his mother. And I had to listen to Mother scream in frustration at why Susan wouldn’t speak to her any longer.

But that night, I was sitting in the front seat of the 1978 Dodge Aspen station wagon, the camel-colored one. Jesse and Curt were asleep in the back seat, Jesse with her soft dolly in the crook of her elbow, Curt with the patch on his good eye to correct the lazy one and his head lolling against the seatbelt that still cut into his neck. I could see them in the rearview mirror because there were no cars behind us to blind.

The slant-six engine purred along like a sewing machine as it always did. prrr-prr-tick-tick-tick. It’s a sound that comforts me. I seek it out on Youtube videos. It’s why I’ve owned two antique Chryslers. I will again. The sound can soothe me like falling asleep on a gently rocking train.

Mother’s left hand held her Winston Light 100, and the smoke was backlit by the blue glow from the dashboard as it slipped out the triangular vent window.

Click.

She pushed her foot down on the round aluminum high-beam switch on the floor. Then she turned on the AM radio. Heart’s Magic Man came on. Mother sang along in her pretty, pitch-perfect soprano.

Cold late nights, so long ago, when I was not so strong, you know
Pretty man came to me, never seen eyes so blue

“Your father was the most handsome man I’d ever seen,” she said, exhaling in that signature pursed-lip way. Decades later, when I was in phone and mail contact with the father I’d never met, he sent me a box of photographs and films (yes, film) from throughout his life. He was indeed uncommonly handsome. You couldn’t blame a girl. Especially a girl like my mother, only 18, plain in appearance, from a poor family. He must have seemed like a waking dream.

Sometimes with admiration, sometimes with suspicion, Mother would tell me how much I looked like my father. “You’re a knock-out,” she’d say. “All the girls will want you.” It made me feel good. And it made me feel dirty.

You know I could not run away it seemed
We’d seen each other in a dream
Seemed like he knew me, he looked right through me—yeah

These conversations on the night ride home made me feel close to my mother, and special, and they made me squirm with discomfort. I wasn’t really supposed to be hearing this.

So I concentrated on the music. Mother gave me the gift of the music of her generation. Peter, Paul, and Mary, Seals and Crofts, Joni Mitchell, Heart; they were as much my music as Kaja Goo Goo, Culture Club, and Madonna were my music.

As I got older, the music of my mother’s generation remained as important to me as the hits I taped on the radio from Rick Dees and Casey Kasem. I dug into the back catalogs of these singers and learned more about them than could be gotten from the Top 40 hits. My love grew.

Something, I don’t know if it’s love, continues to grow for me with these songs. Many of them are tied to specific memories of Mother, but what they mean has changed over time. And they’re coming around again in new ways, with new things to say about what happened between us.

What did happen between us. That sentence needed a question mark, not a period, but that doesn’t seem right. Christina Crawford was bitter and disappointed at what director Frank Perry turned her memoir Mommie Dearest into on the big screen. Christina had written two screenplays based on her book, both of which the studio rejected. What the movie became was not her vision, and, she said, it did not tell the story she wanted to tell.

Christina said Mommie Dearest was a love story gone wrong. She loved, she tried to love, her mother so many times. They had moments of connection that Christina does not know what to do with. Joan took her aside one day and held her while she told her what it was like to have grown up poor and despised, and what a better life she wanted for Christina. She told her why rules were so important, and that even if she didn’t understand them now, her mother was doing them out of love.

But memories like that are shattered by night raids of drunken screaming and filthy accusations. Those pieces cannot be put back together.

I’ve been lonely. I’ve been waiting for you
I’m pretending, and that’s all I can do

It takes years after a final break with an abusive parent to understand and describe the real, true loss, not the part you see and feel on the surface. My greatest sorrow is being unable to give my mother love for almost all my life. She wouldn’t allow it.

I loved my mother so very much, like all children do. She meant everything to me. When she cried, I cried. I would have done anything for her. I tried to love her all my life, even when she was screaming at me. Even when she put me in an institution.

The love I’m sending, ain’t makin’ it through to your heart

I loved her when I was little and she cried from loneliness and fear. I loved her when she huddled with me in my bedroom while her husband raged in the living room, only opening the door to fling a heavy glass ashtray at her and instruct her to “have a nicotine fit with your son” after slapping her around.

I tried to love her again later in life. I gave her a home, literally. Nothing worked. Nothing mattered. None of my love made it to her. There was no place for that love to go. And there never will be. It can’t be given to someone else.

But something’s missing, you’ve got to look back on your life
You know something here just ain’t right
What about love? Don’t you want someone to care about you?

For these 50 years I’ve been lonely; I’ve been waiting for you.