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"Mother Load"

© Jody Hart Lehrer

I recall quite clearly that summer day, in 1967, in Vermont, where my sister and I lived with our grandparents, when my father came to vist and to tell us some "very sad news." I had known, at six years old, that my mother was ill with breast cancer, losing her hair, and dying in a hospital in Boston.

As I sat, hands clenched in my lap, near the tranquil lake to which my father had taken us to receive this news that would alter our lives forever, I knew what he would tell us. I cried before he could form the sentence "she has died."

On that July afternoon, my childhood died unnoticed along with my mother. I was elevated - unwittingly - to adulthood. I took on the "mother load," promising to raise my sister and never relinquished the role of mother.

However, I am now, myself, a mother and must focus, as I have for nearly six years, on raising my beautiful daughter. I seek nothing more than to establish with her the very special relationship that I, along with my sister, never had as a child.

Now, for Hannah, my daughter, I can say, at least, that I am well-rehearsed in the role of caretaker, nurturer, and provider of support. This job I assume instictively; it came about as a matter of survival, due to the circumstances of my childhood. Still, there is rarely a day, not even a good one, when I don't wish that I could fall back on some comforting words and gestures of my mother, if only I could remember a single one. She died - at the age of 44 - before I could store them up.

For Hannah, I have practically made it my religion to give her everything that I did not have. This includes pictures and journal entries depicting an all-too rapidly passing childhood. I like to boast to my friends that my daughter is the most well-chronicled child since the Kennedy family kids, those symbols of American royalty.

Since my daughter was eight months old I have studiously recorded every gurgle, sneeze, and shuffle, every word and every adventure, every good deed and bad, in journals now numbering eleven. Each one containing over 100 pages, I have literally thousands of pages of diary entries, replete with photographs where called for (if we went to the zoo, I include one or two shots of Hannah with the zebras; if I bought her a new stuffed animal, the animal gets his furry mug shot in the diary along with his name).