Secrets unfolded, grievances addressed
Nausheen copes with a mother's sadness
Having just finished reading an enjoyable book on parent-offspring attachments and detachments, coming across another novel dealing with the same subject, but with a very different story, was a welcome coincidence. Elizabeth Berg's What We Keep wrings out silent tears as it takes us along the difficult path of lives irrevocably bound together, yet apart. Apparently a simple book, which the writer dedicates to "women who risk telling the hard truths", it has layers of inexplicable emotions. While flying out to meet her mother after a gap of thirty-five years, forty-seven year old Ginny Young goes back into her past, a past which holds beautiful as well as ugly memories, a past she wants to forget, but cannot. Ginny lets us into her near-perfect childhood where she has two loving parents and an older sister. It is in the summer of her twelfth year that their life undergoes a drastic change; nothing can ever be the same again. Now a mother of two daughters herself, Ginny tries to reconstruct her childhood and to see things from an adult's and a mother's point of view. Temperamentally, the two sisters, 12-year-old Ginny and 13-year-old Sharla, are very different, but somehow they complement each other. Berg does a marvelous job of describing people, feelings, the environment, from the 12-year-old's perspective. The arrival of Jasmine Johnson, a very attractive-looking woman (who the girls feel could be Liz Taylor), in the neighbourhood and in Ginny's family life, is the beginning of the end, so to speak. Ginny's mother's behavior sometimes made Ginny feel that something "dark and uneasy" was going on with her but that she would neither admit it nor let anyone else do so. This "internal storm" seemed to get "fiercer" after Jasmine moved in next-door. We get inextricably tied up with the story as the two girls start sensing the changes in their mother and seeing the distance between their parents growing. The day comes when the mother goes away (from their homes and their lives). The children's insecurities, fears, anger, and tired acceptance, are all described sensitively and realistically. The sisters are brought closer together because of their shared misfortune. The mother makes several attempts to explain to her daughters, her reasons, but because of their age, they are incapable of understanding. They see her only as a mother, not as a person or a woman. When she wants to talk about how her marriage has not been fulfilling enough, and how she feels happy doing art classes, they are extremely hurt and block her out of their minds and hearts. She fails to convince them that she truly loves and cares for them. Years pass. The girls slowly and painfully come to terms with the fact that their mother is gone for good. Their resentment becomes a part of their being and they move on with their lives. Their father remarries and they get along very well with their stepmother, a pleasant woman. Meanwhile, they keep up a semblance of a connection with the mother, occasionally talking over the phone and visiting her at times. They reject her overtures as she tries to involve them in her life; they believe she has gone mad. Not being able to accept the new person their mother has become, they refuse to see her or talk to her anymore. Says the writer, "It's funny how, oftentimes, the people you love the most are given the least margin for error". Thirty-five years later, Sharla and Ginny go to meet their mother. Their father is dead. They're both married and have children. Sharla has told Ginny that she's ill and wants a reunion with their mother in case the illness is really serious. She later tells Ginny (after they've just met their mother), that it's actually not she who's sick, but their mother (and that she'd called her to tell her). At this meeting, this long-overdue reunion, the three woman talk, really talk. Secrets are unfolded, grievances are addressed and misunderstandings are cleared. Ginny wants to tell her mother that she knows she never stopped loving them, that she had been an artist, living in an oppressive atmosphere, and that she had done what she had done, in order to survive. Although she doesn't end up telling her all this, the whole matter makes her think more analytically about her own relationship with her daughters. It allows her to finally appreciate her mother's needs and individuality. She and Sharla gladly take her back into their lives hoping to let their children, her grandchildren know and be with their grandmother. This "ode to motherhood", as the Greensboro News and Record calls it, ends on a touchingly optimistic note, washing away the guilt and the hurt and heralding in promises of stronger familial ties. Ultimately, forgiveness and redemption reign supreme.
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