The Last Time I Saw My Mother
I hugged her goodbye at the subway station
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“You don’t want to eat that do you?” my mother asked as she snatched the basket of bread away from me and moved it to her side of the table. Exasperated, I rolled my eyes as I usually did and answered, “Oh no, of course not, mother.”
My mother, father and I were at Allen’s on the Danforth for lunch. She was always on me about my weight, even though I was 40 years old and had been living on my own for decades. If I had lost weight from illness or poverty, she couldn’t stop going on about how attractive I had become. If I had gained weight, she would drop hints, or just take food away from me.
My parents were recent transplants to Toronto. They had finally sold their house in Fredericton and moved to a condo in the Beaches. My mother had accomplished her lifelong dream: she had escaped Fredericton, my hometown and the bane of her existence. Toronto was my mother’s dream destination. It was everything Fredericton wasn’t: full of sophisticated people, exciting and fashionable.
I had been living in Toronto for about ten years when she and my father moved. To me, Toronto was expensive and exhausting.
When I was growing up in Fredericton, my mother would often take me to run errands. We’d drive to get groceries and she would hustle past the people hanging around the plaza. When we returned to the car, she would exhale “ugh” and say to me, “Don’t you feel like everyone who lives here is retarded?” Then she and I would laugh raucously: A private mother-daughter moment that I cherished.
Still, she achieved a lot in the town she hated: she went to university, graduated with First Class Honours and then went to law school and practiced criminal law.
On Sunday nights she would come into my room and close the door to braid my hair for school. She always wanted me to look my best, so she would take her time, parting my hair, moisturizing my scalp and give me a coronet of french braids. While she stood over me, she’d tell me about her life and her struggles.
“I’ll tell you why I became a lawyer, my duckie.” She paused. “Status.” She paused again for dramatic effect. “I couldn’t wait to throw it in everybody’s faces.”
She went on, “All those goddamned English department wives. So condescending…and dad, he just doesn’t understand.”
The first time I heard her talk like that I was rapt. I loved being privy to her heartbreaks, her triumphs, her frustrations at being a professor’s wife in a small town with such provincial people. But after the twentieth time, I couldn’t bear it.
I would interrupt her monologue with questions, or turn on the radio to distract her, but these devices didn’t work. I was her audience held captive. After she finished braiding my hair, she would beg me to wear a scarf over my head to protect her handiwork until Monday morning. “Please my duckie. I want your hair to look nice and fresh. I don’t want you looking like ‘you know who’ from across the river.” I knew who she meant. It pained my mother to think that I might be mistaken for one of those poor blacks from the north side of Fredericton. She wanted everyone to know that we belonged to a different class of black people.
But the distinction didn’t matter much here in Toronto because we weren’t the family famous for being Black that we were in Fredericton. We could relax a bit, as we did that late afternoon at Allen’s.
The waitress cleared our lunch plates and asked us if we wanted dessert.
“Yes. I will take a look at the menu,” I answered boldly.
My mother shot me a look.
I looked back at her.
Then I turned to face my father and he smiled and winked at me. My father and I knew my mother’s tactics well. We were veterans with the scars to prove it. I ordered the coconut cream pie with three forks. When it arrived at the table, piled high with whipped cream, we ooohed and aaahed. The three of us ate from the same plate. My mother ate twice as much as me and my dad.
“Oh, you’re certainly enjoying that, aren’t you mother?” I said wryly. She covered her mouth in embarrassment for a second and then started cackling. I loved my mother’s laugh. It was so unabashed and loud. When we went to see the comedy, “As Good As It Gets” in the tiny cineplex in Fredericton, I had to sink deeper into my seat as the people in the row ahead of us turned around to see who the person howling and hissing with laughter might be.
“Mother!” I’d chide, tapping her hand.
But she couldn’t help herself. She simply repeated the line in the movie that made her laugh, tears streaming down her face. I reached for her hand again to hold it.
After we finished at Allen’s, we walked to Broadview Station. My eyes teared from the chill in the air. I was impatient to get home, so I walked slightly ahead and waited to hug them goodbye in front of the newsstand. I would be taking the train west and they east.
The next time I saw my mother she was at Toronto East General Hospital on a breathing machine. She had had a hemorrhagic stroke. As soon as I saw her on the gurney, tears flooded my eyes and refused to stop. All the years of my hardened exasperation melted away in a second.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I kept saying. I did not know this soft version of myself. I wanted to get back to my old self and tell her that the doctor looking after her was called Dr. Inch and he had braces on his teeth and wore acid-washed jeans. I wanted to tell her that as usual, my father looked lost and my brother was being an asshole. I wanted to tell her that her wish had come true, she wasn’t going to die in Fredericton. But I just wept.
I couldn’t believe I was so unprepared for this because my mother talked about dying constantly. She would call me up after a fight with my brother, announcing, “I’m making you the chief executor of my will.” Or apropos of nothing, she would declare that she wanted her entire body donated to science.“My duckie,” she would ask in a kitten voice, “will you wear my fur when I die?” To which I would roll my eyes, as usual, and answer, “Nope.”
But that night, seeing my once formidable mother frail on the gurney, I forgave her for everything.
About the Creator
Daphne Faye
I love to write personal essays. Some are humorous; others are more serious, but they're always heartfelt. I'm also an avid photographer, check me out on Instagram @molelovesbokeh
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