I am proud to present Martha Sarkissian’s place-winning essay. When I read this essay about making a trip to where the author’s mother had grown up, I was impressed with the way she organized her essay around her short stay, skillfully using dialog with a friend who accompanied her and the man who hosted the two at a bed and breakfast in the remote area they were in. Looking at specific images in the area she is visiting helps her associate to stories her mother had told her and then to memories that help the author see how her relationship with her mother had grown and how she can now derive sustenance from those memories.

I also enjoyed reading Martha’s words back to me when I contacted her about winning a place in the contest:

I usually write more straightforwardly and took advantage of this contest to practice going back and forth in time, which seemed to call for many transitions. Seeing Cochise’ Stronghold where my mother grew up certainly helped me to come to more resolution of her and my relationship, so it was a therapeutic as well as interesting project for me.

The theme of our Spring 2010 essay and poetry contest was parents–your own, yourself, or those you’ve adopted as parents. Marta’s essay certainly speaks to the ways in which as we age we reframe our parents’ words and actions. Age and understanding of our parents times and backgrounds often helps us see how much more our parents were on our side during their lifetimes than we may have thought as kids growing up.

Searching for Mother in the Cochise Stronghold
By Martha Sarkissian

“Arizona wildfires out of control.” I snapped off the car radio. No fire could stop Louise and me.

“We better turn back. We can’t outrun a fire at our age,” Louise said.

“The radio didn’t mention southeast Arizona. Let’s give it a try, ” I begged. We drove on, two schoolteachers determined to find my mother’s family home in Arizona. After Tucson, we turned onto a dirt road and stopped at the National Monument sign, Cochise Stronghold. This marked a hidden canyon so secret that the Apache Chief Cochise was able to hide there from the US Army.

I scrambled out of the car. “Look, Louise, another plaque.” Through the smoke that hung heavily on the pine trees, I read Guitard Ranch, First Ranch in Arizona. At last I would see where my mother, Albene Guitard, lived until she was sixteen. If I walked where she walked and saw what she saw as a child, perhaps I could solve the mystery of our relationship.

“Get in the car,” Louise ordered. “Ashes are falling on my Toyota. We’ve got to turn back.”

“The fire’s on the other side of the highway. I just can’t give up.”

“We’re getting out of here!” Louise raced the engine. I jumped in. So Mother’s adobe ranch was a little out of reach, just like Mother. Louise see-sawed her auto back and forth, crashing into manzanita brush on both sides. Sweat drenched her face. “There’s no room to turn around. We have to keep going. Martha, read me the directions to where we’ll stay.”

“Follow service road number 48. The road has five places where you will cross the wash.” Louise took off. Suddenly, the Toyota leaped in the air and landed with a bounce. “Wash number 1,” Louise called as we drove down a road surrounded by granite domes and sheer cliffs. I imagined my mother, a little girl with soulful eyes, galloping on her horse to school through this canyon. She rode before she could walk. She once told me, “Safer that way. There were rattlers on the ground.” My mother often longed for the Dragoon Mountains. I wondered what they could tell me about her.

The very year my mother was born, 1895, the Indian wars in Arizona ended. A government agreement gave the Guitard family the right to keep their ranch and also gave the Indians permission to return to their land. They lived side by side. My grandmother, Clemenceau, refused to let my mother, Albene, play with the Mexican ranch hands’ children or with Indians. Driven by loneliness, Albene decided to steal an Indian papoose. Every time she sneaked up on a baby, a squaw working in the cornfields spotted her and snatched up her papoose. My mother used to laugh as she added, “If I had stolen a baby, it would have started another Indian war.

The frontier life didn’t allow mothers much time for emotional extras for babies. Clemenceau, my grandmother from an aristocratic immigrants’ family, probably had as little time to cuddle a baby as the Apache women in the cornfields. Like them, my mother never had time to cuddle me or read to me.

When I was a baby, I crawled after her up the circular stairway and into the bedroom. I dragged a book with me demanding, “Read me, Mommy, read me.” Mother giggled when she told this story but it made me wonder why she never stopped to read to me, or to hold me on her lap. When I wanted her attention, she stared through me with rejection in her eyes. I wasn’t what she needed.

“Hey, Martha, wake up. We’ve crossed four washes. What do the directions say?” Before I could answer, Louise slammed on the brakes. She wound down her window and pointed. “Animals running from the fire.” A doe and a fawn crossed the road, followed by a mother quail and four babies. Each chick sported a perky feather. Had my mother watched the ancestors of these deer and quail? Did she experience a season of drought and fire like this?

A man with a manzanita walking stick emerged from the twilight and stood by my window. “I’m your host, Edward. I was looking for you. Welcome to the Nature Retreat. You can park here.” His weathered skin marked him as a mountaineer. As we followed him up the trail, Louise asked, “Are we safe here? Will the fire leap the highway?”

“Safe enough for a few more days. You’re only staying overnight.”

“I’m looking for my mother’s childhood home, the Guitard ranch.”

Before he could answer me, the Nature Retreat cottage came into view. While Edward switched on the lights and settled our luggage, he told me, “I’ll show you the Guitard Ranch tomorrow morning. It’s only a stone’s throw away.” His blue eyes held the faraway look of a man who watches the weather.

“Oh, can’t we see it now?” I asked.

“Tomorrow. The sun’s gonna sink like an anchor any minute. Your dinner’s in the fridge. Micro it.”

After a dinner of beef stew seasoned with wild herbs, Louise and I moved to the front porch. Edward was right. The sun did sink like an anchor. I lit an old iron lantern that hung by a chain. We rocked in our chairs. I stared at the lantern. It reminded me of the wrought iron chandelier that hung two stories high in my childhood home. I envisioned Mom standing on the circular staircase, holding the chandelier with a broom and trying to wipe away the cobwebs. Even then at the age of six, I tried to make sense of my mother’s relationship to me. “Mommy, who would I be if you weren’t my mother?”

“Little Sister, can’t you see, I’m busy?” Mother let go of the chandelier and gave it an exaggerated push. It swung back and forth, creaking.

I had to make her answer. I tugged on her skirt. “Who would I be, Mommy?”

“If I wasn’t your Mommy–you wouldn’t be anybody at all,” she announced.

“That’s not true. I’m always me. Who would I be?”

“Don’t bother me with your questions.” I stood there nervously chewing my fingernails. If I wasn’t her little girl, I was nothing. Mommy didn’t like me and I didn’t know how to get a different Mommy, one who liked to hug me and wouldn’t make me go to Charlie’s Oyster Bar.

“Hold still, Little Sister, while I take the rags out of your hair. Daddy’ll like the pretty curls I’m making.”

I stuck out my tongue behind her back. “My name is Martha Albene Hunter. Don’t call me Sister.” She ignored my words.

“Little Sister, you must make Daddy come home early so he won’t get sick.” She looked deep in my eyes.

I didn’t want to go with Daddy. He’d make me stand on the bar and tap dance for beery men. “Do I have to?” I whined.

“Yes. Daddy might get sick if he drinks too many beers.”

“Ok. I’ll make Daddy come home.” I crossed my eyes in protest.

I was sure Mommy loved my brother Ben more than me. Five years older than I, he had a Roman nose like Mommy’s and her hair, black and shiny as my Mary Jane shoes. He’d swoop Mommy up in his arms and say, “Here I am, Mumsydorf.” I hung on her legs. I couldn’t pick her up and she didn’t pick me up. I couldn’t be lively and funny like Ben and my mommy. Once Daddy, drunk, fell asleep in his armchair. I kept my eyes peeled on his burning cigarette. When his hand slipped, the cigarette landed on the armrest. Smoke spiraled from a round black hole. I sneaked up and took the cigarette out of his hand. I poured water on the fire. I told Mommy. She just stared from her melancholy eyes. She should have said “thank you” to me.

I needed a friend, but in Mom’s eyes, no one was good enough for me. Some friends I loved were taboo because they had divorced mothers, or a Jewish father, or slept in a Murphy bed. Her French parents taught my mother that anyone with European blood was superior to any other race.

To protect me from what Mother called “common girls,” she enrolled me in the Poinsettia Fruit and Flower Guild. They drilled me on manners, posture and proper leg position, feet tightly together, and hand position, palms up. I had classes in articulation, horseback riding, and dancing. I hated every minute of this training. I separated myself from the other girls, an attitude that followed me for much of my life. Cyrano de Bergerac’s slogan became mine, “I stand not high, it may be, but alone!”

I was fifteen when my father Benjamin Stickney Hunter died. I was a Daddy’s girl. I adored him. When he wasn’t drinking too much, we sat together in his library and shared poems and books. I had no compass for my life without Dad. Then two shifts occurred; my mother started to pay me attention and I started dating lots of boys. We even had one mother-daughter talk. While we washed and dried the dinner dishes, she told me, “All I ever knew about sex, I learned from a cattle breeding book. But I warn you, if you ever get pregnant without being married, I’ll drag you to Tijuana and get you an abortion.” Her definite way of speaking aroused my opposition. I argued fiercely. “If I were pregnant, I’d never give up the baby.” I stalked off to my bedroom, lit a cigarette and raged over her narrow attitude. Remembering this dispute, I smiled to myself. Mom actually had some surprisingly modern ideas.

Louise sat up. “What are you smiling about?” she asked.

“My mom. When I started dating, she was afraid I’d get pregnant. But she was the one who pushed me to perm my hair, flirt with boys, dress sexy–all that stuff.”

“I bet she thought you’d enjoy the things she never got a chance to do, though of course she worried. There was no birth control then. I think you misinterpret her.”

Louise, like my mother, liked to disagree with me. But this time she made sense. “You could be right, Louise. But Mom sure didn’t pay me any attention when I was little.”

“Didn’t you ever feel close to your mom?” Louise probed.

A sudden view of my mother and me lit up. We were admiring ourselves in matching brown checked suits. “Yes, after my Dad died we grew closer. Mom’s eyes even sparkled. She called us the Hunter Girls.”

Louise rocked angrily in her chair. “Bet it was darned hard on her to have a drunkard for a husband.”

I jumped up. “Let’s go to bed.” I felt outraged, yet Louise’s words helped me to realize Mom’s stare disappeared when Dad died. It was Dad who filled her eyes with sorrow, not me.

The next morning, Edward led me through an opening he’d cut in the manzanita brush. “I’ll leave you to enjoy the site of the Guitard ranch for yourself.” He pointed. “Those three mounds are all that’s left. ”

How bittersweet! The winds and rain had sculpted the adobe house into three rounded spires that glowed in the sunlight. I seated myself in the meadow and leaned against the remnant of a wall. I breathed deeply of its earthy smell. A scraggly rose grew nearby. Like my mom and grandparents, the rose refused to give up.

I remembered my mother’s favorite game. She used to fasten her mother’s old bonnets on the hitching posts, and she named them Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Green. She’d curtsey and offer tea to the posts.

Then she’d drink the cupful herself. I admired the spirit of little Albene preparing herself for leadership in society.

Now sitting on my mother’s childhood land, I became aware that in my childhood I formed the habit of misinterpreting her. When I complained about my brother’s teasing, she answered, “Don’t leave your feelings lying around like a dog’s tail and they won’t get hurt.” I used to think this saying blamed me, but it was actually an attempt to help me control my emotions.

Another of her sayings was, “I’m sure glad I was born when they still made women out of blood and guts.” I took this as a slam at my sensitive nature, but now I understood she had to believe in her “blood and guts,” to survive. She wanted me to develop the strengths she had, not my own strengths. When my baby Jennifer died in a crib death, I was beside myself but my Mom said, “Pull up your socks. A mother can’t give up.” She had a saying, too, for the ultimate tragedy, the death of her son, my brother Ben. “Martha, we’re not going to let this ruin our lives.” When things went wrong, she fought the blues by singing a World War I song, “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.” That was her way to shift her mind from negative to positive.

The Dragoon Mountains turning golden in the sunlight helped me to shift, too. This rugged area needed tough men to conquer it. Mother loved me as much as she did Ben, but she valued men’s strength for taming the frontier. I wandered across the field to where mother’s hitching posts may have stood. I spoke to them. “Oh, Mom, I’m sorry I misinterpreted you in so many ways. I had to journey six hundred miles in distance and travel back in time to your generation. You endured the loneliness of this Cochise Stronghold and the loneliness of your marriage. You tried to prepare me for the tough world you knew. I no longer feel neglected by your melancholy stare.” I took a deep reassuring breath. “I can say, “Thanks, Mommy. Without you, I wouldn’t be anybody at all.”