Secrets In My Mother's Journal

My mother died on a deceptively blue summer day in August. She’d been sick just about a year with cancer that ravaged relentlessly, never giving her a chance, not really.

I remember going with her to the hospital that day, the day when the doctor stared me straight in the eyes and said, without flinching, “Don’t worry, she may have years. You never know how these things will go.”

The nurse took me aside quietly, breaking all rules and boundaries in the name of compassion and said, “I was there. I saw the scans. The cancer is everywhere. Spend every minute with your mother that you can. She doesn’t have much time.”

I will always be grateful for that nurse.

Time was something we didn’t have a lot of, my mother and I. She was 53 when she died, I had just turned 29, with a new baby and nowhere to turn now, for advice and the secrets only a mother could share.

Not that we’d had a lot of heart-to-hearts over the years. My mother, a single working mom, would get up every morning and take the R train from our apartment in Brooklyn to the Rector Street Station in downtown Manhattan, where she worked in securities for a major bank. How proud she was of that position, of being able to say she had a desk job in a big firm, a company where she had to dress up and wear nice shoes and lipstick.

My mother, who’d never graduated from high school, had found something she could be proud of, after years of running wild, years of late nights and the wrong men, rum and Cokes flowing. Years when she — herself the daughter of a single mom left with two children when their father ran off — could often be found in brightly lit bars and on dance floors where she’d wear spandex pants and low-cut blouses, trying to hold on to ever-elusive youth.

By the time I came along when my mother was 24, she was alternately smitten with her daughter and shocked at the shackles of motherhood. Much of the actual parenting was left to my grandmother, my beloved Nanny, who read books every night and always had a green Depression glass pitcher of Kool-Aid ready when my friends came over to play Barbies on our porch.

Nanny, she had time, time for long, involved games of “store” on our Brooklyn porch in the two-family house where we rented the upstairs apartment. Time for trips to the park.

Time for me.

She moved out when I was 17, my mother. She’d found love, she told me. Finally, after so many years of searching, she’d found a man who made her smile, who cooked at night and who held her hand. She stopped going to the bars then. Started buying business suits and planning for a future.

Somehow, the talks became longer as I grew older. My mother was the person I called when I’d met someone I cared about, the one I turned to for advice, navigating the pitfalls of my 20s. She knew the secrets I couldn’t share with anyone else and she took them in and kept them close.

My mother knew about secrets.

When I was about nine years old, my mother and I were in the spare room, where there was a portable wardrobe. Rifling through my mother’s sequined sweaters and shiny earrings, I found a small, weathered black notebook, worn black leather, creased and smooth with time.

“Don’t touch that,” she said. “That’s my private journal.”

I asked why, what could she possibly have written that I shouldn’t be allowed to read, but she was resolute. “That’s my personal journal and you are not allowed to open it,” she said.

And that was that. My mother, a very free-spirited woman, was always laughing, ready to dance. She wasn’t firm but that day, her voice left no room for argument.

I left the notebook alone.

My mother and I may not have had much time, and there was never any money to spare, but there were flashes of magic. There was the cold, windy March day she told me to put on my warm winter coat, the one with the hood. We were going to Asbury Park, she said — the boardwalk where we spent our annual two-week summer vacation without fail. Asbury Park on a cold, windy day in March. It made no sense, and it was wonderful.

We drank orangeade and played games of chance; we sat by the ocean and felt the cold, surf-soaked wind in our hair. We ducked into a photo booth and made silly faces, giggling.

I never forgot that day.

One day, she brought home the “Saturday Night Fever” album I’d been wanting so badly. A double album, it cost more, but that payday, she’d made it happen.

There were the many, many Christmases. My mother, who had so little, lived for the magic of Christmas. She’d start shopping on January 1, tucking the gifts away in her closet, piles and piles of presents that towered so tall on Christmas morning, the tree was dwarfed.

When she died, her co-workers at that New York City bank brought her a tiny Christmas tree in the heat of August.

In the blistering days before that last day, my mother, in the suffocating heat of her Brooklyn apartment, lay small in her bed, no longer laughing or dancing or able to wear the bright red shoes she loved so much. Her light fading, she stared into the mirror one day at her reflection.

“I look like my grandmother,” she said. “This is no life.”

Desperate to feed her, to cook something, anything that would tempt her to eat, I asked what she wanted. Her voice a whisper, she said, “I’ve been dreaming about Christmas stuffing.”

My mother loved that stuffing. Every holiday, after my grandmother had stuffed the turkey with the family recipe, my mother was at the stove, spoon in hand, ready for a forbidden taste.

It was a rite of passage when, after I was just married, my mother came over with all the ingredients and the familiar recipe written on an envelope to teach me not just about cooking but about carrying on tradition.

And so, on that hot, humid day when she asked for stuffing, I went home to my small kitchen and chopped the celery, cooked the sausage, desperate to get back to my mother. I was rushing, knowing that we had so little time. The celery was undercooked, the pieces too large for my mother, who struggled to eat after months of chemo.

I knew I could have done a better job, if only there had been more time.

But when I finally got back and handed my mother the bowl of stuffing, she took a bite and looked up at me, her smile filled with all the love a mother has for her only child.

“That,” she said, “was the best stuffing I’ve ever tasted.”

In the few hours we had to talk, me by her bedside on the last, suffocating August day, my mother tried to fit it all in, all the words she’d left unsaid. She voiced her regrets.

My mother, who worked for an international bank, told me how sorry she was that she’s never traveled, always afraid to fly.

“I was always so busy working,” she said. “I wish I’d spent more time with you.”

That last night, the call came when it was already dark. An ambulance was coming to take her to hospice. We followed behind, the bright lights fading into the night, becoming smaller and smaller as that ambulance took my mother away.

In the hospice, it was too warm, the heavy scent of lilies permeating the thick air. I kept asking the same question, again and again, to empty faces who had no answer: “We can take her home again, right? My mother is coming home?”

I sat by her bed as my mother stared at the ceiling. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. Then, her head turning, she said, “Oh, you look just like my daughter.”

The call came at 9:22 that night. My mother was gone. My whirling, laughing, dancing mother, forever still.

When I went through her things, looking for the blue dress she loved so much and wanted to be buried in, I found myself back at that wardrobe, staring at that little black notebook.

She was gone now. Could I read it? Would it be breaking some unwritten promise? Did I have the ability to leave it be?

In the end, I picked up the soft black notebook, almost afraid of what dark secrets I’d uncover.

But when I opened the book and began to read, I realized that what my mother had written over so many long months and years, was not scandalous or racy or rife with mystery. It was a journal, pages filled with my mother’s frustration, her loneliness, her struggles with money, her grief at having to work through so much of her child’s life.

“There’s never enough time,” she wrote. “I’m missing it all.”

When I got home, there was a letter from my mother’s insurance company. She’d left me $20,000. A fortune for my mother, who’d never seen that much, or even close, in the bank account so often overdrawn.

And yet. The money, while a windfall for a young mother, wasn’t the greatest gift. What my mother left me, in that little black notebook, was the hard-wrought wisdom of what to do with that money. What to do, to build a life.

I took my little boy to Disney World, just months after receiving that money, that final gift from my mother. When I boarded the plane, I had her little black notebook tucked into my bag. I turned off my cell phone on that trip, left the laptop closed. And I danced with my sweet child at the water’s edge, staring at the setting sun as the ocean spray soaked our hair. We took silly pictures in a photo booth and played games of chance. We drank orangeade.

We had time. Precious time.

I will never forget those days. And, in the end, those words in my mother’s little black notebook, her forbidden journal, were my greatest inheritance.