I’m back, blogging again after a little more than a year’s hiatus. In that year of not-blogging two things happened: I began doing Bikram yoga and my mother died. Other things happened too, of course, but those two things come to mind first. They aren’t necessarily related. Not in any causal way certainly. My mother did not die because I had started doing Bikram yoga. She and I had lived 3,000 miles from one another for quite a while and my growing yoga practice was barely a blip on her radar, though I sometimes ranted to her about it, the heat, the smell, the cult-like atmosphere (‘crack yoga’ one woman’s husband calls it).
My mother had other things on her mind. She had recently buried her second husband and, after a full and satisfying life she was ready to die herself, something she finally accomplished the day after Thanksgiving when she came home from a dinner party, fixed coffee for herself, and went to bed. Three days later the cleaners found her still in bed, decidedly dead, three days of unread papers on her doorstep.
My mother was the quintessential New Englander—more specifically Bostonian—a little fierce, okay, yes, sometimes scary; a little righteous; very liberal; always outspoken; often fun. She liked attention and she found it easily. She could be stoic or histrionic as circumstances required. People liked her, adored her even.
Her absence has created for me an unanticipated silence. In interacting with her—often tangling with her prickly opinions, her judgments about me and my sisters and our children, her disdain for the inhumanity and stupidity in the world, her outsized admiration for achievement—we all had someone who helped us define and refine our sense of who we were. The ways we were like her, the ways we were different. Because she was always so much herself.
Now, there is only silence. Five months so far. No one calling, no one expecting visits, no one alternately laughing and despairing about the world’s foolishness.
I am one of the least scary people in the world. I do not intimidate my students. Nor do I seek to intimidate them. I never learned much in an atmosphere of fear and I don’t expect them to. Nor do I love the current climate that encourages continual public blabbing, continual verbal breast-beating, continual bulletins announcing the state of the self. A writer needs silence. A writer is nothing if she doesn’t spend much of her time listening.
But in the silence since my mother’s death another part of my DNA has been seething; another side of me is trying to coalesce. Motherless now, I feel a tribal call to fierceness. Perhaps it comes from the feeling of being orphaned. Even a parent 3,000 miles away who has no idea about the sweat you are losing to Bikram yoga offers a certain kind of protection against the world. Now on my own, the tigress in me is coming to life and staking out some turf for herself. Stand by. Witness. Beware.
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Glad you're back!
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