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Monday, May 09, 2005
Cuizon: Other mothers
By Erma Cuizon
Bird by Bird
I ASKED a couple of friends if they could suggest a topic for my column a week after and Myke O. said I could write about SRP. But this topic gives me a heartache. We have big and bigger kids on the block spoiling for a fight, rendering our days dark and darker, who’d like to think about it?
Then Orly C. said, “Why not about mothers?”
Although no topic such as mother could really grow old, wouldn’t it be like reciting a stale piece if I were to talk about mothers in the usual way?
“But why not mothers who did not give birth,” asked Orly and he sounded serious on text.
I surfed the Internet and came across a web site called Literary Mama, “a literary magazine for the maternally inclined.” It has “mama-centric writing,” it says. But it was the beautiful story of a mother by the poetry editor of the magazine that I found attractive. “My Daughter’s Other Mother” is a fascinating profile of the other mother by writer Rachel Iverson, about her children’s nanny.
Perhaps her being a writer enables Rachel to have a different insight on a nanny and lets her see the gem in the woman.
Rachel wrote about the first time Frances, the nanny, came. “She stood in my doorway, a woman in her early 30s, just a few inches shorter than me, with her black hair tied neatly back. Her hand trembled just a bit when we shook hands. She smoothed her flowered skirt behind her as she sat on my sofa.”
The nanny took care of Rachel’s son and later, the daughter. “(Frances) knew my daughter from the womb.”
“My daughter runs into her nanny’s arms three mornings a week. My pale-faced, almost-bald blonde two-year-old wraps her arms around mounds of thick, wavy, black hair. My daughter speaks untroubled Spanish to her, and, when I’m not around, she calls her Mama.”
Then Rachel was told by her husband that they would have to move to New York for his job. And she knew Frances would not go with them to the big city. One of her husband’s colleagues looked incredulously, “It is New York, after all. We’re not asking you to move to rural South Dakota.” For a nanny, she was going to pass up a promotion of her husband?
So she had to tell Frances about the move. The nanny was her happy self when she came into the room and Dorothea ran into her arms. “Tears gathered in my eyes, and I began. ‘Frances, I have some news.’ A few minutes later, she stared out the window, tears in her eyes and her hand covering her mouth. Her untouched latte steamed into her face.”
“Though I am already crusading to find her a new job, and though we have pledged to pay her several months’ severance, none of that will change the sadness in her eyes.”
Orly is right. There are mothers who did not give birth and they are unforgettable, too.
(May 9, 2005 issue)
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