Stereopticon: Twelve ways of looking at my mother

215 other what is this word? I am three years old and perched on my mother’s hip. We are in the kitchen; my mother mans the stove. My legs hang around her waist, unanchored. I know she will hold me; she won’t let me fall. I am holding a book. “What is this word? This word?” My finger moves along the page. Sometimes I peer into the pots on the stove, getting so close that my mother is forced to stop stirring. She sinks us into her seat at the head of the table, opposite my father’s. It’s just the two of us today, my mother and me, which will forever be the way I like it. I did not know it at the time, would not know it for years, but every morning she sat in this chair and worked on drafts of her poems. M Stereopticon Twelve ways of looking at my mother Emily Bernard essay 216 | EMILY BERNARD “You wouldn’t let me cook!” my mother complained the final time we saw each other. She complained every time she told this story about the two of us in the kitchen, and she told it often. Beneath the complaint was pride in her daughter, but also pride in herself, for the balance she had struck, mothering, teaching, and tending to her family, all at the same time. She o≠ered this story to me whenever I needed to be reminded of her expectations, of the determined woman she wanted me to become. I don’t remember this story, but it is the story of my life, of my mother and me, our primal connection. For many years, I believed this ability was the sign of a true mother, a good mother: someone who executed the job seamlessly, and always put other work aside until the work of mothering was done. For years, I thought this image a portrait of my destiny, my rightful inheritance as the daughter of a mother who seemed born to the role. The story never changed, but my mother’s reading of it did. The last time we talked, she told me she had come to believe that the reason I was leaning so far over the pots wasn’t that I was born hungrily searching for stories but simply because I couldn’t see. I was prescribed glasses a few years later. visions i have always been fascinated by a bizarre event Zora Neale Hurston recorded in her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. She was sitting on a neighbor’s porch when she was beset by a series of visions, which she described as twelve “clear-cut stereopticon slides.” She was terrified by what she beheld. “I saw a deep love betrayed,” she wrote, “but I must feel and know it.” There was no escape from the drama ahead: “I knew that they were all true, a preview of things to come, and my soul writhed in agony and shrunk away.” I have read these passages to audiences before, but since my mother died, I have never been able to get through them without crying. This story is my favorite in the entire autobiography, which I first read during my freshman year in college. I later read this STEREOPTICON | 217 scene to my mother. I remember the look on her face, both satisfied and intrigued, as she put her finger to her lips and looked away. I had known the lines would speak to her—that we were drawn to the same thing, the promise that no matter how painful, life was always unfolding as it should, and it was possible to view all of it with the cold, clear eye of acceptance. There was something comforting in the strange promise that our lives are not, in the end, a consequence of chance or even choice, but the indi≠erent hand of fate at work. home “let’s go so we can come back” is something my mother would say. I teased her whenever she said this. It perfectly encapsulated the most important feature of her personality. Over the course of 30 years, out of the many...