“Phantom of the American Mother”
My Mama’s birthday is coming up and even though I am not the type of person that remembers birthdays as a religion, I always remember hers even though we never really celebrated it. Maybe it is the white hot august heat that reminds me or the way the sun bleaches out the red clay and pine landscape. Maybe it is the way the late confederate jasmine smells in the evenings when the air is so still and heavy. Like there is nothing else and that scent is all there is.
I never understood my mother and I don’t think she ever understood me. She was a foreign country to me. One of those remote ones where war is always breaking out and where even Sally Struthers does not dare venturing to save the children. But like a glossy travel brochure advertising an exotic far away place draws me, I was always drawn to her ‘otherness’.
I know it always confused her... how her petite dark hair and green eyed self managed to alchemize a tall gangly blonde. Maybe I can understand her disappointment. Men and women that have never given birth don’t understand what it is like to carry a child, the dark fear that rests in the back of your mind, the newly coined superstitions. The preternatural awareness of the separate (but somehow also entirely yours) life that rests beneath your heart. It seems to be a given that there will be something to visibly, indelibly mark that child as your own.
She gave me life but nothing of her life made itself visible on me. No identifying marks that mothers always look for. No fingernails like hers, no slight crook to a pinky toe, no tiny birthmark... In short, no one ever looked at me when with my mother and remarked “she’s got your...” anything... In fact I think if I had not resembled my father’s sister so uncannily they would have sent me back and demanded their real baby. Funny how those differences started on the surface and later became bone deep.
Some people say my voice reminds them of her. Now that I am older, maybe so… I startle myself sometimes when I say something that sounds so much like her that I don’t really believe it came out of my mouth and I have to stifle the urge to clap my palm over my lips. Just a word and I feel and taste the dark honey of her voice. It slides over my tongue and fills my mouth like I am channeling her. It surprises me like august surprises me. It surprises me the way remembering something you had not realized you had forgotten surprises you. I think about the strange irony of the one tenuous bond we share. How I hear her voice in my head but will never hear her speak the words I wanted to hear.
Sometimes when I sit with my small son, with my hand on his glossy black hair, so like hers and see the dark lashes on his cheeks , thick and sooty, just like hers, and we are both still…. together in the heavy scented air... quiet…. I will suddenly hear my mother’s voice, all sugar and butter and praline and honey on my lips... and we say to him “you are my baby”. He stirs and looks up at me with her cat green eyes and says “I know”. And for a moment we all belong.
Happy Birthday Mamma…
