love loss and what i wore
09.22.09 at 1:16 pm
in life, love, family
Kind of Blue
By Rosie O'Donnell
The truth is, I have no fashion sense—never did. For many years, I blamed this on my mom’s death. Then again, I blame pretty much everything on that—my weight, my addiction to television, my inability to spell.
In my fantasy world, had my mother lived, I would be thin. I would be extremely well dressed and I would never need spell-check. I would know what went with what, and everything I tried on would fit. Mom and I would shop together at the places that moms and daughters go—a department store, an outlet mall, the flea market. I would wear a lot of tasteful makeup, too. And I’d know how to pick out a bag—a purse, a pocketbook, whatever. It could all be so different. My mom and I would lunch someplace while shopping. It would be at a café where we would have salad and like it. We’d laugh about how great our lives turned out and make plans for all the things we were still going to do.
But that is all a dream, because my mother did not live. She died when she was younger than I am today.
The fact is that no item of clothing has ever moved me in any way—except one. After my mom died, all her clothes were removed from the house while my dad took his five motherless children to Belfast, Ireland. It was 1973. I guess he thought we could best recover from the trauma of her death by living in a war zone. The IRA was nowhere near as scary as what had just happened to our lives. When we returned, we found her side of the closet barren. The last of her was gone.
In 1981 or 1982, my dad got remarried to a lovely woman. She was a schoolteacher named Mary May. After the wedding, she moved in. That first morning she was there, I was eating breakfast with a few of my siblings when my new stepmom walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. She was wearing a long mauve velour three-quarter-sleeve zip bathrobe with a thick vertical white stripe down the center surrounding the zipper. No one said a word. We all looked at one another as Mary happily made her way to the stove to put on the kettle.
My mother had had the same exact bathrobe—in blue. Electric blue. What are the chances of that, really? The unspoken rule in my house was that my mom’s name was never mentioned after her death. But that morning, I knew the rule was about to be broken. My siblings silently left the kitchen. I was alone with Mary. Sensitive to the fact that this was her first day as a married woman, I was unsure of how to phrase it.
“Ummm,” I said. Always a great way to start. “Ummmm…Mary. My mom had that same bathrobe in blue.”
“Oh,” she said and nodded.
And that robe disappeared. Gone. Never to be seen again. Sent away to the same place my mother’s clothes went, I assume. No one ever mentioned it.
To this day, that bathrobe is the only piece of clothing I can actually see in my mind. I have no visuals of prom dresses or favorite sweaters or shoes I couldn’t live without. Clothes are just something I use for cover, leaving room for one electric blue memory.
