MY MOTHER'S DIAMONDS

"I think of this butterfly pin as a hard glittery remnant of her."

If there were one word signifying the opposite of soft, warm, and cuddly, that word would describe my mother. Strange as it might sound, she never hugged me. Or kissed me. Not when I was a child, not when I was an adult. I have three grown children and I still hug them and tell them how much I love them. My mother? I never heard those words from her. She could be hard as a diamond. Maybe that’s why she bought, or rather had my father buy for her, so many of them.

I think of this butterfly pin as a hard glittery remnant of her. I have no intention of ever wearing it, yet I keep it around the way some people keep space rocks. Encased in its satin-lined coffin, it’s the antithesis of a light, fluttery creature. I wonder why she designed it as a butterfly at rest, wings folded back, as if contented. Perhaps she longed for contentment. I’ll never know.

My childhood was a rollercoaster ride through a weird fun house where you could never guess what terror might spring at you next. With no warning, my mother would swoop down and punish me for things I couldn’t remember doing. When she wasn’t in a cycle of rage—periods that could last many months—she was supine in a lounge chair in her darkened bedroom, overcome by severe headaches or spasms of weeping. I tiptoed around during these bouts, and in the up times spent a lot of waking hours at my best friend’s house, where her mother served us cookies and milk and smiled. 

Therapists will tell you that on an emotional scale, love and hate are together at one end. At the opposite end is indifference, the only truly weightless emotion. There was no being indifferent to my mother, who was a complex of opposites and conundrums.

She carried herself as if she’d been born the ruler of her realm. In fact, when she was a child, her family referred to her as “the duchess.” At two years old, she fired her baby nurse. I think her parents were afraid of her. When I was a young girl the two movies that exemplified her to me were Now, Voyager and The Snake Pit. The mother in one, the mentally ill young wife in the other. She was both the tyrannical dowager queen and the helpless manic depressive victim.

When she was nearing the end, not sick really, but definitely not all there a lot of the time, she asked me in a plaintive tone, “Was I such a bad mother?” Such a question has no good answer. “That was all a long time ago,” I told her. She seemed satisfied and didn’t press further.

Decades earlier, a cousin had asked me to be her matron of honor. The dress she sent me to wear had a high neck, long puffy sleeves, and a huge bow in back. When I called my mother to tell her it made me look like someone’s shapeless old auntie—yes, I called her; although I was always wary around her, I also longed for a connection, and fashion was a safe-ish topic for us—she said, “Wear diamonds, darling, no one will notice.” For her, diamonds were both a power statement and a diversion from stark reality. She once asked, “Do you think it’s easy being like this?” It wasn’t, for either of us. But it was all a long time ago.

—LB Gschwandtner