Pieces of My Mother: A Memoir, by Melissa Cistaro
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Pieces of My Mother: A Memoir, by Melissa Cistaro
Ebook Download : Pieces of My Mother: A Memoir, by Melissa Cistaro
"A story that lingers in the heart long after the last page is turned." —HOPE EDELMAN, bestselling author of Motherless Daughters and The Possibility of Everything
This provocative, poignant memoir of a daughter whose mother left her behind by choice begs the question: Are we destined to make the same mistakes as our parents?
One summer, Melissa Cistaro's mother drove off without explanation Devastated, Melissa and her brothers were left to pick up the pieces, always tormented by the thought: Why did their mother abandon them?
Thirty-five years later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. After decades of hiding her painful memories, she has just days to find out what happened that summer and confront the fear she could do the same to her kids. But Melissa never expects to stumble across a cache of letters her mother wrote to her but never sent, which could hold the answers she seeks.
Haunting yet ultimately uplifting, Pieces of My Mother chronicles one woman's quest to discover what drives a mother to walk away from the children she loves. Alternating between Melissa's tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother's final days, this captivating memoir reveals how our parents' choices impact our own and how we can survive those to forge our own paths.
Pieces of My Mother: A Memoir, by Melissa Cistaro - Amazon Sales Rank: #170979 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-05-05
- Released on: 2015-05-05
- Format: Kindle eBook
Pieces of My Mother: A Memoir, by Melissa Cistaro Review "This is an astonishing book, full of heartbreak and love and hard-won wisdom. Melissa Cistaro writes beautifully not just about her search for the mother who abandoned her, but about the myriad ways parents and children don't and do connect. Told in vivid scenes and through the texts of letters her mother never sent, Cistaro chronicles a journey that goes way past forgiveness to true understanding." - Will Schwalbe, bestselling author of The End Of Your Life Book Club"Sometimes we are defined as much by the person who is missing as the person who is there. Melissa Cistaro has a story to tell and one you don't hear every day. I was deeply moved from word one." - Kelly Corrigan, bestselling memoirist of The Middle Place, Lift, and Glitter & Glue"Melissa Cistaro's imagery is startling and vivid, her story brutally honest and devoid of judgment. Pieces of My Mother is a story that lingers in the heart long after the last page is turned." - Hope Edelman, bestselling author of Motherless Daughters and The Possibility of Everything "Full of hope, regret and lessons learned, Pieces of My Mother is a unique and compelling look at how profoundly mothers affect our lives. Whether absent or hauntingly close, longing for a mother can force a child into maturity beyond her years, and garner her with a lifetime of longing. This book is as lyrical as it is honest, as humorous as it is heartbreaking." - Monica Holloway, bestselling author of Cowboy & Wills and Driving with Dead People"Heartbreaking in its simplicity, Pieces of My Mother is Melissa Cistaro's attempt to shed some much needed light on her dark past...a tentative, poignant, painful exploration that welcomes complexity, forgiveness, and empathy. " - Sahar's Reviews"Weeks after I read the last gorgeous page of Pieces of My Mother, I still find myself thinking about Melissa Cistaro and her complex, maddening and fascinating mother. What caused this woman to walk out of her house one afternoon, leaving the children she loved behind? As Melissa puts the pieces together we are treated to an outstanding memoir written with tenderness, wit and depth. " - Elaine Petrocelli, Book Passage, San Francisco, CA"An honest and affecting story of the many complexities involved with family relationships." - Kirkus"At three, Cistaro watched her mother sob in the driver's seat of her car through the window in her bedroom. Minutes later, her mother drove off, removing herself from the traditional role. Thirty six years later, Cistaro leaves her family on Christmas Day to sit by her mother's bedside as she succumbs to cirrhosis. Challenged to piece together a woman she barely knows, Cistaro takes the reader into her world, her story. Weaving between Now and Then, Cistaro tells of life with and without her mother. And without her." - April Gosling, Boulder Bookstore (Boulder, CO)"Truly wonderful. Not your typical dysfunctional family memoir. I thought the structure - alternating scenes of her dyeing mother with the past was brilliant." - Suzy Staubach, U Conn Co-op (Storrs, CT)"Filled with moments of poignancy and grace, Melissa Cistaro's beautiful book lands on a gorgeous note of redemption. I loved it." - Lolly Winston, bestselling author of Good Grief and Happiness Sold Separately
About the Author Melissa Cistaro is a bookseller and the events coordinator at Book Passage, the legendary San Francisco Bay Area independent bookstore, where she has hosted more than 200 authors. A writer and mother of two, she has been interviewed on a number of radio shows and has been published in numerous literary journals including the New Ohio Review, Anderbo.com, and Brevity as well as in two anthologies alongside Anne Lamott, Jane Smiley, and other writers. Melissa graduated with honors from UCLA and continued her education with the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. She has participated in the Tin House Writer's Workshop in Portland and The Writer's Studio in Los Angeles. She lives in San Francisco.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THEN a house underwater
Bun-Bun notices my mom outside before I do. He tells me about it. We watch her walk toward her car. She's wearing her summer dress that is the color of ripe avocados. Her brown purse, slung over her shoulder, is as fat as the raccoon that crawls into our garbage cans late at night, and she has an armful of clothes hooked into her elbow. Her favorite coat drops onto the pavement. It doesn't look like a coat the way it crumples up on the ground.
I know that coat so well, every bit of tan, brown, yellow, and red-every small wooden button. So many times I have traced the curling patterns and small rows of dots with my fingertip, and my mom always reminds me that the pattern is called "paisley." She turns around, picks up her favorite paisley coat, and tosses it on top of the pile of clothes she's already put in the backseat of her blue car, then slams the car door shut.
As she turns around to look back at the house, I have Bun-Bun do a little wave and a dance as I duck below the window in my room. She'll think Bun-Bun has really come to life. His tan head and floppy ears are made of real rabbit fur that only recently began to shed around his green eyes and on the tips of his ears. I know how to make him look like he's hopping through a field. I lift my eyes just above the ledge. My mom is standing next to the car looking down at her feet.
I am supposed to be taking a nap, but it's too hot and I don't like to sleep. During nap time my whole room comes to life and anything can happen. Stuffed animals talk to each other, fairies fly out of the wall sockets, and plastic horses gallop across the hardwood floor. My brother told me that when I'm five like him, I won't have to stay in my room during nap time.
For days now the air has been like fire, so hot that it ripples above the concrete and makes things outside look like they are underwater. It is the kind of heat that has made our next-door neighbor's dogs hide underneath our house where it's cool and dusty. Mr. Bird, who owns the dogs, came over and told us this just yesterday.
"Dogs know what to do with themselves when California heats up like this, but not people," he said. "It's the kind of heat that could cause some folks to snap." And when he said that word, "snap," he took the toothpick out of his teeth and broke it in two. Then he laughed like he thought he was clever. Later, I saw his broken toothpick on our porch and kicked it into the dead grass where it got lost in all the yellow.
I open my bedroom door and peer into the living room. My brother Eden is asleep on the couch with a box of Lucky Charms wedged underneath his arm. The TV is on and I watch for a moment as Underdog flies across the gray screen, and I remember that my brother Jamie isn't here. He's almost six and the oldest. He left the house earlier to go swimming in his friend Bobby Winston's pool. My mom was mad when Mrs. Winston showed up early to grab Jamie for swimming. She told Mrs. Winston that she only had two cigarettes left and didn't want to go out to the store in the heat.
When Mom is out of cigarettes, she counts on Jamie to be here with Eden and me so she can run down to the corner market. If she has to wait too long to get them, the house begins to swell with noise-the clap of cupboards opening and closing, the crack of the ice-cube tray slamming against the counter, and her voice rising over ours like a mockingbird.
I wish that Mrs. Winston had offered to lend her some cigarettes or get her some, but she didn't. She just pointed to her hairdo, which she called a "beehive," and said, "This darn heat is just killing me and my hair too."
After Mrs. Winston left, my mom said she thought that hairstyle looked "goddamn ridiculous." I picked up the box of cigarettes lying on the table and carried it to my mom. She tapped the last two out of the package. Then we sat side by side on the plaid couch as she smoked each of them. Out of her red shiny lips came rings of smoke like little white doughnuts floating through the air. I reached up and stuck my finger through the center of one. She pulled my arm away and whispered, "No, just watch."
She said she liked it when the rings began to lose their shape and stretch out. She said they were beautiful the way they disappeared. I didn't like it when they went away. I preferred it when they first came out of her red lips and looked like powdered doughnuts.
"Make more," I said. And she did, like magic, over and over.
With my brother Eden asleep and Underdog ducking back into a telephone booth, I sneak past them and into the kitchen where our old fan is clunking around in circles, but no cool air is coming out. On the counter there is a pitcher of sticky orange Kool-Aid with three black flies floating on the surface. The sight of the soggy flies makes me uneasy, and in an instant, the heat feels like it will swallow me. I want my dad to come home from work.
I race back to the window in my room to see if my mom is coming back in. She is standing in the same place. I want to tell her that it is too hot out there for her, that she could melt. But she's stuck out there, it seems, and I'm stuck in here.
I need her to come back in the house. I need her to tell me that nap time is over and that tonight we will go to Fosters Freeze where the ice cream races out of a noisy machine and into perfect swirls of vanilla and chocolate.
Instead, she opens the car door and gets in. I lay my hand against my bedroom window. The glass is warm and it feels like I can almost reach her.
I know this is not a trip to get cigarettes.
I want to yell out to her: "Please don't leave..." I am trying to say it. But nothing comes out. I just watch her without blinking once. Bun-Bun and I both have stupid plastic eyes and sewed-on mouths. Inside of us there is nothing but sawdust.
Then I see her mouth break open wide like a fish gasping for air. She is crying inside her car. The air wobbles above the concrete. Everything is underwater. It crosses my mind that I could swim to her if I knew how. Jamie does; he would swim to her if he were here.
I press my forehead against the glass and swallow every word I know. Underwater, everything is quiet and full of ripples. My mom is a mermaid as she swims away from me, her thick hair waving like strands of long seaweed. I don't hear the sound of the car engine starting up, but I watch as my mom backs up and drives away in her baby-blue Dodge Dart.
• • •
Jamie says he was bad and that's why Mom left. Eden cries the most and spends extra time in the backyard looking for gypsy moths and black crickets to kill. I collect small boxes from around the house-empty Band-Aid tins, Lipton Tea containers, and Lucky Strike matchboxes. They are tiny suitcases that I can hide things in. Anything I want: buttons, bad thoughts, daisy petals, and even the shiny sequins that fall off my Christmas stocking. I put these small boxes just beneath my windowsill, all lined up and in order, and keep them there so that I can show them to my mom when she comes back.
Our dad tells us she's taking "a break" from us for a while but he doesn't like to talk about it. Jamie says maybe we will see her when the weather cools down. Or maybe she will come if one of us has a birthday. I keep hoping it is all a mistake. When I hear laughing late at night outside our house, I stay awake in case it is her coming back. And sometimes I hear the radio next door shouting out songs she would sing along to. I can feel her swaying me in her arms and singing "Good-bye, Ruby Tuesday." I am waiting for her to come bolting through the front door and never stop hugging us again.
A sitter, who is not our mom, comes to live at our house so our dad can go back to work. And when that sitter gets tired of us, a new one arrives. Everyone says I am too young to remember what's happened and that children my age simply don't remember the details. I can't blame them for saying that. But I am as quiet as a cat, watching everyone and everything.
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37 of 41 people found the following review helpful. Pieces Of A Broken Mother . . . . By SundayAtDusk There's no shortage of contemporary memoirs about mothers, particularly mothers who did not excel in mothering. Melissa Cistaro has added a new one to the list, and it is definitely a worthwhile one to read. When Ms. Cistaro was three, her mother packed up all her stuff in her car one day and drove away, leaving the author and her two brothers to be raised by their father. She still saw her mother at times throughout her childhood, but those visits weren't particularly productive and her mother always left again.The story not only concentrates on those mostly motherless childhood years, but also on the trip the author made when she was in her late 30s to see her dying mother one last time. Ms. Cistaro does an excellent job going back and forth between the two time periods, too; there is no confusion about what's going on or when something happened. During that final visit, the author discovers letters her mother wrote to her children and others, but never mailed. She reads some of those letters while she's at her mother's home, and then takes them home with her when she returns to her husband and two children.The author appears to see those letters as being insightful and loving. My views on them are far less generous. I'm afraid I don't see it as being any great loss that her mother never mailed them. In fact, I thought at least she had the decency not to mail her narcissistic letters, filled with all her claims of care and concern! Talk is cheap and the letters were nothing but talk. Ironically, I thought the most nauseating one was the one Ms. Cistaro thought for sure proved her mother's love and interest in her life--the one where she asks her daughter to tell her about any "special fellows". All I could do while reading that letter was picture a young, naive teenage girl with a nasty boy at a dance, or a not much older teenager girl walking quickly down a deserted road at night, trying to get away from a creepy guy wanting to give her a ride. It's impossible not to imagine her mother kept all those letters she wrote for no other reason than she was impressed by her own "eloquent" writing.The author's views of her mother's writings are indeed very generous. In one way that is refreshing since there has been so much mommy bashing going on in today's memoirs. But is she being too generous? It's her mother and her choice. Moreover, where she mentally ends up at the end of the book is basically where everyone should end up when it comes to parents--you get who you get and it's your job to make sense of it all, as well as to realize you are responsible for your own life. Contrary to what self-righteous people like to believe, an apple can fall very far from the tree. When Melissa Cistaro realized that one miserable night as a teenager, she began to acquire the personal strength that she lacked due to her negligent, absent mother. Strength no one could take away from her because it wasn't given to her, but was so hard earned.
28 of 31 people found the following review helpful. Self-Centered Mom Splits and Never Leaves A Good Excuse Why By G.I Gurdjieff This book turned out to not be what I was expecting or what I would hope it to be. Pieces Of My Mother is Melissa Cistaro's account of living without her mother. At the age of three, Melissa's mother loaded her belongings into her blue car and drove away. It wasn't an unexpected departure, but an open ended one. Melissa and her two brothers had no idea when their mother would return, but years went by where birthdays were ignored. Even when the mother returned for brief visits and would seemingly be gone before her presence was actually felt, it didn't seem to mean much. The kids were cared for and probably felt loved as what seemed like a virtual army of caretakers came and went. It was only when Melissa was a mother herself to two children that she reconnected with her mother. The reunion was not particularly joyous. Her mother was dying of liver cancer and cirosis. As she came to visit, she found a stash of unmailed and undated letters from her mother.Melissa pieces together the letters in some sort of chronological order and also manages to flip from anecdotes about growing up without a mother, her vague memories of her mother when she surfaced during her intermittent visits and before she left the family home entirely. During these interludes we do find out that Melissa's mother came from a long line of mothers who abandoned their families.As for the letters themselves that Melissa appears to believe reflect a caring woman and mother, my main impression was that the mother was self-centered and probably should have never married in the first place. I suspect that readers who are mothers themselves may agree with me. As I read these 'letters' I just couldn't warm to this woman and I found that I had no sympathy for her. I couldn't connect with the mother on any level. I did not get any answers as to why this woman could justify leaving her kids.The saving grace to this book is Melissa's writing talent. She was warm and open as she let us view her motherless life and at times sort of funny as she has a definite way with words. If Melissa wasn't a likeable person and a legitimately good writer, I wouldn't have stuck with this story. I was glad Melissa wasn't her mother.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful. A poignant memoir, drawn from memory, letters, and early recollections of her own childhood and family trials. By Judith D. Collins A special thank you to Sourcebooks and NetGalley for an ARC exchange for an honest review.Melissa Cistaro courageously steps out to deliver a poignant memoir, PIECES OF MY MOTHER, a heartbreaking story, drawn from memory, letters, and early recollections of her own childhood and family trials.While trying to sort out her troubled family and a mother who left when she was a small girl, she reflects as a grown woman, while looking at her own family, and wonders genetics can spill over and make you question yourself as a mother. Are we destined to repeat our past environment?Perfect timing as we approach Mother’s Day, to appreciate our mothers, and realize some children do not always have the proper parents—ones to love and protect them, to serve as viable role models for their children. These children grow up always wondering if they were to blame for their parent’s absence, and desperately seek love and validation.As a child, Melissa sees her mother drive off while her dad informs the family their mother is "taking a break" from everyone and not very forthcoming about the details. They can only hope she will return for their birthday, or possibly a special holiday. However, when she does, is she really there? She and her brothers--Jamie and Eden, alone without a mother.Now a mother herself, how can she tell her daughter a dark truth, she was leavable and unkeepable. What if there is some sort of genetic family flaw, some kind of leaving gene that unexpectedly grabs hold of mothers like the ones in her family? What if the gene is lying dormant inside of her? What if her own daughter worries she may leave one day?She pictures her mom, a thousand miles away, and only visiting a few times, while each of the children carried "her leaving" in different ways. She took all the colors with her. She drifted in and out of their lives like live-in sitters, always seeming just out of reach. She wants her own daughter to feel safe and loved, not left the way she has always felt.Now years later, a mom with children of her own, she finds herself in Washington, as her mother is dying. Her mom has cirrhosis and liver cancer; all the years of drinking have caught up with her. All her fears surface. She is leaving once again. She will only be sixty five in five days and she promises her own family she will be home by New Year’s Eve. Her own family needs her and wants to make sure she WILL return.Her mom is as mysterious as ever, yet her mother surrounds herself with bits and pieces of life collected; a life she never really knew – the books she loved. Melissa began to fill her own notebooks, only attempting to understand her mom’s leaving, searching for memories that could rescue her. Believing that if she could dig up the goodness in the things that haunted her, there would be a chance she could save her mom, her brothers, her dad, and herself. If she can get the words right, maybe she can keep her alive. She wants desperately to understand a woman who is dying.As she is going through her mother’s things, she finds folders, letters, treasures, and all the while she recalls the days she was afraid to move to yet another house, for the fear her mom may not be able to find them; if and when, she would come back. Now, letters her mom never sent may provide her comfort and answers. Her mom and dad were both hoarders, coveting treasures and not one of these items will keep her alive. She too suffers from hanging on to things.However, as she reads her mom’s letters, thirty-six years have passed since she watched the her mom drive away in her baby-blue Dodge Dart, she still wonders what if she had called out to her, would she have stayed? Now she has to make the decision to leave her mom to die, to get back to her own family and a miracle of her own.A deeply moving complex, honest portrayal of family, of motherhood, yet uplifting and captivating; alternating between Melissa and her mother, we see firsthand how a parent’s choices impact their children’s lives for generations to come with emotional devastation.From regret, understanding, acceptance, to forgiveness; a book of the strong bonds of love and motherhood. What doesn't kill you, will fortunately make you stronger.
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