Why Leah McLaren’s mother feared a ‘Mommie Dearest’ treatment in her new memoir ‘Where You End And I Begin’

After breakfast that first day in New York, my mother and I walk the High Line then weave through Chelsea Market, poking into shops and galleries. I hold up a T-shirt that says, I spent my thin years thinking I was fat. Mum says she spent her youth thinking she was old. She laughs, then we both do.

We go out for a fancy brunch at a private members’ club where we sit in tufted leather chairs and order eighteen-dollar Bloody Marys chilled with fat balls of ice and garnished with six different kinds of pickled vegetables on toothpicks. The buffet is a royal wedding feast: platters of prawns the size of baby fists; avocados stuffed with crab; oysters on the half shell; a quail inside a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey, carved by a man in a puffy white hat. There are eight different kinds of salad. I would move to New York, I tell my mother once we have sat down, just for the salad.

After we eat, I show Mum a video Rob has just sent me of the boys getting ready for school. “Hullo, poo-poo head Mummy!” Solomon says, then they take turns poking out their tongues at the screen. “Don’t forget to buy us presents!”

I talk to my mother about how much easier Frankie seems than his older brothers did as toddlers, then find myself wondering aloud if this is in fact a self-involved misperception? Perhaps as “experienced” parents we’re like zoo animals — hostages who’ve grown so accustomed to the routines and rhythms of captivity we no longer remember the pleasures of the wild. Mum laughs and agrees that yes, it’s probably the latter.

Irrespective of the reason, I say, things are getting better — easier somehow. Rob has started getting up with the boys in the mornings and making breakfast. It’s amazing how this minor adjustment in our division of labor, him doing one meal a day, waking me gently with coffee in bed, has made a tangible difference in our marriage. He’s more engaged. I’m less resentful. Ultimately, I think we might make a good team, I say to my mother, who raises an eyebrow. The Bloody Mary is humming in my veins making me loquacious. Reckless and giddy with sentiment. It’s been difficult since Frankie’s birth. My mother knows this. His entrance was early and violent. The last bit involved a vacuum and scalpel, forceps and a wailing alarm that summoned a crowd of trainee doctors who piled into the birth room like a somber Broadway chorus line. They blocked the view of the limp bluish creature on the table to whom an obstetrician was affixing a doll-sized mask attached to a tiny plastic air pump. Rob sat to my left, gripping my trembling hand. For most of an hour we sat there watching the residents watch the consultant doing things we could not see to our son. I will never forget how calm and studious they were, like a flock of intelligent and curious birds. Necks craning, shoulders shifting under smooth white coats as they jotted down notes and looked on with interest, guessing at the outcome.

Three years and two surgeries later Frank and I have both recovered. I am working again and Frankie, well. He’s a bespectacled leftie with barely there dimples and a smile that swallows his head. As a baby he slept like a lamb. Later he gave up the breast, then his bottle, his nappies, followed by his crib and stroller with an insouciant shrug. He roared into nursery, then big school without so much as a wave or a kiss. His first word was More! Spoken in reference to garlic mashed potatoes, it sums up his approach to life. His absurdly boundless enthusiasm delights his brothers and father, but to me, the person who was both the driver and vehicle in the car wreck of his birth, Frank seems a genuine boy wonder. I decide to tell my mother a secret — a private cherished conviction I haven’t shared with anyone, not even Rob, out of superstition. I don’t want to jinx it.

Frank seems proof of something I’d not thought possible: that joy can be born of trauma. That sometimes, without apparent effort, suffering and horror can be sloughed off the human psyche like water shaken from a dog. I have no idea why or how it happened, just that this is how it is with Frank. As I confide in my mother my eyes prickle and a tightness gathers in my throat. It’s the jet lag, I say, wiping my nose on my sleeve. I shake my head, laughing, overwhelmed by sudden joy.

Across the table my mother regards me coolly.

After a pause she says, “You know Basil’s an early bird. Five a.m., every morning, like clockwork.”

I nod slowly, uncertain where she’s going with this.

“He cooks every meal and brings me coffee in bed. Every. Single. Morning.”

“That’s lovely,” I say.

My mother has told me this before of course; the question is, why is she repeating it now? I do a quick mental rifle through our conversation before realizing she’s still stuck at the part where I told her about Rob making breakfast.

“He’s so nurturing,” she continues. “He takes such good care of me. It’s wonderful. I remind myself every day not to exploit it. His goodness, I mean.”

“I’m so happy for you, Mum. I’m so glad you have each other.”

There’s a pause, then she says,“You know, my therapist thinks it was hard for you when we got married. Harder than you like to admit. She thinks …” My mother drifts into silence then mutters that it doesn’t matter.

“Go on,” I say.

“I just wish you and Basil were closer. I love you both so much.”

I nod again slowly, saying nothing. Mum closes her eyes and twitches her head to one side, wincing slightly as if responding to a sound only she can hear. I get up from the table and walk over to the buffet, where I scoop up shredded kale with a heavy silver serving spoon and deposit it onto my plate. I lift a cut crystal jug, tilting it toward the glass with great care, so the water dribbles out slowly like a leaking tap. When I return to the table, Mum is on her phone scrolling through Instagram. She taps Like on a photo of my aunt Kate’s yellow Labrador plunging into a murky farmer’s pond. Mum and Basil’s dog, a guileless, deaf shih tzu named Banjo, had to be put down a few weeks earlier. Since marrying Basil, she’s become a born-again pet lover. After Banjo’s death Mum posted a photo of him staring wistfully out the window at a snowbank, with a caption by George Eliot: “Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.”

After a minute or so her gaze lifts from the stream of images on her phone and drifts across the table to rest on me. “So is it all going in your book, then? Is that what it’s going to be: Mommie Dearest?”

I tell my mother she can read the book first. I tell her I want her to be okay with it. Speaking quickly, too quickly, I say that this is very important to me. She is quiet, still as a statue, patiently hearing me out.

“What I want …,” I begin to say, casting around for the words I’d had in my mind on the plane.“My intention …”

“Is what exactly?”

I reach for my mother’s hand, but she flinches and pulls it away.

“I want the book to be an act of devotion.”

Excerpted from “Where You End and I Begin” by Leah McLaren. Copyright © 2022 Leah McLaren. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

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