Mothering

Carmen invades my mind a lot, even years after her astonishing death. Life is strange
like that, sometimes. How people who didn’t necessarily have a starring role in your
life sometimes have the greatest impact.
As an adult, I think of Carmen as the mom I want to be. She’s the mom I try to be,
even though I will never be as carefree and full of joy as she was. I parent with law
and order, Carmen did it with wildness and magic. As a kid, though, Carmen was the
mom we all wished was our own. It was the way of preteen girls then and now; your
own mother could never understand you the way another one could. Your own mom
was never cool.
But Carmen really was cool—to us and to her own children. The other moms had the
typical poofy 1980’s hair and the “mom jeans” that have dreadfully come back in
style. They sported pinched looks on their Mary Kay-painted faces. But not Carmen.
She wore her dark hair long and parted in the middle, hippie-style, and her jeans were
throwback bell bottoms, an ode to the decade before. She floated when she walked, as
if her bare feet touched clouds instead of pavement. Her face was always devoid of
make-up, always shining. Her presence was powerful. When she walked into a room,
you immediately felt swathed in her beauty, in her bliss. You immediately became
lighter.
Carmen didn’t have rules and she didn’t bake cookies or fold laundry. Instead, she let
us roller skate in the basement without knee pads and since all of her daughters loved
pizza, she served pizza for dinner every night. Her pantry was stocked, and it was a
kid’s dream: chips, cookies, and every sugar cereal imaginable—as long as you liked
it dry, because there was no guarantee of milk in the fridge. It was a wonder that none
of them were overweight, but Carmen’s motto for life extended to food as well—
indulge in what you love.
In the summer of my twelfth year, she would load up her Volvo station wagon with
kids and drive us all to the pool, staying at a time when we were old enough to be
dropped off, at a time when we should have been embarrassed to have a mom with us.
I had somehow morphed to the age where the idea of my mother lying next to me on a
towel, in a bathing suit no less, would have been a social travesty.
But we were never embarrassed of Carmen. It wasn’t just because of how she looked,
though that was some of it. She was younger than the other moms. We knew from
Tally, the oldest, that Carmen had been just sixteen when she had her. It was blatantly
clear that there was no man in Carmen’s life, at least no steady man. She had dates a
lot, dropping Tally and her sisters at whoever’s house, winking at the parents and
saying thanks so much, who knows what time I might get home. Carmen seemed
oblivious to the tight smiles, the judgmental eyes that we all saw, too young to even
understand judgment.
It was clear that Tally and her sisters had different fathers. They all resembled Carmen
with the long dark hair and tight little gymnast bodies, but their faces were completely
different, with only Tally bearing the same stunning, heavily lashed brown-gold eyes.
Although it was a time when divorce was coming of age and more of us had broken
homes than didn’t, having a baby out of wedlock was still taboo. Having three was
shocking.
Tally and her sisters seemed unbothered by it, and I could understand why. Although I
myself had a great father, it was as if there was no need for one in Carmen’s family,
so rich was it,  bursting at the seams with love. My parents balanced out with a whole
good cop/bad cop routine of parenting, but Carmen had obliterated the need for that.
She simply loved: softly and strongly. Her mothering was in the way she listened to
us, the way she encouraged us to do thing we might otherwise roll our pre-pubescent
eyes at: smell the flowers, lay down in the meadow next to her house and look for
constellations, write down our dreams and burn them in a fire under a full moon. She
was infused with something contagious.
None of us knew what Carmen did for a living because she never seemed to work. I
don’t know what she did during the school year, but in the summer nearly all her days
were spent with any number of kids—in her house, at the pool, around a campfire.
She seemed to be just as comfortable financially as any of our parents. Her house was
modest but nice, there was a swimming pool and an acre of untouched land next to it.
She drove a Volvo and her girls shopped at The Gap just like everyone else. But there
were little signs that she was more well-off than she let on. The dark green Jaguar
parked in her garage, the cleaning lady who came on Tuesdays.
The rumor mill was ripe with theories, I deduced, because she was different. Because
we all wanted to be with her all the time, and the other parents just couldn’t accept
that it was because we liked her. They couldn’t accept that a woman just might be
independently wealthy by honest means. It couldn’t be a family inheritance or smart
investments. No, they presumed, she was a prostitute. She had a secret sugar daddy.
She had married one of her children’s fathers and divorced him for a hefty alimony.
I never believed any of that was true. I was a kid, and I didn’t care about how or why
Carmen had money.
The rumors, obviously, were born out of jealousy. We lived in a small town, and
Carmen stood out like a beacon. At the pool, she laid on her towel in a red string
bikini, her body with no signs of birthing babies, youth having snapped her right back
into shape. She would pile her hair haphazardly on the top of her head, and the messy
pieces that fell down gave her a wildly sexual look. She would saunter up to the snack
bar with a ten-dollar bill in her hand, and the heads of every middle aged dad and
teenage boy would arc towards her. She would drop the money and tell the kid behind
the counter to let us get whatever we wanted.
As we grew older, I saw less of Carmen. Tally was really more of my sister’s friend,
and the other girls were younger than I was. In high school, I no longer needed rides
to the pool or school, but I still looked for Carmen anytime I was somewhere she
might be. There was something delicious about her. The way she would break into a
genuine smile and run over to you with her arms wide, with hugs and kisses and
smelling your hair as though she were enfolding a toddler into her embrace. Her aura
would pour into you like a personal serotonin boost.
Sometimes I try to remember the last time I saw Carmen, but memory is a funny thing
and has a habit of conglomerating lots of instances into one giant blur. I’ve settled on
running into her at Tally and my sister’s high school graduation, one year after my
own. In the milling sea of red and blue gowns on the football field, everyone posing
for pictures, I spotted her with Tally and the girls. I grabbed my sister’s hand, and we
abandoned our own family and ran to Carmen’s.
The night was ablaze with excitement, the celebratory vibe pulsing, and Carmen’s
unfolding of her arms when she saw us felt regal, familiar. We ran into her, crashing a
little too hard, all of us shrieking and forming an awkward group hug that somehow
felt perfect.
“My girls!” she said, cupping first my face and then my sister’s. We shone under her
attention, our faces beaming. This is how I remember her, when I think of her, the
long red and white sundress she had on, the dark hair shimmering under the lights on
the field, her gold-flecked eyes radiating love. She was pure joy.
It would be the last time I saw Carmen.
A few years later, my sister sent me an email, in which she told me that Tally had
contacted her to tell that Carmen had cancer, of all things. Melanoma. It seemed
strange, being barely in our twenties. We weren’t quite at the stage that parents were
dying. And Carmen was what? Thirty-six, thirty-seven?
Tally said its treatable with surgery, my sister wrote. So hopefully no big deal.
I accepted the news with concern, but not too much concern. I was starting out in the
world, working my first job at an advertising agency, dating a cute guy that would one
day become my husband. Though Carmen crossed my mind often, the news of her
cancer wasn’t something that took up much space. No one died of melanoma, right?
Wasn’t that one where they just cut off the offending mole or blemish?
But just six months later, my sister called me, in tears. Tally had reported that the
cancer was Stage V and had spread, viciously and relentlessly. My sister choked out
that Tally had insisted that if she was ever your friend, now is the time to come see
her. Tally was telling her this was the end. In my head I was unable to accept that this
was happening—it was as if my sister were talking about someone else, someone we
barely knew. Or as if it was just a rough patch, and Tally was just being dramatic.
Carmen would pull through. I was young and naïve, and I didn’t really understand that
when you had multiple types of Stage V cancer, you didn’t just pull through. You
died.
I didn’t go say goodbye.
In hindsight, I don’t think I was ready to accept that a woman so full of life could just
up and die. It all seemed so incomprehensible to me. Carmen was the most alive
person I knew. I had never even lost a grandparent, so I wasn’t ready to accept that
anyone died, let alone Carmen. Not Carmen, who danced to music after midnight and
taught us how to shave our legs and let sleepovers be real sleepovers, where we stayed
up until dawn talking. She was full of life.
On the quiet August morning when I sat in my office and saw that I had a new email
from my sister, with Carmen as the subject, I froze. I didn’t want to open it, didn’t
want to read the inevitable news, didn’t want to confront the guilt I’d been laying on
that I hadn’t made a trip home to see her yet. I kept adding on the yet, as if I was
going to go, any day now. If you’re her friend, now is the time to come see her. She
had been my friend, but so much more—and I hadn’t gone.
The funeral was a week later, and I remember so very little of it. A blur of black, so
many of us the kids, the people she’d touched when we were in the most formative
years of our live. Tally and her sisters sat in the front row, and I remember staring at
the back of their heads, all of them bearing long, dark waves that reminded me so
much of Carmen. I don’t remember the words that anyone spoke, only the way their
hair reminded me of riding in the backseat of the Volvo, the wind whipping Carmen’s
long locks while music blasted from the speakers.
After the service, I found Tally outside. Off around a corner of the church, she was
smoking a cigarette, looking as glamourous as a girl possibly could on the day of her
mother’s burial. Decked out in a black suit with an impossibly short skirt, Tally saw
me and opened her free arm in the same characteristic welcoming gesture that her
mother had had.
“Hey girl,” she said. Her eyes were puffy but dry. We talked about mundane stuff for
a moment, the dumb conversations you have when you don’t know what to say. I
wanted to say something about why I hadn’t come, but I couldn’t find the words.
Instead, I commented on the crowd.
“It’s like she raised a village, huh?” I said, nodding my head towards the young adults
flocking the outside of the church, waiting for the signal that it was time for the
processional to the cemetery to begin.
Tally snorted. “Well, we can’t expect the older folk to attend the funeral of the town
escort, can we?”
I shook my head. “I never understood that,” I said. “Why people have to make up
stuff just because they’re jealous.”
Tally gave me a side eye, and a wry smile. “Come on. You know it was the truth. That
was common knowledge, no?”
I simply stared at her. I was speechless.
Tally shrugged. “I guess we didn’t really talk about it, but I assumed we all knew. I
mean all those dates, and never a boyfriend?” She gave a short laugh. “She was
working.”
“I didn’t know,” I said, swallowing thickly, trying to keep my face empty of shock,
trying not to show the assessment that my brain was trying to make. Carmen as a
woman who slept with men for money did not resonate with the Carmen of my
childhood.
“She wasn’t a hooker,” Tally said, defensively. “She was an escort. She was company,
mostly, for old guys with money who just wanted a date. She barely slept with any of
them, not that it matters.”
I just stared at her. I had no idea what to do with this new information, this new piece
of Carmen that had apparently, always existed.
Tally shook her head and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Not that it matters,” she
repeated. “It never did, you know? That was her job. It wasn’t who she was.” Tally
dropped the cigarette and twisted her toe over it, turning to stare pointedly at me.
“You know who she was,” she said. The heavy sadness on her face was crushing, the
mark of a woman who was, for all intents and purposes, an orphan.
I nodded, reaching out to embrace her. “She was everything,” I whispered, feeling
waves of regret for any moment of judgment that had crossed my face. “Everything.”
It’s been a long time since Carmen died, and just as long since I’ve seen Tally or her
sisters. We keep in touch via social media, like everyone does these days. I’ve
watched Tally and her sisters get married and start families, watched the tightknit unit
of the three of them and their husbands and most importantly, their daughters. I see
Carmen in every single one of them—in the long, dark hair, in the crazy family
parties, in the way they all laugh the same, with their whole heads thrown back.
I think about how my mother and her friends were right, after all. That Carmen was a
woman who had sex for money, sometimes. As if that was the whole of her, the
entirety of her being, peppered with a history of being a teenage mother and having
children from different fathers. As if it wasn’t just a way to make a solid living. As if
those things so exclusively defined her that there was no room for anything else, no
room for truth or friendship or love.
But Tally was right. I knew who she was. I knew her as a mom who made our
childhood feel magical, who listened to us in our teenage years, who spread joy
wherever she went. I knew her as someone who did everything for her kids, her
biological ones, and the rest of us who fell in love with her. I knew her as a person in
the back of my mind, always, when I had my own daughters and began the hard work
of raising girls. I thought of how easy she made it seem, as if all it took was giving in,
pizza and soda, no bedtimes, no boundaries.
Mostly, I’m not a mom like Carmen. I’m a mom who sleep-trained babies, who had
strict bedtimes and grounded a child who took out her bike without a helmet. I have
rules and boundaries and schedules…but sometimes, I like to think pieces of Carmen
invade me, loosen up my joints and my heart and my breathlessness at life.
Because what she really taught us was how to grasp the moment. How to
say yes when my girls ask if they can make brownies for breakfast. How to sit and
listen without turning every situation into a teaching moment. How to be silly and to
have fun even if people look at you funny. How to hug someone so there is never a
doubt how much you love them.
My daughters and their friends are close to the age I was during those magical years
of pool summers and stargazing. I feel this pull to emanate Carmen when I drive them
around, when I let them blast music with the windows rolled down. I feel her when I
catch their faces in the rearview mirror, their beautiful, unabashed delight.
I can see myself in them, years ago, wild and free in the back of a Volvo, me and
Tally and our sisters, singing along to Madonna. At the wheel, Carmen’s hair flies
around her like a halo, her gorgeous face in the rearview mirror, her voice the
strongest and most beautiful of us all.