Good Night, Mother
by Rebecca Sadun

You must have tiptoed in, for I have no recollection of the door opening or the light from the hall piercing the darkness of my bedroom. When I opened my eyes, you were walking towards the foot of my bed, your dark hair falling out of a loose bun and your thin, cotton sweater crookedly buttoned. I closed my eyes and said nothing.

—I love you, Sweet Pea.

—You’re a good girl.

—It’s good to stay sweet, so long as you’re also something more.

—When you’re older and things are different, remember that I taught you everything I knew.

—Give Mommy a kiss.

—Good night, Sweet Pea.

I said nothing. From under gently-closed eyelids, I watched you retreat from the room, watched you close the door softly behind you. At that moment, every inch of my six-year-old body knew I would never see my mother again. I stared through the darkness and cried without making a sound.

What I felt that night was pure. There wasn’t much complexity to my emotions: I was numb and I was hurt and I was sad. But once I fell into a listless sleep, everything changed. Decades later, I feel like part of me is still asleep, still under the influence of flighty dreams. I can no longer tell if my emotions are mine, or if they were bestowed upon me by a dream; I can no longer tell if I feel something because I know it’s what I’m supposed to feel—or because I know it’s what I’m not supposed to feel.

This must be what they mean when they speak of “innocence lost.”

Milk and honey: spilled and sticky. Shoes on—even in the house and on the grass—don’t want to feel too much between my toes. This is what you’ve given me.

I see her on my bed, I hear her whisper, I feel her rise to leave, I smell the door shut and the finger paint fumes strengthen as the sweet odor becomes the only thing that is real. Every day of my life this scene haunts me. A couple of times a year the haunting manifests itself differently: I’m in my daughter’s room, laying a blue dress on the dresser and selecting a pair of white sandals for her to wear in the morning. I look at her sleeping, her mouth not quite shut and her pale blond hair framing her serene features. A couple of times a year, instead of thinking, “I love her,” I think, “I could be gone by morning.” The thought is fleeting; it barely takes form in words before it vanishes. But it scars. For weeks afterwards I feel guilty. I put extra cookies in my daughter’s lunchbox and tiptoe around my house like an unwelcome guest. For weeks. But nothing can help me shed the guilt. My internment always lasts until I am visited by my worst nightmare, the one in which my daughter comes to me in her yellow nightgown and tells me that she’s leaving me. This now ritualistic dream returns me to me.

I once told my sister about the dream. She studied psychology at Harvard and she gave me a lecture on projection. I reminded her that I know my Freud and she reminded me that I’m the only one in the family who still hasn’t recovered. I’m always tempted to point out that she never recovered either—she never had to. She was never broken. She took the anger route, got mad at our mother for leaving us, and was done with it.

Milk and honey: spilled and sticky. I smile sweetly, smile often. But for others—not for myself. This is what you’ve given me.

My husband tells me that if I were anyone else I’d be fine by now. He’s convinced that I’m looking too hard for tragedy. If he only knew that whenever I look at him, my stomach spasms with the thought of him falling out of love. When I look at my daughter, I imagine her getting ill and dying. When I look at myself in the mirror, I imagine myself giving up. Tragedy has me by the coat tails; try as I might to run away from it, I just end up running in circles. I have spent 30 years doing a pirouette on quicksand. And I wonder how much longer it can last.

A Yale degree in English and a neuroscience PhD from MIT—still the best I can do is make words like “pituitary insufficiency” sound poetic. I can’t fix myself. I can tell you why my sister is wrong: She knows her sublimation, but forgets her projection and displacement. I can pinpoint the fallacy in my husband’s understanding of the situation: He subscribes to normative standards of teleology, and people are neither normative nor teleological beings. I also know what to hide from my daughter: She must see only what she needs to—enough and not an ounce more—so that the cycle will not be repeated. I know a lot, but not how to fix myself. Even Freud couldn’t do that.

My favorite professor taught poetry at Yale. I once asked him who he thought to be the greatest poet ever. “Donne,” he replied, as though his answer required no qualification or clarification. I asked why and he smiled. “Genius creates daemons. Poetry is the confrontation of daemons. And beauty is the conquering of daemons. Ah, such beauty is in his words. Poor Donne must have lead a tortured life, but I thank G-d for his pain because his poetry is the greatest beauty my soul has ever seen.”

Milk and honey: spilled and sticky. Skinned knee, twisted ankle, hunger pains—all a blessing, all pain of a different kind. This is what you’ve given me.

“Good night, Sweet Pea,” she says. I say nothing back. Though I salute quantum mechanics for providing a comforting faith in infinite possibilities and for banishing finalities, my salute is purely theoretical. I know finality is the ultimate truth. I learned finality at the age six, when I learned that decisions are like freckles on your skin: You don’t know how they got there, but you do know they’re there for life. Melanin secretions and my mother—they have more in common than my body’s blemishes would like to admit.

“Good night, Sweet Pea,” she says. I say nothing back. This is my greatest daemon.

To be “fixed,” I don’t need promises of peace and prosperity. I don’t even want a flowery finality, I just want the past to be donne. Tonight, I want to stop fostering daemons. Tonight, I want to fight my daemons. Yes, tonight, Mother, I shall make my daemons answer to my poetry:

For all those things I should have said before, I here command the silence be no more.

“Good night, Sweet Pea,” she says tonight, like every other.

“Good night,” I offer in reply. “Good night, Mother.”