How to be a daughter
By: Babette Dunkelgrün
Tags: Nonfiction, Daughters, Essay, Mothers, Family

Photo by Shanna Camilleri on Unsplash

From the edge of a patio where I sit across from my mother, we watch farmers from the Haute-Provence region setting up their weekly market. It’s the end of summer. She wears her signature sweater set, lightweight for the season, exposing her forearms in white, rolled up sleeves. When she brings the coffee cup to her mouth, the movement reveals just another sliver of her chest. My mother’s dark hair never launched fully into silver, like many of her friends’, but wrinkles in the face and neck announce her age. She has a habit of sitting with her shoulders hunched, headed in a direction I remember from her mother and recognize in myself. Ivy climbs the café’s walls; a local French couple under the awning shares a cigarette. The square is still quiet. An empty tote basket sits on the table between us, awaiting fresh produce.

“Tell me your strategy, mom!” I say putting my hands on hers. This is her favorite morning of the week.

My mother glances at the three market options that have lined up closest to us, from merchants whose stalls look identical to me. “We’ll need to start with the organic farmer. His stuff just tastes better.”

“Organic, got it.”

On the same day last week, my mother and the organic farmer had a conversation. She managed to explain that she’s looked all over for a fig tree, the kind she could drive back to the Netherlands. He motioned with his hands that you can’t take them like that, in pots.

“I was so disappointed,” she says now. “I had the perfect plan for our balcony.”

“Why couldn’t you put it in a pot?”

“It doesn’t like to be constrained.”

I wave down our waiter and we pay the check.

I’d left home almost a decade before. I picked a job in San Francisco, at least in part wanting to be nimble after the recession. I was a recent college grad. Naturally, I questioned my choice. “Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing,” wrote Cheryl Strayed in the essay that turned into Wild. “It’s doing what you have to do”.

These had been years of acceleration. I’d gained nieces and nephews. My parents had turned into retired people. Their bodies lost buoyancy. My mother fell down a few steps of stairs and had taken weeks to recover. This was the part in the movie where they hire another pair of actors to play the older version of the characters you know.

Our dynamic had also shifted. At the end of my first trips back to Europe, I watched a fading image of my mother waving goodbye and crying, as I walked through the line at customs. More often now, I was the one whose tears started streaming well before check-in. Any sense of obligation around our togetherness had dissolved. I joined my family on their vacations when I could. But we were only temporarily a family in one place; I missed them almost as much as when I was on my own in California.

“I think your life would be easier if you moved home,” my mother says during our drive back from the farmers market. I have heard her tell me this over the years; sometimes she phrased it as a question. The yearning underneath the phrase is a part of her. And with distance, it has become mine too. Fig tree, constrained life, the push and pull of being in relationship. Would life be easier?

Back at the summer house, I spend some time at the garden table paging through an early journal my mother brought for me. After reading Anne Frank’s diary, I believed journaling was what you did when you were young. What preteen reads exclusively Holocaust literature? She is making do with what’s around.

Yesterday after field hockey, there was red and white wine. Tried both. I’m pretty sure I was tipsy. Today, mom was asking if I had any alcohol at the club and I said no. I felt sooo bad. I don’t like lying to her. After she was kind of quiet… moms have a way of knowing everything!

One day in my early teens, my father is in a meeting during which he is to fire an employee. The door is open, somehow. My mother walks by his office to see a man pulling my dad’s tie. He could have choked him. She takes her full body weight and jumps in. My father is safe again, but there’s meaning in the stories we retell. Are we ever safe, really?

There are restaurants where my parents overorder — as if we won’t know where our next meal will come from — and my father ensures we’ve located the exit signs. They share their need for an escape route. I memorize this line by Maya Angelou: “I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself”.

As a child, I accompany my mother at photography exhibits where signs advise against viewers of my age. We talk about the life-sized, black and white pictures and my mother proceeds to ask which classmates would save me if it came to that.

Also, this: moments when I’m in trouble for saying, “I didn’t know”. I could be talking about a curfew or homework.

My mother, “Don’t tell me ‘I didn’t know’. That’s what the Germans said.”

She once organized an event at my school with a survivor to speak about the war. The teacher who invited only the handful of Jewish students made her furious. “Why would he only invite them? They already know all of the stories.” She had a point.

Besides, in class one kid had asked, “Can’t we talk about the wars that are still happening?”

My mother, before the France era, lamented on summer trips to Italy and Spain. She had been a local staff member working at the Israeli embassy in the Netherlands, surrounded for thirty years by a rotating cast of diplomats speaking Hebrew. She scheduled visits for the country’s thinkers and artists. On days when school ended early, I’d walk through a metal detector and get frisked in order to meet her for lunch. “If we flew just another hour, we could have been in Israel.”

Now she reclines on a lawn chair, slicing a peach. When had her discontent morphed into this ease? Where was the mother from my memory? “Mmmm,” the sound escapes from her chewing lips. She holds a napkin that catches the juice. “I could eat these every day.”

My mother gave birth to me thirty-four years ago. She was forty then, six years older than I am. I became a human inside her body. There is a process for her readying. She had months to know how to mother me. But how do you learn to be a daughter? My parents had two children first, a son, a daughter, then me. My mother has called me every week since I left, often more than that. She has visited me once a year, nine times altogether.

She cradled my head in her lap, softly stroking my hair on schooldays when I felt “off” and I didn’t realize that “off” meant “puberty”.

“How can I feel lonely when I have friends?”

An explanation, from my mother: “You’re Jewish, you’ll always feel like an outsider.”

Two decades later, a lesson from a Buddhist podcast I listen to in the Bay Area: “Feeling separate is an existential trance in which we have forgotten the wholeness of our being.”

Before she met her Dutch husband, my mother grew up in the Midwest. When we visit my grandparents, we buy Oreo cookies and Tootsie rolls. From our family trip to Tel Aviv, we gain a pint of hummus and a watermelon that fills the carry-on. We were in Greece once, as yoghurt traffickers this time, learning upon our return that you can find the same brand at a local store. Someday, perhaps, we will see our individual hungers syncing up. I’m still learning that they don’t have to.

August marks a fragrant time for the area. The house is nestled in between patches of lavender that sprout up between country roads. One morning, I drive alone, headed south from our temporary address in no particular direction but to look for solid ground before reintegrating into collective space. The road winds into a landscape of medieval villages perched on hilltops and surrounded by greenery. I drive for several miles until a small sign urges me to stop, alluding to the location of a restaurant: La Presqu’il. In French, it means “peninsula” but also translates to “the almost island”. How had I never thought of that? Seemingly free, always tethered to her. My mother is the first place I call home.