I have been thinking about boarding school all day (more on that non-sequitur in a moment), but really, this belongs under the umbrella heading "ways my thinking/perspective have changed since I became a pregnant person".
Back to boarding school. (I know you're dying to know what crazy train of thought my pregnant brain has wrought. Or not.) My mother was adopted as a toddler (1-ish?) and her mother (Elizabeth, she dubbed herself, after the Queen, natch- she was an Anglophile) was something of...oh how do you say? An evil bitch? Completely unfit to be a mother? Someone with unwashed socks instead of a heart? Something like that.
Elizabeth sent my mother to boarding school when she was 5. (My mother's father did not figure into the decision making equation. Distinguished in his professional life, he was a total cipher at home.)
A boarding school that was within walking distance of home. WALKING DISTANCE PEOPLE.
Every Friday afternoon my mother's nanny would walk to boarding school, pick her up for the weekend, and they would walk home. Come Monday morning, the route would be reversed. Many of the children at the school were day students, so that was certainly an option, but Elizabeth elected to have her live away from home. Anglophile that she was, this was a British-style boarding school, so one can imagine how warm and affectionate an atmosphere it provided.
Yesterday I was in the car, and I realized that at some point Bunting (who, let's remember, is not born yet) will go to Kindergarten. And I wept. (Note: I am not a weeper. Pregnancy has fixed this. It is disconcerting and embarrassing, but totally beyond my control.) Then I realized that some day he will go to college, and NOT LIVE WITH ME, and then I really wept. As my sister would put it, sinus infection crying.
AND THEN I remembered that my mother was sent to boarding school. Now, this is not new information. I have known this for many years. The details of my mother's life story, which make 'The Joy Luck Club' seem like a snoozer of a technical manual, have emerged in dribs and drabs over the years. For instance: a few years ago she mentioned to F that as a child she A) had a German Shepherd as a pet and B) was once kidnapped, albeit briefly, for ransom. WHAT!!?!?!? I am your daughter for 30+ years, and neither of these ever came up? That is how Mama shared information.
All this time, pre-Bunting, I have always shook my head and thought "Man, that Elizabeth was a cruel woman. Within walking distance! Unbelievable." Intellectually sad on my mother's behalf, and certainly outraged. That was about it. But now? Now that motherhood is impending and I am so in love with this fetus, this child I have not even met yet? It is almost unfathomable. I see kindergarteners at work every day, and they are so little, so chubby and soft and still with a patina of baby-ness. I can't imagine sending my child away, yet having him so close. I think of what it must have felt like for my mother, and it is almost unbearable. What it must have felt for 5 year-old Mama to be left behind, knowing her beloved nanny and mother and father were just a few blocks away. And I begin to understand, at this late date, why she held me and my sister (but especially me) so close, so smotheringly close. Why as a child we shared a bed for so long, why she never let me out of her sight, why she chewed my food for me and rocked and sang me to sleep every night long into my school years.
The abandoned 5 year-old inside of her demanded that she do these things, demanded that she right the wrongs of her childhood. Just as I vow to teach Bunting how to fall asleep on his own (so he will not wrestle with insomnia as I have), how to be brave and confident about being in the world (so that he will not be cripplingly terrified of leaving his mother's side, as I was), to feed himself and embrace and enjoy food with gusto (so that eating food will not be a terrible, corrosive, power struggle, as it has been for me).
No matter what craziness my mother inflicted upon me over the years, I always knew, without a doubt, that she thought she was doing the right thing. I always knew she was doing these things out of love. I knew without question that she loved me. Not all children can say that. I hope that years down the road, Bunting will feel the same of me.
No comments:
Post a Comment