by Bethany M. Dunbar
copyright the Chronicle 5-15-2013
Tea Leaves; a memoir of mothers and daughters, by Janet Mason, published by Bella Books, Tallahassee, Florida, 2012, paperback, 202 pages, $15.95.
I celebrated Mother’s Day pretty quietly this year. My own mother died a little more than a year ago, so it was a time to think of her, which I always do anyway. My thoughtful adult son came to see me with a basket of flowers. My thoughtful boyfriend took me out and gave me flowers. I had spent the week before with my thoughtful adult daughter in California seeing some great new music, some killer whales, and trying — completely unsuccessfully — not to freak out over traffic in Los Angeles.
To pass the time while waiting for airplanes on my way out and back, I brought with me a small paperback I thought might be good to read at this time. It came to me last fall, when the author gave a talk at the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick. Since the death of my own mom was so recent, I had to set this book aside. A book about a daughter my age taking care of her dying mother was a bit too much for me right then.
Yet, I was intrigued by the parts I’d read. And I was glad to have it with me on this trip some months later. Now I’m glad to recommend it as the kind of book that makes you think about your own life. What’s right with your relationships with your mother and your daughter? What’s wrong and why? What doesn’t really matter? Sometimes reading other people’s experiences puts your own into perspective.
Janet Mason is a talented and honest writer. Her relationship with her own mother was not perfect, which of course is what makes the book interesting. More interesting is the fact she is willing to explore the imperfections without dwelling on them and becoming one of those victim writers whose memoirs I can never quite stand to read.
Life is hard. Being a mother is hard. Nobody’s really ready for it when she gets the job, no matter how much you might have read or planned. It’s just not like anything else, and you can’t really prepare.
But somehow the species keeps managing to perpetuate. Somehow some of us seem willing to take that plunge and become parents. We do our best, whatever that is.
Ms. Mason was an only child. Her grandmother and mother were factory workers. She was the first generation to go to college, and that in itself puts a certain amount of pressure on. The politics are not the same through the generations, and neither is the sexual orientation. Ms. Mason is a lesbian, and while that might have put a strain on some mother-daughter relationships it wasn’t a big issue for her mom, who was open-minded in this respect. The family supports and loves Ms. Mason’s partner, their “unexpected daughter-in-law.”
Ms. Mason’s mother was, herself, a bit of a rabble-rouser and one to question authority or the status quo in general:
When I was old enough, she sometimes took me with her, the two of us marching and attending rallies, waving our matching mother/daughter coat hangers at pro-choice events. I was the less adventurous one — hanging back and watching with something bordering on amazement as my mother heckled the hecklers and squeezed the balloon testicles of a Ronald Reagan cardboard cutout.
Ms. Mason’s grandmother was a lifelong Republican and Episcopalian, yet she, in her own way, questioned the status quo by getting a divorce in the 1920s and raising her children herself in a time when many other single mothers were forced to give theirs up.
Ms. Mason’s mother developed cancer, which was misdiagnosed at first. By the time she found out what it was, the disease had spread too far and the diagnosis was terminal. From then on Ms. Mason spends much of her time with her mother and father.
At first it’s hard for Ms. Mason to understand and accept that her mother is dying:
The next day we had an appointment to see the oncologist whose office complex was next to a shopping mall. As I sat in the backseat of my parents’ car, I felt lost in long loops, off-and-on-ramps that seemed to go nowhere. I was subsumed in a hard glittering sense of doom — deep in a nightmare that would not let me wake.
A theme of the book is a mother’s hopes for her daughter — hopes that she will do better, or accomplish more, or accomplish something the mother was not able to do. Ms. Mason’s mother had very strong feelings about this, and sometimes Ms. Mason feels she has not lived up to her mother’s dreams for her. Meanwhile Ms. Mason’s mother was a woman of artistic talent and interest, but who needed to work at a basic job to support her family. Ms. Mason finds a portfolio stashed away with no artwork in it, which leads to feelings of guilt — did she get in the way of what could have been her mother’s success as an artist?
She finds something else to hold on to in these final months — and for long after her mother is gone. It’s a “School Years” book with report cards and pictures from each grade:
She always asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I wrote it down each year. It didn’t matter how ridiculous or remote the possibility was. In first grade I wanted to be a fireman, later a violinist, a gypsy, a scientist, a comedienne, an oceanographer, a guitar player in a jazz band.
My mother let my dreams be dreams. She did not expect consistency or demand a discipline that would eclipse my childhood. No one ever asked my mother what she wanted to be when she grew up. But she asked me every year and wrote down my answers. As I watched my mother slipping away from me — as painful as it was, day after day — the thought of this book, filled with my earliest dreams and aspirations, was something for me to hold onto.
A simple thing that meant so much. Tea Leaves is a simple book with a lot to offer. It’s about figuring out your future, your past and your present.
contact Bethany M. Dunbar at [email protected].
For more free articles from the Chronicle like this one, see our Reviews pages. For all the Chronicle’s stories, pick up a print copy or subscribe, either for print or digital editions.
0 shares
