Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other and the World- Excerpt

By Claire and Mia Fontaine –

From Chapter 4: NEPAL: KALEIDOSCOPE

Last night’s spell is broken the moment our taxi leaves the gates of our hotel to inch into the jammed traffic. It feels as if we’ve left the castle for the land where the heroine has gone off to find the magic elixir to save her kingdom and hasn’t yet returned.

It’s strange to be on a dirt road in the middle of a city of two million people. Either side of it is scattered with chunks of concrete, debris, piles of garbage, what looks like a sewage trench, and skinny dogs flopped on their sides in the heat.

Nepal is one of the five poorest nations on earth, with a 50 percent literacy rate, a precarious infrastructure, severe environmental issues, a fifty-eight-year average lifespan, and a large number of malnourished, homeless children.

Five of whom are out the window on our right, scavenging on top of a block-long hill of smoking garbage. They’re barefoot, only partly clothed, and two of them can’t be more than five. One is trying to yank something out of a dog’s mouth. Two women in deep-yellow saris with water buckets walk past the children as if they’re invisible.

On our left is the kind of slum I haven’t seen since my family got lost on a trip to Tijuana in the sixties. Dwellings are cobbled together from corrugated metal, branches, rope, and blue tarps. A few kids tease and play; one sits listlessly beside a group of men squatting on their haunches, staring silently at passing traffic. They’re called sukumbasi, the landless population.

But even among the heartbreak on this long road, there is beauty. Small shrines on every block are dusted by the faithful with orange and pink powders, fathers and sons stop to leave offerings of flower petals and move on. A mother and daughter in pink tunics over lavender pants emerge from the slum, stepping over trash, dogs. Women wrapped in vermilion, marigold, and peacock-blue saris weave through traffic with babies on their hips. When women proclaim their place in the world with hot-pink scarves trailing from their shoulders as they walk beside stink- ing garbage heaps, beauty is a weapon, a refusal.

Even here, there are signs in English for ESL, for IT training and computer classes. School kids in crisp blue uniforms with neckerchiefs tied smartly under their chin bike or walk to the schools that seem to be on every corner: Little Genius English School, Bright Future High School, National Inventive English School. Some of these kids come out of slums and walk right past starving kids. I wonder how the kids are selected, who decides whose fate is sealed with a pencil case and blue blouse?

Her hair’s not even dry from her shower, but already Nepal has made Mia’s face unfamiliar to me. Compassion, fascination, revulsion, sadness, delight, surprise—all flash and flit as we drive. She’s never seen life like this, other than in magazines or photo exhibits. I’m as compelled to watch her as what’s outside.

A mother never tires of her daughter’s face, at any age. One of the most rewarding and entertaining aspects of mothering is being able to witness the very moment your little girl discovers something about her- self or the world. We’re always with them when they’re small; we have the opportunity to see subtle changes, the light bulb moments, the shock at harder truths.

It’s part of what we, and they, lose when they grow up, the world is no longer new to them in the same miraculous way; and when it is, we’re rarely there to witness it. It was one of the most amazing things about writing Come Back with Mia, witnessing her during the creative process, seeing something emerge from her soul, still shiny and wet as a newborn.

I know Mia watches me this way, too. Sometimes I would catch my reflection in a window near my desk and see her face off to the side, watching me. Or I’d see her through a kitchen doorway when she was young, watching me cook from a distance. So much of us is unknown, and unknowable, to our daughters. We carry a whole lifetime of before within us. How do you express that to them?

That before is all the more mysterious and inscrutable for daughters of mothers from other countries and cultures. My mother is from Eastern Europe; she survived the Holocaust in hiding in Budapest. Her family did not. We share almost no social, cultural, emotional, or, save a few cousins, familial experiences or references.

When I was little, I used to love to spy on my mother as she sat knitting on the sofa, after a houseful of kids was quiet. Knitting was the first time I remember seeing her as someone other than my mother. It was something she did for herself, as a person, not as a mom.

William Morrow, 2012

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