Then I had this beautiful kid. It was very hard in the beginning, and I hated that Sam didn’t get to have a dad, but I provided him with the world’s kindest men. I didn’t even think of trying to find John, this man with whom I had such a bad history, yet who’d given me the greatest gift of my life.
When Sam asked about his father over the years, which was not often, I’d tell him the truth. Sort of. I did not mention how badly things had ended, that his dad and I had said things to each other that perhaps Jesus would not have said. I told Sam what a smart, sweet man his father was, which is true, that he was tall and good-looking. I told him I had two photos of John he could see if he ever wanted to, and that I’d help him if he ever wanted to try to find him. And I really, really hoped he’d never want to.
When Sam was in first grade, there was a fine crack in the wall of silence. A letter arrived from John, in response to a story I’d published about Sam and his first library card. It was one sentence of grief and pride and outreach—but there was no phone number or other way to contact him. It only made me feel more confused, and in my swirl of blame and fear, I put the letter away.
A year later, when Sam was seven, he started wondering more frequently where his dad was, and what kind of a man he was. The man I was with at the time told me point-blank that I had to help Sam begin his search. That it was time. I wept. I was so afraid—sore afraid—and hopeless that Sam would never get to find his father or that, even worse, he would.
When Sam would ask about his father, I’d say, “Do you want to see his pictures?” He always said no, thank you. (He has good manners, which I believe can cover a multitude of sins.) But one day when we were sitting in the car after church, he looked solemn. Clearly he had something on his mind. He said, “I think I’d like to see those pictures now.”
I felt as if I had swallowed a bunch of rubber bands. When we got home, I took the photos out of the file and handed them to Sam. He studied John for a moment, the big round eyes, small nose, dark hair, all like his own.
“How could we find him?” he asked.
I didn’t know, except that with writing, you start where you are, and you usually do it poorly. You just do it—you do it afraid. And something happens.
I called John’s old number, the one in the phone book, and no one answered. I called John’s father’s house, and no one answered there. I called his best friend, with whom I had lost touch, and there was no one there, either. Then I prayed, because when all else fails, you follow instructions, and I began to pray the way my mentors had taught me: I prayed, “Help me, help me.” I prayed, “Please. Please.” I let go of an angstrom of blame. That was the hardest part. This batch of blame had more claw marks than most of the things I try to let go of. Blame is always my first response: figure out whose fault things are, and then try to manipulate that person into correcting his or her behavior so that you can be more comfortable. I put a note to God in a box, asking for direction. I told God I was taking my sticky fingers off the steering wheel, that God could be the driver and I would be just another bozo on the bus.
“Help” is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn’t matter how you pray—with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, “Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.” Prayer usually means praise, or surrender, acknowledging that you have run out of bullets. But there are no firm rules. As Rumi wrote, “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” I just talk to God. I pray when people I love are sick, and I prayed when I didn’t know whether I should have a baby. I pray when my work is horrible, or suddenly, miraculously, better. I cried out silently every few hours during the last two years of my mother’s life. I even asked for help in coping with George W. Bush. I prayed that he would make decisions for the common good, which he has not done, but I pray that he might slip up and do it anyway. I do not pray for his success, as I do not pray for mine. I pray that he and his people do not destroy everything on the way down.
When I am in my right mind, which is about twice a month, I pray kindly.
Sam prayed for his dad every night.
Nothing happened. I determined to take this up with God when we meet: Would it have been so much skin off your nose to give my child an answer? I couldn’t believe it. Usually if you pray from the heart, you get an answer—the phone rings or the mail comes, and light gets in through the cracks, so you can see the next right thing to do. That’s all you need. But nothing happened at first. I secretly believed we’d bump into John at the market, perhaps, or at the movies, but we didn’t. I kept calling the best friend, but it turned out I had the wrong number. Finally I found the right number, but the friend didn’t know where John was, except that John’s dad had been sick, so John was probably in town taking care of him. I called John’s father again. No one answered.
Things got worse. I decided it would have been better if we’d never even tried. Sam had been doing fine before we’d started looking. Now he was frustrated, mad at his dad and more so at me. He said that if I were a better person, I would not have driven his father away. I wanted to find John, for Sam, but at the same time, I hadn’t seen him in more than seven years, and I had, at best, mixed feelings about him. It was a mess. We got more frustrated, more stuck, less hopeful. Wendell Berry once said, at a coffeehouse in Mill Valley on a dark, rainy December day, “It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.” That line came back to me, from out of nowhere, and I decided to practice radical hope, hope in the face of not having a clue. I decided that God was not off doing the dishes while Sam sought help: God heard his prayers, and was working on it.
And within a week, the local paper carried John’s father’s obituary. This is God’s own truth. The story said that Sam’s grandfather had been cared for until the end by his only son. Sam’s father was in town. I felt like a cartoon character who is standing too close to a huge Buddhist gong.
“I think I know where he is,” I told Sam after school that day. “He’s at his father’s home.” We decided to let a little time pass, so John could heal from the loss, and then Sam would write him a letter.
His letter began, “Hi, Dad, it’s me, Sam, and I am a good boy.”
He said he wanted to know him and to be friends. He put the letter in a small red box, with his favorite action figurines and some candy, and we took it to the post office.
A week later Sam heard from his father, who said he couldn’t wait to meet him.
This is the only part of the story I am allowed to tell, except to say that a week after their first, shy meeting, a few days after their first meal together, John was standing in the doorway of Sam’s second-grade classroom when school ended for the day. He was holding a soccer ball. Sam reported later that all the kids turned to look at him, having been prepared by Sam’s teacher for the introduction, but one kid said anyway, “Who’s that guy over there?”
And Sam said, “Oh—that’s my dad.”
Things are not perfect, because life is not TV and we are real people with scarred, worried hearts. But it’s amazing a lot of the time. Where there was darkness, silence, and blame, there’s now a family, and that means there’s mess and misunderstanding, hurt feelings, and sighs. But it is a family: Sam and his father love and like each other. Can you imagine how impossible a dream this was for Sam? He even gets to whine about our shortcomings, like any old kid. For instance, on our first winter visit with John, the three of us making snow animals in a busy park, Sam said: “Why doesn’t this family ever bring thermoses of cocoa, like other families?”
Things go wrong every time we visit, yet more things go well. Since we visit at Thanksgiving, it is always cold, and we are lit mostly by domestic fires, logs in the fireplace, candles. One year John took us to a frozen lake on a mountain, which you got to by gondola, where you could r
ent ice skates and buy hot food. John and I watched Sam skate. We got to be really proud at the same time. Maybe married parents always do this and it is not that big a deal. But it was to us. When we got too cold, we warmed ourselves over trashcans at the edge of the rink, in which people had built hobo fires with paper cups and wrappers and twigs they had found in the snow.
four
o noraht, noraht
In a superhuman show of spiritual maturity, I moved my mother’s ashes today from the back of the closet, where I’d shoved them a few weeks after she died. I was going to put them on the bookshelf, next to the three small pine boxes that held the pebbly ashes of our pets, now reincarnated as percussion instruments. My mother’s ashes, by contrast, were returned in a brown plastic box, sealed, with her name spelled wrong: Dorothy Noraht Wyles Lamott; her middle name was Norah, not Noraht. She hated the name Norah, which I love, and she didn’t go by Dorothy, which she also hated. She was called “Nikki,” the name of a character on a radio show that she had loved as a child in Liverpool.
I put the brown plastic box in the closet as soon as it came back from the funeral home, two years ago, thinking I could at last give up all hope that a wafting white-robed figure would rise from the ashes of my despair and say, “Oh, little one, my darling daughter, I am here for you now.” I prayed for my heart to soften, to forgive her, and love her for what she did give me—life, great values, a lot of tennis lessons, and the best she could do. Unfortunately, the best she could do was terrible, like the Minister of Silly Walks trying to raise an extremely sensitive young girl, and my heart remained hardened toward her.
So I left her in the closet for two years to stew in her own ashes, and I refused to be nice to her, and didn’t forgive her for being a terrified, furious, clinging, sucking maw of need and arrogance. I suppose that sounds harsh. I assumed Jesus wanted me to forgive her, but I also know he loves honesty and transparency. I don’t think he was rolling his eyes impatiently at me while she was in the closet. I don’t think much surprises him: this is how we make important changes—barely, poorly, slowly. And still, he raises his fist in triumph.
I’ve spent my whole life trying to get over having had Nikki for a mother, and I have to say that from day one after she died, I liked having a dead mother much more than having an impossible one. I began to call her Noraht as her nom de mort. I prayed to forgive her but didn’t—for staying in a fever dream of a marriage, for fanatically pushing her children to achieve, for letting herself go from great beauty to hugely overweight woman in dowdy clothes and gloppy mask of makeup. It wasn’t black and white: I really loved her, and took great care of her, and was proud of some heroic things she had done with her life. She had put herself through law school, fought the great good fights for justice and civil rights, marched against the war in Vietnam. But she was like someone who had broken my leg, and my leg had healed badly, and I would limp forever.
I couldn’t pretend she hadn’t done extensive damage—that’s called denial. But I wanted to dance anyway, even with a limp. I know forgiveness is a component of freedom, yet I couldn’t, even after she died, grant her amnesty. Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You’re done. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare—which is the tiny problem with our Israeli and Palestinian friends. And I guess I wasn’t done.
I stored her in the closet, beside her navy blue purse, which the nurses had given me when I checked her into a convalescent home nearby, three months before she died. I’d go pick up the ashes from time to time, and say to them, grimly, “Hello, Noraht.” Then I’d put them back. My life has been much better since she died, and it was liberating to be so angry, after having been such a good and loyal girl. But eighteen months after her death, I still thought of her the same way I do about George Bush—with bewilderment that this person could ever be in charge, and dismay, and something like hatred. I decided to see whether I could find some flecks of light. Friends told me to pray, and to go slowly, because otherwise, with my rage so huge, how would I be able to see fireflies in the flames? I should try to go as safely, and as deeply, as I could into the mystery of our relationship. I couldn’t scatter the ashes—the box was sealed. So I went through my mother’s purse.
It looked like a doctor’s bag, worn and dusty, with two handles, the sort of purse Ruth Buzzi, of Laugh-In fame, might hit you with. I opened it, and began pulling out Kleenex like a magician pulling endless scarves from his sleeve. This was very distressing. My mother’s Kleenex had been distressing to me my whole life. They always smelled like the worst of her, all her efforts to disguise herself—the makeup, the perfume and lotion and lipstick and powder, all gone rancid. And she’d swab you with Kleenex to clean you up, with her spit. It was disgusting. In her last years, she fumbled for them, and finding them, not remember why she’d needed them. My mother almost never cried—her parents were English—so the Kleenex weren’t to wipe her tears; and she had drowned in those uncried tears.
Uncried-tears syndrome left my mother hypervigilant, unable to settle down into herself, and—to use the clinical term—cuckoo.
Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away. It was also health and preparedness, filled with anything you might need. For instance, there were a lot of Band-Aids. You never know when you’ll need one, only that in this world, you will. There were pads of Post-its; they gave her confidence that she could keep track of things, if only she could remember to write things down and stick the Post-its somewhere. And then remember to look at them.
There were house keys, which made me feel such grief that I had taken away her freedom. But my mother had an unbelievable life for someone so sick with Alzheimer’s and Type II diabetes, and so poor, for as long as my brothers and I could pull it off. We helped her have independence and a great view, and her cat, and her friends, until the very end. When we put her in the home, her freedom was gone anyway. She had only the freedom, when the nurse left at night, to fall when she tried to get up to pee; to lie in wet sheets; to get stuck on the balcony and not remember how to get back in.
There were mirrors in her purse, so she could see that she was still there: Am I still here? Peekaboo! There I am. There were a dozen receipts from Safeway, which was right across the street from her retirement community. She was supposed to be on a strict low-carbohydrate diet to help control her diabetes, but every single receipt was for bread and cookies, which she’d sneak out to buy when the nurses or I were off doing the laundry. I kind of like that in a girl. She also bought dozens of tubes of Crystal Light, intensely flavored diet drink flakes you mix with water. She must have hoped they’d fly straight into her brain, like Pop Rocks, and energize it like Tinkerbell.
There were a number of receipts from our HMO in her purse, handed to her over time; she had been told to hold on to them until she was called, and so she did, because she was a good girl. She loved the nurses, and she loved her doctor, so the receipts were like love letters she’d never throw away. She had a card with the direct line of a nurse who helped her clip her terrible rhino toenails. People always gave her special things, like their direct lines, because she was so eager and dignified and needy, and everyone wanted to reward and help her. People lined up to wait on her, to serve her, her whole life.
There was also a large, heavy tube of toothpaste in the purse. Maybe she had bought it one day at Safeway, and never remembered to take it out. Maybe she liked people to sneak peeks of it in her purse: it said of her, I may be lost, but my breath is fresh, or could be. There were three travel-size containers of hand lotion, a lipstick, a compact, and six cards from cab companies—Safe, Friendly, Professional. Just what you need in this world. She could always get home when she got lost, which she did, increasingly.
I kept putting off opening her wallet. There would be pictures inside. Finally I opened it, and found it filled with cards. She had library
cards from thirty years ago, membership cards for the Democratic Party and the ACLU and the Sierra Club. There were two credit cards, which had expired before her mind did. She had an insane, destructive relationship to money, like a junkie. There was never enough, so she charged things, charged away a whole life, to pump herself out of discomfort and fear. She assault-shopped.
There were photos of my nephew Tyler, my older brother’s son, and of Sam. She loved being a grandmother. And there was an old picture of herself, a black-and-white photo from when she was twenty-one or so. She was a beautiful woman, who looked a little like Theda Bara, white face, jet-black hair. She had dark eyes, full of unflinching intelligence and depression and eagerness to please. In this photo, she looked as if she was trying to will herself into elegance, whereas her life was always hard and messy and full of scrabbling chaos. Her frog-stretched mouth was trying to smile, but she couldn’t, or maybe wouldn’t, because then she would look beautiful and triumphant, and there would be no rescue, no one to help or serve or save her.
She’d kept all of her cards from the years she spent practicing family law in Hawaii—a state bar association card, and her driver’s license, which expired in 1985. In the license photo, she was brown from the Hawaiian sun, soft and rosy, as if she had risen through warm water, but her eyes were afraid, as though she might have been about to sink to the bottom again. And she did, and clung to our necks to save her.