When I read this, I imagined my mother as a young woman, brilliant
and energetic, but also anxious and complying. Then the image
changed, her body thinning, elongating, her hair flowing, long and
silver.
Emily is being bullied, I wrote.
She is, Mother said. Like I was.
She is you, I said.
She is me. But we know better now. We can rewrite the story.
I asked about a memory. It was from the weeks before I’d left for
BYU, after Shawn had had a particularly bad night. He’d brought
Mother to tears, then plopped onto the sofa and turned on the TV. I’d
found her sobbing at the kitchen table, and she’d asked me not to go to
BYU. “You’re the only one strong enough to handle him,” she’d said. “I
can’t, and your father can’t. It has to be you.”
I typed slowly, reluctantly: Do you remember telling me not to go to
school, that I was the only one who could handle Shawn?
Yes, I remember that.
There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t
known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been
searching my whole life for them.
You were my child. I should have protected you.
I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not
the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who
remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of
those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that
when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she
wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.
I love you, I wrote, and closed my laptop.—MOTHER AND I SPOKE only once about that conversation, on the phone, a
week later. “It’s being dealt with,” she said. “I told your father what you
and your sister said. Shawn will get help.”
I put the issue from my mind. My mother had taken up the cause.
She was strong. She had built that business, with all those people