Last May I gave my mom a copy of Anne Rivers Siddon's Colony for Mother's Day. I first read it almost ten years ago, just after I had turned twenty. Colony is the story of a summer retreat told by two narrators: Maude and her granddaughter Darcy. We grow up with Maude from a young swamp creature paddling through the South Carolina backwaters, into a Maine wife who has to learn how to survive her mother-in-law, finally becoming one herself. When Maude decides to pass the family's summer home on to her granddaughter, the narration shifts to a young girl's perspective. We hear the same stories spun, this time in the raw, unripened interpretation of a teenager, fifty-some years Maude's junior.   And in the retelling of Maude's life—as I experienced the folly of Darcy's childish version—it occurred to me that my own mother might have had a life before me. She may even have had a life of hopes and plans and thoughts I knew nothing of during me. Reading Colony was the first time I had ever thought of my mother as her own person, rather than defining her by the title of her role in relationship to me.
My mother called me mid-June and said, "I don't want you to get your hopes up about me finishing that book. I tried. I tried twice. I couldn't get beyond the first page. There are just so many words—on every page. And there are so many pages." When I was home over Labor Day I found the book. It still had a perfect, unbroken spine and satin cover.

Reading is only one thing my mother and I disagree about. She does not read for pleasure, cannot understand how I am able to spend time and money in such pursuit. Books annoy her—at least my books do. They are a detour in dusting. They are cluttery, and mine are usually scattered. They are a backache to move. They are a ridiculous expense considering the library will loan them out for free. And they are a hog of time and energy. She does not understand their appeal to me. I do not know that I understand it either. I just know that I feel better among books. I have a physiological response to entering a room full of books—especially old ones with creaky spines and hard-backed covers that emit a whiff of mildew. Nervousness depletes and I feel at ease, comfortable.

At least reading and books rest among a populous—if not pleasant—company of topics and opinions and ideas my mother and I do not seem to agree on. It remains a joke between my parents and me—a chorus really, or popular refrain—volleyed about in pleasant disagreement, that there must have been some sort of switch at the hospital when I was born. This seems to be one of the few likely and plausible explanations for the great gaping disparity between us. One flaw mars this sensible notion though.  Only one other baby, already awaiting my birth, was born in the Hartley Hospital in February of 1971. But he was a boy—named Adam. And his parents thought it would be clever if my parents had named me Eve.

While I was growing up I sometimes wished I were a member of my best friend's family. Andrea had moved to Hartley the summer before we were both enrolled in Mr. Blair's 4th grade class. I did not welcome her that summer in Vacation Bible School, or Sunday school, or at the pool. I tried to keep a well-guarded shield between her and mine—afraid she would upset some delicate balance within my ring of friends. Small towns are often bastions of fierce, territorial possession. But somewhere along the 4th grade, while I was trying to cope with the distress of being assigned the seatmate of this foreign invader, Andrea became my best friend. We sat together, shared everything, and planned our wardrobes to match everyday. I still remember the first time I spent the night at her house. Her mother made lasagna with a technicolor red sauce, composed of the brightest tomatoes ever canned, no spice more daring than salt, topped by an equally vibrant yellow cheese that might have been Velveeta. It gave me my first and only case of heartburn.

After supper (In Iowa, we eat supper in the evening. Dinner is served at noon. And lunch is something eaten between meals.) Andrea and I went outside to play in the first serious snow of the year—mostly to escape her two brothers and the friends each of them had invited to spend the night. They had taken over the basement, which also meant the family room, the only TV, and Andrea's playhouse. The boys were playing darts and watching some pathetic TV remake of Psycho.

Because Andrea's dad was the minister of our church, her family lived in the parsonage; she and her brothers had the privilege of laying claim to the football-field-sized lawn between their house and St. Paul's when it wasn't the venue of church picnics or Vacation Bible School activities. That lawn was also where the elder who scooped the church parking lots dumped the excess snow. That night Andrea and I built a snow fort at the peak of a careening frozen mountain. While we created and constructed our Eskimo abode, we tried to determine the best strategy for convincing her parents to let us spend the night in our igloo, partly for the adventure of it, partly for the story we would have to tell on Monday morning, and mostly to be free of the aggravation of four Hitchcock-inspired, junior-high boys. But as we lay on our backs, in the snow and the dark, with only the faint glow of the far-off moon and street lights, planning how best to go about our persuasion, we looked up and recognized a patch of snow on the roof of the church that lay in some eerie, uncanny silhouette of Abraham Lincoln. It was spooky and frighteningly real enough for us to debate abandoning our architectural triumph, to return to four Psycho-watching boys. We had to choose between Abe and Alfred. We chose Alfred and any threats those teen-age boys might conjure rather than spend one moment longer with Abe, who honestly seemed to have some ghostly agenda for us.

We ran into the kitchen, where Andrea’s mother had just made popcorn. Leona promised us that if we remained upstairs, not only would she keep the boys away from us, but tomorrow we could have the basement, with the playhouse and the TV to ourselves. And then she offered to read to us. No consideration was necessary. Nothing was left to ponder or debate. No boys had been reason enough for me to remain free and clear of the basement. But Leona reading to us was a lagniappe better than getting whatever lay behind curtains One, Two, AND Three. We piled into Andrea's bed, with the head and footboards her grandfather had carved. The popcorn rested between us, and Leona read Libby's Step Family. The next day instead of playing downstairs when the basement was finally boy-free, Leona read some more. And Sunday afternoon I came back and we finished our book. I knew that I seemed to fit there—somehow better than in my own family.
 
 

It was not that my mother had never read to me. She didn't anymore now that I was in the 4th grade. She still read to my younger sister, and sometimes I would listen. But I didn't particularly care for the choice of books the five-year gap between Jamie and me made popular for her. Sometimes my mother read to us in the car during long trips to Michigan and Colorado that we forever took to visit Dutch relatives during holiday seasons. She started when it seemed our fighting in the backseat was sure to get out of hand and stopped as soon as her carsickness took over. Then I usually hauled out my own books again and was able to ignore Jamie for another fifty or hundred miles. Inevitably though, this lead to bickering between my mother and me. She took issue with the fact that I read so much in the car. She didn't think it could possibly be good for my eyes to read that much while scenery was whizzing by in my peripheral. And of course, since reading made her car sick, she was quite sure it would make me carsick too. But the biggest reason she lobbied against my reading on our trips was that I was missing the scenery she and my father had arranged and financed for us to see—all because my nose was stuck in some book that I could read at home. She wondered why our family even bothered to take vacations when all I did was read my way through them. But, the problem with starting a trip from Iowa is that regardless of the direction you travel you have to go through several cornfield—corn-filled—states before you see anything different: Nebraska, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Missouri, all those "I" states—all filled with identical and fraternal rows of corn.

The irony of all our arguing about my incessant reading is that it was my mother who had first encouraged me to read. When I had been very young my mother read to me a great deal. She started when I was just months old. In the evenings when she got home from work she pulled me on her lap and read. She said it calmed some inherent fussiness dominant in my character. And of course there were more stories every night before bedtime. I wouldn't go to sleep without them. I still can't.  She bought me books, packed them along where ever we went, knowing that a book could usually stop a tantrum. I still take a book with me wherever I go. Usually I do not need it. But if I do not have a book with me, inevitably there is some yawn of time I will need to occupy.
 
 

Almost two years ago, Andrea’s mother died of heart burn—acid reflux they call it now, to make it seem almost as glamorous as the sanitation technicians that used to just be garbage men. It was supposed to be a simple procedure—minor the doctors said. But the surgeon did not tie the stitches tight enough, and when the acid fluxed, it leaked into her chest cavity where it attacked her asthma-weakened lungs. She died three days later to everyone's—including her own doctor's—surprise. Andrea's dad came home from work to find her peaceful in the chair.
 

When I was thirteen my Grandma Westerman died.  She had cancer. Both her illness and her death were long and drawn out with trips to the doctor, to chemotherapy, and months in the hospital. We sold her house, and moved her and Grandpa into a retirement home, preparing and waiting for her to die.

She was my dad's mother. His family is Dutch, from a Dutch town and a Dutch school and, most importantly, a Dutch church. My mother's family is German, from a public school in a German town and, to our discredit, a German Lutheran church. My mother's family always made fun of my sister and me for being half-Hollander and my father's family never quite forgave us for tainting our Dutch heritage.   Except for Grandma Westerman. It never seemed to bother her. She never had any snide, backstabbing comments about us not being Christian Reformed, or not going to school at Hull Western Christian. She did not seem to be convinced that the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and the public school system, with their loose moral ways, would condemn us. And when Grandma Westerman was around nobody else said anything either. She was always happy to see us. Every Sunday afternoon in between the morning services and the evening services of the Christian Reformed churches that she and my grandfather and all my Dutch aunts and uncles and cousins went to, she pinched our cheeks and hugged us and asked how her sweeties were. And then she served an afternoon lunch of Dutch Lace cookies, or banket, or jan hagel and tea on paper-doily-lined trays that we had to balance on our knees.

But then Grandma Westerman got cancer. We all knew she was going to die. We were just waiting for her to go. I remember people saying what a relief it would be when she did; that finally she would be out of her pain. Most of the time Grandma was in the hospital. Then we would visit her almost every night, wondering if this would be the last time we would see her, Jamie and I wondering if we should be happy about that since everyone seemed to think her dying would be for the best.
One Saturday morning just before her death, my mom took my sister and me to see her. Somehow I knew something was up because my dad always came with us. But he was in the field that October morning trying to get as much work done as he could before it might rain or snow. So we were without him, and I knew that our visit was purposeful and premeditated, even though no one had warned me.

We got to the hospital and had to find Grandma's new room. She had just been moved again and she was waiting for us. My mother made some awkward chit-chat before she was able to excuse herself to run to the store while we had our visit with Grandma. I just stood there—a foot or two away from the end of her bed—and waited for her to begin, wondering what had motivated this private audience. Jamie snuggled as close to Grandma as the tubes and machines and her threshold for painful contact would allow. Jamie always was cuddlier than I. And then Grandma started to talk.

She told us that when my parents had decided to get married there had been a lot of argument about which church they would belong to. Their wedding was the first time in either my dad's family or my mom's that someone had married a person of a different culture or faith. Somehow joining another church, which would also determine which school to send any future children, seemed to betray both families. Two factors had swayed my parents’ decision in favor of becoming Lutheran. First, my mother's father was dying. He had emphysema, and he plagued my mother with guilt at the thought of her leaving the church in which she had been raised. Second, we lived in Hartley, the eastern most edge of all those Dutch towns that filled the three counties to the west of us. Hartley had a Christian Reformed church, but no parochial school. We could go to the grammar school in Sanborn, only eight miles away. But once we graduated junior high, we would have to drive fifty miles to the nearest town with a Christian Reformed high school. That was a commitment my parents were unwilling to make and it didn't seem right to commit half-heartedly. So, my father joined the Lutheran church and Jamie and I went to public school.

When my mom and dad told their families they had decided on the Lutheran church, a great cry rose up—two great cries, actually. One of jubilation from my German uncles and aunts that we would not be leaving the House of Luther. And one of outrage from my Dutch uncles and aunts that we would have the temerity to leave the House of Calvin. But Grandma Westerman said nothing. She just went to the Lutheran church every Sunday for a month, scheduled an appointment to speak with the minister, and made a study of Luther and his practices. Then she pulled my parents aside, away from the quivering, angry, high-riding noses of my Dutch aunts, and gave them her blessing. And for the thirteen years that I had known her, Grandma Westerman seemed fine with that.

Until one Saturday morning in October while she lay in her deathbed, when she had to set her conscience to rest by knowing that Jamie and I had been taught by Luther all that her other grandchildren had been taught by Calvin. She quizzed us on the Ten Commandments, on Bible verses, and the tenets of our faith. All so her mind would be put to rest and she could die content that her Lutheran granddaughters shared the same faith as her Reformed grandchildren.

And all the while she quizzed us, making sure we knew to honor our father and mother that it may be well with thee and thou mayest live long on the earth, my mind raced with two screaming thoughts. One, she was betraying us. All those years she had let us think she was the one person to whom this never mattered. And two, I knew she had never quizzed my Dutch cousins like this. I did my best not to cry or scream with outrage all in an effort to pretend that I understood and that it was OK.
Fifteen years have passed. I still haven't quite forgiven my Grandma.
 
 

When Leona died, a hole unraveled in my soul. It had been eighteen years since she gave me heartburn and then made it up to me by reading her voice hoarse. Since then she had become my friend, not just my friend's mother. She taught me how to weave baskets, and paint, and how to sew my own angel for the top of the Christmas tree. One of my favorite memories of Leona was the three hours she spent one afternoon trying to create appropriate-looking hats for the Mr-&-Mrs-Snowman-Christmas-tree-ornament inspiration that had brought me to her basement.  Leona and I even had our own book club. We loved historical Southern fiction, like North and South and The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Gone With The Wind.

But along with loss and a loneliness I had never really experienced before at anyone's death (the only other dead person I really knew was my Grandma Westerman) was some small sense of guilt. The week before she died I had been home from Chicago, a nine-hour drive from the Windy City. My Grandma Harders mentioned that Leona had hoped I would be able to stop to see her while I was home. I never went. A couple of years earlier, Leona and her husband had moved to Ida Grove, an hour south of Hartley. I did not have the energy to drive there to see her. But one week later, at 6:30 on a Friday morning when my mother called with the news that Leona had died, I drove the nine hours straight to her house to be with her family.
In the last two years I have spent a great deal of time missing and thinking about Leona. Not a day goes by that I don't think about her and how unfair it was that she died so young—and how ridiculous it was that she died from acid indigestion. I think I have thought about her more dead than I did when she was alive. At first I thought the reason her death overwhelmed me was because I had taken her for granted.

Then it occurred to me that maybe this was about my mother. Maybe I was mourning my own mother in Leona's death—mourning what my mother and I did not share. Maybe I was feeling guilty for not sharing the same kind closeness with my own mother as I felt for Leona. Maybe I was scared about what I would do, how I would feel—the regret—at my own mother's death.

Another Mother's Day is almost upon us. The book that I had hoped would speak for me a year ago failed. I've had the revelation that she is her own person aside from mother and wife, but I still do not really know who that woman is. Maybe I'm not supposed to. Maybe the hurdles of "mother" and "daughter" are not to be, cannot be, leapt.
I had hoped Colony would tell her what I am unable to articulate. I still do not feel closer to my mother. I want to. I just do not know how to get there on my own.

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