Life Sucks, But At Least There’s Pie
The following story is fiction.
I never thought I would look at my mother the same way I look at regular people.
As children, it is during our most vulnerable stages when we are our most forgiving and forgetful. And our parents are, on the contrary, as guarded and behaved as we will remember. Through infancy and childhood, our parents are the pinnacle of stability and security. With her first wobbly steps, a baby leaves one parent’s arms and stumbles ungracefully into the other’s. Between belly kisses, bubble baths, and bedtime stories, our mothers stand strong and resist revealing their cracks. As children, we do not come close to understanding debt and death and divorce and the desperation to halt time and cure loneliness — you know, adult things. Our parents create and maneuver wonderful disguises. But only briefly.
What would you do if your mother collapsed beside you from utter exhaustion? Three kids and no sleep would make any mom tired, you tell people. Or if your father hurled the vase of flowers he’d just bought for her at the glass sliding door? He lost his job and needs a break, you insist.
My parents don’t do that — until, unexpectedly, they did. My mother was tired, and my father was angry. And suddenly Patricia’s husband, who happened to be walking his dog past our front lawn and heard us screaming, is knocking at the door and Mom combs her knotty hair faster than I’ve ever seen and blots her face dry and Dad cusses and mutters under his breath and grabs a newspaper as if he’s been reading the whole time and suddenly it’s just me standing alone on cold kitchen tiles and when Patricia’s husband peers inside and asks, “You alright, hun?” I lie and laugh and fold my arms — defensively — , “I slipped and broke the flowers I bought for my parents’ anniversary and now I feel bad because we have to clean up the mess.”
And from that moment on, my parents slipped faster and faster, showing me the people they had been all along.
Mom likes carnations and my grandmother liked lilies, so when Grandma passed, we alternated each visit to her grave with carnation and lily bouquets. Grandma believed that in all of our instantaneous moments, awake and asleep, we are guaranteed a breath. When our contract expires and the gap between the last breath and no breath exceeds its limits, we are guaranteed death. The day she passed, two things were certain: In that same day, she lived and died, and the absence of one insured the presence of another. And on the drive home, we discussed neither.
That night Momma cooked and cooked and promised me and my brothers pie because Italian families customarily ate after every occasion, morbid or not. When we were younger and relatives passed away, Mom told us to play in our rooms and promised to bake our favorite dessert if we played past our bedtimes. She said that “moms need extra time to make desserts for those they love most.” We hadn’t understood death yet. And this bought her time to grieve. To scream. To demand “why?” to a ceiling that did not answer. To cry until she thought she heard one of us barreling down the stairs — we never did, but she still called after us to make sure her vulnerability did not unravel. My dad excused himself on these nights and came back the morning after. His grief and screams and demands and cries were the same, I think, but he never taught himself to hide them. So he hid himself from us.
Then when my father passed, Mom didn’t make me go upstairs. My brothers booked their flights home, and I sat silently. I watched her dig through the cupboards. Cherries were out of season this time of year, so we agreed on blueberry filling instead. And somewhere in the middle of her meticulous routine of mixing the sugar and flour and butter by hand, we said nothing, and she just stopped, wiped her forehead with floury fingers, inhaled sharply, and admitted it.
“I have never. In my life. Served a homemade pie.”
So we left, both drove to Jewel as she had done alone a few times prior when we had been upstairs playing, and picked up two pies: one cherry, one blueberry. And with the first slice she murmured, “Life sucks, but at least there’s pie.”
And with that, my mom became a person.
