The Trivial Pursuit of Happiness

Last night, as I was finally falling asleep, I heard fire truck after fire truck rush past our house, continuing down the hill. A child of tornado-alley, I instinctually started making a list of what I would shove into my pillowcase if I needed to rush to safety - obviously Ella and Tom would be the first things to be thrown out the window, but then the material things: my wedding ring, the photo box, the insurance papers. The thickblack binder with my mother’s letters. I realized, as I lay in bed trying not to imagine where the fire trucks had been going, that the binder was downstairs, in my craft room, next to the furnace, and if our our house were to ever catch on fire there was almost no chance that I could save anything down there. Poof - ashes.

I did my best to get out of bed quietly, but woke up Tom as I opened our bedroom door. He has gotten used to this lately - I am up two or three times a night just to wander the house, my body getting into the rhythm of a nursing infant I suppose. He mumbled that he loved me, and then rolled back over to cover up Ella before he fell back asleep. I did my best not to run down the basement stairs, sure that the binder wouldn’t be there - that somehow it had gotten lost, and that they were gone. Panic is easy to fall into when you are tired, and I panicked as I ran my hands over the books and journals, trying to remember the last time I saw it, the last time I really read her letters.

In the midst of the worst depression I have ever known, in my sophomore year of college, I started seeing a therapist on campus. I went in saying that that I was there for anxiety, an eating disorder, insomnia. And, in a way, I was there for all of those things. But what it took us 3 months of talking in circles for me to admit was that I was there because my mother was dead.

Until that point, I had lied to the therapist, told her my mother was living in Oklahoma, that we talked every couple days, that she was great.Wonderful.My best friend. I lied, because if I said it outloud, it was easy to pretend that it was true. I lied, because it felt so good to live in a world where my mother was alive, if just for a few hours a week. I lied because I just wanted to be fixed - I wanted someone to shove gauze into the wound, give me some antibiotics, and tell me that I would be better in a week. Ignore the cause, treat the symptoms.

Luckily (though I would not have used that word then) therapy does not work that way. I slipped one day, mentioned my aunt who I had not spoken to since my mother’s death, and watched the lie fall apart. Suddenly, the sessions were about her death, our relationship, my childhood, my family as a whole. The breathing exercises we had worked on for my strange anxiety months before, were suddenly relevant as I sat, numb but sobbing, unable to remember why I had shown up for another session when I always left feeling darker and less healed than before.

It was in this period that I started digging through boxes, sorting out the letters that were poking out of books and shoved into boxes of crafts, and putting together a timeline. My mother had written me (us really, my sister and I) hundreds of letters in the 7-or-so years between us going to live with our father and her death, but the details of those years were hazy. Rereading the small stack of letters I had somehow saved, my mother became a person I had not known before. She was real - she was frustrated and lonely and angry and funny and optimistic and wanted so badly to give her daughters (and later, after Luke moved in with us) her son, a chance to know who she was. So she wrote. She wrote to us about our family, about her goals, about the things she was proud of us for, about the things she worried about. Through all of this we also called and talked, but I can barely remember voice when I try to remember those calls - in these letters, she is loud and clear, her laugh unmarred by the rattling cough. In these letters, I refound my mama - not the memory of my mother, or the lie I had created to replace my mother. Just my mama.

Last night, I brought the binder upstairs with me, close enough to be grabbed and thrown into a pillowcase if I am forced to choose what is saved, what can be burned. Today, I am reading. I am scanning in the pages and saving them privately on Flickr (if I am doing it right, my sister should also be able to see them, and if my brother is interested, of course I will find a way for him to see them also) because I worry, in a moment of panic, whether I would walk into the fire to try and save the letters. If I could forget that they are just paper and memories. If I could bear to lose her again.