AFTER THE CANDY-MAKING FAILURE, my mother tried nothing else; she didn’t even talk about trying anything else. She had been defeated. She was finished. One day when I came home from school, she was sitting at the dining room table, looking straight ahead, weeping. There was something so bleak and hopeless about the way she was just sitting there, with no obvious provocation for her weeping, no sad letter in front of her, no bandage on her finger, that I stopped inside the door, dumbstruck, immobilized, unable to go to her and ask her what was wrong, certainly unable to offer her any comfort, unable even to tiptoe through the kitchen and into the living room and leave her in private.
Grieving, I have decided since then, was what she was doing, grieving for the loss of someone who had never existed: that Ella Piper Leroy whom she had hoped to become, a woman whose potential existence had depended on the possibility of success, on hope.
If hope is like a warm breeze that lifts and lofts and carries us on when we hardly have the will to carry on otherwise (and it is), then the candy-making failure had let my mother down, deflated her. She sank under the weight of her failure. She had lost hope, and having lost hope she had lost someone she had hoped to know someday, someone she had hoped would make her proud, as a mother hopes that a child will make her proud: she had lost Ella Piper Leroy, tycoon, child of her own ambition.
When I saw her crying at the dining room table, she was, I think, grieving over the death of that hoped-for self. In her own mind’s eye, she could no longer imagine a future for herself that was different from and better than the present in which she found herself, so she had no future at all, and that was the end of her.
I didn’t recognize that at the time. I was too full of myself. I was embarrassed by the sight of her, weeping there. I suppose that she was embarrassed too, because she made a stab at pulling herself together, forced a smile in my direction, and shrugged. I returned her false smile with one of my own and went upstairs and into my own cares and my own hopes and my own ambitions for my own little self.
[to be continued]
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