The Lessons We Learn

At every step, I was scared. Ma told me that the little, wooden steps were safe but my knobby knees wouldn’t stop shaking on the way up. She told me that the tree was solid but my eyes could see the ground too far down for my liking. She told me that the wind wasn’t strong enough to knock us over, and I screamed into her chest for an hour. At every step, she was patient. 

We sat in the tiny house in our backyard, hiding from who knows what. I told her I was hiding from the darkness outside, and I asked her what she was hiding from. She didn't reply, but I let her hold my hand and pull me up to the window. We looked out and I realized we had not been hiding but waiting. As the sun peeked out over the horizon, the most incredible shades of pink and orange transfigured the Louisiana swamps into a wonderland. I turned and saw my mother illuminated in sunlight.

I was twelve before I realized there was something wrong with her. Doctors marched into the house like invading foreigners. Every day we waged a new battle. Ma was screaming; she was demure. She was threatening to throw herself out the window; she was reading me Le Petit Prince in bed. 

We had moved back to the south of France five years earlier to stay with Mamie and Pépère. I saw the wrinkles in their faces deepen as the doctors talked in frustrating circles. 

“Je ne comprends pas, pas du tout!” Mamie would shout at them, as I wondered what she was trying to understand. The shouting did not produce answers. Pépère sat at the kitchen table in the mornings with his espresso and pain au chocolat, staring into the Provencal sun so intently I thought he would go blind as a bat. Rinse and repeat.

I grew up missing my treehouse, but the frequent trips to the coasts of Nice were a satisfying substitute. We went weekly, to give mother fresh air and me something to do. Watching the sunsets over the pebbled shores of La Reserve became Friday night tradition.

One Friday, she was particularly bad. We couldn’t go to the beach, Mamie said she didn’t think it was safe. I stewed and brewed. I hate to admit I was impatient, bratty. Why can’t we go? I begged. I was determined to see my friend Claire, a little girl with whom I often frolicked on Friday evenings, while our families mingled politely.

Relentless, I stormed into Ma’s room and found her limp on the ground. My heart raced though I didn’t truly know why. Anger forgotten, I raced to her side and shook her. She blearily opened a teary eye and then closed it. Go away, I’m sleeping now, she said. She had worn herself out; I sighed. My chest relaxed but my hands gripped hers and I sat with her until I too fell asleep. 

From then on, I knew. I think of this as the moment the training wheels came off. I no longer fought with Mamie and Pépère but became one with them, weary and wrinkled with age beyond my years. 

One afternoon, when she was tired from a week of rampaging and throwing out doctors, I brought my mother a picnic in bed. 

“Remember our picnic in the treehouse?” I said.

She took a bite of brie. She nodded.

“When I was six… Remember how we spent all day there?” 

She nodded again.

“You brought a picnic basket full of food. We watched the sunrise and we ate. And then we stayed all day, even when it got cold. You brought blankets.”

“I was hiding from your father,” she stated simply.

I think of this as the moment someone stole the bike altogether. Childhood innocence is lovely until it is ruined by adulthood’s insight. 

Once I was older I had a harder decision to make. Pépère had passed on at the ripe age of 84. His wife left living, but only by definition. Mamie stumbled on for a few years and then followed her husband into eternity, leaving me to take over care duty entirely on my own.

The doctors had prescribed medicines years ago, but Ma hated taking them. A curse of her illness was not wanting to be cured. She saw herself and her illness as inseparable; or perhaps she feared the shell that she might be after all these years. 

On a Saturday in July, as she sat staring blankly out the window, she asked me what I remembered about my father. Very little, I said. Good, she replied. “I never look back.” You never look forward either, I thought to myself.

She continued, “Do you miss Louisiana?” Where is this coming from, I asked. “My head, stupid,” she laughed coldly. 

That night at dinner she told me about the treehouse. She told me how it took thirty whole minutes to hoist me up into the tree, and another forty-five to bring me down. I remembered perfectly but I let her tell the story anyway. The years were beginning to pass quicker than I remembered, and thirty minutes seemed like such little time in the grand scheme of things.

At every step, I doubted myself. I spent too much time with her, I spent too little. I visited every day, I hated visiting. I made her take her medicine and she resented me for it; she was better for it. It was a frustrating cycle and it took all the patience I had in my body. Until one day, I came to visit and saw her lying limp on the ground. This time, I knew why my heart raced, but I walked slowly to her and shut her eyelids. With one sigh of relief, and one of sadness, I saw the light from the window shine one last time on my mother’s beautiful, broken face. 

I sat with her body until the Provencal sun shifted, rays of orange and deep red burning on her skin. I mourned her, but more vividly I mourned the woman she could have been. We both entered the treehouse fearful and hiding. I left with a sense of the world; big, scary, but yielding and patient and wonderful. She left with a lesson: hiding works. She never unlearned it.