I love my mother. I don’t like her. My mother left when I was a baby, but I can’t blame her for that knowing I would’ve done the same thing if I looked at my baby and saw what she saw. The death of youth, of innocence, her hopes and dreams crumbling with a cry, and my father’s eyebrows. My father, 15 years her senior. My father, the sinkhole. My mother wanted to be a poet. My mother wanted her mother to come home and tell her she could outsell Ernest Hemingway. My mother used to do chunky, horrible eyeliner and read voraciously.
I’m always looking for her, in my 12th grade English teacher, in my grandmother, in the notes my great grandmother left me, in the voice actress for Mary in my Bible narration CDs. I find a picture of her as a toddler, shoving chocolate cake in my great grandmother’s face and my chest feels like it’s being ripped in two. I see her in every kind hand. Even though she’s never been kind. I would’ve been kind to her. I would’ve cleaned chocolate off of the corner of her mouth and watched Bluey with her. I would’ve gone to her middle school graduation. I would’ve made sure my father never saw her.
Mom, I don’t know how to talk to you. My entire life I’ve wanted to hold you but our arms don’t fit together right and your favorite perfume burns my nostrils. I love you and it hurts that you can’t look me in the eyes anymore. I don’t know you, but I know your greatest shames. I don’t know how to love you, and I don’t think you know either. I’ll lay my head in your lap and we can pretend to be different people for a while. I’ll pretend you held me and helped me sound out sentences in all the little kid books I loved and you’ll pretend to know them.