Motherless, Chapter 1 - Leila

I no longer remember how I found the website themotherless.com, but it struck a deep chord in me to read stories of other women who had lost their mothers. I've never written about it here, or talked about it much to anyone, but the drive to fill the "mother" void in my life was a huge thing for me for the second and third decades of my life.

This is Chapter 1 of three - Leila, my birth mother.

She was always a cipher to me. I have a few pictures of her. This one is the only one I have in my living space as a framed photo in a glass cabinet; all the rest are buried in boxes of family pictures in the basement.




In this picture, she and my father are walking into, I believe, their engagement party in Brooklyn in the mid-1960's. It is one of several pictures I have of her in which her eyes are closed or downcast. I have a precious few from after I was born, in which she looks far more alive (if fatigued), holding me, wearing her glasses, wearing casual clothes, in the apartment she shared with my dad and his Airedale.

I have no conscious memories of her. I was close to my grandparents, her parents, and my aunt, her sister, growing up, but neither they nor my dad ever talked about her as I grew up. When I asked my dad, he never seemed to remember anything substantive - only that she loved to cook and was good at it. My aunt told me that all she had ever wanted was to be a wife and mom to a lot of kids, and that she was happy after marrying my dad. My grandmother never answered my questions and became stonefaced when I asked. I only once asked my grandfather about her, after seeing the grief that washed over his face.

I pieced together the little bits of information I was able to gather about her. I knew she had died when I was about six months old. I knew she was the same age as my dad. I knew she was a little heavy, much as I turned out to be. Once, snooping through my dad's stuff (I was a sneaky miserable little kid) I found an old spiral pad of his that he had made a few diary-like entries in. One entry mentioned how he had been trying unsuccessfully to get his hands on some marijuana, and how she kept bugging him to get it. This was most interesting to me, at the age of 10 or so, not yet having tried the stuff myself.

I don't to this day know where I got this idea, but my whole life growing up, I thought she had died of liver cancer. I have no memory of anyone ever having told me this; it was just something I knew like I knew that the sky was usually blue.

My husband only met my aunt and her husband one time. We were recently married and we went to New York City to visit. I dropped hubby off with Uncle G. and my aunt and I went uptown to visit my grandma at the Jewish Home for the Aged. Sure enough, hubby and Uncle G. hit it off like gangbusters, and G. spent the day showing hubby around all his favorite NY spots. And he had a substantive conversation with hubby, whom he just met, about my mom and my dad and how he felt about the situation. G. told my hubby that my mom had died due to medical malpractice but that my dad had never taken any legal action as a result, and so G. hated my dad for having allowed me to be shortchanged out of having a mother and then never getting me anything to compensate for that loss.

G. never talked to *me* about my mom, not even once.

My aunt and Uncle G. both died in a car accident in 1994. My grandfather had already died of heart failure sometime in the late '80's. My grandmother, long since lost to senility, passed away in 1996. I didn't think I had anyone left who could tell me anything about my mother, given that my dad somehow didn't seem to remember anything important about the woman he married.

Fast-forward thirty-three years. My dad's sister, my one remaining aunt, was elderly and not physically well, but had made what would be her last trip to visit my dad and me in our home town. I was pregnant with Esther, and feeling contemplative about all things maternal. I drove her to the airport nearly two hours before her flight home, and we sat talking about motherhood - how she had delivered both her sons without anesthesia (very unusual in the late 50's) and how she had helped my dad with caring for me in the months after my mother passed. I mentioned that I worried I might die young of cancer and deprive my daughter of her mother, the same as had happened to me. She looked at me strangely and asked what I meant. I told her that I was afraid to die of liver cancer like my mom. She was really surprised, and told me that that wasn't how my mother had died at all.

My aunt then told me - finally - what had really happened. My mom and dad had had a lot of trouble conceiving. When she finally did become pregnant with me, her OB/GYN discovered that her uterus was full of fibroids. She actually had to undergo surgery while pregnant with me, cutting-edge at the time, to remove enough of the fibroids to allow enough room for her to carry me to term, but not all of them could be removed. The idea was that once she had healed up sufficiently from delivering me via C-section, they'd go back in and remove the remaining fibroids, after which conceiving again should have been much easier.

So, sure enough, six months after I was born, my mother checked back into the hospital to have the fibroids removed. It was supposed to be, at most, a three-day admission. After the surgery, she complained that she wasn't feeling well. She then went to sleep and never woke up. The autopsy showed that the surgery had left her with an air embolism, an air bubble that had traveled to (I think) her heart and caused heart failure. Or perhaps it was her brain and it caused a stroke. Either way, it was an air embolism that killed her.

Ooooohhhhh.....

To go 34 years without knowing how my own mother died, even worse - thinking I knew how she died but being completely wrong, is just so sad. I barely know the woman at all, even now. She is just a few photographs and a few stories to me. I'll never know things like, did she like to sing? was she good at it? what kind of clothes did she like to wear? what kinds of books did she like to read? what did she hate? was she interested in politics? I would give anything for one face-to-face meeting with her, even if she came to me in my dreams, just so that I could see how her face looked when she spoke, whether she talked with her hands, hear what her voice sounded like. And maybe, just maybe, to hear my own mother say "I love you, Susan" and feel her arms around me. Oh well. People in hell want ice water too.

It took me years to realize how empty her absence left me. Over the years, I would desperately try to fill her place with other women who came into my life, not seeing the pattern, not understanding that it was in fact not possible to substitute just any old female adult for the mother I had lost.

Coming up next: Chapter 2 - Alice.