Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 78th post, Helena recalls a bonding experience dancing with her mother in her childhood kitchen. Enjoy!
Dance, Mama, Dance!
We were in the kitchen on Crown Street, my mother and me, the yellow, red, and black-streaked linoleum glowing, reflecting the electric light ceiling fixture, switched on. Someone, Jackson Pollack, could have thrown the black and red streaks with a loaded paintbrush from buckets of paint. Good linoleum for a kitchen floor. It was cheerful and my mother was giddy.
Suddenly we were dancing the tango. Suddenly, because I can’t remember what had happened just before, to cause my mother to sing “La Cumparsita.” I know she took hold of my hand and led me in a tango. She was singing full-voiced and we were both laughing, that laughing that sometimes comes upon people, like a spell. It was a giggle fit.
My mother had a beautiful voice, yet I wonder how she sang and laughed that way. Maybe the music was coming from the old yellow plastic dial radio on the kitchen shelf. What had taken my mother over? What had moved her to reach for me? We danced past the refrigerator, the sink, porcelain, glowing too, passed the stove, around and around the kitchen over the stage of that joyous, yellow, linoleum, throwing rays like a spotlight around us.
There was so much worry and grief my mother carried. The thing that comes to me now is this: my Aunt Rose, my mother’s sister, was sick. I loved Aunt Rose. She was like the sunshine, brighter than the kitchen linoleum. And she carried the worry of life, the ordinary things, getting the shopping done, keeping the kitchen floor washed and waxed, the rest of the house vacuumed. She worried about her children, money. I know my parents worried about money from their voices that would suddenly rise, in the dinette, when I was falling asleep in my bedroom down the hall.
And, also like us all, she carried the generations of griefs, some still known, the mass of it inchoate to its next generations, but passed, its stories lost to time.
My mother was aloof by nature. I was in desperate need of the love she had for me but couldn’t express in a language I would understand. That dancing day, I could feel she had broken away from something, maybe that aloofness, and was desperate too, to let go for a moment the weight her soul carried. She took me, her youngest daughter, as her dancing partner, her arm around my waist, my hand on her shoulder, our other arms stretched straight out, our hands pointing, leading our way, beyond that bright kitchen, into a territory I didn’t know. The spot light goes out there.
My mother and I came sweetly close to each other, then drifted to come close again. Even later, when I was a young teen. And later, when I was in my twenties, after my father died. Close and far away, close and far. Maybe that describes any relationship. I have a picture of my mother and I, snapped in Wisconsin, where my father was studying one summer. We’re at lunch, she at one table, me at another. Our chairs are back to back. I’ve turned around and so has she. We’re smiling at each other, overflowing with our deep bond, the bond I can only see clearly now, long, long after she’s gone. And once again, I mark the way the ground of love reveals its radiant shine to pierce, at last, apart from time. I see it now and wait and work to open for it to claim me—to take me in, as surely as my mother, deep deep underneath her mere personality, yearned for it to do.
Do you have a strong memory of bonding with one of your parents? Have you ever written about it? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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