"My Mother's Diary" by Linda McMullen

My Mother’s Diary

          My mother’s old diary wasn’t locked, though it bore a pair of looped metal arms awaiting a padlock’s embrace. She had cornered me on a rare weekend trip home. Lonesome weeks had eroded my self-control: I’d felt an unconquerable desire to escape my takeout-container-lined urban lockdown by paddling around the glorified pond near my parents’ house. I yearned for the algae-tinted swamp my paternal grandmother had christened Lake Glissando after her sister, my Great-Aunt Eliza — a classically-trained pianist and persistent grouch — took an operatic spill on its banks in the early ‘90s. But my best childhood memories had involved hanging out there with just Dad (God rest him), pretending to fish and talking about nothing. Which is all to say: I returned to the house of my childhood without adequately reviewing the reasons I’d left.
When I returned from my rowing — windblown, pink-cheeked, achy-shouldered, and in desperate need of a bathroom — Mom had cornered me. Before I understood what was happening, I’d been commandeered, ordered to wade through my cardboard box sea cluttering basement — to dispose of the flotsam and jetsam of high school awards and college photographs. “You can spare me an hour.”
          I gave you life, after all.
She doesn’t have to say it.
This time.
After an initially promising start to the day discussing a new salmon recipe and my sister Dana’s recently adopted rescue cat, the conversation lists toward the prominent, block-letter SIZE 14 label in my coat. It runs aground when she asks me if Derek has called lately. And it capsizes completely when she suggests that perhaps I can eventually meet someone “decent” if I commit to a “healthier” routine before Dana’s wedding.
“I’d better get to the basement!”
I procrastinate with infantile glee by leafing through yellowing yearbooks, then turn to a duct-tape larded box. It’s not mine. Some of Dad’s crumbling scorebooks from coaching Little League; remnants of Dana’s oil-paints phase . . . and my mother’s chronicle. From the magical year she discovered yoga and got a nose job; the year I refused to get confirmed and (unrelatedly) lost my virginity to Derek in the back of his mother’s Ford Focus; the year Dana, ostensibly two years behind me, started college-level math at the local community college and won the freshman girls 400-meter sprint at the state level.
I could pretend that the miniature angel and devil lurking in my lapsed-Catholic subconscious engaged in a pitched moral struggle over whether to horribly violate my mother’s privacy. But that’s just a lie. Frankly, I considered that she had ceded her right to confidentiality when she had squawked, “Fourteen!”
I nestled my neck into a conveniently concave dent in an adjacent box, and began to read.
Sylvia and Jean and Karen went to lunch without me. Karen came to me afterward . . .
Mom and her ancient frenemies adhered to the architectural principle that triangles were strongest; at any given time, three of them were icing out the fourth. That particular story had more twists than Game of Thrones but fewer deaths and no sex, so I skipped ahead.
I gave Dana Great Aunt Eliza’s sapphire earrings but reminded her not to wear them when anyone else could see.
I knew it. Mom claimed that her younger sister Elaine had taken them, but this rang false even to my seventeen-year-old self, who never saw Aunt Elaine wear any jewelry she hadn’t made herself.
Typical of Dana, though, not to mention it.
Ever.
It’s been eighteen years.
Oooh, here we go: Laura reminds me so much of Deborah.
That was one line of my childhood’s refrain, along with you’ve got such a pretty face and you just need more confidence and do you need another brownie? My grandmother — my own mother’s mother-in-law — the said, Deborah — was aware that no one ever needs a brownie. But she knew life was too short to quibble over a second one. Or a third. And she never gave a rat’s ass about my mother’s opinion on the subject.
She’s got that same ornery streak in her. She’s sly and sassy, with that know-it-all attitude —
I’m not hurt. That’s just a fact.
I fear it’s going to prevent her from ever taking real responsibility for her weight . . .
Now I’m afraid that my retinas are going to detach because that last eye-roll may have dislodged something.
. . . or finding the right man, someday.
Aw, Mom, I found the right man in high school. And we’ve been on-and-off for almost two decades. There are tons of married couples who don’t possess that level of stability. Any one of the Kardashians and their designated himbos, for instance.
I skim through the traditional litany of my faults, until I come to the unuttered words finally before me in black and white: God help me, I love her, but I just don’t like her.
“Laura!” calls my mother from upstairs. “How’s it going down there?”
I can’t respond. I can’t even breathe. And yet I don’t feel any sense of panic, or distress. I remember reading in some distant catechism class about Catherine of Siena, who starved herself and prayed and experienced sudden gifts of understanding. I mean, I put down quite the lunch in anticipation of some exercise out on the pond, and I haven’t been to church in months, but that ecstatic sense of revelation . . .
“Laura!” calls my mother, again, concern creeping through the irritation. “Did you find anything useful down there?”
Something more valuable than yearbooks. Or sapphires. Or acceptance. 
Something I can’t quite name, but which is greater than myself, or my mother, or even the two of us together.
“Yeah, Mom!” I call back, finally, but she’s already come downstairs, and she lays into me for wasting my time and hers, and I sort of let the sound wash over me. When she finally pauses for breath, I say, “You know what, Mom? This isn’t happening today. Let’s make brownies.”

linda mcmullen

Linda McMullen is a wife, mother, diplomat, and homesick Wisconsinite. Her short stories and the occasional poem have appeared in over ninety literary magazines. She received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations in 2020. She may be found on Twitter: @LindaCMcMullen.

Headshot: Gerald McMullen

Photo Credit: Staff