This is how it looked to me, anyway, taking into account that nobody (and especially not the
children) ever knows the secrets of a marriage. What I believed I grew up seeing was a moth-
er who asked nothing of anybody. This was my mom, after all—a woman who had taught her-
self how to swim as an adolescent, alone in a cold Minnesota lake, with a book she’d bor-
rowed from the local library entitled How to Swim. To my eye, there was nothing this woman
could not do on her own.
But then I’d had a revelatory conversation with my mother, not long before I’d left for
Rome. She’d come into New York to have one last lunch with me, and she’d asked me
frankly—breaking all the rules of communication in our family’s history—what had happened
between me and David. Further disregarding the Gilbert Family Standard Communications
Rule-book, I actually told her. I told her everything. I told her how much I loved David, but how
lonely and heartsick it made me to be with this person who was always disappearing from the
room, from the bed, from the planet.
“He sounds kind of like your father,” she said. A brave and generous admission.
“The problem is,” I said, “I’m not like my mother. I’m not as tough as you, Mom. There’s a
constant level of closeness that I really need from the person I love. I wish I could be more
like you, then I could have this love story with David. But it just destroys me to not be able to
count on that affection when I need it.”
Then my mother shocked me. She said, “All those things that you want from your relation-
ship, Liz? I have always wanted those things, too.”
In that moment, it was as if my strong mother reached across the table, opened her fist
and finally showed me the handful of bullets she’d had to bite over the decades in order to
stay happily married (and she is happily married, all considerations weighed) to my father. I
had never seen this side of her before, not ever. I had never imagined what she might have
wanted, what she might have been missing, what she might have decided not to fight for in
the larger scheme of things. Seeing all this, I could feel my worldview start to make a radical
shift.
If even she wants what I want, then.. .?
Continuing with this unprecedented string of intimacies, my mother said, “You have to un-
derstand how little I was raised to expect that I deserved in life, honey. Remember—I come
from a different time and place than you do.”
I closed my eyes and saw my mother, ten years old on the family farm in Minnesota, work-
ing like a hired hand, raising her younger brothers, wearing the clothes of her older sister,
saving dimes to get herself out of there...