Conjuring Momma in White Oleander

In which I consider my relationship to a book that reminded me of my mother...

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

A few weeks ago, I went back home to record a live podcast of From The Front Porch, the podcast for my hometown bookstore, The Bookshelf in Thomasville, Ga. My favorite part of these events is how they always make me feel like a beloved celebrity, like I’m my hometown’s Dolly Parton or Lindsay Lohan. People come up and ask for pictures and laugh at my stories until they grow bored and think up an escape plan from my ramblings. As a person who often hates myself, this is a lovely way to feel, however briefly, that I have something to offer to the world. While I was down, I took my Momma and Granny out for lunch. Because in this scenario I am a celebrity, I pay for their meal whenever I’m home for the podcast, and they always argue that it’s too expensive, and I always remind them that I make good money now (a white lie), and they thank me and we part ways. I find myself on the verge of crying after every lunch, watching Momma and Granny walk back to their cars, because I miss them, but also because the idea of seeing these two women together in the same room once seemed almost as unfathomable to me as becoming famous.

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My Momma always said my Granny never loved her more than when she was pregnant with me. She got pregnant just after high school, by a much older man who worked at the car dealership next to her job at Subway. She’d already been knocked up once before, at fifteen, and had a botched, back alley abortion that almost killed her, which might be the only reason why, when Granny found her crying in her bed one Saturday morning, Momma confessed. While I was in utero at this point and don’t recall the situation, I spent a lot of time in Momma’s bedroom as a kid and have no problem conjuring my own version of this moment based on Momma and Granny’s mutual recounting of it. Sun cuts in through the cheap, dusty blinds, bars of light scattered across the white walls and matted, blue shag carpet. Granny comes into Momma’s room and sits on the bed, which is bright white with a pattern of little blue bonnets all over, and asks Momma why she’s crying. Momma looks up, her permed hair sticking to her sweaty, tear stained face, and tells her she is pregnant, and Granny says, “You wanna keep this baby?” to which Momma nods, and Granny says—tenderly, but firmly, “Then stop your crying, or you’re gonna lose it.” Momma wipes her eyes and asks if she has to marry my dad, to which Granny says she does not. After that, they make a plan for my arrival.

(I hold this memory so tight, because, though it is not mine, it is the one moment from the past that they both speak so fondly of. Yes, there is pain, but more than anything, there is love.)

My Granny doted on Momma throughout the whole pregnancy, recording her with this gigantic camcorder, documenting my Momma’s swelling. They laughed together as they argued over what my name was going to be—Mercedes, since I was predicted to be a girl—and spent months turning half of Momma’s bedroom into a nursery, playpen, stuffed animals, religious iconography (Granny’s idea, not Momma’s). For the first time in Momma’s life, she told me, she thought everything was going to be okay. I was born on a Wednesday evening in August of 1993, Momma’s epidural all going to one side of her body, leaving the other half to take the brunt of the pain. Everybody was there—Granny, Momma’s high school friends, a woman who Momma briefly lived with during a rebellious phase who couldn’t have children and so Momma let her name me. A few days before birthing me, Momma had gone to the nail salon to get new acrylics in a tangy red color, and depending on who’s telling the story, she scratched me the first time she tried to hold me, and cried so hard they handed me off to Granny, instead. When it was time for discharge, Granny was the one who took me home. Momma said that as she watched Granny carrying me away, she could literally feel all of the love Granny had been giving her pull away, like the ocean, all of that love now washing onto me.

At various times, Momma tried to establish a life for herself, tried to do the “right” thing. After birthing me, she was shamed by the Church of God into marrying a man named Frederick, a marriage that lasted only a few months, since, Momma said, Granny antagonized her and picked at her every time Frederick was around. She lived alone for a while, in this apartment in Cairo, a beautiful building that she couldn’t afford, and so she married a man named Roger, a much older man who’d once hired Momma to babysit his son. He beat her up all the time, sometimes while I was there. He caused two miscarriages, and by the time she was pregnant with my little brother, she’d quit worrying about smoking or drinking or anything that you’re supposed to do while pregnant, because she assumed she would lose it anyway. Not long after my little brother was born, Momma got out. Granny co-signed on a trailer and Momma finally thought she would have her life together. She set up a bedroom for me and one for my little brother, she stocked the freezer with chicken tenders (my favorite) and ordered Disney decorations to make it more appealing for us kids. She soon realized that being a single mom of two was basically financially impossible and started looking for a second job. On her way to an interview one afternoon, she turned a tight corner and a little girl ran out in the middle of the road, and Momma’s brakes weren’t fast enough. I was shielded from this story until only a few years ago, but I remember hearing small details—brain matter on the road, Momma holding the child as she died. Because Momma was working at the hospital around this time, I assumed it had been someone she was trying to save, a person that someone else had injured. I didn’t realize she was the cause.

Not long after that, Momma’s life spiraled out of control and she eventually filed bankruptcy, meaning that Granny also had to file bankruptcy. Momma disappeared. Granny and I lost everything—her beauty shop, our double wide, her silver convertible, which might have been her most prized possession. We moved into this tiny building that used to be a bookstore, and Granny and I rebuilt our life there.

A year went by where I didn’t see Momma, and I looked for her everywhere I went. Whenever a woman cussed or smoked Marlboro ultralights or had long blonde hair, I molded her face over theirs. Granny befriended a rich woman named Judy with substance abuse problems and a habit of chain smoking in restaurants, even when they asked her not to, and I saw all of the ways she was like my Momma and clung to her. When she died a few months later—some combination of booze and pills—I imagined it was Momma I had lost instead.

It was around this time that I saw the film adaptation of White Oleander. The story follows a girl named Astrid as she goes through a series of foster homes after her mother commits and act of violence. The mother, Ingrid, is played by the stunning Michelle Pfeiffer. Early on in the film, Ingrid leaves Astrid alone in the car to have sex with her boyfriend, and while waiting, Astrid looks into the side mirror and repeats a phrase her mother used when rejecting men—”you’re not my type.” Not only did Ingrid remind me of my mother, but Astrid reminded me of myself, of the way I was so desperate for this illusive person who was supposed to love me, be there for me, but for reasons beyond my understanding, couldn’t.

When I read the book at fifteen, my Momma and I weren’t seeing each other very much. She’d married her third husband, a man named Eric, and because he often knocked the shit out of her and because they were often on Meth, my Granny didn’t like me to visit. Reading White Oleander felt like having some access to her again. My Momma was the trailer trash version of Michelle Pfeiffer—cunning and ruthless, only caring about what she wanted in the moment, everything else a distraction. Momma, like Ingrid, was also a poet. I felt such a kinship with Astrid as she fought for her mother’s love and attention throughout the book. When Astrid eventually moved in with her first foster mom, a former-stripper named Starr, it felt like encountering just another version of my Momma. Starr was a chain-smoker, like Momma, and in the film version, Robin Wright played her with a southern drawl that wasn’t too far from Momma’s. Starr also filled in the trailer trash part of Momma, which I don’t say in a derogatory way, because I'm proud of our trailer trash roots. Later, when Astrid moves in with another foster mom, Claire Richards—a cloying, desperate, washed up actress who takes Astrid as a pet, to keep her company while her husband is away—they go through Claire’s jewelry, and, again, I saw another version of my Momma. It might seem impossible that three women who seem so strikingly different could remind me of one person, but my Momma has always been a series of contradictions. When Momma confessed to me, one April night after watching me in a show at my high school, that she thought she might have cancer, the only thing that calmed my fear of losing her was knowing that I had spent the last year or so conjuring her from inside the pages of this novel.

Moving in with Momma later that summer, I brought my tattered copy of White Oleander with me, re-reading it over and over, because even though I was with her, it felt like a constant reminder that if I lost her again, if I lost her permanently, she would still be somewhere within this book. I remember watching the movie with her a few weeks in and telling her that these women reminded me of her, and she was so offended, told me not to ever compare her to those narcissists, that they were bad people and she wasn’t all bad like that. I think she was more harsh in her judgement because she saw the same things that I saw, and the things we often hate the most in other people are the things we also hate about ourselves.

Those few months living with Momma were terrible. She was high all the time, we were constantly scared for our lives—my stepdad was evil, and I know that word sounds like an exaggeration, but he was truly the most cruel person I have ever met. The details of his actions don’t matter here, since this is not about him.

One morning, on the way to the methadone clinic—Momma was trying to get her life together, again—she saw me reading the book and told me I should read something else. When I told her it comforted me, she grabbed it from me, tossed it in the back seat, said she was sick of seeing it. Later, when I asked why, she said it sometimes felt like I loved the book more than I loved her.

A decade went by where Momma and I barely saw each other. Once I became an adult, moved out and set up a life of my own, I set boundaries, told her we could only spend time with each other when she was sober. At random times, like my twenty-fourth birthday, she would sober up and spend the afternoon with me, and then return to her life of using things that erased large swaths of time from her mind, made her forget all of the things she still wasn’t ready to confront. While I was in a much healthier headspace, while I knew I was doing the right thing by keeping her at a safe distance from me, there was still a part of me that died every time I walked away. The film version opens with an adult Astrid talking to the audience in voiceover, saying, “I don’t know how to express that being with someone so dangerous was the last time I felt safe.” And that’s exactly how it felt.

I had spent more than a decade of my life using White Oleander as this alternate universe to where I could access some version of my Momma, but I also used it as a guide, to find answers, to help understand her, my life, where I was supposed to end up. I combed through it’s pages, and I even remember certain moments, certain years, where the wisdom that comes with age illuminated some aspect of my Momma’s life that I had never considered before. Characters I used to love, I now despised, and people I once saw as just like my Momma were no longer quite so. Despite reading the book so many times, I always resisted reading the last few pages, always anxious that I might not like the ending, or that I wouldn’t believe it if the outcome was something I could actually live with.

Momma officially got sober when I was twenty-seven, a year after I finished writing my memoir-in-essays, a collection that often felt haunted by her absence, filled with questions of where she was and why she’d left me. Much of my book was influenced by White Oleander, because every time I didn’t know how to articulate something about Momma, my experience with her, I turned to the book for answers. I remember asking her all of these questions I’d spent years wondering, finally getting the answers that White Oleander couldn’t tell me. It turned out that the book wasn’t what I needed after all, but was just a stand in for this thing I never thought I’d get, but eventually did.

I haven’t read White Oleander since Momma got sober. She moved in with Granny at the beginning of 2021, and by that summer, we were talking every month. I stopped feeling this desperate need to find Momma within the pages of a book, because I finally had her right here. Not only do I get her, but I get to exist with her in the life I had already spent years establishing without her. At the end of White Oleander, Ingrid has a choice to do what is best for herself or to do what is best for Astrid—for years, I thought I knew the answer to if Momma would choose herself or me. But in the years since Momma has been sober, she has put her wants aside to be the kind of parent I need, get along with other people in my life, even when it’s hard, to show up when it’s important. She has often chosen me—a surprise, and just another thing Astrid and I have in common.

I love books, and I always depend on them in hard times. But I am glad that I no longer have to return to this book to conjure a person I miss. I am glad the book can sit on my shelf, just being a book I once loved.

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Over the last few months, I have been reflecting on the books I love and my relationship with them—and also my relationship with other readers. I’m hoping to write more about this over the next few months. If you like, I hope you continue to read them, but I will also have things that aren’t personal essays coming out soon, too, so stay tuned. Anyway, I appreciate you reading.

Until next time,
XOXO