We do not recover the past, we re-create it ... Memory edits things, colors them, mixes cement with the rainbow.

Maria Gainza Portrait of an Unknown Lady 2018

As I age and tire of life, my child-self is insistently present. She has not faded with the passing of time; instead, I have a growing sense of quiet urgency—to know her more deeply and to comfort her.

That long-ago child was the middle of three daughters: her older sister, the favored child, too old to be a companion, and the younger too young. She was ignored by her parents. In a matter-of-fact way, she expected indifference and accommodated neglect. Paradoxically she also faced the brunt of their rage, prompted, they said, by her audacity and impertinence. She dreamed about leaving home.

I’ve always assumed she was tough and resilient. But I deceived myself about her fortitude. She was lonely and sad, unable to soothe herself. Her abandonment has always been etched on my skin, weaving its way through my body, and seeping into my dreams.

My child story is inextricably linked to my mother, who died on the first of November 2003, now more than twenty years ago. My mother and I were never close. I remember her anger, self-absorption, and disappointment in life. I had a raging contempt for her from a very young age and determined never to be like her. But of late, I feel a sense of loss. I wonder about her, what I don’t know, never knew, didn’t understand. I’m unsettled by the not knowing. Unfortunately, a cavernous void exists where childhood memories might live. Did the lack of mothering and my strategic self-protection erase them?

The Babysitters
I have only two vivid memories from when I was a young child. Oddly, in both, I’m cared for by strangers. In the first memory, a babysitter puts me in a dark room. I’m standing in a crib. I’m scared of her sharp voice, her dismissive and impatient look, her strict mouth. She shuts the door. I’m afraid of the dark. I call out. No one comes.

“Please don’t leave me with her,” I had begged my mother. She ignored me. If I was able to talk to my mother, why was I in a crib? Faulty memories. Haunting as these images are, they’re more like a dream than a memory.

In the second memory, I see a different babysitter in a dress with small flowers. I can’t picture her face or call up her name. But I can still feel the physicality of making taffy with her,  the candy stretched between us in my parents’ small living room, each of us holding one end, twisting and pulling. The taffy changed texture and colour, a kind of alchemy.

Where do buried memories live, I wonder. How to access the seemingly impenetrable emptiness, capture fleeting moments like the lingering edge of dreams, encourage them to slide into my consciousness? Can I learn about my child-self through a dialogue between the imagined and remembered, through speculation.  From slivers of the past, I invent Marie, a loving, quirky, playful babysitter. She comforts my child-self and helps me unearth buried memories.

**

The early morning air is still. The quiet is like my soft yellow blanket. Sometimes I pretend to wrap quiet around myself. My mother told me not to bother her in the morning, so I stay in bed. But I have my secret places in the apartment. The best is the corner between my bed and the wall. It’s just big enough for me.

Today my babysitter, Marie, comes. I stand by the window watching for her. She doesn’t look like a grown-up. She’s thin and small and has short brown hair and wears small hearts in her ears. When she arrives, she puts on a red shirt painted with bicycles and lets me trace the spokes of the wheels with my fingers. I’d like to ride a bicycle, but my mother says I’m too young. Tony, who lives in the apartment next door, is only one year and two months older than me. Once he let me try his bike, but I fell and scraped my knee. I didn’t cry, but when I stood up and looked at my mother, her face was red, her mouth tight. Sometimes I dream about a bicycle with wings. Marie read me a book about Peter Pan. I’m glad to know about Neverland. Imagine visiting Wendy.

My sore tummy feels better when Marie is here. I don’t tell my mother about the hurt. “Your own fault,” she says. Her shouting fills the apartment. Sometimes she holds my arm hard and I can’t go to my quiet place. I shut my eyes and hum.

Marie lets me sit on her lap and wear her chain with the seashell. I can ask as many questions as I want, and together we sing “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” I clap my hands three times. Sometimes I keep clapping! My biggest wish is to live with Marie. She has a little girl, Amélie, just two years older than me. She would be eight. Imagine being friends.

Last week Marie said to my mother, “When I come next time, Linda and I will make taffy.”

“No,” my mother said. “Too much trouble.” But Marie just smiled and I knew we would. Today is taffy day.

“Only sugar, corn syrup and water,” Marie says. “We can make magic with them.” She puts the ingredients in a pot on the stove. “First we’ll cook it until it’s hard.” She turns to me. “You have a big decision to make. What colour taffy would you like? I brought red and green and blue.” She hasn’t brought my favorite colour, purple, so I pick green. I want the taffy to look like the leaves in the park.

After lots of stirring, Marie pours the taffy onto a board. “We have to let it cool and then we’ll pull it. In the meantime, let’s make some lunch.” The lunch I like best is toast with sour cream. I’m not allowed to have it. It’s bad for my tummy. Marie decides that if I eat a scrambled egg, I can have half a piece of toast with cream.

By the time we’ve eaten, the taffy is cool. Just in case, Marie puts oil on my hands so I won’t get burned. Then we begin pulling, Marie at one end, and me at the other. We stretch it out, fold it, and then twist, like a dance.

“It’s hard work. Why do we have to pull it so long?”

“That’s the magic. Pulling the taffy adds tiny air bubbles and makes it delicious and chewy. Watch closely,” Marie says. “Watch it change colour.”

I can see it. The taffy is getting shiny. “Like a pearl,” she says.

I finally get to taste a piece. Sweet but not gooey. Definitely chewy. Strangely green. It’s perfect. Marie cuts all the taffy into pieces and sits down, with a smile. I hear my mother at the door. I take four bites to hide under my bed for later, in case my mother throws them all out.

“I’ll see you next week,” Marie says. I put my hands behind my back and use one finger to count out the days: one, two three, four, five, six, seven. I stand tall.

**

My story about Marie untangles threads of fragmented memories. It brings back my mother’s anger, my perennial stomachache, my hiding in small places, my disappearing into the imagined. I see why I embraced secrecy. It was a comfort.

I learned early not to depend on things. If Marie had been real, if she really had defied my mother, my mother would’ve fired her. But in this fictive reality, I take pleasure in having her on my side.

Sometimes I tried to scream loud enough to drown out my mother’s anger, her bickering with my father, my father’s temper. When I was fourteen, I stopped speaking to them, stopped speaking back. It was a relief. Now I’m addicted to silence and still startle at loud noises.

I remember being compliant until I was not. I remember trying hard to please until I gave up. I dreamed about leaving home.

The Good Mother

Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea (2022)

As she told it, my mother had a privileged childhood living in a large house with servants in Outremont, a classy area of Montréal. In an unexpected tragedy, her father died in his forties when she was fourteen. Shortly after, her mother—my grandmother—had a stroke. Needing to support herself and her mom, my mother left high school before she graduated and went to work in a lighting store. The ability to rewire a lamp was one of her few technical skills. Despite these misfortunes, she retained a deep sense of entitlement from her charmed childhood and likely hoped that marriage would return her to this state. But she was continually disappointed with the life she had with my father—no stability with his constantly changing jobs, little money, and incessant arguments.

When I fled home at sixteen to rent a damp and cramped basement room that felt like freedom, I abandoned my angry mother and our troubled relationship. I lost interest in her. Like Strout’s Lucy, “I did not know who she was.” But I never made up a ‘nice mother’ to replace her. Instead, I shut down the place inside me that needed a mother.

Decades later, in a box of old family photographs, I found one of my mother dated 1943. She’s twenty-three, perched precariously on a stone railing with a long drop, her legs swinging. She’s smiling—courting danger. The mother I knew was fearful, spiteful and risk averse. As I studied the photo, I found myself wondering, “Did I ever really know her?”

The photograph triggered my curiousity and prompted me to try writing in her voice and speculating about her inner life, perhaps to illuminate her impact on me, and to know myself better. The tone of her voice may not be quite right; maybe it isn’t even fair to her. Likely it’s coloured by my longings, sadness and anger.

**

I am a good mother. For all these years, I’ve been a good mother—fantastic even. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. To hear Linda, you’d think I was the Wicked Witch of the East. Once she said, on the telephone no less, in her irritating calm voice, that she wanted me to talk to a social worker. Anger management, she said! I listened, but frankly, I just tightened up, my skin like a coat of armor. Her words bounced off and I went blank.

I do remember Marie, her babysitter. Oh, she was a smug one. So quiet but I could just tell she had attitude. When she made taffy after I’d told her not to, I fired her. Linda went crazy, screaming and yelling and kicking. I grabbed her arm to stop her tantrum, and then she went still, absolutely still and limp, and started to hum. That sure was an infuriating habit she had. I’m sure the whole theatrics was just to provoke me.

Daughters are a trial, I can tell you. I always wanted a son, a boy. But instead, I have three girls. And talk about my other daughters. I have no idea why Su                        and Sh                        have turned against me.

Years and years of being their mother and now they won’t talk to me. Su               married up, as they say, and really got a bit full of herself. But still, to stop talking to your mother when all I did was love her. She was the first, the eldest. I loved her best, even though I know mothers should love all their children the same. On the rare occasion when she’s in touch—maybe once a decade, if you can believe it!—I can’t seem to steel my heart against her.

We were supposed to adore being mothers. Like all my friends, I dreamed of having babies. We were promised joy and fulfillment. I had such hopes. Su                    and Linda dressed in matching outfits, walking down the street, so special, drawing a lot of attention. Of course, I would pretend not to notice folks staring at us in admiration.

In fact, taking the kids out was a nightmare. They were a bit like dogs, running off, and never listening. And worry worry worry about what they were getting up to. Really, I hated being a mother and I could never get away from it. I never told anyone. It would be like admitting to a terrible crime.

On that one afternoon of freedom a week before Sh              was born, when Su                was in school and Marie watched Linda, I would wander the streets of Montréal, stop for a coffee and a chocolate croissant—the French sure know how to make pastry. I always visited Ogilvy’s, my favorite department store on Ste. Catherine. The foyer had a magnificent Bohemian crystal chandelier with more than a hundred lights. I dreamed about living in a mansion in Westmount with a view overlooking the city, and a room large enough for that chandelier, and no kids. I was meant to be a lady of leisure. Out shopping, then dropping my purchases with the driver waiting for me. No buses, no lugging bags of stuff.

Instead, it has always been home home home, and cooking and laundry and cleaning. And those girls at me for this and that. They never did appreciate the meals, and their clothes, and how I tried to keep the apartment clean. They just wanted me to read to them, play with them, take them to the park or buy them a bicycle. Linda always wanted to go to the library. Books books books. I guess I should’ve been glad but even watching her read got on my nerves.

With kids, it’s always about them. Tiresome it was and still is. But I would say, all things considered, I was a terrific mother. I still am. I have absolutely no doubt.

**

Weeks have passed since I wrote this imagined monologue. I reread it with some disappointment. Had I really tried to find her voice, hear the world from her point of view, write with some compassion? Perhaps I found some sympathy for the constraints of the era in which she lived and captured her resentment at motherhood. But her failings come easily to me, resonate with my memories and irritate me as they always did: her lack of self-awareness, sly meanness, self-absorption. She was childlike, narcissistic, needy, brittle, self-centered and delusional. I’ve given voice to my mother defending herself. I guess I think she should.

In the years before she died, I tried to maintain a relationship with her, albeit at a distance, her in Montréal and me in Toronto. Given the absence of my sisters, I felt some responsibility for her living on her own after my father died. Sometimes I tried to have conversations with my mother. But she was not a teller of truths, didn’t know herself and was impermeable to being known. With a childlike ability to slide away from reality, she offered only imagined versions of her past, and of mine.

“Why do you think I left home at sixteen?” I once asked her.

“You were such an adventurer,” my mother, then seventy, said with a smile.

It was not an adventure. The day I moved out, my mother said nothing. The erasures, her complicit silences, hardened my heart against her.

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures,” Emerson reportedly wrote. Perhaps he was wrong. Imagining had not been as curative as I hoped. Sadly, I’m no closer to the twenty-three-year-old woman in the found photograph, dangling her legs near a precipice. What I do feel is the weight of my continuing anger, even after all these decades.

When I moved away from home at sixteen, I was determined to slice my childhood out of my consciousness with a fine scalpel. I committed to a life without a past. I developed an antagonism to memories, imagined them buried deep and gladly inaccessible. I certainly abandoned any connection with my mother.

Now many decades later, perhaps as I age, perhaps as I write about my life, the residue of that troubled but submerged relationship has bubbled up. I wonder how a mother so full of resentment affected my child-self and shaped me as an adult. In seeking my mother’s voice, I didn’t uncover any more compassion for her, but excavating these memories did bring my child-self closer. I’ve tapped into a deep sorrow for that sad and lonely girl, and a yearning to comfort her.

The past and present slip into each other, force me from the safety of a kind of amnesia to anamnesis, prompting me to remember the past. I have learned that I still long for a childhood I never had, what the writer John Koenig calls anemoia, defined in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as nostalgia for a time or place one has never known.