She was named Cynthia, after a great grandmother, Jean after someone I have not found in the family tree. She was born in 1928, her mother's second child, the third child of her father, one year and two months (minus one day) after her first brother's birth. At four years old she had a second brother; finally, after nine years of being the only daughter, she saw her first sister born, and three years later, her second sister, the last child.

Her brother named her Cynthy. Later she was also called Cynnie, or Cyn, by her brothers and sisters, who adored her; she was the center of the family.

Her older brother taught her stories and rhymes, sometimes naughty ones, to amuse himself. He laughed when she repeated the words before she understood them:

Cynthia Jean went to the coop
To let a p...
...oor little chicken out.
She stepped in the grass
way up to her a...
...nkles high.

She was a good girl. She went to mass and helped her mother. She was expected to help care for her family, to help with the cooking and the dishes. Before her father's death he was ill at home for a long while; she cared for him as well, washing and combing his beautiful white hair, of which he was inordinately proud. Because of his illness, he could no longer work; her mother opened a small store down the hill from the home they did not own. While her mother was away, Cynthy was in charge of the house.

She went to high school during World War II, in a small town in Maine that had always sent its young men off to be soldiers, knowing it could not welcome all of them back. After her older brother enlisted, she sent him her school picture, addressed "To mine handsome brother. In hopes for a letter. Cynthy." She is a beautiful girl, with long black hair, shining eyes, big straight teeth perfectly white behind the dark lipstick girls wore in the nineteen-forties, a dark sweater, a small double string of pearls. She smiles as if it is something she does often.

She had long beautiful legs of which she was proud. They are not visible in this picture, but in another one, in which she hikes up her skirt and poses for whoever is taking the snapshot, probably her brother. She wanted to be a dancer. She wanted to be a writer. Her teachers told her she was smart enough to attend college, but there was no money. In high school she wrote plays about life during war; they were funny or ironic, not about heroism but about the ways people managed without the familiar things they were required to give up for the war effort, about good-natured rivalries between boys and girls. As a child, I would sneak into the storage room behind my parents' bedroom to read them. It felt clandestine and bold to do this, although I was probably only forbidden to touch them because I was careless and forgot to put things back. In one play, the girls cannot buy silk stockings because the silk is needed for parachutes. Instead, they paint their legs with makeup to look as if they are wearing stockings, even drawing seams up the backs. I understood even as a child that this was a play about creating illusions, keeping up a brave front.

She was the first in her family to marry. It was 1947. The war had ended. At home her father was dying, her mother had begun drinking heavily. My mother married my father, who had left high school to enlist in the marines, who had fought on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and came home again, shaken but physically intact, to finish high school. Who had, like her, lived all his life in the same town. She had attended school with his sisters and brothers; their mothers had played on the women's basketball team together in high school.

I never thought it odd until now, but none of us knows the date of my parents' anniversary, although they have been married nearly fifty years. Once a friend calculated back from my birthday and told me I was probably conceived on the Fourth of July, like many post-war babies. But I don't know that my parents were married at that time. When I was in college, my father mentioned for the first time that they had eloped, and that when they came back from their honeymoon he asked his parents if he could move back home; instead, my parents ended up in a small apartment in town, and he went to work for a builders' supply company.

In April of the next year, I was born; two weeks later her beloved father died, of coronary thrombosis. She was nineteen years old.

I see that in this account, much of my mother's childhood is missing. There are things I have forgotten, things I have never asked about. There are things she does not talk about, even when asked. There are things I would prefer to guess. There was never a lot of money. They lived in an apartment, not a house. The Catholic church and her family's need for her to be a good girl held her in her place like the fingers of a firm hand. I believe she was mostly happy; she grew up with a loving heart and a cheerful disposition. Her mother drank and was sometimes cruel to her; she loved her father best.

They had a dog, and cats. The dogs were ordinary and lived to be fat and old, with names like Brownie and Blackie. Once the cat had kittens in her brother's bed, while he was asleep. On Christmas morning, the children had to attend mass before they were given their presents. My mother remembered this as a cruelty; she did not force her own children to be religious.

She was not yet an adult when I was born, but I do not remember her as being young. She seemed grown up and responsible, busy with her own concerns, with my brothers and sisters. When I was her only baby for a time, her first baby, she made my clothing and read to me, and taught me poems she had memorized in school and still remembered, Robert Service and Longfellow. She listened to opera broadcasts on the radio, to symphonies; she danced around the kitchen, pretending to be a ballerina. She sang to me, but she could not carry a tune as well as I did and I made her stop.

At 25, she had five children; at 35 she had ten; when she was 39 her eleventh and last child was born; I was already in college.

Sometime in the 1950s, television entered our lives and my mother seemed to slip away from us. Slowly, not in apparent ways, she disentangled herself from her children. We moved when I was six, out of the town to a farm on the same road where my father's parents lived, and most of his brothers and sisters and their families, each family in its identical ranch-style house. My mother was pulled away from her family and into his. Neither she nor her mother could drive; there was no bus between our house and her mother's. Her youngest sister was just fourteen. In town we had gone easily from our house to my grandmother's house; both places were home. Now another grandmother, her mother-in-law, took us over. My father's family was Baptist; they had stopped attending church but they were stern about drinking and bad language; it was sinful to them not to have a clean house, and ours was not often clean.

My mother struggled to hold on to herself, trapped at home with small children. My father was often away at work, and he had begun to drink more. I know, but am not sure I remember, that my mother was expected to stop him from doing this, but she had five small children, and then six and seven and eight, no car, nowhere to go, no money, a wringer washer (but no dryer). She had only the television, when it was working and there was something to watch, to distract us; while we watched, she could escape into her own thoughts.

A fact: sometime in the 1950s, we began to notice that my mother did not seem to hear people when they spoke to her. When she paid attention she seemed fine; if she was distracted she heard nothing. When she misunderstood what someone said, she claimed to have been distracted, tired, too busy to listen. I know, because she told me, that she thought she had become old; she was just over thirty. A doctor diagnosed otosclerosis, a disease of the inner ear, which was immobilizing the small bones that transmit sound to the brain. At the time there was no cure.

My mother hated the hearing aid he prescribed, a small gold box like a compact; it clipped to her bra, and a conspicuous wire ran out her collar to the plug she wore in one ear. She claimed it distorted sound and amplified noise, with which she was surrounded. Sometimes she claimed it picked up radio transmissions, strange voices and snatches of music. When we crowded around her, competing for her attention, she made a show of turning down the volume, pretending she didn't understand what we were saying. We learned to stand in front of her and tap her shoulders and face for attention. We spoke into her face and laughed at the ways she mistook what we were saying.

She learned to read lips and switched the hearing aid off at home to save batteries.

Deafness was an escape for my mother, but it was not enough. She taught herself to drive and got a job as a waitress. She worked nights so that she could be home to get us off to school in the mornings, and care for whoever was the baby at the time. My father was supposed to care for us nights, but he was angry about the job, and often went out to drink with his friends. When I arrived home from school, my mother's shift ended and mine began.

She was on her feet for hours, always tired, but she slept soundly, protected by silence. At night, if we woke up, we learned to comfort each other; until I was 18 and left home for college, I got up with the babies in the night.

What I am not sure about is what her deafness was like. Did she dwell more and more in the velvety silence of deep night, a quiet so profound it wakes you? Or was what she heard like interference, like the babel of conflicting voices of a radio tuned between channels? This is what I often imagined she heard--not an increasing nothing but an undifferentiated everything. When we spoke of her deafness we said that she tuned out, not paying attention. By standing in front of her, tapping her shoulders, demanding her attention, we could get her to tune back in, but words spoken just behind her, or beside her, outside of her peripheral vision, were inaudible to her.

Sometime at the end of the 1960s, a surgical technique for reversing the damage caused by otosclerosis was perfected. One ear at a time, my mother regained her hearing. By that time I had left home.

My mother's space: the kitchen. Not because she loves to cook, but because it is the place of hospitality. The kitchen was the lightest room in our house. The cupboards were most recently painted a sunny lemony yellow, the doors never very carefully closed. The walls were papered in a kitcheny pattern one of my brothers calls "coffee pot, teapot, flower pot, pisspot." The room is large enough to have accommodated, when I lived at home, two stoves, an electric range and a pink enameled woodstove; a refrigerator; a washer and dryer; a round oak dining table covered with oilcloth; behind it, between the fridge and the woodstove, an enormous pile of dirty laundry we never quite got to the bottom of. My mother held court in this room during the day for her regular visitors, her family, an occasional member of my father's family (although they never dropped in unannounced), a few female friends and a handful of my father's male friends who worked nights, or whose jobs allowed them to take long coffee breaks or lunch breaks. These were people she had known all of her life; their welcome was assured. No work, whether cleaning or cooking, was too important for her not to interrupt it for coffee and a chat.

The one object my mother was never without was her coffee cup; her favorites were thick-walled porcelain straight-sided white diner cups that cracked and stained like teeth but were impossible to break. In my childhood she drank her coffee like the French, with milk and sugar. After milk began to be sold in waxed cartons the carton stood on the table all morning; my mother liked to peel the wax from the sides of the carton with her nails, littering the table top with ripply translucent strips of wax. At some point she gave up milk and learned to drink her coffee black, and then without sugar. After she read, or was told, about the therapeutic effects of honey on the sinuses, she began putting that in her coffee, and the table was never without a drippy quart jar of clover honey she bought from a local farmer and drizzled into her cup from a teaspoon.

In a time when women were encouraged to become dependent, to be feminine, to curl their hair with home permanents and have a signature fragrance, my mother resisted. Her signature fragrance was the sweet almond smell of Jergen's lotion, which she kept beside the sink to moisturize her hands after she did the dishes. As she rubbed it on she would take one of my hands in both of hers and share the extra lotion with me, so that I smelled like she did. Her only makeup was Avon dark red lipstick, applied just before she went to work. I liked her to blot it on my hand so that while she was away I could carry a kiss around with me. When I put my lips on the red print, I believed I could feel the kiss again, and I would often do this when I missed her at night .

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To other parts of "Archaeology of a Mother": 2-- 3-- 4-- 5