In Spite of Everything Read Online Free PDF Page B

herself that she either would have said something like “Well, dear, that’s just how our family has
always
been” or “The people you call ‘weirdos’ are usually the most interesting people,” or she just wouldn’t have known what I was talking about.
    I would come to realize later in life that my mother belonged to a select tribe well known to English majors everywhere: the female English Renaissance scholar. At thirty, when I saw
W;t
, the play about a Donne scholar who is forced to see that everything is
not
a metaphor when she is struck with actual cancer, I did not see the fabulous,heartbreaking, childless character that my friends saw: I saw my mother. If you didn’t see
W;t
, think back on your college days, recall that English lit class—Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell—and if your professor was a woman, you have the gestalt of my mother in clear sight. The long line at the grocery store was not just a pain in the ass; it was a Chau
cer
ian pageant of
souls
, winding its way to
repast
! The fig salad you ordered at the yuppie bistro wasn’t just skimpy on the figs. The salad was
chary
of figs, and actually
fig
, interestingly, was connected with the word “sycophant,” which meant “showing the figs”—from the ancient Greek words “fig” and “to show”—and was used in ancient Athens to describe those who
snitched
on illegal fig exportation to gain favor with high government officials, so perhaps
we
might appeal to the
chef
in sycophantic
terms
for a greater representation of figs in this otherwise most
elegant
of
salads
. Ta da!
    No amount or type of life experience could knock the metaphor out of Mom. Every comment was elegantly footnoted, every moment linked to linguistic constructs or literary precepts, tropes, and conceits. In this, my mother was clearly not the typical Baby Boomer parent to my Gen-X child. She was not, like my friends’ mothers, so preoccupied with finding herself that she either shunted off the kids’ feelings with “I can’t deal with this right now—there’s too much on my plate!” or derailed a conversation into a monologue about what
she
was going through with her boyfriend right now.
    But Mom was no less self-absorbed. Perhaps because nothing really happened
to
her but was, rather, strained through that scholarly, metaphysical membrane, my mother did not relate to direct experiences or feelings. She loved drama, loved talking, loved
discussing
, loved words. But she could not understand personal affect. All was simile, pumped up for maximum amplification. I was not actually struggling with a problem; I was
like
Jacob wrestling with God! I was not angry at people who made fun of my younger brother, Ian; I was
like
Antigone, defending my brother on pain of death. After my parents divorced, I was like Iphigenia, sacrificedfor her father’s ego; I was not a girl whose father had left. End scene. Whereas many X girls got the clear message that it was not they themselves but their Boomer mothers who were the protagonists in their lives, I understood that I was a dull facsimile of the tragic figures of ancient and Renaissance drama—and that my mother was the director. We were all understudies in someone else’s theater.
    Of course, as all readers discover sometime in adolescence, literature, poetry, and plays are the magical keys to the kingdom of human condition. We read literature to understand ourselves, to elevate the nobler ends of experience. By indoctrinating me in this habit, my mother gave me the skeleton key, for sure, but she imparted this gift to anyone smart enough to listen—most especially to her students. She was, is, a spellbinding teacher. If there was an award to be won, my mother won it; a grant to be awarded, my mother was awarded it; a teenage student in trouble, my mother was always the adult in whom she confided. Wherever she works, my mother is exalted.
    But when you’re the daughter, you just want your mom. You just want her to