This week we are proud to post “My Mother, the Queen,” our first place-winning essay in Writing It Real’s 2010 Spring Contest. I think you’ll find the author’s use of an extended metaphor to describe her mother both poignant and useful. The metaphor facilitates the author’s humor, expressions of love, and evocation of patience while deepening the author’s understanding of her current and past relationship with her mother.

My Mother, the Queen
By Maria MacLeish

My mother and I are sitting in the lounge of her assisted living home, gazing at family photographs when she suddenly says, “Honey, I’ve lost my crown. I think it’s in this room somewhere.”

Instinctively, I look around. I have arrived late that day and missed the Mother’s Day lunch — perhaps the residents were given paper crowns as party favors. Or is this an example of senile grandiosity? “Can you smile for me, Mother?”
 She bares her teeth. Sure enough, one of her two front crowns is missing.

“Does it bother you?” I ask her.

“Of course not. But I’d like to find it. I’m pretty sure I left it nearby.”

“We’ll have to see if we can have a dentist look at it,” I say, thinking, how much will it cost? As far as I know, porcelain crowns are not covered by Medicare. “That would be lovely, dear,” my mother says, in the benign yet distant tone she reserves for helpful minions. A staff person circles the room, handing out tea and cookies. Swallowing the tea in one long gulp, my mother holds out her cup with a commanding air. “May I have some more, please?” Turning to me she whispers, “I need to tell you something, but it’s a secret.”

“Okay. What is it?”

“Keep your voice down. I don’t want the others to hear.”

“Sounds like it’s important.”

“It is,” my mother says, growing excited. “I haven’t told anybody but you. They all work for me. I own this whole place!”

“Wow,” I say, although I’ve known about the secret since I can first remember anything at all. For all of my life, my mother has owned the “whole place”, and owning it, crowned herself Queen.

As a little girl, I called her Mummy and she called me Mia or Honey. When I turned nine, I began to be called by my given name, Maria and she asked my brother and me to call her Mother. The days of picnics in our neighborhood park, the blanket spread out with a luncheon of deviled eggs and Fig Newtons by the eucalyptus trees, or visits to the musty magic of the children’s library, gave way to less frequent, more formal interactions. She found new worlds to conquer: golf, liberal politics, her doctorate in American Literature. Recently I learned from her cousin Dorothy that this distancing had its roots in a seismic event. When my mother was nine years old, her father was hospitalized by a serious accident and the family broke up. The children were sent to live with relatives in Denver.

What was my mother like, as Queen? Like so many sovereigns, her rule spanned several eras. From the ages of nine to fourteen, she treated her children as projects requiring lessons to reach completion. She saw it as her duty to shepherd me to piano, horseback riding, ballroom dance cotillion, and orthodontics. I recall my time with her as being spent in the car, silent rides punctuated with improving comments, or sitting at the library desk in front of the complete works of Dr. Arnold Gesell, dawdling over my homework while she grew steadily more annoyed. Unlike Queen Elizabeth, whose duty it is to encourage, advise, and warn, my mother’s monarchy was guided by different precepts: to correct, control, and instruct. In the Project Era, as I called it, her heyday as hostess for my step-father, she set out to educate me in the wifely arts.

It began with dictates about ironing and the minutiae of dusting. Then my grandmother’s curio chest was set up in my room and soon after, my parents placed within it my first pieces of Spode. Instruction in table setting, flower arranging and the care of fine furniture, followed. By the time I was twelve I could roast a perfect leg of lamb.

Left to myself after school while my mother golfed or did precinct work for the upcoming elections, and with my older brother Johnny at softball practice, I would pretend to dust the library. Secretly, I devoured Gesell’s books on child development. The series, my mother often said at dinner parties, was her “bible” for raising children. She was amused when I, circling the room with a plate of hors d’oeuvres for the grownups, would quote its advice. “Nine is ready for an allowance” I recall saying, and got one. But the real subject of the books — the nurturing of children — seemed un-regarded by my mother. Those years were very lonely. I needed her in ways she couldn’t express.

And then, one day, she did.

We were camping at the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, where the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, join Montana in a vast parkland of mountain ranges, lakes, and at that time in the 1950’s, more than 50 glaciers. “Roughing it” my mother liked to say, was preparation for life. We had the biggest tent, the newest gear and the best campsite with which to learn survival skills. I’d mastered fly casting and could bake a cake in a Dutch oven over a campfire, but my canoeing needed improvement. That day, my mother decreed, we would work on my paddling. While Johnny and step-dad Jack fished for Dolly Vardens, Mother and I set off on one of the pristine small lakes half-encircled by a glacier.

As we oared, a summer storm came up. Lightning flashed; rain poured down, a fierce wind buffeted our craft. Somehow, my mother guided our wildly rocking canoe to shore, a piece of the glacier that ended in a shelf at the water’s edge. “We’re beached!” she said, pulling our canoe, with me in it, close to the ice and helping me clamber up the steep bank to the summit. “Isn’t this place divine? We’re at the top of the whole world.”

The thrill in her voice reassured me. This was high adventure. She quickly set out flares and pulled from our packs, chocolate bars and raisins. “Although you’ll usually be found, it’s important to be prepared in case you have to wait,” she told me. And as we perched precariously in the freezing rain and wind, she began to tell me stories of her girlhood in Colorado. When she had been my age, she had faced a “real” emergency. While sailing at Grand Lake, she’d developed appendicitis and her uncle, a physician, had been forced to operate without anesthetic.

At sunset we were rescued by a ranger in a snow-cat. Ever the gracious hostess, my mother invited him back to our camp for a nightcap. Warm and safe in our sleeping bags, Johnny and I listened to our parents and their guest share tales of true-life adventures. Not once did my mother sound frightened by our ordeal; whatever anguish she felt, I was never to know. Her strength, her unconquerable confidence, and yes, her love, had been transmuted to me in one magical afternoon when we owned the whole place together — a glacier on top of the world.

For a few more summers we camped together as a family. Buoyed by my experience on the glacier, I backpacked confidently through the Sierras and out-climbed everyone up Mount Lassen. At home, I stopped practicing the piano, got my braces off, and no longer had my mother drive me to the barn to ride my horse. I took the bus instead.

By the time I turned fourteen the Project Era of lessons and instruction had ended. A year later I joined my brother at boarding school and my mother expanded her dominion as a mental health advocate and public figure. Even today, decades later, I meet people who, upon hearing her name, recall her accomplishments. Boxes of plaques and admiring letters gather dust in storage, but I can’t bring myself to throw them out. She was very proud of those accolades and saved every article and memento, but not one drawing or report card. Like a well-known British Queen, she felt secure on her throne, but less certain of her children.

On this Mother’s Day visit, I’ve brought the photos from our trip to the Peace Park. There’s one of all of us together on a mountain side, in stylish outdoor duds no doubt selected by my mother. “Do you remember where we took this?” I ask. She doesn’t, and I can tell she’s not sure who we are. But another picture, of a fawn, brings back a memory; she knows my brother took it with his new Yashica. I return to the one of our family. “See?” I say, pointing to my brother with his camera in its case slung over his shoulder. “That’s Johnny.”

She looks away for a moment. “Did you know my son?”

“Yes, Mother,” I say gently. “He was my brother.”

“I know that, Honey.”

“Well this picture was taken when we camped at the Peace Park. There’s one of the glaciers right behind us. Do you remember the day we went canoeing and we got beached on the glacier?”

“Of course I do,” she says, with queenly dignity, pretending perhaps for my sake. I tell her then how I am planning to return there, to see it all once again. I don’t tell her that the glaciers are in retreat, and expected to disappear in my lifetime.

She’s tired, the visit is over. It is time to say goodbye. A kiss, a touch to the thin hair and wrinkled cheek, and I back out of the room. For a moment I stand in the doorway looking at this tiny, posture-perfect lady who is surrounded by her subjects — a snoring, drooling woman, a man bent over in his wheelchair, and two more companions who like my mother, babble and imagine. Yet she is unperturbed. I wave; she returns the wave and bestows a gap-toothed smile.

Long may she reign.

****

When Maria was notified that she’d won first place in our contest, she sent me the following note about writing her essay:

About “My Mother, the Queen” (Writing Process)

Dear Sheila,

I wrote the first draft in June 2006, just after the Mother’s Day events it describes, because I had an assignment for a summer writing course on personal essay at Sonoma State University. Then in 2009, after completing a compendium of family history for relatives, I dug it out again.

In the earlier version, the bones of the story are there, as are the pivotal events, the characters and the setting, and all of the bigger emotions. But it was written for a specific audience (my classmates and teacher). When I returned to it three years later, I revised it for myself and wrote from a deeper understanding of my mother’s life and choices as well as my own.

A few months later I was invited to read it to an audience who didn’t know me, and so I polished it up a bit with that objective in mind. That’s the version I submitted to this contest.

By the way, my mother is now 93 years old. Her dementia has increased of course, as has her frailty. But she still enjoys life in her own way! Sincerely,

Maria

****

An essay’s real time occasion, in this case a Mother’s Day visit, is often where we start essays. Something tugs at us and eventually, in our drafting, we find the emotional occasion for writing about the time we’ve chosen. Bravo to Maria for her wonderful essay with its metaphor connective tissue: “Like so many sovereigns, her rule spanned…” “Unlike Queen Elizabeth, whose duty it is to encourage, advise, and warn, my mother’s monarchy was guided by…” “Like a well-known British Queen, she felt secure on her throne, but less certain of her children.” “…this tiny, posture-perfect lady who is surrounded by her subjects…” are among the gems here. When we are very close to the people we are writing about, it can be hard  because our familiarity gets in the way of the perspective we need to evoke them on the page. A well-chosen metaphor provides a lens through which we gain that perspective and evoke our subject engagingly. The trick is to realize that a metaphor is a delicate part of our craft. It is easy to over-extend it, make it too cute or use it to take readers off on a tangent.

Maria, you have done the work just “write!”