Mothers

When my mother was young and her father suddenly dropped out of her life, my grandmother broke the news to her like this:

“Your father is leaving the family. That’s the end of the story and there will be no tears.”

There were no tears.

My mother walked alone in the winters without a coat and chopped firewood in the snowy hills of New Mexico for extra money. There was the biting cold of the wind as it seeped through the fabric of her sweater and chomped at her bones. There was the town below her, lit up with strands of twinkling Christmas lights, smoke swirling out from chimneys on the tops of warm houses harboring happy families that were unlike her own. There was the indifferent silence of the twisted tree limbs frozen in ice above her. There was the muddy snow at her feet. But there were no tears.

At 17, my mother hitchhiked all the way to Mexico and spent her summer sleeping on beaches. She slung a hammock between two palm trees and called it home. She would fall asleep to the sound of ocean waves rolling over and over onto the shore, and in the early mornings she would wake to the sound of a thousand little crabs clicking across the hot sand. She was at an outdoor market on the day she was robbed, having returned to her spot on the beach that day to find that she had absolutely nothing left. So she went for a swim in the ocean. Because this is what you do when you have absolutely nothing left. There was the warmth of the water on her legs. There was the fizz of residual foam left by the waves as they swept back and forth across the shoreline. There was the feel of soft sand on her bare feet as she faced north and began the long walk back home to the hills of New Mexico. There was the ache of leaving all of this behind her. But there were no tears.

She graduated from high school and moved to Norway, back to the roots of her family, back to the countryside where the ghosts of our nomadic ancestors forever wander among the wildflower petals. She fell in love with the Norwegian sky; the same sky her mother and her mother’s mother and all of the mothers who came before her fell in love with. She hiked in knee-deep snow through high mountains to witness the Aurora Borealis, to see all those intense glowing lights quivering against a black sky. This is where she fit.

But she could not stay. We can never stay. It’s in our blood to roam.

Before she left, she took one last hike through the high mountains, tethered by a long rope tied around her waist to a dozen other climbers. They pushed through a late spring storm, the snow soaking their boots as they trudged across the icy ground. My mother was the last in this long line of hikers, and as she placed her foot on a sheet of ice covering a deep crevice that cut straight down into the center of the mountain, it cracked beneath her and she was swallowed whole. There was the feeling of an endless freefall as she plummeted in slow motion through the dark depths. There was the sudden jerk of the taught rope as it caught her and held her in place, her body swaying back and forth in the cold air. There was the vast emptiness below her feet as she dangled from the rope. There was a narrow sliver of light shining down through the split in the earth above her. There was the sound of voices calling down to her, promising to pull her out. There was the eerie silence of the mountain that engulfed her, and the fear of the rope breaking in half. But there were no tears.

When she returned to the states, she lived alone in a lookout tower in the Gila Wilderness. She stayed high above the trees and spent her days scanning the horizon for signs of wildfires. At night, she was besieged by stars as she lay alongside the wall-to-wall windows of her watchtower and listened to the whistles of elk drifting through the trees. On weekends, she strapped a small tent to her back and hiked through the woods. Early one morning she was awakened by a bear outside of her tent sniffing at her feet. She froze. She slowly gripped the knife she kept under her pillow and stayed completely still. There was the hulking shadow of the bear at her feet. There was the flimsy fabric separating her legs from his teeth. There was the fear that turned her knees to rubber. But there were no tears.

I stole her diary once. I should not have done that, but I did. I read it cover to cover. She started it when I was not quite a year old. She was sad on most of the pages. Stuck in a small mountain town where she felt like a complete outcast. She wrote about the sky that was always heavy with dark clouds, one storm rolling in after another. She wrote about me, the silent one who hardly ever cried, the last descendant in a long line of tearless Norwegians. She wrote about me crawling so quietly on the floor at my father’s feet that he failed to notice I was there at all. She was sad on most of the pages. There was the sudden loss of freedom that came from being tied down by two babies. There was a stack of bills she could not pay. There was the kitchen table where she sat and worried on sleepless nights that grew more and more frequent. There was the unceasing rain. But there were no tears.

Last spring, my mother slipped a disc in her spine and started walking crooked. She told me she was just fine. I did not believe her. She used a cane and walked with her back hunched over at a ninety degree angle. This had happened twice before. I made her go to the doctor, who made her go in for immediate surgery. When it was all over, she called me from her hospital bed. In a voice so weak and strained that I could barely hear her, she told me that she was just fine.

I did not believe her.

I hung up the phone after we said goodbye. I went into the kitchen and drank a bottle of gin before falling asleep next to my cat on the floor. I had the same dream I always have of my mother. I’m running through a wilderness, trying to follow her shadow as she weaves through a thick maze of trees. No matter how fast I run, she stays just out of my reach. I try calling out to her, but when I open my mouth to speak, I find that I am mute. Millions of bright yellow leaves fall from the trees and she finally stops and sees me. She reaches out for me and I reach out for her, each of us pushing our hands through the myriad of twisted branches that separate us. We never connect. It’s always the same. There is the maze of weeping trees surrounding us, leaves fluttering down from limbs, like falling constellations. There is my hand that looks like her hand, with my thin fingers and bright blue veins branching through my narrow wrists. There is the empty, ever-widening space between us where our fingertips never touch.

But there are no tears.