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Joyful Noise
This morning, Hope and I sit at a table, and I wonder what we will do until we meet my brother, and then what we will all do together. 5:00, when I need to pick up Dreux, seems far away from this moment: Hope starts to jump up and down in the booth. The couple two tables away looks like they were up late last night. I try to get Hope to eat some eggs, but she just wants apple juice. The waitress checks in on us and surprises me by wishing me a Happy Mother’s Day. Dreux had given me a card earlier in the hotel room, and I was touched. But that moment had passed, and the words from the waitress remind that this day is about me and what I’m trying to do for Hope. Growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness, we didn’t celebrate any holidays. So, to put it mildly, I’m a little weird about all of them. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a silent pressure, telling me that I’m not feeling what I’m supposed to during these moments of cultural ritual. When I was a child, I used to ache to have a birthday, and as I approached my 16th, I must have yearned louder than I realized because on that afternoon on my sweetest birthday, my mother turned to me and said, “You’re not getting a birthday, so just forget it.” Part of me wilted at the reality of her words, and yet, part of me still hoped that maybe, somehow, a group of kids from school would show up and sing to me while candles flickered from the wind of their voices. Mother’s Day is almost as strange. Around me, the world bows to the mothers, and I feel nothing for my own. And if I did, she wouldn’t want me to or let me. Even though I started much later than her, I’m often not sure how to be a mother, one that helps my daughter meet her spirit, rather than squash it. I realize while I’m sitting here with my 3-year-old rejecting her eggs, I’ve been a mother for longer than I’m aware of. I had to do many things for myself, without knowing how. And then I became a big sister at the age of 14. I remember that my mom, my sister Jerrie, and I had gone to Saint Helena to help my cousin prepare for her wedding. Dad was supposed to show up for the ceremony and then head home. Instead, he got drunk and slurred himself all over the place during the reception and afterwards with my mother. The next morning, something about Mom had changed, her mouth pulled tighter than usual. Dad was still asleep and Mom hurried Jerrie and me to the car parked next to Dad's truck. Jerrie got behind the wheel and as soon as we left my cousin's driveway, Mom announced, "I'm pregnant." Jerrie swerved into the oncoming lane and then fixed our course. "What?" I watched them from the backseat of the LTD, the way the morning light played through Mom's passenger window as we curved down the hill through the trees. Mom stared forward and told us that she hadn't brought her diaphragm because Dad was supposed to head home after the ceremony. I didn't know the exactness of what she meant, especially the word "diaphragm." I did know, intuitively, that the trajectory of our family life was now altered. "He said he'd drive home if I didn't have sex with him." She cried, and Jerrie's hands on the steering wheel grew ever whiter. "You should have told him to go." Mom pulled her hands away from her face and pointed at the road, "With these curves?" Watching the way she seemed to grow smaller in the front seat, I wondered how she could be so sure that she was pregnant already. She knew her own body, and the test at the clinic two weeks later confirmed her knowing. At 34 she was going to become a mother again, her oldest 18. Dad returned to his old habit of staying out late and coming home blurry and smelling of whiskey. Jerrie gave up college to help, and Mom’s anger grew in direct proportion to the swelling of her midsection. She referred to the growing life inside her as “oops” and “the turd” and on the really hard days, “the shit.” My stomach hurt each time she uttered these expletives, and when she was five months pregnant, I said to her, “You’re sending negative messages. His name is Tony and you need to call him that.” For whatever reason, she listened to me, and began to refer to my fledgling sibling as Tony. None of us were surprised that he was in fact a boy. I was 14 then, and naming my brother was the first of many mothering acts I performed, and still do. He and I both know I am his emotional mom, the one he calls when he’s upset, the one he leans on to get him through his hardest moments. Mom sometimes mentions her hurt at being out of his intimate orbit, and I feel for her now. “Momma, let’s go.” Hope and I stand. We walk past three fashionably dressed young women waiting for a table and I blurt out, “Do you know where Glide Memorial Church is?” Hope pulls on my hand while one woman looks it up on her cell phone. The sun warms us, and I think to myself, yes, we will go to Glide and see the love of all humanity. Dreux, Hope and I went there one time with a friend; it was glorious, especially the music. Glide is in the Tenderloin, smack in the middle of every kind of hard luck case seeking help and direction. One must wade through an army of homeless to get to the front doors. In the car, I find my way to the church and park. At the door, an usher hands me an orchid and bids me a Happy Mother’s Day. We find seats and people’s faces broaden when they see Hope. I feel a pang of guilt at wearing pants in church, remembering all those hours I suffered in dresses at the Kingdom Hall. A glance around eases that old burden: every color and kind of person fills the pews, and only one woman has a dress on. “Hey, there,” a lithe man says to Hope. My guard goes up, and I have to remind myself that folks at Glide are probably good people. Hope hides her face in my leg, but she peeks one eye at the man. “What’s your name?” he asks and she unpeeks the other eye. I tell him her name, and he states that he’s a kindergarten ballet teacher. The band begins, and Hope studies the man playing the saxophone. The band beats out a lively tune, the drum filling my chest. I pick Hope up, we sway to the music, and the large choir crowds the stage. They clap their hands and dance in place; the audience stands and matches the clapping and dancing. We all make a joyful noise until the preachers come on stage. We settle into our seats, smiling. One of the male preachers starts off with. “Let all the men in the audience give a hand for the women.” The men are on their feet again, stomping, clapping, whooping, hollering. I flash to my dad, how out of place he would’ve been in this church, on so many levels, but maybe his heart and mind might’ve expanded at the sight of these many-colored men making praise and appreciation to the women in the world. Once, when I hadn’t seen my dad for almost two years, he made a special detour on his elk-hunting trip, driving the extra hours to Denver to see me. We spent two days together, him referring to every woman he knew as a bitch, and if she had the nerve to present any kind of backbone, she became a fucking bitch. Each time he used these words, I cringed, and late on the second day when he and I ate dinner, I worked my nerve up: “You know, Dad, all women are bitches to you, and many of them are fucking bitches. I’m female, so where does that put me?” He took a bite of his steak and chewed. “Oh, you’re sweet, but you got a little bitch inside you, too.” I shook my head. When I was 6 Mom started cooking at the Redwood Diner to help with the finances. She usually did the dishes in the pre-dawn light before she went to work, and most school day mornings we did not see her. Jerrie oversaw the task of getting us all ready and we only occasionally saw Dad at this time of day. One morning, we emerged from the bedroom the four of us shared, and found Dad at the sink washing dishes for the first time. We stood in the harsh bulb light, shocked, and Jerrie finally asked, “Why are you doing dishes?” Dad turned from the sink. “Your mother’s sick.” Suds decorated his forearms and we continued to get ready for school, all of us a little disoriented by the sight of him with his hands in the dishwater. I wanted to creep into their bedroom and see if Mom was OK, but Jerrie forbade me, perhaps knowing Mom needed the rest. The next morning, he did the dishes again, and Cindy was the one to ask, “Is Mom dead?” A woman steps forward from the choir to offer the opening prayer. Before the preacher hands her the microphone, he tells us that it’s OK to pray with our eyes closed or opened. The woman leads us in the most informal prayer I’ve ever heard, talking about her deceased mother and the picture the woman keeps in her bathroom of the two of them. They wore muumuus, and the woman is 5 years old, her mother’s hand around the child’s jaw. “I used to think she was holding me in place, but now I see that she was holding me up, as she does even now.” Tears fill the woman’s eyes. “Miracles can happen, I’m here to testify. A year ago I was in the street, homeless, and now I’m in front of you all.” She beams and offers, “Amen.” The crowd answers, “Hallelujah.” She says and we respond, “Namaste.” We return the blessing. After the prayer, a special program is announced. Three women, all mothers, take seats on the stage. They have all been homeless and are to tell their stories in honor of the day. It’s both uplifting and hard to listen to. They look so young, so hard in many ways, and remind me so much of who my mom probably was at their age. We walk back to the car, and I think about all the ways we drift or jump apart from each other, the ways humans make life so complicated. Walking with my young daughter, with imperfect strangers wishing me well, I see that we all are each other’s mothers and fathers. Those men with the rumpled, dirty clothes reached across a great distance in their wishes, unmoored from their own mothers, so far adrift from the children they had been. One time, my parents and my two brothers and I went on a trip to Eureka. On the way back my 3-year-old brother, Tony, rolled and wrestled with himself in the back section of our Ford Bronco (I don’t know why he wasn’t in a car seat). He threw himself on the floor, kicked his legs up into the air. I was almost 17 (Mom was six months pregnant when she was my age). After 10 minutes of Tony’s physical contortions, I felt a strong urge to hold him. I took him in my arms and soothed his hair. He was asleep in five minutes. I held him the rest of the way home, and just as we took the off-ramp to our house, Mom turned and said, “The mother in you knew what to do.” I beamed at her rare praise and also wondered why she hadn’t asked for Tony. There’s a universal mother available to us all. She’s the one inside us who feeds the hungry, soothes the hurt places, sings to our saddest and bravest moments. She’s the icon of our possibilities of what we can be for ourselves and for each other. That woman guides our finest moments of mothering, fathering, sistering, brothering, and she comforts us and forgives the times we fail in our attempts to be good people. Perhaps I was able to tap into her strength when I was a teenager because I was able to open up a positive space for Tony's arrival in our troubled lives. The universal mother isn’t always there, or we aren’t always paying attention to the ways she can lead us. When we’re tired, frustrated, anxious, overwhelmed, when we yell at our children for not understanding our wishes, she’s still available, but we forget. Back in the car, I maneuver through the streets of downtown San Francisco to get to the Bay Bridge. Once on the bridge, Hope begins to sing and dance in her car seat. Her happiness spills forward to my own body, and I dance with her while I drive. Despite all the times I don’t know how to be a mother, all the times I fail to be the person I want to be, or forget that the universal mother sits within, Hope gives me the opportunity, every day, to try and get it right. Charlotte Gullick is the author of By Way of Water (Penguin 2002) and is the recipient of a 2008 Christopher Isherwood Fellowship. She directs the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference in Northern California where she lives with her husband and daughter.
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