Read The Year My Mother Came Back for Free Online

shirt.
    â€œYou know what your vagina is, don’t you?”
    â€œYeah, of course I do.”
    Vagina
was one of the code words that made the girls giggle during the top-secret fifth-grade girl movie. I would look it up in our
Worldbook Encyclopedia.
    â€œWhat did you think I meant?”
    â€œI thought you meant I’d be bleeding from everywhere.”
    â€œOh dear!”
    â€œI thought I’d be gushing blood from my entire body.”
    â€œGood heavens. No wonder you were upset.” Mom held me closer.
    â€œI thought that every month I’d have to wrap my whole body in napkins.” I giggled through my tears. “Sanitary napkins—” I started to laugh “—like a mummy wrapped in really clean napkins.”
    Now, Mom was laughing with me. “I’m sorry, Sweetie. I’m no good at talking about this kind of thing. I admit that I’m kind of uptight about sex. I mean, talking about sex.”
    â€œThat’s okay, Mom.” (Sex? Is that what we had just talked about?)
    â€œGood. So we’ve had ‘The Talk,’ right?”
    After The Talk, I still didn’t know anything about sex. When my gullible little sister Jennifer (who believed everything I said) asked me, “What does mating mean?” I made an educated guess. “Mating is when a boy cat bites a girl cat’s neck,” I told her, while we spied on Amanda, as she lay down seductively in front of a virile tomcat and let him have his way with her.

    Eliana reads silently, her mouth agape.
    â€œ
Ewww.
Did you and Daddy really do that?”
    â€œYup.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you ever tell me?”
    â€œYou never asked before.”
    I don’t ask Eliana if she has any more questions. That’s all I can handle for one afternoon.
    Did I deal with Eliana’s inquiries better than my mother did with mine? I hope so. In any event, this was light stuff, relatively speaking:
Motherhood
101
.
Answering these inevitable childhood questions was a breeze, compared to the onerous maternal challenge that lies ahead—helping Eliana through her complicated and grueling medical ordeal. Have Michael and I adequately prepared her for what’s going to happen? Is it better not to tell her too much? Will I have enough energy after my radiation treatment? How do I prepare, physically and emotionally, to help her?
    I wish I could talk to my mother about it. Am I doing this right? For the first time in ages, Mom, I want to ask your advice—
    Whoa, whoa, whoa! Where is this coming from? I was terrified when my mother appeared at my kitchen table the other day. Now I want to talk to her? I don’t think so. I send thoughts in her general direction, somewhere in the stratosphere, trying to strike the right tone for addressing my mother’s ghost—a balance of superstition and ironic detachment: Stay where you are. I repeat. Stay. Where. You. Are. Please, please,
please
don’t show up again.
Tuh, tuh, tuh!
(I toss salt over my left shoulder for good measure.)

FIVE
    Julia is home from an inspiring high school theater workshop at the Stratford Festival in Canada, where she was thrilled to perform Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy—a peak experience for a kid who’s been enamored of Shakespeare since she was six years old, when I first took her to Shakespeare in the Park (a production of
Henry VIII;
hardly the Bard’s most kid-friendly play, but Julia was spellbound.)
    Radiant, confident, and relaxed, she’s in full vacation mode, wearing a gauzy sundress, flip-flops and sunglasses, her waist-length thick brown hair sun-streaked with blonde, like it is every summer. She drops her suitcase and backpack in the living room. “It’s good to be home.” She reaches down and I reach up for a hug.
    Next week is Julia’s eighteenth birthday. She leaves for Princeton the week after that. These are our last days as a family