girl talk

"It's the nature of men," Lorna says. "Sex...sex...sex." Mom and I laugh, startled into glee by Lorna's irreverent words. Mom's laugh is huge, her mouth open so wide she could be doing any number of things--yawning, screaming, catching flies--but instead it's laughter coming out, a screeching, hoarse sort of noise, reflecting how rarely Mom laughs now since her Alzheimer's and her stroke. But why should we be surprised by Lorna's words--Lorna's always the pillar of honesty and, after all, there is some modicum of truth here, isn't there?

Mom, Lorna and I have been talking about marriage, and in particular the early days of a marriage. I've been asking Mom about her and Dad, wanting to know what these days were like for her. I ask her--"Did you like being first married to Dad?" She answers--"I don't know"--and I think--how can one not know something like this?

When I think about my own marriage I remember the ridiculous joy--the sheer pleasure at simply being appurtenant to this person, with him forever, or so I imagined. And then the intense pains of adjustment--how my husband and I rarely understood each other, coming to our marital world with such different values, expectations. A collision at best. I'm astonished, really, at how unprepared I was, despite being thirty-four years old and living on my own for so long.

But Mom and Lorna...what were their experiences? I ask Lorna--"Were you prepared for marriage? "No," she answers quickly, her answer not requiring much thought apparently--something she has already worried over, pondered. Lorna is from the Philippines--born there, grew up there, married there, taught there in the local school district of her province for thirty years. And then she retired and immigrated to the US. She has three children and more grandchildren than I can keep track of. Some of them live in Seattle, but most live in Vancouver, the place she travels to most every weekend with her husband--Lorna's husband driving (Lorna doesn't drive) and Lorna riding shotgun as they wait for hours every week to get through the border, their car packed with 50 pounds of beef, 30 pounds of chicken, dozens of eggs, bags of vegetables and rice. Food is three times as expensive in Vancouver, so out of love Lorna and her husband provide a shopping service for her family. Now that they have their Nexus pass (as of last week), and can travel quickly over the border without waiting, she is limited to 20 pounds of beef, 20 pounds of chicken, 20 pounds of pork and so on. Apparently, customs is worried that, while Lorna is not a security risk (hence her Nexus pass), she may have turned "commercial," when really all she's doing is being kind to her children and their families.

"I eloped, my dear, " Lorna adds. "Got married when I was nineteen.""Oh my dear, such a fuss. I was not ready for marriage." She laughs then, not a laugh of pleasure, I imagine, but one of disbelief. One's marriage is a reason for disbelief--so many years ago, lifetimes, I'm sure. Nearly inaccessible, those memories, these emotions.

I eloped too, but I don't say this aloud. This is still a point of great pain, humiliation for my mom--not something we have ever been able to talk about, work through. It was the trigger point for Mom's departure from my life, so many years ago. I got married on Stewart Island in the San Juans--we flew in (there's no ferry and no formal airport) on the twenty-second of April fifteen years ago and pledged a life together while we gazed adoringly off into the Gulf Islands and Canada beyond. I remember the surprising heat that day, while it was April, it was hot, sticky--my nylons (something I never wear now, no matter what) my very own portable sweat lodge. The vintage dress I wore--embroidered silk from 1910--slicked down tight to my skin, despite its loose drape. We stood there, like every couple, full of hope, excitement. And like every couple we were deeply disappointed.

"Did you know about sex, Mom," I ask her at this point, now venturing into dangerous waters, "I mean, before you got married?" I add. Mom does not feel comfortable talking about sex, particularly her own sexuality. Never has been. Prudish, I have always thought, this reticence of hers. But I feel emboldened by Lorna's presence. "Did you talk about this with your girlfriends, your mother?" I add. I know that by the time Mom got married in 1948, Berentina had been dead for three years, long before such mother-daughter confidences might have occurred. Mom got married on September 26th--she remembers this clearly, no matter what day I ask her this, what hour. This information is firmly imprinted into her brain tissue and synapses.

"No" Mom adds quickly, getting the words, the taint of sex, out of her mouth as quickly as possible. "I knew nothing." And I remember how Mom never had these discussions with me either, not when I reached puberty and certainly not when I was engaged to my husband. She left me to fend for myself.

I think then of my mom, as she appeared in my favorite photo of her--she's been rowing with Tommy and now luxuriates in the bow of a skiff, leaning in close to the camera. She's nineteen or twenty and how clearly she exudes sex, sexualized glamor really, and yet sex is the furthest thing from her mind. In fact, it's the thing she's most afraid of, always has been. Mom's a Calvinist at heart, despite her Methodist upbringing--she's steeped in an Augustinian fear of the body as a sexual being. The body is something she eschews, whether it's her clitoris or her hamstrings. Something to be controlled, kept under wraps. Not something to be looked at, talked about.

"Did you like sex?" I ask Mom then. Actually, I can't believe I've asked her this. And really, I never would have but for Lorna's easy words about marriage and sex.

Into the wake of my wonderment, Mom says--"Wasn't fun." And I think, this is how the world has changed for women, or at least one of the ways. Sex can be "fun" because it can happen on women's terms. Sometimes.

Lorna adds--we didn't have birth control, so it was...bam... bam...bam...three babies in three years, and as she says this she slaps her thigh three times with her right hand.

"After that," I ask Lorna, "what did you do?"

"Avoid as much as possible," she answers with a wide smile.

"Not much awareness about birth control then," I say aloud, confirming Lorna's revelation, and then Mom unexpectedly adds--"I always thought that was kind of goofy." I'm thinking, what's goofy about birth control and then I realize what she's reflecting upon is her own discomfort about sex and the the body. Anything having to do with these issues--like how to alter bodily functions to prevent pregnancy--appears "unnatural" to her, appears "goofy."

"Do you think sex is a 'right'...something husbands are entitled to by reason of being married?" I've addressed my question to Lorna and I wait, curious for what she will say. After a moment of two, Lorna nods her head "Yes" but doesn't say anything more. And I think--perhaps this too has changed for women. Sex is not a "right," it's a benefit that comes from intimacy, from doing the work of keeping a marriage alive, healthy. Their is the real choice to leave, a choice for women now, and not just men. I'm glad for just this moment that I'm not a nineteenth century or even an early-twentieth-century woman. And yet, I know how these ideas linger--how Lorna and Mom's expectations about sexuality in marriage still circulate today, surface as men fight to stave off the erosion of patriarchy.

And then I remember Lorna's comment--"the nature of men"--that men are somehow perceived as inherently hyper-sexual and hence having urgent sexual needs. And then, how this biological "fact" is seen as justifying men's sexual behavior, good, bad or otherwise. Just a brief look at mistaken assumptions regarding rape goes to show how powerful this cultural learning can be about men's sexual needs--that somehow men must be satisfied. Women have sexual needs. They are due the respect of having these needs met on their own terms.

I think about my father--what a creative but uncompromising man he could be at times with his bombastic ideas and certitude about how the world should be lived. And I think about Lorna's husband--a man turned religious convert (zealot) twenty years into their marriage and how this has made him rigid, cruel, someone to avoid at all costs for the last ten years (there's a reason why Lorna now works as a 24/7 caregiver five days a week). And I think about my own marriage to an eccentric gifted man who nonetheless rarely considered those around him, but for how they might bend to his needs. All of them--not "bad" men but men acculturated to seize what is theirs. Not a woman's learning, at least not my generation, not be mother's generation.

Mom and I look through the photo album I've brought with me--a plaid wool-covered binder that's about six inches square. It's Mom's, but I borrowed it, needing to search for my parent's secrets as Mom has so little to reveal. There's page after page of snapshots of Mom and Dad right before their marriage and then in the early days of their marriage, before Peter is born. I hold the album on my knees, sitting close enough to Mom so that she can see the photos too. Some of the photos are faded, some are less than clear.

There's pictures of her and Dad while on a trip to Portland to visit Dad's family--his father, Gus, and his brother, Chuck, and sister, Lu. There's pictures from a road trip Mom took with my father and her Dad, Deda, before they got married. When I question Mom about this, she blushes and asserts that Deda was the chaperon....that "I wouldn't have gone without Daddy." They pose with friends, people who have slipped from Mom's memory. She looks at one picture of a couple dressed in ski pants and standing in snow and says--"I know...this is...this is..." but can't conjure the names. I feel the loss of this, heavily. There's no getting back to this moment, this couple, that experience. It's gone because Mom's memory is gone. There's a picture of Mom and Dad standing by the Peace Arch at the Canadian border (a trip they took soon after being married)--Lorna recognizes this monument, an attraction she sees ever weekend as she and her husband make their familial commute. They look so content, Mom and Dad, just pleased to be with the other. Both are slim, in good health, and their lips curl with the kind of happiness that I can't ever remember seeing on either of their faces when I was growing up. There's even pictures of them building the house in Medina--snapshots of half-built rooms and ladders leading to not-yet-built roofs.

My favorite, though, is a picture of Mom, standing on a beach--she can't remember where. She's in one of her ubiquitous sweater sets, with a white Peter Pan collar, and a wrap skirt of gabardine. Her hair is very much how it is now--short bangs and a slight curl at the shoulders. Her body's facing away from the camera but her face and shoulders are bending into the viewer's line of sight. The photo is overexposed, so their's no richness here, only the quality of Mom's smile. Her teeth gleam white against her lip-sticked lips. Everything about this photo says--"I am happy, we are happy, we are happy to be together." Where did this "happy" woman go? How did marriage, life, children erode an essential fact: that my parents chose each other and were glad of it.

When I go to leave, Mom is agitated, she has been on and off during the whole visit. She feels she "did poorly" in OT. Johna, the OT, wheeled her to the dining room for lunch, a place Mom does not like to be for meals. Mom spilled a glass of water, wetting her pants and bottom. She's so flustered that she can't use her fork, can't begin to figure out how to eat the food on her plate. She's mortally embarrassed. Nothing on her plate gets touched.

"Mom," I say. "It was just one OT session. You've been doing well otherwise."

No," she says, "no, it was bad...really bad."

It occurs to me then that Mom lives by a strict code of what is "good" and what is "bad." New people Mom meets fall into the category of "a nice man" or "not a nice man." An unsuitable husband her daughter wants to marry falls into the category of a "good match" or a "bad match." A son who behaves painfully and disappears becomes inscribed as "a good son" or a "bad son." This is the world according to Mom, an unforgiving world where one's behavior always carries the possibility for catastrophic loss. Perhaps it's the unexpected death of her mother that produced this sense of fear in my mom--that everything could turn out badly unless strict rules are followed, that everyone could leave you unless you hang on hard enough, long enough. The need for control, or rather the appearance of control. The world is that frightening.

When I close the door for HC 201 behind me I can hear the low mummer of Lorna and Mom's voices--girl talk, I think. Lorna is the friend Mom hasn't had since college. She's the companion Mom has been hungry for but didn't know it amidst the self-enclosed world of her marriage. I feel grateful just then for Lorna, for Mom, for the second chance I've been given--the chance to chat with my mom as a friend, not just as a daughter. The girl talk we never had.

Deeply, a mother's daughter
--this is alifewithmom--