My Mother’s Daughter

It took me fifty years to find my mother. She died when I was 13 months old, and I have no memories of her; just stories I’ve created and photos I didn’t see until I was grown. There’s the one of her playing table tennis with my father; the one where she’s sitting on a city bench, smiling broadly; the one where she strikes a confident pose.

As a child, I asked my father, “Why was I named Silvia Pauline?”

“I don’t remember,” he said. I didn’t realize then that he couldn’t distinguish what he had forgotten, from what he never knew, from what he thought it better not to tell me, from what was too painful either to remember or completely forget. And so, my name was like me — rootless, arbitrary, without purpose.

My father remarried when I was very young, and talking about my mother’s life and death was taboo. I knew no one in her family except my grandfather, who was permitted to see me several times a year. I felt the shame in these visits. They were reminders of a death, a loss, which I did not understand, but with which I felt intricately bound.

My father spoke to me about my mother only a few times — once after I showed him a poem I’d written.

“Your mother wrote poetry,” he said.

So I tried to be a poet, wanting nothing more than to be my mother’s daughter.

The last time my father spoke of my mother, I was with him in the hospital shortly before his death. There was something I had to know.

“When I was born, did you know that she was dying?”

“No; we were full of laughter and hope.”

Whether it was too painful to speak of my mother, or he truly thought I was better off, I’ll never know. As for my name, I believe it was a memory that got lost in his trauma. After he died, no longer afraid of hurting or betraying him, I determined to find my mother’s family. With the help of a genealogist, I found Estelle, my mother’s first cousin.

Meeting Estelle, I was nervous. I am 20 years older than my mother ever was, and even when younger, I didn’t look like the woman in the photos. My sister Phyllis did, with her long hair and make-up done just right. Nine years old when our mother died, Phyllis remembered birthday parties and family outings, my mother’s voice, her laugh. Phyllis grew up to be a therapist specializing in grief, loss, and trauma. There was no question that she was her mother’s daughter.

Estelle gave me her mother’s — my great aunt’s — photo album. There were photos of my mother, and there were photos of me. In my great-aunt’s album were photos of me taken in the years she had not been allowed to see me. Somehow, she’d found a way to get them. Somehow, I was remembered.

Estelle was thrilled that I had found her.

“I am so happy to have you in my life,” she later wrote.

I found other cousins who also warmly welcomed me.

But one of the biggest gifts I found was the one from my mother.

Silvia Pauline. They were not random names; they had meaning and purpose. They had power. My mother’s mother was Silvia; her grandmother, Pauline. My mother loved these women, these names. They belonged to her; they had always belonged to me.

Dying, my mother gave me all she could. My name. She connected me to the grandmother and the great-grandmother I never knew and who meant so much to her; and in connecting me to them, I was forever connected to her. I belonged to these women. I belonged.

It took me fifty years to find my mother. Fifty years to find that she’d been with me all along.

I am Silvia Pauline. And I am my mother’s daughter.