(Day 10 of 22) My mom was Sylvia Plath
My mom died suddenly -- with neither hint nor omen -- on Christmas 2020. Counting down until her death anniversary is a newfound Advent. Four Sundays/22 days: Hope, Peace, Joy, Love, Rebirth.
Our parents told us they met at the Hour Bar, over drinks – vodka gimlet meets whiskey on the rocks. But when we were old enough – were we, though? – my mom told us the truth. Famously depressed women were not household names, but later in college, I would realize I had fancied my mom as glorious, notorious, a Sylvia Plath vexed by children, a Virginia Woolf scribbling in journals, a Susanna Kaysen, girl interrupted by childhood memories, bone spurs beneath the flesh. Her psychic landscape was “Lady Lazarus”; she sang like Marianne Faithfull. I wondered if, as for Anne Sexton, death remained “the almost un-nameable lust.” I spent what remained of her lifetime knowing, not knowing, my mom.
There's the version your mother has agreed to tell with your father ("our parents" version) and then there's your mother confessing the truth to her children likely too young to grasp it. From the first line I knew of the intimacy between you and her, between mother and child. And as the daughter of an often depressed mother, I felt both the cause of her emotional state and responsible for changing it.