Soothing A Broken Heart

Mom wanted to be a writer. To put her creativity on paper and share it with the world. When I was a little girl, she showed me a fragment of a story she had started, a semi-autobiographical piece about a young married woman who had a tough childhood and is excited to learn that her nausea is caused by morning sickness. She can’t wait until her husband comes home from work to tell him that she is pregnant with their first child.

“That’s really good, Mommy,” I remember saying. “You should finish it.”

Mom gave me a sideways glance and shook her head. “I don’t think it’s any good.”

I reassured her that it was, that I wanted to read more. But she put the story away.

Years later, after my sister, Sylvia, was born, Mom agreed to support my father’s dream of opening a clothing store. She invested savings in it, designed a business plan, taught my father how to use a sewing machine to make alterations, helped him choose merchandise, waited on customers, and rang up sales. All while taking care of my sister and me. During those years and later, she’d sprinkle conversations with talk of being a writer, wistfulness in her voice.

She never failed to tell me how proud she was when she read the bylined stories I wrote while on a college internship at the hometown newspaper and after I graduated, for a major metropolitan newspaper. When I would send her links to short stories I’d gotten published in literary magazines, she’d say, “One day I’m going to write my memoirs.”

She had plenty of stories to tell. She shared many of them with me: growing up poor in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley during the 1940s and ‘50s under the Jim Crow era form of segregation, pushing a white playmate into a pond when the child stated firmly that black people were inferior, tugging on her mother’s sleeve and asking her why they had to stand in the back of the bus where every seat was taken when there were plenty of empty seats up front and being told, “Hush up, child!” by her mother. How her father, a prominent medical doctor in the community, refused to acknowledge her, the result of a brief relationship he’d had with my grandmother. How her stepfather burned down their rental home and her family was on the run from the authorities, hiding out in abandoned houses, sleeping on cardboard, how she moved as an 18-year-old newlywed married to my father, from her small Virginia community to a bustling New England factory city.

Sylvia and I would give Mom blank books to encourage her to write. I’d tell her about writing classes she could take at nearby writing centers and community colleges, but she’d find reasons not to enroll.

One day when she was in her late 70s, she called me to vent about her disappointments, how she spent so many years, decades, in fact, supporting my father’s dream, and how she wanted something of her own. I mentioned an online creative nonfiction class I was taking and how encouraging the instructor was. To my surprise, Mom had me send her the link to the writing center’s website. I walked her through the online registration process.

Each week, Mom wrote a scene about her childhood, many of the stories she had told me and some I hadn’t heard before. After the course had ended, she printed copies of her work and proudly showed them to my sister and me. Then she tucked the writing away.

When Mom was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer, I was devastated. I had to remind myself to breathe. I lost interest in food and dropped 20 pounds. I didn’t want to face the prospect that my biggest champion would no longer be by my side.

Months after Mom’s surgeries and chemo treatments, doctors told us there was nothing more they could do for her. Mom had mere weeks to live. My sister and I returned home and moved into the bedroom with her and gave her 24-hour care. We were with her when she took her last breath.

As we grieved, we busied ourselves sorting through Mom’s personal effects. We spent hours cleaning out her desk. It was her special place where she made phone calls, paid bills, wrote letters and filed away important documents. On her desktop computer she’d keep up with email correspondence, play the occasional game of solitaire, and smile proudly at her grandchildren displayed in pictures on the desktop slideshow.

In one of the desk’s cubby holes, we came across a stack of papers. Within the stack were two letters, one addressed to me and one addressed to my sister, written in blue ballpoint pen in my mother’s beautiful cursive handwriting. Time stopped for me as I read her words:

Dear Lisa,

Words can never express my love for you. You are my first born whom I love with all my heart. As a child, I felt unloved and have felt that way most of my life. But I know that you and Sylvia love me and that has sustained me. I wish you nothing but happiness.

Love,

Mom

In my mind I heard my mother’s voice saying the words as I read them. I imagined the joy and heartache she felt as she penned them.

I dream about my mother often. In one of my dreams, we’re on our way out the door to the shopping mall. Mom is in her late 30s, full of life, ready to catch some sales in both the department stores and the boutiques, and I’m a teenager, anticipating what Mom will buy for me. When I wake up from that dream and others like it, I feel hollow, remembering that Mom is gone and the dreams are only a momentary break from reality.

Then I think about her letter. Her words comfort me as the tears come.

Mom didn’t become the writer she dreamed of. She never saw her words printed in a bound publication placed on the shelf of a bookstore or showcased on the homepage of an online book retailer. But she became something much more extraordinary. She became the author that I needed, the writer of powerful words that soothe my broken heart.

A Golden Shovel for Langston

Plantation Lullabies For The New Millennium [Momma Said We Standing On Shaky Ground] & Jesus Wept.