Like me, my mother found her voice late in life. Her boundless creativity and can-do spirit was out of step with the times. The 1960s, for all the psychedelic talk of freedom and “doing your own thing,” were still a time of repression, not least for women. Proper women stayed home to raise their children and do volunteer work; they didn’t make waves, and those who defied convention would have their husbands’ masculinity called into question. My mother managed to maintain the status quo on the home and volunteer fronts, but she also wrote a newspaper column and cultivated hobbies that weren’t typical of a suburban mother in those days. She was different from any other mother I knew.
Along with my father, she developed a passion for preserving old homes. When no one could be found to assume old ruins slated for demolition, our family would move in. No house was deemed too run-down to save—not even if the place lacked running water. It bears reminding that in the early 1960s, the term “home renovation” was not in the lexicon.
Mom also had an insatiable appetite for antiques and was adept at scouring the back rooms and basements of dusty antique shops in parts of downtown Toronto where no other mother dared to tread. She cared not that the rest of civilized North America was swooning over the Swedish Modern look or that the color palate of the ’60s favored hot-pink and fluorescent green: Our family lived in a 19th-century time warp of ball-and-claw-footed chairs, brocade and damask upholstery, inlaid walnut tables, and mahogany dining room suites that could seat twelve people. Our home resembled the set of The Addams Family. I was the only eight-year-old who knew that crewel work was not a reference to torture. Frequently my mom would drag me into shop after shop on her endless but unspecified quest for “a piece.” When something caught her eye—a china platter or a carved medallion, for instance—she would lovingly examine it, running a delicate finger slowly and reverently around its detailed scalloped edges while marvelling at its beauty. It made me flush with jealousy; I craved for her to touch, admire, and notice me in the same way.
We operate differently as parents, my mother and I, and yet—and it pains me to admit this—there are undeniable similarities, just like Don the electrician said about Zoë and me. In an effort to be our own people we will deny any similarities and even try to make them look like differences.
Later in life, when I had children of my own, some of my mother’s criticism waned, but the wounds never healed. All it took was one comment about my hair, my housekeeping standards, or my parenting skills to reopen the scars. I adopted unconsciously her insistence on perfection in everything and everyone around me, including her.
I also inherited my mother’s penchant for busyness. Single parenting for much of my adult life was a frightening juggling act of keeping my head above water financially while maintaining the facade that the lack of a husband/father was but a minor inconvenience. I tossed more balls in the air just to prove my point. I enlisted my children to help out so we could all appear productive, respectable, and on our toes. I subscribe to the belief that chores and responsibilities are important to a child’s development, but the memory of my own chore-filled childhood was a reminder to go easy on them and to cultivate within them, and within me, gentleness, helpfulness, and forgiveness. I didn’t always succeed but I tried.
Somehow, I could not bring myself to be gentle with my mother.
Not that it was all miserable between my mom and me. We’re white Anglo-Saxons after all; we are able to hide vast amounts of emotional damage behind stiff upper lips, fake smiles, and forced laughter. Still, an awkward detachment exists.
The question that has always bedevilled me—besides, Was I adopted?—is, How did my mother and I fall off the rails so early in our relationship and why was there no attempt to mend our rift? Instead, we let things drift and accepted dysfunction as the status quo. Whenever we locked eyes it was like the bell had been struck to begin another round. Still, no matter how bitter things got we never left the ring. We kept swinging and bouncing off the ropes till we all but exhausted ourselves.
A trip to Italy was the reward for two old prizefighters.
What better place to hash out mother-daughter matters than in Italy? The country positively invented motherhood— worships it, in fact. It is the backbone of Italy’s dominant religion; it is woven into the social fabric; it is an iconic feature of the culture. You cannot picture Italy without visualizing a robust mother smiling at the head of the family dinner table or smacking the head of a misbehaving adult son or pinching his cheeks with her chubby fingers out of love and pride.
Italy seemed like the best place to view our relationship from a safe, therapeutic distance; a place where we could assess the past as if it had been some kind of psychosocial experiment whose results had been submitted for peer review, and where we could regard the hurt, the rage, the what-ifs, the sharp words, the crushing disappointments with breezy dispassion.
Who was I kidding?
Still, nothing can silence my mother like the sight of a faded tapestry or an ancient ruin, and that was another reason I thought Italy would be perfect for us: When we ooh and ahh over stone follies, pastoral views, oil paintings, and antiques, we give voice to a common denominator that confirms our familial tie, a tie frayed by too many years of tugging.
Our shared interest in antiquity was the reason we gave when well-meaning friends, aware of our contentious history, carefully inquired as to why we were going on holiday together. But the unspoken reason—one that my mom and I could barely admit to one another—was that we were going to use the background of the Italian Renaissance to spark a renaissance of our own.
I WAS stretched out on my tummy on the living room carpet like a teenager, legs bent at ninety-degree angles and crossed at the ankles, elbows propping me up as I pressed the phone’s receiver to my ear. My favorite book, the National Geographic Atlas of the World, was open in front of me. My index finger was languorously following the contours of Italy’s curvaceous coastline while my mind dallied with fantasies involving stiletto heels and a swarthy hunk named Giancarlo. Then Mom’s voice spoke sharply across the phone line.
“And make sure you tell them I need a wheelchair. Those airports are too big, and I can’t make it from the check-in counter to the plane without one.”
Poof! Giancarlo and the stilettos vanished.
The words “wheelchair” and “Italy” seemed incompatible, almost as incompatible as my mother and I. The mere mention of a wheelchair caused my chest to tighten and brought my vocal chords to the brink of a scream. I had only considered pushing my mother around Italy in a purely metaphorical sense.
“And I’m bringing my walker. The red one.”
I hate the walker. It makes me feel seriously old, even though I’m not the one using it. I do not like to think of myself as being old enough to have a mother who uses a walker. And of course when you walk with someone who is pushing a walker, you unconsciously adopt the walker shuffle: a slow, deliberate one-step, the type of gait you use when you’re recovering from a C-section or hysterectomy.
The wheelchair was but one consideration in planning this trip.
My mother is at an age where myriad health issues are gradually clipping her wings. (She has threatened to cut me out of her will if I divulge her exact age, so let’s just say that she is younger than one hundred and older than sixty-five.)
Seating on the plane had to be near a washroom: my mom is incontinent.
The hotel rooms had to have ensuites for the same reason.
The hotel could not have too many stairs: my mom has osteoarthritis in her knees.
The distance from the lobby to the hotel room could not be too far: my mom has asthma and heart problems.
Food to nibble on needed to be packed: my mom has diabetes.
No-fish meals had to be requested: my mom is allergic to seafood.
Rental cars had to have enough storage space to stow the walker.
Mom also has two canes: a fold-up cane for travelling and a non-folding