High-school football is a big deal in Texas. When I moved here from New York in ninth grade, I was taken completely by surprise by the pep rallies and fundraising and spirit days and general noise about it all. I felt mildly interested but separated from it, like I was watching from behind glass. I was shy and strange, not the kind of girl who got invited to Homecoming, or to anything. No one was buying me a carnation for a dollar before school on Fridays. But that was okay. It was all very festive, and on that first Friday of football season, I bought a carnation for myself. It was pretty and bright red and smelled divine. I carried it around all day like other girls carried theirs, and no one noticed or cared how I had gotten it.

I brought it home on the bus into the huge, newly constructed house, where the light in the big windows stabbed into the rooms so white and strong even in September. I showed my mother this strange artifact. And she said, “Is that for me?” And I said it was. And every Friday of every football season of my high-school life, I brought my mother a carnation.

At the same school, many years later, I taught Hamlet to seniors. Before we started the play itself, I would tell my students this story.

“When I was a kid, my mother was very, very hard to live with. Our relationship was a nightmare. Especially after we moved here from New York, she was lonely and miserable, and it made her sarcastic and mean. She said things no one should ever say to anyone, much less a kid. And she hit me. And I hated her so much that at night I would lie in bed and clench my teeth and knot up every muscle until I shook, just lying there and hating her. And the only way I got through it was to swear to myself every day that the minute I could get out, I would. I would walk out and she would never see me again. I just had to wait it out a little longer, and then I would disappear and be free of her and never think of her again until the day I died.”

My students would be absolutely silent when I said that.

“But it was more complicated than I realized. When I went away to college in Houston, that was a huge relief. My first year, I only even called home every other Tuesday. I loved college, and I hated coming back. But the thing is, the dorm would close for holidays. My scholarship didn’t cover textbooks. I just didn’t have the resources to be on my own. And I couldn’t land a job in Houston before I graduated. So I had to come back. I got a job in Dallas and moved into an apartment, but I still needed my parents’ car. And then I got my own car, but by then…” I’d shrug. “Things had kind of settled down. I could leave the house any time she got too nasty. And there was never any one incident terrible enough to justify blowing up my family. And she eventually did mellow out. Now we hang out all the time. She’s a good mother and a good grandmother. And it’s wonderful.”

Hamlet is largely about vows. I studied it carefully every year I taught it, trying to sort out exactly what it had to say about them. Hamlet himself is disgusted with his own waffling: “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” The ghost of old Hamlet demands justice and specifically wants his son never to rest or think of forgiveness: “Remember me!” and “Do not forget. This visitation / Is to whet thy almost blunted purpose.” To be sure, by the time Hamlet gets his act together and kills Claudius, Claudius clearly and obviously needs killing. So it’s important and desirable to keep these vows. Right?

To take it to its logical extreme, though, look at Fortinbras. He vows to attack Denmark; his uncle dissuades him. So he doesn’t keep his vow…exactly. But, having an army at his disposal and his dander up, he cheerfully agrees to go after Poland instead, because he’s ready to fight and fight he shall! For nothing! For “an eggshell”! And Hamlet says Fortinbras is wonderful “to find quarrel in a straw when honor’s at the stake”! Most importantly of all, Fortinbras is the winner of the whole shebang in the end: he’s as good as crowned, with Hamlet’s blessing. So that shows that he who persists in his violence for honor is virtuous and worthy. Right?

But look at Laertes. Laertes wants to avenge his father “in terms of honor.” But he weakens: “And yet it is almost against my conscience.” And by the time he gets what he so fiercely wanted and pokes Hamlet with the poisoned blade, all he wants is to “exchange forgiveness.” And he literally poisons himself by his hatred. So stubbornly insisting on vengeance is not such a hot idea after all. Right?

After studying and teaching Hamlet for years, all I see is that the whole question of keeping or abandoning vows for vengeance is complicated as hell. If Shakespeare comes down on one side or the other, I can’t tell which.

When we finished the play, my students would ask about my story. “So you’re saying that it’s better to not keep your promises to yourself? Because if you had, you’d be sorry now, right?” I admitted that when they put it that way, as a general principle, I didn’t know. I still don’t.

I know my sister wanted my mother to pay, and she never stopped wanting it. At the very least, she thought Mom should admit to what she had said and done. She tried occasionally over the years (with admirable fortitude, I thought), to confront my mother about our lives together. And Mom would deflect and deny and shake her head in sorrow and astonishment that after all she had done for her, Melissa would imagine and accuse her of such terrible things. My sister seldom walked out and never permanently, but she never forgave my mother, either, and she thought I was pandering and pathetic for trying to let it all go. She may not have been entirely wrong. I bought my mother’s affection with my willingness to forgive. That price was not negligible. It includes a nervous system so tightly wound that I panic if my playful son puts a hand too near my face or touches my head unexpectedly. It includes teeth I’ve ground down to the nerves.

A few years before she died, I told my mother about a vivid dream I had had in high school in which she and I were the same age, and we were best friends. It’s one of the only times I’ve woken up crying. “Why would you cry?” she asked.

I was tactful. “Well, our relationship was pretty rough then. We were having a hard time. And I wanted so much to stay in that dream and get to be your friend.”

“And look at us now!” she said triumphantly. “Look at all the fun we have now!” She was so cheerful. But there was a warning in it, too. Leave the past alone, it said. I will never offer retribution. Take what you have. And I did, and we had wonderful years of deep connection and affection before she died, and I am not sorry for that. I loved her then, and she loved me.

Gjertrud Schnackenburg has a beautiful poem in which “word-roots blossom” and connect carnations, “Christ’s flowers,” to the words nails and flesh. I think of it when I smell carnations, and I think of the flowers I brought my mother on Fridays. Like nails in flesh, offering flowers to this woman I hated so venomously and loved so desperately. Like throwing a barbed hook across the distance, hoping someday it would catch.

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
— Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas“