When my mum handed me the notebook, I was excited. It was from a trip she’d taken in the 1970s, visiting her aunt in Omaha, Nebraska. I had just done the exact same trip – a flight to New York City, then a Greyhound bus across the Midwest. I had made this trip to research the ebb and flow of women’s rights over a generation, but also to understand my mother better, and to tell the story of both in a book. This, therefore, was primary source gold: her private thoughts of that moment in time, perfectly preserved from nearly half a century ago.
Or at least some of them were. Because when I took the thin yellow pad in my hands, the faded paper covered in her unmistakable scrawl, I began to notice something. Pages had been removed. Some had parts missing, neatly cut off, as if folded along the line of a ruler and defiantly torn away. It had been redacted by my mother, like a document of national security, and forced into the light by a freedom of information request, by me, her daughter.
Mining for details of my mother’s life, and finding myself on a Greyhound bus crossing Middle America recreating her trip, all started with a tiny square Polaroid. When I was growing up, an old wooden school desk sat in the corner of our living room filled to the brim with family photographs, some in paper packets, others loose. It was like a memory lucky dip. I’d root around and pull something out – a birthday, a first day at school, a hot afternoon in the garden. I was looking for evidence of my father, proof he’d been there before he left when I was a baby. But in searching for him, I came across a version of my mother I’d never seen before.
It’s 1974, she’s 22 and standing on the shores of Lake Michigan, wearing denim hotpants, a brown, cropped halter neck, and a smile as dazzling as the waters behind her. The mother I had watched as a child was an exhausted single parent, battling a demanding job, a three-hour round commute, and a particularly unpredictable Citroën 2CV. The young woman in the picture radiated hope and possibility, illuminated by the potential of everything that might happen, everything she might be.
I wanted to learn who this young woman was and how she became the mother I knew and loved so fiercely. The timing was not insignificant, either: our trips bookend abortion rights in America. My mum made her journey the year after Roe v Wade, the constitutional right to abortion, came into law. I travelled on the eve of the repeal of Roe, almost 50 years later. The hope that saturated the Polaroid undoubtedly filled the air of the moment she was in – something terrifyingly absent as I began my journey into an America still feeling the shock waves of a Trump administration.
Seven states, six weeks, 1,300 miles and innumerable highways lined with corn fields later, I came to realise that all the clues to the young woman I was looking for had been in front of me all along. My mum’s spirit for adventure, the one that led her to Nebraska, took us on night trains through the Alps and long drives down to the south of France as children. Her determination to see a world far bigger than her own was there when she’d leave work, collect my brother and I from our home in Surrey and drive us into Brixton to attend meetings (as part of her job) between the community and police, ensuring we understood life far outside our Home Counties bubble. Her hopeful belief in all that could be was there when she pleaded with my brother and I to follow our passions at university. Life hadn’t transformed her into someone else as I’d mistakenly assumed – everything in that Polaroid had stayed with her. And she had been trying to pass it on to us.
Yet if my trip reaffirmed what I already knew of my mother, a journey of discovery still took place – one of self-discovery. Because I hadn’t realised that by asking “Who are you?” as a daughter to a mother, I was actually asking, “Who are you, and therefore, who am I?”
The trip became an exercise in understanding all that I could be, as much as it was an understanding of all my mum was. Taking a bus halfway across America, stopping off in big Midwestern cities and interviewing women about their work to protect their freedoms, revealed a side of myself I wasn’t always convinced was there. It was a version of me I thought only existed in late-night conversations where I’d whisper ambitions after a few glasses of wine dared me to.
“You’re braver than you realise,” my partner told me as we had said goodbye at Heathrow. As the weeks rolled by, I started to believe him. I took all the hope and possibility of the young woman in the photo and used it to catapult myself into a string of life-affirming experiences: visiting a blues bar in Chicago and talking to the band until 1am; meeting old timers in dive bars in Indianapolis; speaking to young girls at a pro-choice rally in St Louis; sitting on the porch of a 70-something who performed illegal abortions in the days before Roe. It was not lost on me that the most exciting thing I’d ever done, and the most ambitious and rigorous journalistic project I have ever undertaken, was because of my mum. In the pursuit of her, I finally found the courage to chase my own dreams.
A few months after I got home, I discovered I was pregnant. It was around this time she showed me the faded notebook from her trip, and the state secrets withheld from me. At first I was taken aback and mildly offended. What was she hiding? But in time, as the days of motherhood turned into weeks, and then months, I began to understand the redacted notebook in a new way.
I began to realise there are some stories I won’t want my son to know, partly because they serve no purpose or are too embarrassing or shameful but, more importantly, because they are mine. In the baptism of fire that was looking after a newborn, I watched my sense of self disappear – sandcastle walls crumbling at the relentless tide of giving everything I am and have to keep a baby alive. In order to fortify ourselves, of course we must keep things only for us. Of course our children can’t know all of us. Of course there is more to my mother than her motherhood, as there is more to me than mine, and I started to wonder if my journey into my mother’s past felt something closer to trespassing.
And so in time I came to see the notebook not as the absence of something, but the fulfilment. As much as I realised a braver and bolder version of myself because of my mother, when she handed me the notebook I understood, perhaps for the first time, the limitations of the stories we can know about ourselves if we’re looking for them through the lens of our parents. And this, unexpectedly, completed my trip. Her independence from me proved she is much more than just my mother, that her life is far bigger than my understanding of it. I was, at last, recognising her beyond her relationship to me. Did this mean I’d finally grown up?
My journey across the Midwest only took me so far in terms of what it could tell me about the woman in the Polaroid, but because of that young woman I went out in the world and had the adventure of a lifetime. And I came home convinced adventures were, after all, for me, too. Now, as a mother, I wish that same belief for my son. I want him to know he comes from women who believe the world is big and needs to be explored, that journeys for one on Greyhound buses are good for the soul, that unusual paths are the ones worth taking, and great and important stories are worth chasing and telling. I hope I can pass down courage the way my mum did, by showing, not telling. And I hope I live my life in such a way that it encourages him to live his – full of ambition and curiosity. Just as my mum has done for me.
Our parents might be mirrors to stare at compulsively, searching for explanation and understanding, or ones we avoid because they are too painful. But we need to remember those mirrors are distorted, incomplete. Our parents will, and can, only tell us so much about who we are, however hard we look. On the journey, and now on the wild ride of motherhood, I realise it’s up to me to figure out the rest. Because I will never see the unredacted version of that notebook, and nor should I.
Wild Hope by Marisa Bate is published by HQ at £16
