Mother Dominates Daughter

Mother Dominates Daughter
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Mother-Daughter Exchange Club 15
(2010 Video)

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Date and time: Sun, 10 Jul 2022 08:52:34 GMT

Published in the print edition of the December 20, 2004 , issue.
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The New Yorker , December 20, 2004 P. 69
Christmas, 1992, I go home to Washington, D.C., to visit my family. The night I arrive, just after dinner, my mother says, “Come into the living room. Sit down. We have something to tell you.” Her tone makes me nervous. My parents are not formal people—no one sits in the living room. I am standing in the kitchen. The dog is looking up at me.
“Come into the living room. Sit down,” my mother says.
“There’s something we need to talk to you about.”
“Come,” she says, patting the cushion next to her.
“Yes, it’s you. We’ve had a phone call. Someone is looking for you.”
After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness-protection program, I’ve been exposed. I grew up knowing one thing about myself: I am the mistress’s daughter. My birth mother was young and single, my father older and married, with children of his own. When I was born, in December of 1961, a lawyer called my adoptive parents and said, “Your package has arrived, and it’s wrapped in pink ribbons.”
My mother starts to cry. “You don’t have to do anything about it—you can just let it go,” she says, trying to relieve me of the burden. “But the lawyer said he’d be happy to talk with you. He couldn’t have been nicer.”
“Is he sure she’s the right woman?”
“I think he’s fairly certain that it’s her. Do you want her name?”
I shake my head. “Where does she live?”
In my dreams, my birth mother has always been a goddess—the queen of queens, the C.E.O., the C.F.O., and the C.O.O. Movie-star beautiful, extraordinarily competent, she can take care of anyone and anything. She has made a fabulous life for herself as ruler of the world, except for one missing link— me .
In the morning, my mother comes into my room with a scrap of paper; she sits on the edge of my bed and asks me again, “Do you want the name?”
“It’s the same name as a friend of yours,” she says, as if trying to warm it up, make it more palatable.
“You can just leave it on the desk,” I say.
Her name is Helene. (I have changed some names and locations to protect privacy.)
I call the lawyer. “I’d like a letter,” I say. “I want information: where she grew up, how educated she is, what she does for a living, what the family medical history is, and what the circumstances of my adoption were.”
I am asking for the story of my life. There is an urgency to my request; I feel I have to hurry and ask everything I want to know. As suddenly as she has arrived, she could be gone again.
Ten days later, her letter arrives with no fanfare. The postman doesn’t come running down the street, screaming, “It’s here, it’s here! Your identity has arrived.” It comes in an envelope from the lawyer’s office, with a scrawled note apologizing for not having got it to me sooner. It’s clear that the letter has been opened by the lawyer, presumably read. Why? I am annoyed but don’t say anything. I don’t feel I have the right. This is one of the pathological complications of adoption—adoptees don’t really have rights, their lives are about supporting the secrets, the needs, and the desires of others.
The letter is typed on Helene’s stationery, simple small gray sheets of paper, her name embossed across the top. Her language is oddly formal, less than artful, grammatically flawed. I read it simultaneously fast and slowly, wanting to take it in, unable to take it in. I read it and then read it again. What is she telling me?
** {: .break one} ** At the time I was carrying this little girl it was not proper for a girl to have a child out of wedlock. This was probably the most difficult decision of my entire life to make. I was 22 years old and very naïve. I was raised very sheltered and very strict by my mother. I remember being in the hospital with her and dressing her the day we both left the hospital. I have never forgotten the beautiful black hair and the blue eyes and the little dimples in her face. As I left the hospital with the lady who was picking up the little girl, I can still see myself in the taxi and her asking me to give her the baby. I did not want to give her the child, however I did realize, I did not have the wearwithall to take care of her myself. Yes, I have always loved this little girl and been tortured every December of my life from the day she was born that I did not have her with me. **
She writes that watching television shows like “Oprah” and “Maury” gave her the courage and the confidence to come forward. She lists the facts of where she was born, what street she lived on as a child, how she grew up. She includes the names of her parents and when they died. She says how tall she is and how much she weighs.
Each bit of information swims through me, then takes root, digging in. There are no filters; there are no screens. I have no protection from this.
She closes her letter by saying, “I have never married, I have always felt guilty about giving this little girl away.”
I call the lawyer and ask for another letter, with more information, a medical history, a more detailed explanation of what happened, what she’s been doing since, and a photograph of her.
A day later, in a panic, I call the lawyer again. “Oh,” I say, “I forgot. Could you ask her who the father is?” Not my father but the father. “What is his name?”
Within days, a second letter arrives.
** {: .break one} ** I suppose now, I should tell you about Stan. This is difficult for me because to me it is turning back the hands of time. I went to work for Stan at his shop in downtown Washington D.C. when I was 15 years old. I worked for him on Thursday night and on Saturdays. During the summer, I worked fulltime. Stan as you know was much older than I. He was very nice to me. This relationship started very innocently. He would offer to drive me home and we would talk about many things on the way. Then one day while we were working he asked me if I would like to go to dinner with him. This was the beginning. At age 17, he called my mother and asked if he could marry me. My mother said, “she is too young.” Hung up the telephone, turned to me and said, I do not want you to see this man ever again. At this time, I was in love and nothing she said would stop me. I have always been a very determined person. Stubborn if you will. This is me. Stan is married at that time and promises to get a divorce and marry me. This was not my idea, but his. Time goes on, I become pregnant with the young lady. He thinks I should go to Florida, says he will buy a house for the both of us. About three months later, I am very unhappy, I return to Washington. Stan and I start to have disagreements. During the last three months of the pregnancy I stayed with my mother in Virginia where her home was. Shortly before the baby was born, Stan again said he would marry me. He asked if he could come and pick me up and take me to buy things for the baby. I told him no. I did not call him when the baby was born. To the best of my knowledge he lives in Virginia. He has four children. All of his children were born prior to the birth of our child. He was an all American Football Player. To the best of my knowledge his father was Jewish, his mother Irish. I knew only his mother. She was a little, chubby lady. Very kind and very nice to me. You asked about my general health. I periodically do have a problem with bronchitis. This is treated with medicine. Damp weather is not for me. I do take pills for high blood pressure. Other than that, I am fine. I am nearsighted and do have soft teeth. Both inherited, my eyes from my father, my teeth from my mother. **
She ends her second letter: “I have a great fear of being disappointed with what I am now doing.”
I follow up with a call. Her voice is low, nasal, gravelly, vaguely animal. I tell her who I am and she screams, “Oh, my God! This is the most wonderful day of my life.” Her voice, her emotion, comes in bursts, like punctuation—I can’t tell if she is laughing or crying.
The phone call is thrilling, flirty, like a first date, like the beginning of something. There is a rush of curiosity, the desire to know everything at once. What is your life like? How do your days begin and end? What do you do for fun? Why did you come looking for me? What do you want?
Every nuance, every detail, means something. I am like a recovering amnesiac. Things I know about myself, things that exist without language—my hardware, my mental firing patterns, parts of me that are fundamentally, inexorably me—are being echoed on the other end, confirmed as a DNA match. It is not an entirely comfortable sensation.
“Tell me about you—who are you?” she asks.
I tell her that I live in New York. I am a writer. I have a dog. No more or less.
She tells me that she loves New York, that her father used to go to the city and always brought back presents from F.A.O. Schwarz. She tells me how much she loved her father, who died of a heart attack when she was seven, because “he liked rich food.”
This causes an immediate pain in my chest: I now have to be careful; I could die of a heart attack early in life.
She goes on, “I come from a very strange family. We’re not quite right.”
“What do you mean ‘strange’?” I ask.
She tells me about her mother dying of a stroke a couple of years earlier. She tells me about her own life falling apart, how she moved from Washington to Atlantic City. She says that after she gave birth to me her mother wouldn’t come to the hospital to pick her up. She had to take the bus home. She tells me that it took all her strength and courage to come looking for me.
And then she says, “Have you heard from your father?” (When the lawyer opened the second letter, he saw my father’s name and called Helene: “If you’re going to pass on this information, you’d better contact him and tell him what you’ve done.”)
“It would be nice if the three of us could get together,” she says. “We could all come to New York and have dinner.”
She wants everything all at once, and it is too much for me. There is a deep fracture in my thoughts, a refrain constantly echoing: I am not who I thought I was and yet I have no idea who I am.
I am not who I thought I was, and neither is she the queen of queens I imagined.
“When can we talk again?” she asks as we are hanging up. “Will you call again soon? I love you. I love you so much.”
Our conversations are frequent—I call her a couple of times a week, but I do not give her my phone number. The calls are seductive, addictive, punishing. Each one shakes me; each requires a period of recovery. Every time I tell her something, she takes the information and holds it too close, reinventing it and delivering it back to me in a manner that leaves me wanting her to know nothing.
She tells me that she never got along with her stepfather and that her mother was cold and cruel. I feel that there’s more to the story than she’s telling me, that something was happening at home involving the stepfather, and that the mother knew and blamed her for it—which would explain the animosity between them, and also why Helene, a young girl, was so easily propelled into the arms of a much older, married man. I never ask her the question directly. It seems intrusive; her need to protect herself is stronger than my need to know. Her lack of sophistication leaves me unsure whether she’s of limited intelligence or simply shockingly naïve.
“Did you think of having an abortion?”
“The thought never occurred to me. I couldn’t have.”
Pregnancy, I gather, was a way out of her mother’s house and into my father’s life. It must have seemed like a good idea, until my father refused to leave his wife. He tried. They got an apartment together; for four days, he lived with Helene. Then he went back, claiming that “his children missed him.” Helene had him arrested, under an old Maryland ordinance for desertion. At the time, his wife was also pregnant, with a child who was born four months before I was.
“At one point, he told me to meet him at his lawyer’s office, so that we could figure out a way to ‘take care of everything,’ ” she says. “I sat down with him and his lawyer and the lawyer drew a diagram and said, ‘There’s a pie and there are only so many slices of the pie and that’s all there is and it’s got to go around.’ ‘I am not a slice of pie,’ I said, and walked out. I have never been so angry in my life. Slices of pie. I told my friend Estelle I was expecting a baby and didn’t know what to do. She told me she knew someone who wanted to adopt a baby. I told her the baby must go to a Jewish family who would treat her well. I couldn’t take care of you myself—young ladies didn’t have babies on their own.”
She interrupts herself. “Do you think one day we might have a portrait painted of the two of us?” Her request comes from another world, another life. What would she do with a portrait? Hang it over her fireplace in Atlantic City? Send it to my father for Christmas? She is living in stopped time, filled with fantasies of what might have been. After thirty-one years, she has returned to reclaim the life she never had.
“I have to go,” I say. “I’m late for a dinner.”
“O.K.,” she says, “but, before you go out, put on your cashmere sweater so you don’t get chilly.”
“We’ll talk again soon,” I say and hang up.
I am losing myself. On the street, I see people who look alike—families where each face is a nuanced version of the others. I watch how they stand, how they walk and talk, variations on a theme.
A few days later, I try Helene again.
In the background, there is a flick, a sharp suck of air—she is smoking.
“Why won’t you see me?” she whines. “You’re torturing me. You take better care of your dog than you take of me.”
Am I supposed to be taking care of her? I wonder.
“Don’t be angry with me forever,” she says. “If I’d known where you were, I would have come and taken you away.”
Imagine that—kidnapped by your own mother, the same mother who gave you away at birth. For years, Helene lived less than two miles from the house I grew up in, not knowing who and where I was.
“I’m not angry with you,” I tell her, and it is true. I am horrified at the way I see myself in her—the loose screw is not entirely unfamiliar—and appalled that in the end I may end up rejecting the one person I never had any intention of rejecting. But not angry. Not unforgiving. The more Helene and I talk, the happier I am that she gave me up. I can’t imagine having grown up with her. I would not have survived.
“I’m surprised your father hasn’t been in touch,” she says.
It occurs to me that “my father” may be having the same reaction to her that I’m having, that he equates me with her, and that that may be one of the reasons he’s keeping his distance. It also occurs to me that he may think that she and I are somehow in this together, conspiring to get something from him.
I write him a letter of my own, telling him how surprised I was by Helene’s appearance, and suggesting that although this is something that neither he nor I asked for, we try to deal with things with some small measure of grace. I tell him a little bit about myself. I give him my name and a way of contacting me.
I go to the gym. Overhead, there is a bank of televisions—CNN, MTV, and the Cartoon Network. I am watching a cartoon in which a basket containing a baby bird is left outside a wooden door carved into the base of a tree. The words “Knock, Knock” appear on the screen. A large rooster opens the door and picks up the basket. A note is pinned to the fabric covering the basket:
** {: .break one} ** Dear Lady, Please take care of my little one. Signed, Big One **
The rooster looks inside, and a small but feisty baby bird pokes up. The rooster gets excited. An image of the baby bird in a frying pan dances in the rooster’s head. A chicken wearing a bonnet comes into the house and shoos the rooster away. The rooster is disappointed. I am on the treadmill, in tears.
There is a message on my machine, the voice raspy, coarse: “Your cover is blown. I know who you are and I know where you live. I’m reading your books.”
I dial her immediately. “Helene, what are you doing?”
“I found out who you are, A. M. Homes. I’m reading your books.”
It is the only time in my life that I regret being a writer. She has something of mine, and she thinks she has me.
“I’m very clever. I called all the bookstores in Washington and asked them, ‘Who is a writer from Washington whose first name is Amy?’ At first, I thought you were someone else, some other Amy, who wrote a book about God, and then one of the stores helped me and gave me your number.”
She stal
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