“You’re gonna rake me over the coals in this book, aren’t you,” my mother said, a statement more than a question.
She was standing in front of the TV, her arms crossed. It was September 7, 2005, and I was lying on the couch, ten months pregnant (yes, 10: did you know a full-term pregnancy is 40 weeks?), wishing she would move out of the way so I could watch what I’d been watching all week: CNN’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Anderson Cooper in his tight black t-shirt, looking so pained, his blue eyes swollen with tears. Water everywhere, I knew how it smelled. Bewildered, suffering faces. My mother had been there herself, the day before.
Mom was originally going to come from New Orleans to Los Angeles to help me a week after my scheduled c-section on September 10th. When we understood the magnitude of the hurricane, the potential danger our mother was in, my sisters and I tried to convince her to come out earlier. She insisted, as so many do, upon “riding out the storm:” a stoicism often interpreted as putting on a brave face, or just plain stupid, but truthfully, usually borne of poverty. My mom hadn’t had a car for several years; she didn’t want one. Katrina hit on August 29th, and we lost contact with her for a few days. She’d never had a cell phone, so without landlines there was no way to make sure she was okay. When we finally heard from her, she said we were being silly. Yes, she’d lost power, but she never used air conditioning because she hated it. She did her laundry by hand. Besides, the trees on her property had fallen outward, leaving her rental home unscathed. Without power, she’d seen or heard nothing of the disastrous failure of the levees in New Orleans, the flooding of the city, the dismal conditions at the Superdome and Convention Center, stranded people using axes to hack their way through their attics to their rooftops and wave at helicopters for rescue. I got her a ticket on a flight out of Baton Rouge a few days before my due date. When my friend picked her up to drive her to the airport, she was taking mold-mottled laundry down from the clothesline in her muddy yard.
Since her arrival in L.A., we’d been fighting about her refusal to admit what had happened in Katrina’s wake. As I watched, unable not to, she sat in the adjacent room and grumbled about the liberal media, and how the president’s lie “Heckuva job, Brownie” had been taken out of context. Now the fight was about my book, a memoir I’d sold a few weeks ago and was contracted to write during the first year of my second child’s life.
She wanted to know how I could write a book in which I would surely blame her for everything, and how she doesn't agree with blaming the parents, that's why she likes George W. Bush, because he's for personal responsibility (ha!), and how even my own brother said, "At least most people wait for their parents to die to rake them over the coals." Oh, and how can I feel so sad for these hurricane victims, because when she looks around my house she sees plenty that I don't need and I certainly don't deprive myself or my family, which is great, she's not saying that's bad, but still...
I stayed silent and let her litany wash over me, taking mental notes of these bullet points more neutrally than I ever had. I was gravid, at the end of an absurdly complicated pregnancy that began with surgery to re-attach my retinas, detoured into scary genetic testing results, and ended with gestational diabetes: a three-fer. I was done. I had only enough energy to listen, and enumerate, and archive. (Believe me, it was hard not to take the bait on that George W. Bush/personal responsibility remark.)
The next morning she said, "I'm sorry I said those things to you last night."
All I could say was, "That's okay, I'm used to it."
“I just love you and I’m sorry I’m a terrible mother,” she said.
This is her way of changing the subject, directing us away from issues we could possibly process, messily yet perhaps constructively, toward the inarguable conclusion that she’s awful. Deep inside, she believes it, which is why she was certain I’d be telling everyone so. Raking her over the coals. The phrase scraped my brain, reminded me of the story of St. Agatha. She refused to marry anyone, so her breasts were cut off and she was rolled over hot coals. My mother, a staunch Catholic, can recite all the saints’ stories by heart, especially the gory details. St. Lucy ripped her own eyes out, St. Catherine drank blood straight from the wound in Jesus’ side. These were my bedtime stories.
“You’re mother’s a saint,” everyone in my hometown reminds me, when I visit.
Southern Louisiana is a place of overgrowth, undergrowth, and ropey vines, where you can’t dig deep without drowning in murky water. The dead are buried aboveground, in plain view, but that doesn’t mean they’re reckoned with. Don’t dig too deep, you might hit the roots. It’s impolite to dig, downright rude to expose the roots. I grew up going on school field trips to plantations. The guides barely mentioned slavery, lingering instead on how impeccably the slaveowners set their table. Those people standing on the roof, frantically flagging down helicopters? An affront to the lie that everything was fine. The unarmed men shot by police, wounded or killed, on the Danziger Bridge on September 4th as they tried to make their way out of the flooded city? How dare they? When everything. Is. Fine.
During my pregnancy, craving comfort, I’d revisited some books from high school. I’d recently re-read Catcher in the Rye, and realized my mother was Holden Caulfield: Everyone's a phony. To her, all motives are ulterior. Being raised by someone who trusts no one and, by example, teaches you not to, set up my life’s mission: to accept people at face value, to trust myself. I’d make a terrible a used car salesman, always opening the hood and pointing out the rust and dents, blabbing.
I come from the land of ropey vines and ties that bind. My mother saved our umbilical stumps, gluing them into our scrapbooks with stretchy rubber cement, and would have saved the whole cords, would have asked for and eaten our placentae, too, had she not wanted to appear greedy. At restaurants, she won’t order food, she says she’ll just drink water and eat bread, or eat whatever we don’t eat.
“Don’t mind me,” she says, as we all go out of our minds, begging her to know her worth.
Fifteen years ago today, my daughter was tugged from my body by two doctors, one on each side. My primary ob/gyn, a woman, grasped her head, and her associate, a man, tried to hold her feet.
“Oh my god, she’s kicking me!” he said. “She’ll be a soccer player for sure.”
What a strangely proprietary thing to assign someone at birth, I thought. I don’t care about sports. I like labels even less, but I did name my daughter Mercy.
I finished my book on the eve of Mercy’s first birthday, delighted to celebrate those twin milestones. It was important to me to be a mom who indulged my own imagination, as well as hers.
Ironically, many readers have told me my mother is the hero of the book. There has always been valor amid her maddening complications. She wouldn’t know, she’s never read it. She’s told me so, several times.
“But you’re the hero of it!” I say.
She’s afraid.
In observance of our weird family tradition - the only kind worth keeping, really - I saved my daughter’s umbilical stump, too. It’s in an envelope in a box in a drawer somewhere, unless our dog ate it. Circle of life. I didn’t ask to eat the placenta, or even to take it home and bury it in the backyard. I don’t bury things.
Today is Mercy’s fifteenth birthday. She doesn’t bury things, either. A thickening tendril on the ropey vine, she’s bright, green, and clear-eyed about injustice. I don’t expect her to wait until I’m dead to rake me over the coals. Rake away, dear one. Your story belongs to you and you’re allowed to tell it. Give yourself permission. Don’t bury things. Exhume.