Learning Joy from Dogs without Collars: A Memoir - Softcover

Lauralee Summer received a B.A. in children's studies from Harvard University in 1998.

Chapter One: Mother

Keeping all this from them --

when they might have helped

-- Adrienne Rich

After fifteen months of being homeless my mother moved into a new apartment. I stood nervously -- hovering in the room's center, not wanting to get too close to the edges -- as if I was on a ship. The further to the edges I went, the whole place might shift under my feet, tipping me off the edge. If I went too far to the edge, I might be thrown to the walls or couch or the sink piled with dirty dishes. I might land in the midst of one of her quaint experiments. For Christmas, she placed the tree in a pot full of thousands of pennies, to keep it upright. The pennies are now soaking in water, being cleansed of the Christmas tree's sticky sap.

Broken bits of toys, confiscated from the church nursery, lie in a colorful plastic heap in another corner. As my mother stands in the doorway between the living room and kitchen, she says to me, "They were too small for safety -- one and five-eighths inches is the government standard for toys for children under three. One and three-quarters is safer yet." The late afternoon sunlight shines on her hair. She sometimes dyes it black or blond, but the gray always grows back in. My own hair is as straight as uncooked spaghetti, but hers spirals in loose flyaway curls around her face, or is tucked behind her ears with bobby pins. She looks girlish and innocent with her little space-rocket curls, salt and pepper colored.

I do not feel at home here though this might have been one of the homes of my childhood. All I see now is the poverty. The bleak walls are broken by yard-sale finds. My mother tries to fill the space with the contents of two bags she had while in the shelter. The refrigerator and cupboards are bare -- only a few items from the food bank: cans, stale taken-off-the-shelf pretzels, a new brand of cereal that didn't sell. All I feel is home's lack.

My mother can spend hours, days, even months on projects of her own devising, projects that utterly absorb her.

There are the three hundred small plants growing in styrofoam cups and egg cartons on her porch. She knows each type of plant and recites its name lovingly. To me they are just plants, although they look beautiful and green in the washed-out yellow sunlight.

In her refrigerator sit row upon row of sprouts: bean, alfalfa; and no food, only half a bottle of flat Pepsi, and some condiments. I worry -- this can't be healthy, Mother. She says she eats oatmeal every day, and uses powdered milk. There are Popsicles and vanilla ice cream in the freezer, which she blends together to make "orange crèmes." This was plain poverty, but it was also what she liked.

I was a snooty college student, a sophomore. I tried to analyze my mother -- distance and detach in an attempt to bring, gather her closer into my understanding. "Mother, do you feel generative or despairing?" I think of Erik Erikson's stages of ego development. The seventh stage, the one my mom should be going through: Generativity versus Stagnation. I sense these feelings pitching back and forth in my mother and I am inadequate to be at home with her. Yet what I have been taught to see as degeneracy (a disorganized house, leaving it only every few days...) may be my mom's way of generating new ideas.

Going to Harvard was in many ways a journey away from home for me. At Harvard, one of the favorite buzzwords of academics is discourse. A discourse is an ongoing conversation, a talking and listening back and forth. Each discourse is physically and culturally situated in a space. There is the discourse of cognitive psychologists, discourse on literature, sociological discourse on poverty and welfare reform. The word comes from the Latin discursus, "to run to and fro." The word current also comes from the same Latin root. So when I think of a discourse, I think of a flowing river of words, a current of communication.

With Harvard's discourses, I could categorize and analyze and discuss my mother's life and situation. I could analyze her according to Freudian or Eriksonian discourse; label her with a neurosis or a psychosocial stage of development. In the discourse of sociology, I could place my mother in a chart or a graph with other welfare mothers. I could understand her in a hundred different ways, a hundred different discourses. Yet none of these were satisfactory to me.

This journey -- from my mother's thought and speech to what I've learned at Harvard and afterwards -- this journey seemed to go in one direction and not the other. When I applied what I learned at Harvard to my mother, she grew farther and farther away from me. No longer a running to and fro, no longer a bridge, a pathway between two (cultural) locations, instead my education was a running away from. I moved away from my mother's thought and speech. I tried to travel back, but I could not find a bridge.

I was told I must not be too at home in the knowledge I created. I must objectively separate it from me as a mother gradually knows her child is separate. If discourses are a running to and fro, then I am left running between my mother's home and the world, out of place (homeless) in both spaces.

Good discourses make it easy to communicate. They increase understanding and clarity. They are like rivers with plenty of water in them, they are like a good steady run, like taking deep long breaths, they flow. There can be rocky parts in a discourse, places you must push through, but you do get from one place to another. As Jeanette Winterson wrote in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, "I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices under water. They are distorted. Hearing the words as they hit the surface is sensitive work. You will have to be a bank robber and listen and listen to the little clicks before you can open the safe." A discourse may be an imperfect medium but it can help you get from the place inside your head to the place where you can begin to see inside someone else's.

In my mother's apartment, I try to reconcile my two homes, to build a strong bridge, one that will travel between the two (political, class) locations.

Once there was a time when I did not feel distant from my mother's voice. But then I was inside the slippery red warm walls of her womb. Yet it is hard to have been inside the womb of my mother and to know -- I can never take her inside of me. My eyes saw more of her wet dark caverns, spaces and limits, than she has ever seen. Although she felt me inside her, now she sees of me only the skin I present. This is difficult for us both.

You and I can judge her from outside, but in her womb, as she read and talked to me, I listened to her voice coming to me not through the wall of stomach muscles but through every inside vibration. I doubled, tripled, became an infinity of the self I was. I grew in nine months more than in the twenty-five years since.

When I was in grade school and high school, I played a violin. The violin's voice was like my mother's was when she read to the unborn me. The violin not only sounded on fingertips but also quivered and spoke within my body. Resounded in my bent elbows, my chin, between my ears, temples. The music spoke in the bones of my foot as it tapped the floor, keeping time. When I heard my mother's voice it was like this. Her voice did not come to me, it was part of me already. Its vibrations peeled me off the womb's walls. I didn't listen with ears because toes could hear as well.

I felt like I would never hear her voice and feel fully separate. I don't want to write only about my mother; I also want to write within.

One day last fall, I went to visit my mother, hoping to find some answers to questions I had about her life. My mom was a mysterious person. She was thirty-six years old when I was born, had a whole life she'd lived before me. I wanted to understand the hints she gave me about this other life. I knew bits and pieces, but had never heard the full story. I love to get my mom talking about her family before me, her life and her "other" kids. It is important for me to hear about this earlier life, because it helps me to understand how we, she and I, got to the place where we were now, how we had arrived in this apartment, this city, this situation.

My mother will turn sixty-two this year. She lives in her own apartment, in Quincy, Massachusetts, a city of about 90,000 people that borders Boston, where John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams once lived. She took me to see their homes the first spring that we lived in Quincy -- the log cabin with no running water where John Adams was born and the large mansion he later lived in where John Quincy was born.

Nothing is clear anymore when I try to understand or write about my mom. My story about her spirals out in a million directions and covers too much material when it needs to be focused and artistic and concise. I feel like since I've grown up so much, I've lost all my great and inspiring truths. My mother seems to stand on the other side of the bank as the river of truth flows past. I search for the bridge that will bring us together again.

She and I know each other well. I hold nothing back from her. Sometimes I must be gentle and slow, when I ask painful questions. I know that because I am her child, she cannot reject me, the bond is too deep. On this fall day, we sit at the kitchen table near the window, with the fading autumn sunlight streaming in. I ask her questions about her life -- a few require only dates or one-line answers. I also ask one or two questions that I hope she will not resist.

I have my many theories and interpretations of her. I may know why she is the way she is, perhaps even more than she herself may understand or speak of. But I must ask her the questions, because I tend to write too much into her silences. In recent years, my mother was diagnosed and treated for a depression that makes it difficult for her to work. She now receives Social Security disability insurance. I asked her why she gets Social Security, or what she thinks the reason is. This is a point of sensitivity for her and is something she doesn't like to speak of. I could say simply: She gets Social Security because she is certifiably crazy. I know that this is the easy answer, but I also know that she does not see it that way.

I know my mom, and I am able to reach the places of resistance within her. I am able to call up the most reasonable, deep feeling and thinking, awareness in her. I demand reason of her because I love her and I know her to be a true and truth-seeking person. I want to understand the mystery of my mother, because it is invariably wrapped up with questions about my own identity.

She understands me in a way that few other people do. She is my source and mainspring -- to erase her would again leave me alone and blank, wondering if I came only from a place of craziness and strangeness.

As my mother began to tell me the rambling stories of her life, she drifted away, lost in thought. Her mouth quivers when she is thinking hard, or when she becomes upset. As she thought, her mouth opened slightly, as if she were about to speak, and I saw her tongue moving up and down just slightly, inside her mouth.

Here is the story she tells:

My Life and My Viewpoint of It by Elizabeth Summer

I have three siblings -- one older brother and sister, Jane and Jimmy, twins, and one younger brother, Tommy. The first time I heard the word sibling was when I was twenty-seven, and brought my third child, Kristi, in for her six-week-old checkup. My second child, Bobby, was three years old and sucking his thumb. The doctor said something about sibling rivalry and the middle-child syndrome.

After the doctor's comment, I started thinking about my place amongst my siblings. I was the youngest for three years, until Tommy was born. After that, I was the middle child. But I was "middle" in more than one way.

I was born in the middle of the year (July 7, 1940), grew up midcentury, was the middle child (and lived on the middle of the Pacific Coast in Siletz and Toledo, Oregon. My mother, Savilla Laura Craven, was also born midyear, on July 4, the birthday of the United States, in its heartland, in Russell Springs, Kansas.

I was of average height and weight and fairly average looks. As a middle child, it may be that I was neither as uptight, ambitious, or focused as a firstborn child nor as charming, sociable, and easygoing as a last-born. Rather, I tended to be a steady mediator, to see both sides of a situation, and to attempt to keep the peace or restore it.

When I was a baby, I slept in a dresser drawer. I now have a four-and-a-half-by-two-and-a-half-inch flat spot between the back and top of my head. I think this spot may be from the drawer.

My mother must have been incredibly busy, with twin toddlers and a new baby. She worked like the very dickens. She did not have plastic or paper diapers, and had to wash dozens of cloth diapers each day with a wringer washer.

Our house in Siletz -- where I lived until I was almost nine -- had no indoor plumbing. Jane and I used to shout to our father when we had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, "Daddy, Daddy, turn on the light!" Then we would grope our way down the stairs and use the pot in the corner of our parents' bedroom. The outhouse, which we would use during the day, was an unpainted wood building, three feet by four feet, and was halfway between the house and the barn.

My earliest memory is of being in the garden with my mother. A red racer snake was there -- about sixteen inches long. My mother grew raspberries and rhubarb, beans and peas.

Perhaps my love of flowers and plants comes from these early times spent with Mother. Just today, I looked over the wildflower seeds at Wollaston Market. There were several more sweet William and catchfly, but no blanket fly. They had several kinds that I didn't have: rose mallow, yellow and purple coneflowers, rare aster, succulent lupine, scarlet glads, evening primrose, globe gilia, colonial poppies, and yarrow.

I bought rare marjoram, savory, blue flax, a whole package of flowering kale, corn poppy, Texas bluebonnet, four-o'clocks, and Drummond phlox. I also bought a package of moonflower; I'll try again, and maybe have better luck this time.

There are thousands of young whiteflies on my tomatoes and strawflower. There are none on the white and lavender forget-me-nots, which I have blooming quite nicely.

When I was a child, we had red, black, and white chickens, some regular and some bantam, and a brownish red cow, named Blaze for the white flame-shaped marking on her forehead. Our mother sold butter and eggs to bring in extra money.

We had an apple orchard of sixteen beautiful apple trees. The first to get ripe were the transparent apples. I never see these anywhere anymore. They were little, soft, and yellow. The Gravensteins ripened next, hard green with red stripes; they were big and juicy and tasted lovely. There was a crab apple tree, and other trees with small little hard red apples. The transparent ...