Ghosts

While waiting for a train on Platform 9 last week, I thought I saw a ghost. In the scratched plastic window of a passing car, the face of my mother appeared like a dreamy vision, and then was carried away down the tracks to Kuroiso. My first thought was, “Why is my mother on a train in central Honshu?” I had spoken with her on the phone that morning, and was fairly certain she was in Midwestern America, giving lectures on computer programming and speeding around in her silver Saturn. It was impossible for her to be here. As I pondered this mystery, my train arrived and as the song of scraping metal and wall of thick warm air washed over me, I saw her again, and understood my mistake. On the cloudy surface of the sliding doors, my own reflection looked back at me, and in my face I saw my mother.
This was not the first time this had happened, not even the first time it had happened that week. I have recently been seeing apparitions of my mother in store windows, rear-view mirrors, and group photos. These visions are not exact representations of my mother as she is now; they resemble my mother as I remember her from when I was a child. It is a bizarre phenomenon; its oddity overshadowed only by the feelings which surface within me when it happens.
Seeing my mother as I remember her from my childhood makes a little well of childlike devotion spring up within me. I am filled with the memory of how it feels to depend entirely on one person for all of my needs. When I was very little, I used to think of myself as an extension of my mother, a detached digit or appendage that must remain close to the parent as much as possible. I would always want to be held or carried, and would even leave my bed in the night so I could go sleep next to her.
Now I am no longer a little girl, and the love I have for my mother has changed with me as I have grown. And although it has been many years since I have felt the obsession young children have for their parents, I have begun feeling the strange echoes of this love, and am left to wonder from where they are reverberating.
I did the math, and discovered that I’m the same age that my mother was when she was pregnant with me. It’s hard to imagine expecting a child at this point in my life, though when my mother was 24, she was married and already had one baby. Things are different for me: I have no career, no children, no house, and no husband. I only have freedom (only, as if it were such a small thing).
I am beginning to wonder if the strange narcissistic feeling of nostalgia brought on by seeing my mother in myself is actually an indication of my desire to regain that special relationship. But I can’t go back to being a child, nor do I want to. So I am left to conclude that part of me is looking for the other side of the relationship: motherhood. It’s a scary thought, but I’m growing accustomed to scary things like seeing apparitions in passing train cars and growing up.
We are coming up on Halloween, a time when the door between our world and the spirit world opens a crack. Halloween is based on the Celtic celebration of Samhain, a holiday whose purpose was to mark the transition between the summer and winter months. It was a time of celebration, but also a time of reflection of the past and a shift in mindset for the future. Samhain and Halloween are both tinseled with dichotomy: the gruesome and the cute, the sweet and the rotting, the summer and the winter, the dead and the living. I find it appropriate that as we draw near to this holiday, I am encountering my own transition of consciousness, from wanting to be held to wanting to hold. The ghosts who stare back at me from shop windows are ghosts of my past, phantoms of who my mother was to me when I was just a baby. But they are also reflections of my own face, of the woman that I have become. And maybe (I like to think) they are visions of who I will be someday, to someone else.
It’s amazing to think how we change and grow, how our love matures and develops as our bodies and minds become adults. The ways we grow can be both fascinating and surprising, and it all happens with such flourish; it’s something beautiful that sneaks up on us like the leaves turning from green to crimson, or the first thick frost on an autumn morning.
The ghosts who haunt me this Halloween aren’t anything to be afraid of. Instead of nightmares, they bring me dreams of a future when I can be for someone what my mother was, and continues to be for me. She may be thousands of miles away, but I carry with me, in my face and my memory, everything my mother is to me. It’s a spirit I’m more than happy to live with.

Happy Halloween.