Friday night there was a big party for my mother to celebrate her 40 years of service to the city. People told stories and offered reflections about my mom and then we all watched a movie about my mom’s career. There’s one story in the film that I can’t shake and that has shaken me up.

It was a really well done film and talked about my mom's life and career in moving and interesting ways. In the late 1960s and early '70s my mother told stories twice a day, 5 days a week, in schools all over Manhattan, Harlem and the Bronx. She had a weekly radio program, Stories from Many Lands, on WNYC for years. She’s written 23 books, traveled the world--she's had an incredible career and is still going strong. The movie contained interviews with friends and other storytellers (I was interviewed as were my kids) and also showed amazing still photographs I hadn't seen. It felt very real, much less idealized than I would have imagined. But this one story:

Early in her storytelling career my mom wanted to go to Haiti. She and my dad and I (in the film she says I was 10 months old but in the still photo I look like I’m about 13 months) all went. My mother fell deeply in love with the country and the stories and the storytellers and storytelling culture there. In the film my mom, at a storytelling congress about 10 years ago, explains to a large audience: It was the day we were supposed to leave and I looked at my husband and said, "I don't think I can leave," and he said, "don't" and I said, "don't?" and he said, "stay, I'll take Rachel home," and so at the last minute I decided to stay and I drove them to the airport and they got on the plane and I was driving away as the plane was taking off and I was watching the plane thinking, this is incredible, they are on the plane and I am here. And I'm driving and watching the plane and I crash into another car. It turns out to be the chief of police of Haiti and not only that but in the confusion my husband has taken my passport and driver's license back to N.Y. with him.

So I’m sitting on the floor (so my kids can see) in the front of an audience of about 100 people. I’ve got my left boob shoved in my newborn’s mouth to keep him quiet and I’m wiggling my middle son’s tooth with my right hand because he is whining and saying it hurts. And from time to time I’m leaning over to my older son and saying “that’s me!” when a still photo of my as a young child comes up on the screen, but it’s already 8 pm (bedtime) and all three boys are about to lose it. I’m weak with exhaustion and spent over 2 hours getting us to this party and I’m so happy for my mom that she gets this party and I’m so moved by the speech that her best friend of over 40 years made about her, but then, the story about the plane—it goes right into me. I feel it pierce me, lodge in some soft tissue.

-- I'm proud of the work my mother did in Haiti. She taped over 400 stories and learned Creole and traveled all over the country and wrote The Magic Orange Tree, an amazing book which has been lauded usefulness to teachers and storytellers.

-- I'm proud of my father for saying to my mother, "stay." It was 1972 or 1973 and my father left his 30 year old pretty, white wife ALONE in HAITI because he knew it was important to her work, to her. What an unusual gender dynamic they had.

-- I'm proud of my mom for staying and being so courageous. Watching the film it also occurred to me that I’ve always taken it for granted that my mother (though she might have it in for rich people and Republicans) is not a racist. Seeing these photos of my mother at these late night storytelling gatherings, alone in a foreign country, I thought, for the first time, about just how far from “home” this was for a Smith college girl who was born and raised in New Jersey by frightfully bigoted Jewish parents. I'm amazed.

But the story, like all good stories, is dark and difficult and my allegiance shifts from character to character and after the pride and admiration there is anger and resentment and fear and no easy moral or directive. After all there is the very young child whose mother ships her off. And that child is me. There are many unanswered questions here, questions that, now that I am a mother, haunt me. Was she nursing? Was she afraid of dying and never seeing me again? What were my father's parenting skills? If you believe the story, then no one prepared me (because there was no time) for this separation and no one thought about how this would affect me. How did if affect me? If I was not upset to be separated from my mother, what was the quality of my emotional attachment to her? If I was upset, what did my father do?

My mother said, "this was incredible" about my father and I flying away on the plane. It's hard to interpret that word. Was she relieved? Was she sad? What did my father think? Was this a rift in their marriage? You can read the story as a feminist triumph but does that reading change if you know that my parents’ marriage ended very badly? How long did my mother stay? (She took me back with her to haiti several times over the next few years, sometimes for many months and I have wonderful and truly terrible memories of Haiti).

My sons always ask me to read the hard stories over and over, the stories they can’t quite understand, the ones that bother them. And I find myself telling myself this story over and over in my mind all night long. It is hard for me to make sense of it as a daughter, as a mother, as a writer, as a wife.

I left my oldest son Moses to go to the AWP conference when he was 10- months old. It was a hard decision, very painful, and in the end I came home a day early. I wasn’t feeling well and thought that the separation from my son was physically too difficult. It turned out that I was pregnant but didn’t know it yet. As a young girl I imagine being a completely different mother than my mother. I imagined having four sons and staying home with them doing art projects and changing my name to Mrs. ? and not working and baking cookies. I’ve got three sons now but that’s not mother I became. My sons went to day care from a young age (I would have lost my mind if they hadn’t) and their existence heightened my desire to write and to work outside the home. I've spent a lot of time as a mother wanting to leave. A lot. And I’ve spent a lot of time “gone.” I’ve been behind closed doors writing as my boys cried for me, resisting the bribes and pleas of various babysitters. I’ve traveled without my children more than most mothers I know and I certainly didn’t change my name when I married. But I've also worked my heart out making this a family and a family life that I don't feel as stiffled by and now I've gone and had baby #3 instead of going to a writer's colony or enjoying the relative freedom I have of having a 6 and 8 year old. I did this on purpose.

My mother was honored for her career, and, as I said in the movie she deserves this on every level. It is weird to have our personal relationship exposed in public but it’s not just her as a role model that I admire. My work ethic, my drive, my love of story, my ability to listen, to be still all come from her. Like all the gifts we’re given these are both life-saving and poisonous. The drive to create, to work, to make something of my life. The difficulty in staying, waiting, considering others’ needs before my own. I am a very different mother. I am a similar mother. There is a way to be a good mother and an artist. There isn’t. Going into the other room while my children are well cared for (even if they are unhappy) when they know where I am and when I’m coming back is NOT like staying in Haiti and sending them home. Going to the writing place is like going to Haiti. I have to choose between my three boys and the novel I have not worked on for almost 3 years. I can do both. Even writing this blog entry feels, on some level, neglectful of them. And what about my poems? My marriage? Do I wish I’d had a mother who lived only for me? Who had not traveled the world and followed her heart and changed people’s lives and believed in herself and in women and the spoken and written word? But, the little girl on the plane, what does she want?

As I’m writing this, early Saturday morning, Judah is waking up and I need to stand up and walk back and forth and make the big boys breakfast and get us ready for the big day of storytelling and get snacks and extra clothes and notebooks and pencils and games and a picnic blanket because I'm slightly obsessive about being prepared and then I will spend 30 minutes feeling nervous that I can't fit in a taxi with the infant car seat and so we will go without one and I'll hold Judah extra tight knowing that if we crash it won't be enough and by the time we get there at 11 am I'll look like the old woman who lived in a shoe and I'll sit in the audience with my 3 sons and watch my mother dance and growl and howl and captivate strangers and I'll be proud and angry and we'll all sing and clap and Godamn if I know what all this means. I don't.