Mom Wrecker
by Michaela Di Cesare
Nothing feels better than someone else’s mother saying she’s proud of me. I instantly regress to a blissful embryonic state, suspended in warm amniotic admiration.
I maintain a rotation of women in their sixties that I let take me out to lunch. They mostly critique my work and ask about future projects. They tell me how far I’ve come. Most of them say they’ve always known I’d do great things. What makes me feel most exemplary is that they all have daughters of their own.
There’s Margaret, a retired journalist. We talk about interior design and international travel. Margaret and her daughter are estranged but she calls sporadically to yell at Margaret about her maternal failings. We laugh together at the absurdity of mother-daughter relationships even though I can tell Margaret is hurting. I appreciate that she keeps things light.
Paula is a retired politician. She was a Minister for the riding where I grew up. In my early career, she made an official declaration at the National Assembly about my writing. She called me a “bright voice of the second generation” and thanked me for my significant contribution to Italo-Canadian culture. I received a plaque and enough external validation to keep me writing through my twenties. Paula’s daughter lives on a yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean. They don’t speak often.
I only see Rose when I’m out of town. She lives in North Bay but has travelled to meet me at my readings in Toronto and as far as Ottawa. No matter the city, we always have breakfast at her hotel the next morning where she encourages me to order the sweet options I usually avoid. Rose originally tracked me down on Facebook after coming across an article about me on the CBC’s page. She’s a retired schoolteacher who has finally pursued her dream of writing novels. Every time I see her she brings me a new book and I read it on the way home, fantasizing about a reality in which I was raised by a woman who could see life through Rose-coloured glasses, if you’ll allow me the cliché. Rose’s daughter lost her husband suddenly, just a few months after the birth of their first child. Rose has been helping her through the grieving process and helping to raise the baby. Despite all that, she maintains an optimistic view on life that I admire greatly.
The fact that these women seek me out as a salve and hold me up as an ideal makes me feel luminous, attractive, and desirable.
“You see,” says a voice from deep inside me, “I am a desirable daughter.”
Today I’m having lunch with Abby Swanson, my first surrogate mother before this became a bit of a habit of mine. Eventually my appetite became so ravenous that I saw every middle-aged woman with a liberal arts education who gave me any amount of attention as a conquest-in-waiting. I needed to win over their affection no matter the cost. This led to some poor decisions in mentorship and a phase where I sacrificed bits of myself for women who had decided from the start they were never going to respect me.
Abby wasn’t like that. She always seemed genuinely excited by exactly who I was—even when I was a seventeen-year-old with bad highlights and unearned confidence in her English class at Dawson College.
Before Abby’s class, I never thought to be embarrassed of my mother. When I was in high school, she was the most popular mom in my group of friends. She was the funny mom. The hot mom. The mom who talked to us about sex. The mom who wore rhinestones and leopard print like she was one of us. “Your mom is the best” is something I heard over and over again—and I agreed. We went shopping together once a week. Her love language was buying me whatever we could get with twenty dollars. I always came up with creative ways to spend it. Once, I picked out a crystal doorknob for my bedroom door.
Sometimes we watched Gilmore Girls together while chugging iced coffees. My mom ran a small business like Lorelei. I was a bookworm like Rory. It didn’t occur to me when I was a teenager that the mother on our aspirational TV show started out with a prestigious education, old money, and New England connections. While her family might have experienced a reverse voyage, docking at the Sorrento marina for summer holidays, Lorelei Gilmore did not arrive in America on a boat.
It certainly never occurred to me to be ashamed of that. Not even when the French Canadian customers at our restaurant made fun of her accent. I thought they were idiots. No, I didn’t feel shame until I was seventeen years old sitting in Introduction to the Novel. When we were prompted to introduce ourselves, a red-headed student with a mature voice casually mentioned that her mom had been our professor’s professor at McGill. Then, oozing even more nonchalance, she mentioned that she had already read one or two of the novels on the syllabus. Meanwhile I was scanning titles I’d never heard of before, my face burning. Moll Flanders? Who’s that? Anything to do with the poppy fields?
In an instant I was painfully aware of everything I didn’t know. Not only did other people’s parents read books and talk to their children about them, some people’s parents were actual authorities in literature! Whenever I asked my mom to take me to a bookstore as a child she would complain that books made her head hurt, though she did begrudgingly take me to the Saint-Leonard library on a few occasions.
When I was in third grade, I handed in a short story about the night my Nonna passed away from cancer. The teacher accused me of having had help at home. I cried and insisted I had written it myself. My mother was called in. She read my story, sitting between the principal and my Doubting Thomas of a teacher. I hadn’t shown my mother the story. It was her first time reading it and as she did, tears flowed down her face. In that moment I came to associate my mother’s emotions with the ultimate goal of my writing. If I couldn’t move her to tears, what was the point? And then protectively, instinctively, my mother looked my educators in the eyes and said, “My daughter wrote this. Nobody but my daughter could have written this.”
#
“Bella, I read your draft.” Abby has a way of looking at me as though the pride she feels for me might explode from her eye sockets. I often get lost in her emerald gaze, stunning against her pale skin and pink cheeks. I find it soothing that she always wears green earrings and a green scarf to match her eyes. A quirk of my anxiety is that I feel soothed by matching colours.
“And?” I say eagerly. I’ve been hungrier for this feedback than for the exquisite truffle risotto we enjoyed with twin glasses of Tuscan red wine. We always meet at Gentile in Westmount. I prefer to eat Italian food as far away as possible from where my family’s business was. It feels like less of a betrayal this way.
“It’s magnificent. Your voice is getting stronger and stronger. The structure is audacious. It flows so well and the ending is completely unexpected. I like the way you took the tropes we expect in first-generation mother-daughter relationship stories and subverted them. I don’t know what else to say…this was ambitious, hilarious, edifying, brilliant…”
I’m swimming in her words. My face feels hot in the best way. Abby adores me so much she named a character in her last novel after me. Her college professor protagonist has a precocious student named Bella who the teacher predicts will be very successful one day.
“You just have to keep going, Bella. And I know you will. I had such a terrible argument with Sarah the other day.”
I usually love when my surrogates talk to me about their daughters. I’ve received some flattering comparisons delivered as confessions, things that will only be said out loud once and then never again. I take these tiny victories and hold them close to my heart. With Abby, however, I am less amenable to the topic. I must admit I’ve been jealous of Abby’s daughter at times. She has everything I could ever have wanted: a mother highly regarded in the literary profession, her mother’s pure unadulterated devotion, and an ivy league education (not to mention she inherited the eyes). As much as Abby adores me, when she talks about her daughter I see the familiar pride in her eyes multiply tenfold. There is an embodied aspect to the praise, such that without explicitly saying it, the timber of her voice, the movement of her hands, the curling of her lips into a wide grin all tell me that Sarah is her most prized creation.
“She’s younger than you. This is her time to really give it a go. I mean, she’s such a brilliant poet. It was not easy to get into the MFA at Harvard, you know? I did everything I could to support her through that. And now suddenly she loves the good guy with the good job and she wants to start a family, so she’s taken this steady gig where she can get maternity leave. I think she’s got five years at least before she should be worrying about that. Would you talk to her?”
I’m five years older than Sarah. I should be worried about that. “Me? What would I say?”
Abby laughs as though it’s obvious what I should say. “Talk about what I’ve always admired in you. You didn’t let anything come before your career. Whatever it cost you. You write about it more eloquently than I can say. The strained relationship with your mom, delaying or opting out of motherhood. You’ve been fearless, stubborn.”
This time my face feels hot in the worst way. I recognize that I’m moments away from a torrent of tears and the only way I can find to avoid them is to be utterly awful.
“Yeah, well, I wish I had a Harvard degree to waste, but seeing as how my family business was lasagna and not literature, I had a hell of a long way to go. And now I have retired working class parents to worry about who don’t have a government pension to fall back on. Even if I wanted to slow down and consider my options, I can’t.”
#
“The dates usually make me feel better. I don’t know why today was different.”
“You don’t?” My therapist, Dr. Singh, squints this way when wants to imply I’m full of shit. But, as Abby pointed out, I am stubborn. Testa dura as they’d say in Calabria, where my mother was born.
“No.”
“Well, you reached out yesterday to schedule this emergency therapy session, but you didn’t cancel your lunch with Abby.”
“Yeah, because I wanted to feel better.”
“But you don’t feel better.”
“No.”
“And you didn’t tell Abby what’s going on with your mom?”
“No. That’s my rule. I don’t talk about my mom with the other women.”
“Not even now?”
“Especially not now.” I look out the window and see a light dusting of snow has started to accumulate on Saint Denis Street. I think how lucky it is I never moved any farther away from home than slightly east of Saint Laurent. I’ll be close enough to the hospital this way.
“Do you remember how you reacted to the news of her diagnosis?” Dr. Singh’s words bring me back to my computer screen.
“No. Yeah. I cried. Not in front of her. I couldn’t. She was falling apart. But later. In the shower.”
“What do you think would have happened if you cried with her?”
I pause, unable to remember the last time I’d been genuinely vulnerable with my mother. I decide it’s irrelevant. “There was no need to put her through that. She needed me to comfort her and that’s the way it’s going to be now. Again. That’s the way it always is.”
“What do you mean it’s going to be like that again?”
“My mother has been rehearsing her death since I was a child and my Nonna passed. I can’t begin to tell you the number of times my Dad and I had to sit vigil with her for days on end while she waited for routine medical results. I remember this one time, we went to Parc Maisonneuve for a picnic. I was probably around ten years old. My dad and I nibbled guiltily on sandwiches while she cried. She eventually held me close, so close her tears were drenching my bread and told me I’d have to bravely live without her. Whatever that was about, turned out to be fine. Seeing as here we are twenty-five years later.”
“She probably holds a lot of fear,” Dr. Singh points out compassionately. I hate when she’s compassionate to people who aren’t me.
“No kidding. And I’m in therapy for that fear. And the worst is that it’s become a self fulfilling prophecy. Now she has stage IV aggressive gynecological cancer, just like her mother. How do you get someone to stop being anxious when their fears inevitably come true?”
“Sounds like that upsets you.”
“It does! And the worst part is that now I can’t be angry.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because now she has cancer so she has a free pass for all of it. And I pretty much become an asshole for thinking any of this. I’m the spoiled brat who goes to lunch with other moms and then cries about it because, why, because my mom doesn’t talk about my work? Sounds pretty fucking insignificant now.”
“That sounds like a lot of self-judgment.”
“And now I have to stop birth control and do all this genetic and hormonal testing. Oh and if it’s positive, there goes my uterus. I thought I still had pregnancy on the back burner. Just in case.”
Dr. Singh holds her hand up like a crossing guard whenever I’m spiralling.
“Hold on. One thing at a time. Would you like to be pregnant?”
“I don’t know! How ethical is it to bring a human into this world who is going to feel such an enormous obligation to you?”
“Is that what you feel? An obligation?” Dr. Singh never misses the opportunity to force me to articulate my amorphous feelings.
“Well, yeah.”
“How so?”
“That’s how it is. I’m an only child. I’m going to have to take care of her now. Any fantasies I had of her coming through for me—finally coming to a reading, or being emotionally available to me, not gonna happen.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I know. I’ll take her to appointments, organize her treatment, be the emotional support pillar I’ve always been. Did I ever tell you about that time I was five years old and I was being wheeled into the surgery to have my adenoids removed? I was terrified, but she was crying so much that I had to sit up in bed and smile and tell her that everything was going to be okay.”
“What would it look like if you didn’t do any of that? If you decided, for example, that your father would be the primary caregiver?”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have to do these things.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the best placed to do them. If I don’t do it…look what’s happened already. She doesn’t get diagnosed for a year and half? She needs me to advocate for her.”
“So, how do the reasons you gave me for doing all this for your mother compare to the reasons you might have not to do it?”
I take an even longer pause this time. I have no idea what this woman wants me to say.
“…No…the reasons not to do it don’t compare to the reasons to do it. There would be no good reason to maliciously withhold…”
Dr. Singh does the little squint again. “Not maliciously, but you had concerns about your boundaries and your short-term goals.”
“Yeah, but, that’s not a reason not to.”
“It’s as much a reason as the ones you gave me for taking on your mother’s care, and yet you seem to have made up your mind.”
“Yeah…I have.” I notice that the snow on the street outside has accumulated at an impressive rate.
“Alright, so explain to me how you’ve arrived at that decision.”
“Because obviously nothing else matters. None of the stupid whining that I’m doing matters because she’s my mother and I love her.”
“Bella.”
I’m sobbing now and it’s all Dr. Singh’s fault.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say that about your mom."
I start sob-yelling at the computer screen, “Of course I love her. It’s not a breakthrough. She wouldn’t piss me off like this if I didn’t love her.”
“Exactly.” Dr. Singh looks very pleased with herself.
“I didn’t pay two hundred dollars for you to get me to say I love my mother like I’m finally admitting it to myself or something.”
#
I usually stand outside the door while she uses the bathroom in the chemo room. The sign on the door says PATIENTS ONLY due to toxic exposure risk. Before the first treatment six months ago, I had to promise the pivot nurse I was not pregnant. She said she wouldn’t let me into the treatment room if I was. Today, my mother calls me into the bathroom. She’s tangled in the IV cord and I need to flush for her.
Once I’ve settled her back into the chemo chair and plugged in the pump, I excuse myself to go to the visitor’s bathroom outside the unit. First, I vomit. And then I cry, silently but intensely, for exactly two minutes (I’ve taken to setting timers). I bring back a cafeteria coffee split into two cups—she complains when I buy two—and set them down on the tray in front of her. Then I fix the pink head scarf that has started to slip, revealing a thin halo of stubborn stragglers. Her eyelashes are still long and thick. When I’m done with the scarf, I pat her on the head which immediately feels ridiculous but also right.
“While you were gone the nurse asked me what you do for a living because you asked so many intelligent questions.”
“Oh?” I say, my face instantly feeling hot. “What did you say?”
“I didn’t know how to say it in French.”
I let out the breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding and start to unwrap the lunch I packed onto her tray.
“But I said it in English. And then she said something, I don’t remember the word she used, but it means you’re a person of talent. And I said oui.”
“That’s nice,” I say, and the nausea washes over me again.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Creator photo by Julian Stamboulieh
Michaela Di Cesare is an author, playwright, screenwriter, and actor. Plays include the extensively toured solo show 8 Ways my Mother was Conceived, In Search of Mrs. Pirandello (2016 WildSide Festival Centaur Theatre), Successions (2017/2018 Centaur Theatre season, Outstanding New Text METAs 2018), FOMO or Fear of Missing Out (Geordie Productions 2019/20, Outstanding New Text Nomination METAs 2020), and Extra/Beautiful/U (Infinithéâtre 2023/2024 season). Up next is her spaghetti western Mickey & Joe (Good. Bad. Dirty. Ugly), followed by Hot Blooded Foreigner (commissioned by Tableau D’Hôte Theatre). @michamusing on Instagram and Twitter. michaeladicesare.com