Column
My mother is leaving.
I've been helping pack her up, pushing flats of cardboard into sturdy boxes, wrapping vases and paperweights and decorative milk pitchers into tight balls of newspaper, cushioned further with bubble wrap, so that nothing, no precious object collected in 30 years of house history, would break or crack.
I am also packing up my own history. Childhood drawings. My doll collection. Report cards. Photographs of friends I can't remember in places I don't recall being. Most of these things I threw out; two boxes of memories and four boxes of fine China I moved to my best friend's basement.
I have no storage of my own.
Thirty-one years, my mother lived in this house. She moved there with my father (they're now divorced) and earnest, four-year-old me, before my brother was born and then my sister, before my parents were divorced, before we knew the adult shape our little family would take.
Parents die, of course. They become incapacitated mentally or physically. They withdraw. They disapprove. My mom has threatened to move for years, but we stopped believing her around year 10. On holidays, she would try to coax us home by telling us that this year would be the one that was the last Thanksgiving/Christmas/Easter we celebrated here together.
Whatever, we thought. We're going home anyway. And how can you make a particular Christmas feel more special, when it echoes so many other Christmases in the same place?
There's a corner where the tree always goes. There's the stair rail, always wrapped with pine and stiff, wire-lined bows. There are the stockings, which we each shopped for when we turned seven. The comfort was in the sameness that stretched back as far as we could remember.
But now that me and both my siblings are all finally back in the New York metro area, within 45 minutes of each other, my mother has decided to move to western Virginia.
It's eight hours by car. It's two planes, with a stop in DC. My mother is leaving, and mothers aren't supposed to leave. But our home, our home is disappearing.
The new owners have already brought in architects, dreaming in front of us about the new place they will create from the old one.
Folks who say that "home isn't a place—it's the people" don't know what they're talking about.
Neither my sister, my brother, nor I own property; we each move every few years. My brother lived for a time in Colorado; my sister in Baltimore; I lived in Boston and Chicago, and just moved back last summer after 16 years away.
When we said, "I'm going home for the weekend," we meant here, this tidy Tudor, with the Robin's egg blue door and the peonies that opened with the help of a troop of ants.
We were only the fourth family to live in this house, which was built around the turn of the last century. All my pet goldfish were buried with ceremony in the dirt between the front of the house and the bushes. I used to dig to China in the backyard (my mom would partly fill in the hole at night to ensure I didn't get there). Our prom pictures were taken by the walkway. Our girlfriends and boyfriends came over for dinner.
I can recreate, in my head, all the sounds I'm used to hearing when I'm at home. The creaking of pine trees, the music pressed out of the stairs, the skitter of squirrels in the attic. I know how every room is supposed to smell. I've rolled around on every floor.
Having a home gave me something to rebel against. I could leave. I could stay away. The leaving, the staying-away, had weight, meaning, because there was a place in the world that always partly belonged to me, a place that kept me pulled to its center.
I don't know what it is to be without a home, but I'm about to find out.
And yet.
As Mother's Day approaches, I find that there is also something reassuring about my own mother continuing to meet her own needs, continuing to find her own adventures. A couple years ago, she went to China. This month she's moving to Virginia. Why not? She knows that we will continue to move and move again, perhaps out of state.
She has nothing to tie her here.
She reminds us by her actions that it is never too late to do the thing we always wanted to do. But she is also saying that she is still making all her own decisions. We are not deciding things for her, not yet. We might be adults, but in our family, we are still children.
Our home is gone, the physical manifestation of our childhood is lost forever in two weeks. But we still have a mother, and we are still her children. We don't have to worry about choosing her future. She is doing that on her own.
Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist based in New York. Email her at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com. Column archives and an occasional blog are at jennifervanasco.typepad.com.
Mother’s Day. Sniff.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
