“Why Don’t I Have a Close Family?”
Taking my mother’s lament to heart
“Why don’t I have a close family?” my mother asked.
I got the quote second-hand, from my sister, who repeated it to me with a rueful laugh that asked, “How could she not know?” My mother had posed the question during a call some time ago — a year, two years, maybe more — and it stuck with her.
The question stuck with me, too. It held our mother’s pain, her befuddlement, and her sense that she didn’t deserve the family situation she had. It also held an accusation. We, her daughters, had let her down.
It was a textbook case of a loaded question. But I couldn’t dismiss it. It kept nagging at me.
I remember a dinner party at my mother’s condo soon after she moved to her retirement community. She was standing in the living room, complaining to her friend’s husband that she didn’t have grandchildren.
“But you’ve had such an interesting life,” her friend’s husband said, suggesting that an interesting life and a gratifying family life were mutually exclusive. This is how my mother might have seen it in the 1970s when we were teenagers and she liberated herself from her role as housewife and mother.
There is no doubt that my mother has had — and is very much still having — an…
