One Fish, Two Fish

The dead goldfish was a new parenting low for me, though it was not the first dead goldfish we’d encountered since Santa brought the fish tank two years prior. In fact, if we’re counting, it was maybe dead goldfish number six in that time period. This one was different, though, because it was not floating at the top of the tank; it was on the floor. In my son’s room. Black-eyed and lifeless on the strip of hardwood that shows between where the area rug ends and the closet door begins.

I noticed the night before that one of the fish was missing from the three-gallon tank. The orange and black one was still swimming around, but the pale gold one was gone. I peeked into the tank through the algae-coated glass in all the regular hiding spots—behind the mini Easter Island statue head and among the leaves of the plastic plant— and could not find the missing fish or its carcass. And it wasn’t until the next morning that I solved the mystery.

Mike, Daniel, and I were in the morning rush of leaving for work and school. I was weighed down with several bags: my laptop bag, my purse, a four-year old’s dinosaur backpack, my lunch bag, and my gym bag, though I knew getting out of the office for a run that day was wishful thinking at best. I dropped it all in a pile on the front seat of my Subaru wagon, and my husband buckled my son into the car seat in the back. As I watched this happen, I realized I was cold, that the weather was drearier than I’d expected, and that my child was wearing only a long sleeved t-shirt and jeans. “Hey,” I said, “I’m going to run inside and grab a sweatshirt for Daniel.”

And that is what I did. And that is what I was still doing when I encountered the dead goldfish on the hardwood floor in front of my son’s closet.

I took a private moment to officially rule the death a suicide.

I pondered the dead fish and was about to go grab a wad of toilet paper with which to pick it up and transfer it via flush to the sewer system of Denver proper. But then I stopped myself. We were already late, and given my aversion to germs, especially those associated with raw poultry or fish, I knew the flushing would be followed by a long, hot hand washing and a scrub of the floor, and it had already taken forever to get my family out the door. So instead of dealing with it, I told myself that I would be home first that evening since it was Mike’s day to pick up D from school, and I would take care of the dead fish situation as soon as I arrived. Then I grabbed the sweatshirt off its hanger, slipped out the front door, and proceeded into the rush hour traffic before I could second-guess myself.

 

I dropped my son off at school and settled into my 45-minute  commute, autopiloting  on to Highway 36 with my mind wandering first to the uneasy guilt I felt at leaving something so disgusting in my house, and then to another dead fish in my past. It was 1999, and my younger sister called me from her college in Utah. “What’s wrong?” I said, which is what I always said after I knew it was her calling. She never called unless there was drama.

She was crying and distraught. “Mom is such a fucking mess!” she spat the words as her sadness morphed into the anger and disgust that were much more her style. “She sent me a dead fish in the mail!”

“Wh-whoa-whoa. What?” I knew our mom was strange, and yes, often a fucking mess, but what entered my mind was a picture of my sister receiving a package with a large, dead trout or catfish in it, like in The Godfather. I was confused. “She sent you an envelope with a dead fish in it?”

“No, it was a box. A care package”

This did not help it make sense. “With a dead fish in it?” I ventured.

“Yessss!” my sister hissed at me, continuing her longstanding tradition of treating me like a complete idiot while simultaneously soliciting my help or advice.

Courtney explained to me that she had received a box in the mail from my mom containing snacks and fun games and lipgloss and lotion and other creative things. My mom often did things like this, and it always reminded us of the Christmas stockings and Easter baskets that we got growing up; she was ridiculously creative and had a knack for putting gifts like that together. Upon realizing it was one of my mom’s famous packages, my sister had apparently summonsed several dormmates to witness the unboxing in a gesture that probably had more to do with trying to one-up people in the cool-mom department than anything else. The audience made the presence of what I now knew to be a large, dead goldfish about the size of an adult fist— dangling from a pair of funky new socks that my mom had undoubtedly picked up at some cool gift shop she’d discovered—even more upsetting. According to Courtney, she had lifted the socks out of the box and held them up in the air for everyone to admire when one of her friends screamed. And then the fish fell with a thud back into the box. After that it was all down hill.

There was really no way to avoid laughing. Which, in turn, infuriated my sister to the point that I thought she might do permanent medical damage to herself. She’s pretty high-strung anyway, and my glee at her embarrassment and anger was not helping the situation. My mom had done some strange things in our lives, but in my sister’s opinion, this was piece de resistance.

“How do you explain that to your friends?” my sister was still at full-tilt, showing no signs of slowing down.

The truth was that there was probably no way to explain it that would truly encapsulate my mother. It wasn’t the first or last time either of us had been forced to make up a brush-off story about how my mom was actually normal, just eccentric and lots of fun, and maybe a little “spacey” sometimes. I thought about the fish and how it could have possibly happened. I knew my mom didn’t do it on purpose. But seriously, how do you end up with a big, dead, google-eyed goldfish mixed in with a care package of cookies and Chap-Stick? The explanation I gave myself was that the fish had probably died in its tank, and my mom, in a common move for her would have let it sit for a few days or weeks until it started to smell. And then she might have gotten around to lifting it up, dumping the water, and then stashing it somewhere, in this case a big empty box that she had in the bottom of a closet or at the back of a cabinet, without actually removing the body. And maybe the tank tipped over and the dead fish fell out and then, weeks later, she grabbed the box (a really nice box, as she always used to say) and used it to pack a care package worthy of a Harry and David catalog. That’s the explanation I gave myself, and given the weird shit I’ve seen my mother do with messes she didn’t want to deal with, I’m sure it wasn’t far off. I gave my hypothesis to my sister to no avail. She wasn’t having it.

“She’s lost it! She’s crazy! I’m done!”

 

My mother died almost ten years ago, several years after shipping a dead fish to the University of Utah, care of my little sister. Her death was, in fact, due in part to her “losing it”, but in the past decade, with all the writing I’ve done about her, I was always too scared to address the crazy. I couldn’t talk about the parts where she was manic or drowning in depression or some other episode of what was very likely bipolar disorder. I couldn’t write about the parts where she spent money compulsively, sometimes leaving only enough grocery money for rice and canned tuna for dinner, or the parts where she did things like hide a disgusting fish tank, carcass included, in a closet or cabinet without cleaning it out first, and then completely forget about it until one of us was left to take care of it. After she sacrificed so much to raise us on her own, and after she did so many great, fun, cool-mom things over our lives, it felt like a betrayal to talk about the fact that she was probably really sick for a lot of her own life. Living with my mom created a confusing childhood, one that likely made us grow up before we were ready, but it seemed disrespectful to talk about her behind her death.

It took me some therapy to figure out that it’s possible to acknowledge my mom’s mental illness without taking away from the fact that she was funny and smart and beautiful and more nurturing than anyone I’ve ever met. I would still choose her as my mom if given a choice between her a million others, but I also now know that I’m allowed to paint an honest picture; it’s ok to process the shitty parts; it’s ok to revoke her sainthood in return for some closure. For a long time, I felt like my grief would be rendered invalid if her secret got out, that it was only ok to mourn the perfect. In fact, I spent so many years protecting her memory, making sure that people saw her as the upstanding mom of the decade, that I never dealt with the residuals of growing up with a mother who was mentally ill. The taboo, it turns out, is not only reserved for the living.

 

When I got home from work that afternoon, it took me about fifteen minutes of puttering around in the kitchen before I remembered that I had a dead fish to deal with. I went first to the bathroom where I fashioned a catcher’s mitt out of about 46 layers of toilet paper, wrapping it rhythmically around my hand while I gave myself a pep talk. Armed with my fish catching apparatus, I walked into Daniel’s room, turned on the light, and walked toward the spot where I’d left the dead fish that morning. I began breathing through my mouth, a practice I typically reserve for cleaning up vomit, but I thought could prove handy in this situation, as well. Ready. Steady. And… nothing.

The body was gone. And because I’m not always great at thinking on my feet, my first instinct was to look back in the fish tank. The tank that sits on the bookcase about five feet above where the dead fish was that morning. The tank that, even if he had been alive and well and just out on a stroll, the fish would never have been able to jump back into. It was at this moment that one of our dogs walked in. (Bex. It’s always Bex in situations like this.) She beelined for the spot where the fish had been that fateful morning and licked the floor. It didn’t appear that this was her first visit. I went to the kitchen to get cleaning supplies and then returned to shoo Bex away and sterilize the floor in my son’s room with approximately seventeen bleach wipes, shuddering as I pictured our adorable, but not super-smart, blonde mutt chewing her snack. I shuddered again as she gave Daniel a big welcome-home lick across the face when he arrived a little while later.

 

I didn’t become a mom until a few years after my own mother passed away. It took me off guard how much having a child would make me miss her, and it put in perspective how difficult her life must have been as a single parent struggling with a mental illness that, because of the way things were—and, really, still are—she kept hidden from everyone except for my sisters and me, who had no way of understanding it, and no way of declining our invitation to the party. For all the moments in the four years of Daniel’s life that I have pined for my mom, at this moment, standing in my child’s bedroom with the late afternoon sun squinching my eyes and shining a spotlight on the crime scene, as it sunk in that I left a dead fish on the floor on purpose which my dog then ate, I actually wanted my mom more than ever. I wanted to tell her I was sorry and that she was forgiven for all the things that she couldn’t control, and that she shouldn’t worry, because it doesn’t take a crazy person or a bad parent to get a dead fish stuck somewhere it isn’t supposed to be. Or maybe it takes both.

Prisoner of Wishing

I overslept by a few minutes this morning; Mike startled me out of a dream to rouse me. Just seconds before, I had been following my mom around our old house. She was looking for something, and I was helping her look while carrying a bag of chocolate chip cookies. I was shoving cookies in my mouth one after another. Upon waking, the dream immediately began to fade, and because I so rarely dream of my mother, I tried to make my brain hold on to it. I stumbled sleepily to the shower, threw my pajamas on the floor, stood beneath the hot water and closed my eyes, willing the image to come back, desperate to remember her voice.

I focused. The cookies I could explain. After spending the past few months working out and limiting calories like a fiend, I am accustomed to waking up with a rumble in my stomach and very odd dreams about junk food. But what was my mother looking for in my dream? I kept thinking about it and trying to get it back, and eventually it came to me. My mom had been searching for her MIA-POW bracelet. Room to room she wandered through the old townhouse we had moved into when I was in 6th grade. And I was following her, helping her look, still eating the stupid cookies. It made total sense. Except for the part where it didn’t at all.

My mom was born in 1953, slightly too young to be a real hippie in the 60’s. There were no cross-country treks to the Haight-Ashbury, no real love-fests or drum circles, and she was too young to be allowed to march on Washington without parental supervision. However, the attitude of the times had definitely affected her, and she spent her life knowing, preaching, and demonstrating the importance of tolerance, peace, and equality, and she made sure that those values were passed directly to me and my sisters. She told us stories of the 60’s on rare occasion. Her best friend, Teri, usually had a starring role, and her stories of rebellion seemed thoughtful and with purpose, in contrast with my high school crimes of skipping class and smoking Camel Wides for the sole purpose of pissing her off.

At some point in the early 70’s, right after high school, she and Teri took a trip to San Francisco. I am pretty sure that was where she purchased her MIA bracelet. A student group in California had started printing the simple, cuff-style bracelets bearing the name and rank of a soldier missing in Vietnam to bring much-needed attention to the MIA-POW issue and to the families who were struggling in the vast unknown. I imagine that my mom purchased it because it was something she believed in strongly, although I know that the bracelets were also very trendy with the aspiring-hippie types. My mom hung on to that bracelet for the next 20 years.

Until I got ahold of it.

The hippie culture came back in style while I was in high school, although we called it grunge. It was an Eddie Vedder- and Kurt Cobain-fueled attitude and uniform that bore a small resemblance to the hippie lifestyle of the 60’s, at least that’s what my friends and I told ourselves. (Hell, we even tried to bring back the Dead.) In trying to keep with staying super-cool and hippie-ish with my high-school friends, I frequently begged my mom to let me borrow her MIA bracelet, knowing that wearing a real piece of the 60’s would make me even more popular than my ripped flannel shirt and Lollapalooza tee already had. While she had always been generous with her things, that bracelet was the one thing she wouldn’t let me borrow. In retrospect, I think it was the last remaining tangible piece of her sordid youth after marrying into an instant family, having kids, and divorcing all while still in her 20’s, and she wanted to protect it, keep it sacred. But I wasn’t thinking in retrospect then; I was a selfish 15-year old who only cared about being cool.

So I took the bracelet out of her jewelry box one morning before school and wore it. Over the course of the day, after bending the three-dollar, 20-year-old piece of aluminum for the umpteenth time to keep it from slipping off my bony wrist, the bracelet broke into two pieces. I was initially very upset. However, after thinking it through, and being the honest, responsible, and respectful little snot that I was, I threw the broken piece of history into the dumpster, and then swore to my mother for the next two years that I hadn’t seen it every time she went looking.

I never told her what really happened. Even later when we became friends in my twenties I still didn’t spill it. I told her about smoking pot in high school a couple of times, and I told her how old I was when I lost my virginity, and I told her who really stole the bottle of tequila from the pantry (not, as she had so innocently assumed, the house sitter from the summer vacation of ’92.) But I never told her what I did to her bracelet. Maybe it was because it never came up, but probably it was because I still felt horrible about it. Still do. In fact, even more now.

So, any psychoanalyst worth her salt could easily pinpoint the meaning of this morning’s dream, the one that has been haunting me all day. It’s pretty easy to figure out a dream when it is about something that actually happened. What I couldn’t understand, though, was what brought up that old bracelet-guilt after almost 20 years.

At some point today, it occurred to me, and I was actually able to decode the way my normally jacked-up mind was working

The feeling that I have had in my adult life every time I have thought about that bracelet is actually very similar to the feeling that I had last night watching Barack Obama win the presidential election. I know that sounds weird because I was ecstatic last night. But as that initial euphoria wore off, there was momentarily a familiar wishful longing.

I wish I wasn’t such a spoiled brat when I was 15. I have wished a million times since that day that I had just left that bracelet where it belonged, nestled on the blue velvet that lined my mom’s antique jewelry box. I wish. I wish. I wish.

I wish that my mom would have been around to see what happened in America last night, to see that the things she believed in and instilled in her children were actually, finally coming true in the rest of the country. She would have been so happy; she would have cried tears of joy just like I did.

I wished that Senator Obama would win, and it came true, but I also wish that history wasn’t happening without my mom around to see it. I wish she wasn’t MIA. I wish. I wish. I wish. Sometimes I feel like I will never stop wishing.

(But, on the bright side, I am glad I didn’t really eat all of those cookies.)

Thank You, Henry James

As the Kubler- Ross model, and every psychology text book since would suggest, there is most definitely an Angry stage in the grieving process. After losing my mom last year, I felt like I was being pretty healthy about my grieving. I was sad all the time, but I was trying not to let it consume me, trying to go on with my life, trying to continue to be the person she raised me to be. Really, I wasn’t doing a bad job as far as I could tell. However, about six or eight months into it, the Angry Phase set in. Because my personality is very ‘all-or-nothing’, I think my brain gave a big screw-you to the other phases and just stuck with Angry. For months. It definitely caused strain in my relationship with Mike. Talking with my sisters about our feelings didn’t always help either because they could sometimes be pretty Angry, too. We were sticking together, but occasionally, we were just making each other more Angry. At work, during a review, I actually had my Creative Director tell me that she was a little worried that I was Angry about some things. That was a shock. I have always prided myself on being a great employee, and spent a lot of the early days after my mom’s accident throwing myself into my work, desperate for the distraction. I had no idea that the people who normally really liked me were suddenly viewing me as somewhat hostile.

For those few months, I fell into a damaging pattern of taking everything personally, and reacting to situations in ways that would never have occurred to me before. Yelling and freaking out when I got cut off in traffic, ranting and raving to whomever would listen about work issues that were really not a huge deal, subconsciously doing things to get a rise out of people who loved me so that they would get angry, too. Not good. While I was being angry, I was also withdrawing from all of my friends, meanwhile keeping myself very busy by gaining 40 pounds. (Can you say ‘Emotional Eater’?) Then, when my clothes wouldn’t fit, and when I would look fat in pictures, guess what? That’s right. I would get really effing Angry. Something had to give.

I’m not sure what exactly it was, maybe just a normal part of the healing process, but about a month ago, the Angry just started to go away. Halloween night, after I embarrassed myself in front of the mayor, I was reading Real Simple Magazine. One page in every issue of their magazine is always a beautiful nature photograph with a deep quote next to it that is intended to make you reflect on life. Sometimes I think the quotes are a little cheesy, but this one stopped me in my tracks. It was a photo of a tiny, fluffy baby bird sitting in the palm of a man’s large hand. The quote was:

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
-Henry James

It really struck a chord with me. The old Cara would have cut it out and posted it on the fridge, dutifully using these words to live by as a small inspiration each day. Angry Cara, who was sitting there reading that magazine, was inclined to roll her eyes and flip the page, idly continuing the search for holiday shopping tips and Thanksgiving cooking ideas. But, something in the quote made the old Cara start to wake up a little. I stared at the page. I read it over and over and over again. I unexpectedly felt tears on my cheeks. I cut it out and posted it on the fridge.

It occurred to me that I had not been being very kind to anyone in a long time. Sure, I was always nice to servers at restaurants, and the checker at the grocery store. I bought Girl Scout cookies when the kids came to the door, and I always waved and said hi to my neighbors. My heart wasn’t in it, though. I used to be a really nice person, and I meant it; it came from somewhere inside of me, and it was definitely put there by my mother. There is a very real difference between being kind and just being polite; I was still going through the motions of being a good person because we are all supposed to, but inside, I really wasn’t giving a crap. On top of it, I was abusing my relationship with my boyfriend, ignoring friends’ phone calls and invitations, and apparently being sort of a bitch at the office. The only living thing I’d really connected with in months was my dog. For some reason I felt like he was the only one who could possibly understand me, an animal with no real ability to truly understand. How irrational is that?

I tried to explain to Mike a few months back that I was waking up every single morning with an uncontrollable urge to throw baseballs as hard as I could through big glass-paned windows. I craved the release and the noise and the force of it all; I would actually spend time picturing it and trying to capture in my mind what it would really feel like. What I have since learned is that the feeling, that fist in my gut, and my heart and my brain that wouldn’t unclench, it has a name, and that name is rage. I have always been such a comedic, even-keeled person that I didn’t even know what the feeling was. I thought I had just developed some weird baseball/window fetish, but there was actual rage inside of me. Mike tried to understand, and he always did a good job of helping me to feel better, but I am sure he was questioning my sanity. I was questioning my sanity, too.

The morning after I read the Henry James quote, I woke up with a different feeling. I woke up thinking: Yes, I am still sad, and I will probably always be a little sad, but today, I am not angry. I will be angry again in the future, but it will not control me, and today, the most important thing is to be kind.

*******

Today, I was walking out to get into my car and make the commute to the office. As I strolled to the driver’s side door of my little SUV, I noticed black plastic and bolts, and broken glass scattered all over the street. I looked at my car and realized that, as it was parked on the street overnight, someone had driven by and clipped my mirror, completely torn it off, a total side-mirror-ectomy. I let out a groan, and picked up the pieces and went inside to get Mike who was still shaving. He came out and took a look at it, assessed the damage in his ever-so-analytical engineer way, and said “Well, I’ll price them today and fix it over the weekend.”

I sighed and even stomped my boot once, “Arrrrggh. This sucks!”

Then I kissed Mike and said goodbye and got behind the wheel. As I was getting ready to pull out into the street, my eyes instinctively went to where the mirror would have been, had it not just been reduced to a tangle of wires and broken plastic protruding from the side of my car. I laughed at it. It looked so ridiculous, and here I was still trying to use it to check behind me. It occurred to me that I was not really Angry about this unfortunate little event; I was just annoyed. Annoyed I can deal with. Annoyed feels healthy and normal. Annoyed does not feel like baseballs crashing through glass.

I do not know why certain things happen in life. I try to believe that things happen for specific reasons, but sometimes it seems that an event will take place and there is absolutely no semblance of a reason attached. It will always be one of those things that humans will never be able to understand. I do not know the reason for my mom dying when she was so young and when I still needed her so much, but I definitely know why some idiot knocked the mirror off of my car. It was simply to show me that the old Cara is back. That is worth way more than the $69.99 for part number 22095 at AutoZone.

Winter Whining

The first Fall chill hit just weeks ago followed shortly thereafter by the inaugural snowstorm of the season. I have always treasured the first snow, and in seeing this year’s, I realized that I had no real memory of last year’s. Breaking local tradition, the first snow this year came before Halloween, passing through a week or so early and allowing the trick-or-treaters to conduct their business with fabulous costumes unencumbered by the dreaded winter coats. Halloween was mild, and even today it is a downright San Diego-esque 76 degrees with the sun bright and sharp, slicing through the perfect blue sky. It does not fool me, though. I am a Colorado native, and I know the sneakiness that comes with Winter in Rockies. I know the feeling of falling asleep after a day spent golfing or hiking in the warm sun only to wake suddenly during the night to hear it, the turmoil outside as something new blows in on a strong wind. It is only the next morning when I come to in a different world, one blanketed in white, that I realize it wasn’t a dream, that I was truly awake, albeit it for a fleeting moment, an aural witness to the brewing storm.

If I had possessed the wherewithal in those dark and early morning moments to go to the window, I am sure I would have seen the snow beginning its descent on the sleeping Denver streets, sneaking in when no one is paying attention, executing its plan of attack in silky silence. But in my sleep-starved state, I typically roll over, and wake in the morning to the smell. I swear there is a smell. Or maybe it is not a smell, but a feeling, the combination of the slight chill of my nose, and the low hum of the warm, dusty air rolling out of the vents, and the strange innate understanding that, outside the house, someone has carelessly depressed Mother Nature’s mute button and forgotten to release it. There is nothing like that feeling, and everyone from Colorado knows it well.

I didn’t realize it then, but I missed Winter last year. Yes, there were the silent overnight snowstorms and the sight of my excited dog plowing nose trails through the yard, whiskers and lashes coated with flakes each time he came up for air. Winter was definitely here last year, but I barely remember it. I remember skiing exactly twice, the second time resulting in a horrible fall, a torn MCL, and the remainder of the season spent snuggled down reading while all of my friends frolicked their weekends away on the slopes. I have a few Christmas gifts to show from last year, too, a book I truly love, and a sweater I wear frequently. The specifics are there, but the larger picture is a blur. It is a section of my memory, a piece of the continuum that both flew by and dragged on at the same time, and it left a scar. I’m sure that this scar will fade, in fact, it has already faded some, but it seems, if this year is any indication, that it will sting a little each year as Fall passes into Winter.

Last September, my mother was killed in a car accident. She was 53. I am, or was, her spitting image; strangers were always commenting on the similarity in our looks, friends always mentioning the way our voices were indiscernible over the phone. At age 30, right before the accident, I had even started to find myself saying her grown-up mom-isms and acting in her grown-up ways; the words would escape my lips and then my eyes would roll with the dread that every girl feels when she is faced with the realization that she is turning into her mother. Now, though, I do not dread it so much.

My mom was one of those moms who celebrated each season with decor and food and silly traditions. I forced myself last year to attempt the traditions that my mother had instilled in us as so important, but instead I was tormented by grief and anger and a brokenheartedness that can only be described as debilitating. I started to bake the things we had always baked, but ended up in a helpless ball of tears on the kitchen floor as soon as the smell of my mother’s Rum Ball recipe hit my nose. I put up my Christmas tree, and then stared at it pointlessly and for hours at a time, the lights turning to blurry stars as my eyes welled over. I couldn’t bear to shop for the traditional “ornament of the year”; 2006 will forever be without one on my tree, the year that was simply missed. When a blizzard shut the city down, I was mistakenly halfway through dialing her phone number before I realized that she would not be around to talk the wasted day away.

This year, I think things will be better. I can feel it. What I have realized in the past few months that had evaded me before is that I am resilient and that I can make it. I have learned to laugh again at the things my mother would have thought funny too, and I have learned that her traditions, so many for each season, are actually gifts and not tortuous memories. So this Winter, I am looking forward to what is ahead. I have accepted that the Rum Balls will always have the tiniest amount of bitterness from now on. There will be no more snow day marathon phone calls, and I will always ache just a little bit at Christmastime. However, I am ready to face those things because they come along with a happy snow-dog carving trails in the yard, and a Sunday morning cup of coffee enjoyed while staring out the window at the clean, crisp, white world, and a ride up the ski lift above the wintery planet, with a knee and a heart that are still a little sore, but healing.

A college entrance essay…on a tangent.

I need to shorten this from 8 pages to 1 or 2…*sigh*

When my mother told me several years back about the day with the hermit crabs, it was the first time I viewed her as a person with a life that was distinctly separate from mine. As we become adults, we all realize at some point or another that our parents’ lives have not always been about us, their children. However, my mom was a single mom who raised my sister and I on her own, so I was always convinced that, in a way, we were her reason for living.
My parents divorced when I was five and my sister was three. My mom was just starting college at the time, and she was 28 years old. My older sister, my half-sister, was to live with my father, and so, my younger sister, my mom and I became a team, in it toghether. My sister and I learned quickly how to help run the household. My mom went to nursing school full time, worked full time, and was a full-time mom; I have no idea when she slept. As I got older, I became aware, albeit somewhat subconsciously, that most everything my mom did was to make sure that my sister and I were ok, and that we became good adults. That is why, when she told me over coffee about the day with the hermit crabs, I suddenly saw her in a completely new light.

The day with the hermit crabs began quite innocently. I was eight, and my six-year old sister was a source of constant turmoil in my life. She was always in my business, trying to hang out with me and my severely cool third grade friends, and, from my perspective, spent almost all of her time being a big, huge baby. It was a Saturday, and I was in the middle of writing a very important report for school, the subject of which was my pet hermit crabs. I would be bringing the little guys into school with me on Monday, and so I told my sister that she could help me by filling the sink with water and letting them swim around while I cleaned out their cage and got it ready for the big debut. She was more than happy to oblige, ecstatic anytime I went out of my way to include her.

I took the small plastic terrarium out on the porch to dump it out and hose it down while my sister gingerly placed the three crabs into the makeshift basket she had created with her t-shirt and carried them into the kitchen. She put the stopper in the sink, and began filling it with water. My mother, in the meantime, was sitting in the next room on the couch staring into space; she had been like that for almost an hour and had told us she was studying. Within five minutes, I heard my little sister shrieking with delight. “Wow, Cara!” she called to me “they are getting really frisky today! They’re coming all the way out of their shells. All the way!!”

This didn’t seem quite right to me because in my vast experience as a hermit crab owner over the prior two years, I had never seen one of them come all the way out of its shell. They were called hermit crabs for the very reason that they carried their little homes on their backs, never to vacate, and so I knew that something must be off. I set down the plastic box, haphazardly sprinkling blue and pink rocks on the ground, and went inside where I found my little sister perched on the kitchen stepstool with her pigtails askew. The stepstool was a purchase made by my mother to allow us to reach high enough to put dishes away, a dreaded chore, however, this day my sister was using it to maintain a bird’s eye view of the goings on in the sink. She was peering down into the water, her face alight with excitement and wonder; she beckoned me over with both hands, not moving her eyes from the sight below.

I ran over, and sure enough, there were my pet hermit crabs in all of their naked glory, shells left behind; soft, curled underbellies exposed. My sister and I chattered loudly back and forth standing shoulder to shoulder on the stool, enraptured by the Discovery Channel-worthy vision in front of us. We called our mom. “Mom! Come here, you’ve got to see this”

Nothing.

No answer.

“Mom! Come check this out. The crabs are going crazy”

Nothing.

No answer.

“MOM!! The crabs are ALL THE WAY out of their shells”

“Huh?” My mom walked into the kitchen, not looking quite like herself. “Are you guys ok? What’s going on with the hermit crabs?”

“They came all the way out of their shells!!” my sister said, and then pointed to the sink, basking in the I-told-you-so-ness of the moment.

My mom strode over to us in a half-run and looked into the sink. Her eyes got as big as ours were for a second, and then her adult logic and wisdom kicked in and she placed her hand in the water, quickly drawing it back, and then plunging it in again, scooping up our frisky pets and laying them on a dishtowel on the counter.

“You guys, this water is boiling hot! You’re cooking the crabs!”

I was instantly angry with my sister and began yelling at her, telling her how stupid she was. My mother was examining the crabs, while my sister started to cry. Seeing her tears, I started to cry, too, sure that my precious little pets were going to die. Then my mom started to cry, and she grabbed us both in a bear hug off of the stepstool, our feet dangling. We all stood there in the kitchen crying for several minutes. My sister and I exchanged glances through my mom’s arms, wondering if she was angry or sad, or maybe just a little bit crazy and if it was all because of us and the crab mess we had created. My sister patted my mother’s elbow as if patting a good dog on the head and murmured, “It’s ok, Mommy, it’s ok”

After we all calmed down, and following a brief family discussion of hermit crab etiquette, my mom helped us clean out the rest of the terrarium. We put our little friends back in their home and hoped they would make it. Miraculously, they did, one of them living for an additional four years, which I assume is unprecedented in the hermit crab world. I finished writing my report in perfect cursive, sitting next to my mom at the kitchen table while she wrote a paper of her own, clacking away on an electric typewriter, a huge cup of coffee in front of her, and her “study-music”, the flute stylings of Jean-Pierre Rampal floating softly out of the second-hand stereo. I gave my big hermit crab presentation that Monday, bringing down the house if I recall correctly. My mother turned in her paper, too.
Life went on, and I barely ever thought about the day with the hermit crabs again, until, at the age of 23, I decided to drop out of college and take a job opportunity I had been given with a financial company in Denver. I was disenchanted with school and figured this was my ticket out of Colorado Springs, my big chance to start being a real adult. My mother, upon hearing of this decision, invited me for coffee to discuss my impending life changes. I went, dreading the lecture that was sure to ensue.

My mom and I talked and laughed the way we always did and then she got serious. “Do you remember the day with the hermit crabs?” she asked, looking straight into my eyes, which, for both of us, was the same as looking into a mirror.
“Which one?” I asked nonchalantly, recalling with a smile several incidents involving the now infamous crabs. The time we lost one in the house for several days, only to find it clamped on to the cat’s tail. The multiple times my sister and I would place the crabs in each other’s beds in order to invoke a scream. PETA would probably frown on all of these hermit crab misadventures, but we were children tasked with the duty of helping to raise ourselves, and those crabs, along with the cat and the dog were a vital part of our upbringing and the teaching of responsibility.

“The day Courtney tried to boil the crabs in the sink,” my mom said, waking me from my childhood daydreams.

I laughed. “Of course I remember.”

I laughed some more, but my mom looked slightly somber.
“That was the day I was going to give up”
She told me the story of the day with the hermit crabs from her point of view. She had a paper to write, a big paper on the subject of something very intricate in the genre of biochemistry. It was due Monday, and she hadn’t even started. She was so, so tired. She couldn’t take it anymore; it was just too much. The little kids, the horribly difficult classes, the full-time job working nights in the X-ray lab. She was just going to quit. Maybe she could become a waitress, or get a permanent position in the lab, but there was just no way she could go on like this, exhausted and drained.
But then we snapped her out of it. Screaming about the hermit crabs in all of our childish drama, my sister and I brought my mom back down from her emotional ledge. It was her job to come in and rescue us from our six- and eight-year-old mistakes, and she did it. She saved the day, and saved the crabs, and saved my little sister from what would have surely been a lifetime racked with the guilt that comes with being a crab-murderess. My mom took care of it, and suddenly, for reasons she still did not understand, she could imagine going on, which she did. The next year, my mother graduated with honors from a top nursing school and went on to have a career that anyone would be proud of. At her nursing school it was tradition that each graduate walk down the aisle with a significant other, or a parent who helped them through. My mother walked down the aisle in her nursing cap, eyes gleaming, flanked by two little girls. We assumed that it was all for us.

My mother paused in her story of the day with the hermit crabs to sip her coffee, eyeing me over the rim of her cup to see if any of this was registering. Then she told me that, while most of what she did in her life was for my sister and I, when she did this one thing, persevering and finishing school, it was all for her. It belonged to her and no one else. She wanted me to have that, too.
I teared up at my mother’s story, and then did the only thing that I could think of, completely ignored her advice, dropped out of college, and started a career like I had already decided to do. In all of her infinite wisdom, she had also raised both of us to be steadfast in our decisions. So I left Colorado Springs and moved to Denver to become a career woman. I have been quite successful, too, but there has always that one thing missing, and this is where you find me now, eight years later, with no children or other excuses to stop me.

I am already getting paid to do something that I love which is to write. I am successful in my work as a financial copywriter, and while I, like many nine-to-five writers, harbor pipe dreams of escaping to the mountains one day to write the great American novel, I find my work fulfilling. It may seem odd to completely change my life when it is all in order and I am happy, but there is something missing. I crave that feeling that my mother described having on her graduation day. I want it more than anything right now, more even than that elusive great American novel.

My mother died in car accident last September. She was only 53. While I know she wasn’t perfect, she was seemingly almost always right. In this case there is no exception. It seems that it took the jolt in my life of losing her to put the wheels in motion, to wake me up to what I’ve been missing. The wheels are finally moving, and I am finally awake. I want to finish my degree. While her memory may be a driving force in my return to school, the degree that I earn will not be for her. It will be bittersweet to achieve my dream of graduating without my mother cheering me on, but this time it will be for me. I won’t quit until I am finished, even if I have to scare a few hermit crabs to get there.

From April, 2007

I have gained 45 pounds in less than a year.
I cried in a meeting in front of the senior vice president of marketing, and on the treadmill in a crowded 24Hour Fitness, and at the bookstore, and in the produce section of Whole Foods, the one on 1st and University Boulevard.
My little sister is filing for divorce from her husband.
I screamed in my boyfriend’s face this morning because he drank the last Diet Coke.
My older sister, as always, pretends nothing has happened, does not scream, does not file for divorce, does not cry in public while clutching a carton of strawberries.
This is my mother’s fault.

My mother drove off the side of a country road eight months ago. She rolled down an embankment, was thrown from the vehicle which then landed on top of her, and she died. She died. I still don’t know if she did it on purpose or not; my sisters do not know either. She was at a point in her life where that may have been her plan. But it could have been an accident, too. It wasn’t the first time someone missed that turn in her little farm town, the town where people refuse to wear their fucking seatbelts. Not even close to the first time. Lots of people had skidded down that embankment after taking the turn too quickly. Plus, how could someone deliberately leave behind three successful, funny adult daughters, two adorable, tiny grandchildren, a dog, a fiancée, and a world full of people who thought she was hilarious and beautiful?
Those are the things that make me think it wasn’t on purpose.
On purpose. That is what my sisters and I call it, “it” being the possibility of suicide. We call it on purpose when we talk about it, which we very rarely do.
I like to imagine that on that night, my mom was really thinking it was time to get things together, and she was just on her way home. The state patrol officer ruled it an accident, said she tried to correct the turn and, if she hadn’t told me just three months before, “Sometimes I just think I should drive off a bridge,” then I would be inclined to believe him. In fact, I am still inclined to believe him, but sometimes I just can’t make myself actually do it.
All I can picture and think and wonder about is what that last moment must have been like for her. It consumes me, and it fills my head at the most inopportune times. At work, during sex, while playing with my niece and nephew, while having a glass of wine with my best friend. I’ll just start to get comfortable in my own shoes again, and then it smacks me in the face, ruins my good time, ends my selfish bout of happiness. It is eating me alive. What was she thinking as it happened? Did she scream? Did she think of me, how much she and I look alike, how people would always ask us if we were twins? Did she think of the things she hadn’t taught my sister about raising her kids yet? Maybe her thoughts were of her big Irish Wolfhound, the way looking into his huge brown eyes made you think of looking into the wise eyes of a retired college professor. Maybe she didn’t have time to think of anything.
It must have hurt so much. What does it feel like when an SUV lands on your chest? The pain must have been excruciating.
Worse than childbirth, worse than her bad knee, worse than the pain of having three daughters who had thrown their hands up at her, unsure of how to continue helping her fix her life. That is what we had done, thrown our hands up for the most part, even when she had selflessly spent a solid portion of the past thirty-five years making sure that our lives were A-OK. That we were fed, and clothed, and polite, and smart, and that we tried really hard at everything.

She must have been so scared; it had to have been torture. And then maybe it was over. Maybe, on impact, she was gone. Or maybe it wasn’t as quick as they said. Maybe she suffered.
At the funeral, a woman approached me. She was tall. I remember that because I am tall, and she stood even with me. She was from the same little town, a nurse just like my mom, and she said that my mother hadn’t suffered, probably never felt a thing. She was trying to help me feel better, and I just smiled at her with my mother’s smile and looked her in the eyes with my mother’s eyes and hugged her, and then I let her walk away. I don’t even remember her name, can no longer picture her face. My sister probably remembers them, her name and face; she is good with things like that. This nameless, faceless woman, as it turns out, was the one who had been on her hands and knees in a ditch administering CPR right after the accident happened. She crawled down the steep, rocky edge of a curvy country road and pushed on my mother’s heart, willing it to beat; she tried to save my mother’s life. She, not me, was the last one to touch my mother while she was still my mother. While she was still beautiful and hilarious and smart.
I, on the other hand, was at a movie. Trust the Man, it was called, and if I remember correctly, it was quite good, although I am no film critic. The ringer on my cell phone was turned off. Obviously. They make you do that in theaters; they put up signs, have banners running across the screen like ads. And it makes me laugh that they still say phones and pagers, as in “Please silence all cell phones and pagers.” Who has a pager anymore? I had a crush on a boy in junior high who had a pager. In fact, I think that was the main draw, the intrigue and mystery that a boy with a pager possessed. I made the rookie mistake of telling my mom about him back then, and she, clearly misunderstanding my adolescent plight, said, “Why in the world would a thirteen-year-old boy ever need to be paged?”
She was always saying things like that.
Anyway, as the strict rule-abider that my mother raised me to be, I had my ringer on ‘Silent’ as soon as I set foot in the theater. I don’t mess with that rule, and I am the first to dole out dirty looks to those who have not complied.
I sat there in the air-conditioned theater, eating buttered popcorn and snuggling up to my boyfriend. It was the Sunday before Labor Day. The end of the summer. The leaves would start to change soon, and I didn’t know it then, but the coming winter would be the worst that Denver had seen in twenty years, something to do with global change and Al Gore. But it was still summer, and I was at a movie with the man I’ll probably marry. I sat there for two hours, happy and selfish with greasy fingers and a big Diet Coke, blissfully unaware of what was going on 150 miles south of us in Gardner, CO, population 500. I was sitting in a Denver theater, and my mind was in New York with Julianne Moore and David Duchovny. I might as well have been a million miles away.
When the movie was over, I had eight missed calls. Eight. I don’t get eight calls in a week unless you count the Rocky Mountain News subscription sales department. But in two hours, there they were, eight of them.
We walked out into the warm night toward my boyfriend’s car, a silver Saab. I have told him before that I feel strongly that Saabs are for women and gay men, but he still loves his, and so that is where we sat, in his Saab outside the Esquire Theater. And that is where I was the last time I felt like me, like a daughter, like a person, like the woman I was raised to be. That is where I was the last time I felt like I had an anchor in this world, when I was still someone’s spitting image.
The Esquire Theater is a Denver landmark, and as I listened to my messages, I stared at the tall, slender letters spelling out E-S-Q-U-I-R-E, white on purple, glowing and bold. My curiosity at blinking red light signifying so many messages gradually merged into a dull realization. The recordings, the chaos on the other end of the line, my mom’s fiancée wailing my name like a scared child; all of this, the complete cacophony of it all, subsided into an ache, like a cramp, or like that feeling when you’ve swallowed too large a bite of a sandwich and it becomes lodged, not choking you, but not moving. I couldn’t tell you now where the physical hurt was in my body, but it was there, aching and pounding. It is still there now, in my chest, in my head, in my shoulders, in the sockets behind my eyes that are my mother’s eyes. It is part of the new me, and I do not foresee it ever subsiding.

According to the messages, there had been an accident, or as I may have mentioned, it was maybe not accidental.
I still didn’t fully have a grasp on my new reality. I watched a typical Denver woman, gorgeous and athletic, walking her dog through the thickening twilight down 6th Avenue, past the silver Saab. Her Golden Retriever made eye contact with me, and I instinctively longed for the softness and innocence of my own dog as I called my mom’s best friend.
Her voice quivered, shook with the weight of what she had to tell me. I said her name aloud, and she cried openly and apologized over and over as if I was hell-bent on punishing the messenger, as if I thought it was her fault. She told me about the accident, and then she told me that my mom was gone. Gone. Dead. Passed Away. In a Better Place. I didn’t cry. I didn’t get it. I just shook a little. I listened as she told me to call the state patrol, even efficiently producing my own pen and paper to take the number down. I said I would call her back and I calmly told my boyfriend to take me to my apartment.
What followed over the next few weeks was hectic and insane, although I remember being quiet and calm and business-like. I wrote an obituary. I called the Irish Wolfhound Rescue to tell them to expect memorial donations. I used the words “in lieu of flowers” as if they were a part of my everyday vocabulary. I hired a funeral director. I was a businesswoman making business decisions under deadline. It was similar to being at work, except for the part where it was emotionally debilitating.
The funeral director was a woman in her 70’s who was not all there, her hair a tangle of faux auburn curls with an inch of white at the roots, her polyester, elastic-waist pants twisted slightly off-center so that they looked uncomfortable, like a small child wandering around in twisted pajamas. Normally, the pants would have tipped me off that I had not made the best choice as far as funeral directors go, but I was catatonic. She could have been wearing a sombrero and I would have let her arrange my mother’s funeral. This stranger sat there with my sisters and me as we discussed how the funeral should go, talked about what should be said, had the most personal conversation of our entire lives. She made inappropriate comments and made us all very aware that this was the point-of-sale for her, that she could not possibly give a rat’s ass about the woman my mother was. To her credit, her manual dexterity was spot-on and she handled the credit card transaction with astute competence. My little sister sat holding her petite, one-year old daughter in her lap and fumed in the general direction of this woman, a woman my mother would have detested. My mom would have hated her own funeral, too. It wasn’t classy or beautiful; it was drab, and unorganized as if it had been thrown together in a couple of days by group of women who, although normally very Martha Stewartesque when planning events, were in complete shock. Strangely, I remember feeling quiet and calm and business-like.
A week after the funeral and cremation, that same woman handed me my mother’s engagement ring in a plastic bag labeled “Bio-Hazard.” It was the only piece of jewelry my mom had been wearing when she died, and this woman apparently found it hazardous. I put it on my finger, knowing it would fit me perfectly and planned to wear it until I could get it back to my mother’s fiancée.
The funeral director, lacking couth and in a general state of senility, had neglected to clean my mother’s ring. After washing my hands, I looked down to see diluted blood on my hand, trickling from beneath the diamond solitaire towards my wrist. My mother’s blood was on my hands. In what is probably a very inappropriate feeling to have about human blood, I wanted to save it, soak it in, ingest it. Instead, I just sat on the couch and stared at it. For an hour. And then I snapped out of it and did the grown-up thing — because daughters who no longer have mothers need to act grown up— I took off the ring, cleaned it, washed my hands, put the ring back on my finger, and then went back out to the living room. I will never be the same again after that. Never.
Now eight months have passed. It is Spring, and I am no longer quiet and calm and business-like. I have become angry and tearful and child-like. With all of the maturity that I can muster at age thirty, I still just want my mom. I want her all the time. I need to talk to her about some stuff. I want her to keep her eye on me. I want her to give me advice. I want more than anything to hear her crazy laugh, or watch her tie those loose knots in her hair with one hand, or to taste her potato salad, or to hear her sing off-key. I want her to know that, if given another chance, I would do anything for her, anything to help her, to save her, to keep her close to me. I want her to see my dog, and how well-behaved he is even after she accused me of spoiling him. I want her to know my boyfriend better, to know that I will probably have children one day with his red curly hair, and I want her to know how she and I would laugh about their little red curls, because that is just the type of thing we would have laughed about before.
I want to look her in the face again and feel as if I am looking into a mirror, a mirror that knows everything about me, at least everything about me up until the first Sunday of last September. A lot has changed since then, and it would be nice to talk to my mom about that, too.
Although I have never really believed in silver linings, preferring instead to take the cynical, sarcastic route, I can say that I have learned a whole hell of a lot in the past eight months. About myself, and about the importance of sisters, and about the hardships that people face in life and the toll it takes on intimate relationships. I learned that using work as an excuse not to deal with things only succeeds temporarily, and I learned that I am tougher than I knew, and I learned that some of my friends are better friends than I thought. However, what has been the most eye-opening is what I have learned about the relationship between a mother and her daughter. It is disheartening, I suppose, that I have acquired all of this knowledge, now having nowhere to apply it.
I was raised by a strong, single mother. And she raised me to be fiercely independent just like her, so much so that I spent a large portion of my life thinking that I did not need her. But I did, and I do right now.
I feel a little more ok, and a little more in control, and a little more me every single day. I am still angry and sad, and there is still an emptiness that I am unable to put into words. However, I will continue to be my mother’s strong daughter, and so will each of my sisters, and right now, that is all I can give to her to replace what I was unable to give eight months ago. I hope she understands.