What We Pass On

My mom reads The Atlantic. She has been devoted to the magazine since at least the mid-’80s the way most women her age have been devoted to Good Morning America or whatever the preferred local news channel is depending on the region. “I was reading an article in The Atlantic Monthly…” she says to me in nearly every long-distance phone call I’ve had with her in the last 15 years.

There is always a battered, water-stained copy nearby—in her purse, tucked in the pocket behind the passenger’s seat, lying open on the kitchen table. Now that I live out of state, she delights in passing these old, unsolicited copies on to me, sometimes by hand and sometimes, between visits, through the mail.

“Mom, I have a digital subscription,” I used to remind her so she’d stop bringing me her dog-eared magazines. “I’ve already read this.” But when I became a mother myself, I started recognizing the gesture for what it is, and I have learned to say “thank you” instead.

My mother is the second-smartest person I have ever met, behind my senior prom date, Stephan, who got a full ride to Princeton and whose real-life genius propelled him into insanity in the later half of his twenties. I have always felt grateful to have a brilliant mother—not so brilliant that she was unreachable, but brilliant enough for me to take her very seriously. I am grateful, too, to have known her capacity for information when so few did. She is insightful, she listens with full, unwavering interest to my most unimportant life updates, she is curious and open, she reads prolifically. She has also been wildly, wildy misguided by others throughout her life, by her parents, old advisors, her husbands. She stayed faithful to my stepfather until his death, even though he hated us both and condescended her for having passions and interests he couldn’t understand. He fostered a lifelong anger in me that never stuck to my mother, somehow. She is a gentler soul.

Growing up, I thought her name, Frances, was the ugliest possible name. An old lady name. That horrible nasal “aaa” sound. I cringed when writing it on school forms, as if I was revealing some terrible family secret with my #2 pencils. I was so embarrassed that her name was Frances. God, terrible. I wanted to explain her name away to my friends as soon as I told them. Look, I’m sorry her name isn’t Melissa or Jody or Lynn or something. She’s not a cool mom.

Twenty-five years after those playground apologies, my first daughter was born. Her name came to me on a barstool, long before children were in the picture. My husband and I were sitting there, warm-hearted with wine, talking casually about the future. I said to him, “What about Frances? We could call her Frankie.”

“What if it’s a boy?”

“Then Francis with an i. Still Frankie. Works both ways.”

And it was settled.

I never told him how much I once hated the name. I never fully told him how much I love the woman–the best parts of her, anyway. She didn’t teach me how to host a party or how to clean with bleach or make friends. (I struggled to learn those things in adulthood and felt bitter every time some social grace escaped me.) But she passed on what she could: the importance of writing a thank you note, the poetry of W.H. Auden, how to listen to a young person with patience and understanding. Frances is good to the core like a child is good. My nature is so different; I thought maybe if I called my daughter Frances, she would be good too. Maybe she’ll be brilliant or kind to her children. Maybe she will see something in a magazine in 50 years and think, “I bet my mom would like this.”