Mom and I spent our Friday nights at the kitchen table, drawing big circles around yard sale ads.

"Mallary, rise and shine. It's yard-sale time," Mom would say at 6:30 the next morning. We hopped into our banana boat, the pet name for our yellow Grand Marquis, and cruised around town in search of treasures. Jewel-studded pins. Trinkets. Trolls.

"Tell Me Why" books were our favorite.

Filled with hundreds of questions that adults wonder about and kids actually ask, the book gave me the answers I sought as a child.

"Tell me why the sky is blue," "Tell me why Eskimos build igloos." "Tell me why cows moo."

Tell me why, Mommy, tell me why.

Maybe Mom bought me these books to shut me up since I was always asking questions. Maybe she bought them for me because she wanted me to have something to remember her by.

Sometimes Mom would get frustrated with me when I asked too many questions. Her frustration mounted into a raging temper whenever I lost something. I would do everything I could to fill the void and ignore the loss, never mentioning the pair of earrings I lost or the $10 bill I misplaced in the school cafeteria one day.

When I lost my retainers, Mom made me tear apart my room until midnight and search for them. She asked me why I didn't take better care of them. I didn't have an answer and I never found the retainers.

Loss and I never got along well.

I was thinking about Mom while researching an article at the St. Petersburg Pregnancy and Resource Center, where I listened to the center's director, Carole, talk with her daughter Danielle. Though my story was about the center, their interaction intrigued me, so I prodded and poked and asked to enter into their world.

I discovered that Carole asks her daughters a lot of questions. She always wants to know whom she's talking to on the phone. "I still want to see her as a little girl," Carol says. But she realizes that at some point, she has to let go.


I felt out of place sitting there between Carole and Nicole. Their interaction would only be a snippet in my story, but I wanted to know everything about them.

"What kinds of movies do you watch?" "How often do you get on each other's nerves?" "What do you do for fun?" I learned all about their mother-daughter traditions.

Every week Carole and Danielle go to the RaceTrac gas station on 54th Avenue North to buy cappuccinos. About once a month they buy shrimp, wings and French fries from Gyros and stay up until 1:00 a.m. talking.

Every week during the summer, Mom and I drove to Bergson's Ice Cream to buy a quart of mocha almond chip ice cream and a tub of chocolate sprinkles. We devoured it together when we watched "Melrose Place" and "Seinfeld." People said I was too young to watch a nighttime soap opera like "Melrose Place," but sometimes Mom was more of a big sis than a mother.

Carole and Danielle are like sisters, too, who can't ever agree on what movies to watch. Danielle loves "Bruce Almighty" but Carole can't stand Jim Carey's humor. She prefers "My Cousin Vinny."

Mom took me to my first movie when I was 2 years old. She had to leave with me after Bambi's mother got shot.

Tell me why, Mommy, tell me why.

I didn't know what to do except cry. I didn't know that I was responding to what would become my greatest fear.


My fear became reality on Sunday, February 9, 1997. Mom had suffered from breast cancer for three years. Like a weed, the cancer tangled itself around her body, strangling her bone marrow, liver and eventually her brain.

All I wanted that afternoon was a mother to comfort me. But the one person who I wanted to console me couldn't. Her body was frail, her skin yellow, her eyes shut. She wasn't the mom who used to go to yard sales and eat mocha almond chip ice cream with me.

The night before Mom died, my grandma suggested I sleep at her house. It wasn't right, she said, to see my mother in so much pain.

I thought all along my mom would survive. At least, that's what everyone had been telling me. As an 11-year-old, I didn't want to believe otherwise. I didn't want to face the "essential female tragedy," as poet Adrienne Rich calls it, the loss of a mother to a daughter, a daughter to a mother. Even as a 2-year-old watching Bambi, this loss seemed so real.

On the day Mom died, I was in her childhood bedroom, sitting on her bed. The phone rang. My grandma answered.

"Yes? Oh my God ..."

My grandma rushed upstairs, sat on the bed next to me and said, "Mal, your mom's passed away." So final, so hurtful, so terse.

We piled into my grandparent's blue Buick and headed toward my house. I lay across the backseat, resting my head on my grandma's lap, holding onto the "Rosie Red" lipstick Mom had bought me. Nervously, I twisted the cap back and forth, crushing the stick. Then I started to cry.

I spent a few minutes at my mother's side but I wasn't ready to let go when the men in black came and took her away.

Tell me why, Mommy, tell me why you had to leave me, I thought. Why did you desert me? Why did you promise you would stay? I couldn't open my "Tell Me Why" book for help.


The blow of the tragedy lessens but it never really dies. It transforms itself into hope when I am with other moms like Carole, who remind me that while my own mom may not be alive, I can still keep her alive through writing and photography.

I sift though pictures of Mom and wish more than anything that I could take photos with her now. Photos of Mom hugging me so tight I looked like I might squeal, and the one of us walking around the front yard in our pajamas, searching for Easter eggs, sit in picture frames on my desk.

Carole and Danielle share memories together, too. They laugh when looking at pictures of Danielle's crazy hairdos as a child. Carole admits she knew nothing about how to do hair. She still needs Danielle to go with her to the salon and approve of her haircut.

I could ask Carole questions all day about how these times bring her and Danielle together. I want to hear about these moments. I want to write about them. I want to know why Mom had to leave so soon.

As students at Poynter, we are taught to ask the "why" questions, but I'm not sure we ever really find all the answers. In searching for stories, I search for meaning. If I'm lucky, I find moms like Carole who help me remember my own mom.

Maybe it's not so much of an accident, then, that when finding stories at Poynter, I found mothers. It's amazing to hear people's responses when you ask them to tell you about their mothers. As journalists, as human beings, it is a question that can lead us on a journey to discovering who people want to become. Or don't.

I want to be a mom who takes her kids to yard sales and watches TV while eating ice cream. I want to be like Danielle, who can laugh and talk with her mom by her side.

In these mother-daughter moments, I realize I'll never lose the need to be mothered.


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PointsSouth: Articles 2007 Archive

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