My Mother - Mary (Longo) Lucchetta
Mom & Me, on the Q.T.
My mom and I had a secret relationship.
Secret enough that hardly anyone knows about the conversations I had with her the last few days of her life. Neither of us knew they would be the last, but there was definitely a summing up quality to them. During what would end up being our last regular Saturday morning marathon chat - during which we typically covered everything from news to my career and her job, to worrying out loud about family, what was on the agenda, and the menu for the week – she assured me I’d be fine without her and ended with telling me how proud she was of the woman I’d become. I rang off feeling warm, happy and already strangely bereft. At 76 and 37 we were each other’s best friends, preferred company, soul mates and touchstones. Gone were the mother/daughter dramas, replaced by the knowledge that had I not been born to her, we still would have found each other on this planet. If she were to leave me, what on earth would I have left?
* * *
Apparently my mom always wanted a little blond baby, though the law of averages weren’t in her favour in a family of dark eyed, olive complexioned, brunette Italians. My paternal grandmother was quite fair, and my father was blond as a child, but four beautiful children had so far popped out with brown hair and brown eyes. Still where there’s life there’s hope and I have in my possession a black and white newspaper photo of a blond baby that my mother carried around with her for hope’s sake. So, when I was born with not just blond, but white blond hair, it was an answer to some prayer she had sent to the heavens above.
My mother’s fervent wish, I’m told, coincidentally had something to do with an anxious pregnancy during a difficult year in her marriage. Needless to say, I got showered with plenty of love and attention from the get-go. Just ask my sister, just over 2 years old when I came into the world. She has plenty of sad stories about being fairly invisible. I can only imagine.
Still, I became accustomed to my mom only publicly showing a portion of what she felt for me. I knew I was different, though I didn’t know why. As I grew into adulthood I often heard her whispers to some trusted someone “we’re soul mates,” or “we are so alike,” or even “she’s really special.” She might spend a whole evening with me at a function only to call me later to tell me, “you looked beautiful tonight,” or “it was so good to see you,” or, “what you said about such and such was really insightful.” These words she could not say in front of my siblings. I was perplexed by this, and secretly very honoured. Though I did not wish to be preferred, I definitely enjoyed feeling special, and so I became complicit with the secret.
On too many occasions she told me how much I reminded her of my dead oldest sister – that I looked, sounded, gestured, acted, thought, was so like her. Though not the only one to mark this similarity, she believed it so strongly that it began to define me – to her, and myself. One day, in the last year of her life my mother said, “It’s not just you remind me of Donna, it’s that you have become her to me.” Wow! I took it as the compliment since my sister, who died at age 25, had been dead for 25 years, and was more a beloved icon than a flesh and blood person to me. She was perfect in everyone’s eyes—beautiful, smart, accomplished, and very loving and caring.
But something was starting to bug me about the whole thing. When was I ever going to get to be the person I was supposed to be before I was showered with attention based randomly on the colour of my hair and the fact that somehow I embodied the traits of my dead sister?
***
After my mom died, one by one, people felt a great need to tell me how my mom felt about me, and I discovered it wasn’t such a huge secret after all. First one of her workmates told me how she talked about me constantly and how much she loved me. Then aunt after friend after stranger whispered in my ear at her funeral variations of these words given to me by her dearest and oldest friend, “your mom loved all the kids, but you were very special to her.” Person after person exclaimed to me: “Dear, you look so much like your mother.” Or if they hadn’t seen me in years, “My God I thought you were Donna. You look exactly like her.”
I thought, if I’m the third in a soul-mate triumvirate, two of whom are dead, is it any wonder I keep expecting some big, bad thing to happen to me?
Needing a few answers I took the opportunity to ask my Aunty M, my mom’s younger half-sister, what it all meant. She said, “When you were born there was a new light in her eyes.” She made it sound like maybe I even saved her life or something. My mom was 39 years old. After I was born she never shed another drop of menstrual blood and she kept me close by at all times. These things all connect in a way that she never put together for me and maybe not even ever for herself. I’ve never been a wife, or mother, therefore have not lost my oldest child at a young age to a rare and fatal illness, have not endured a loveless marriage raising five children basically on my own, and I am, after all, not her. To be my mother is to have experienced and dealt with many painful losses that began at age nine with the death of her mother, and never seemed to end. Though I knew her well and she let me in quite far, there is so much that I don’t know, that I never thought to ask, and that she would never have disclosed if I had.
But I do know she needed me to need her. That she built a need in me for her from early in my life until the day she died and beyond. I grew up a very anxious child, with many fears of unknown sources. Highly sensitive to others and my surroundings I would break out crying for no reason, nor could anything comfort me except the sound of my mother’s voice saying, “It’s going to be ok.” I never felt quite right when I was away from her, or out of touch, or if even one day went by without a connection, though I lived independent of her for many years. We lived together as friends and roommates after everyone else had flown the nest and until I was about 22. Often I chose to stay at home, or socialize with my mother’s friends instead of my own. I preferred her company, our conversation, who I was under her gaze. When I moved out it was after a long discussion during which we agreed that if we did not separate we might never and that wouldn’t be healthy for either of us. She helped me find an apartment, took me shopping for its contents, and sent me on my way with a worried look in her eyes and much sorrow. I called her everyday and saw her all the time. We remained pretty much inseparable.
Once though, and just once, I allowed a friend to come between us, someone who had lost her mother at the age of four and was envious and jealous of my relationship with mine. She convinced me that ours was a flawed and unhealthy codependency and I believed her, because in many ways it was. For the first time ever I would go for days and weeks without calling my mother. When I did call I was hostile and secretive. I broke her heart I’m sure and although remote, I was wracked with guilt and shame for turning away from her encompassing love, which for the first time I came to see as having conditions. My mother had such a difficult time letting go of me and I knew I didn’t need her so much as she needed me. The upside down-ness of that fact made me angry with her, but also filled me with a kind of maternal, responsible love.
Bless my dear mom’s impeccable and generous heart, but it was a lot to pin on a little girl who just so happened to be born with a recessive gene and a happy, loving wide open heart. All I did was reach out my baby arms to her and my life got swooped up into abundant love, and taken away from me all at the same time. The spark in me, that identifiable energy that so many people attributed to me when I was growing, got spent mostly on my mom, because she needed it more. She needed me because of her dead mom, her absent husband, her lost first child, because after too much heartache she needed a one and only. And I was it.
It was only in my thirties, after I’d worked a good deal of my childhood stuff out, that our relationship began to equal and a true friendship based on similar outlooks emerged. Through it all, we rarely fought, and I was sure to try to never hurt her feelings again. I could see that for her, if everything was ok with me, it was alright with the world. She was a stubbornly strong woman with a terribly vulnerable heart, and I was one of only a few of people who saw that the latter could reside inside the former, almost imperceptibly.
***
It’s been eleven years since that last Saturday morning conversation with my mom that left me feeling bereft days before she was even gone. The intensity of missing her never changes, though it is no longer a desperate, anxious loss. I’m okay, maybe even better than okay because I’ve truly stepped into my own skin, lived my own life. For awhile I felt guilty for feeling a freedom I didn’t understand. But lately I’ve come to realize that with great love comes a kind of dependence, that’s hard to quit. For a long time I looked for, and still do look for people to care take. Old habits do die hard. I tried to meet someone exactly like her, and became utterly disappointed when no one measured up, not friends, or boyfriends. What I miss the most is her voice, a comforting and playful sign of a great and irreplaceable friendship forged through only minor difficulties that for awhile threatened to overshadow. But when I look in the mirror I see her steady brown eyes (aging in just the way hers did, not wrinkles, but puffy sacs of earned wisdom) and I know that everything I need to know about life was imparted to me by the person who knew and loved me the most. What I’ve learned about how to live my life is a bonus.
* * *
My name is Carla Maria Lucchetta. I'm a writer and television producer based in Toronto, Canada. I'm, the the youngest of five children, born into a family of Italian heritage - both parents, now deceased, were born in Canada to parents of Southern Italians. My mother, whom I write about, was born in 1921 and died in 1997 at the age of 78. I was 37 at the time. Since then I have safely made it to middle age! I've lived most of my life in Toronto, with the exception of six years in Vancouver where I changed my career from Public Relations to Journalism. As well as articles for newspapers, magazines and online outlets, I write creative non-fiction and have published a short story about my dead sister in an anthology of Italian Canadian women writers called Mamma Mia (ECW Press, 2004)
Posted by Carla Maria Lucchetta March 18, 2009 @ 8:19 AM.
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March 18, 2009 at 6:06PM
This short memoir is filled with wisdom, acceptance, and a sense of true peace.