One Box at a Time

While I was neck deep in a second marriage I shouldn’t have made, doing all the things that a young mom needs to keep up with and whining on the phone periodically to my own mother, her health collapsed.

Only a best friend might have been able to stop her death. In those days, with the Women’s Movement flexing its muscles among college students and taking on politics with strong-minded older women, it still took a lot of nerve to question your own doctor. I’d lucked out — found for myself a young woman doctor who saw childbirth as healthy and encouraged me to have my second baby at home, in my own bed. But for Mom, the doctor’s visit we’d encouraged only embarrassed her: “He says it’s all in my head. That the bleeding is normal.”

Mom’s “head” by then was giving us all a lot of hassle. Lonely in the suburbs, and facing a truth that the rest of us had hints about but either ignored or pretended was harmless — Dad’s unquenchable thirst for extramarital sex — she dosed her coffee with vodka (“it has no odor”) and made long weepy phone calls to me across some 400 miles: “You know I lo-o-ve you, honey,” she’d croon sloppily, and I’d say I loved her too, feeling that I owed her for the time she spent listening to my exasperation and anger. Why couldn’t my husband be an active partner, instead of always having his back “go out” and roaring impatiently at our toddler, making him cry?