One night, she handed me red thread
and taught me to sew
words into my arms
Before I could unravel them I
birthed daughters in the morning
with needles on their tongues.
Where I End, and You Begin
This work is about motherhood and the how the intersection of intergenerational traumas, social pressures, and internal narratives give rise to maternal rage and fear of what I see in my children if I don't change what haunts me. In other words, I hated myself and I saw the parts of myself I hated in my children. I had to heal and once I started doing that, I started to see my kids for who they are and not what I feared.
This project is a portrait of my projections as a mother and how I come to divorce these projections from my parenting.
A work in progress.
I dunno. I dunno what the fuck I'm doing most days.
Every day feels like another wrong decision. Another moment away from feeling out of control, each day like a fistful of marbles.
I’m not one of those perfect women, with their 2.5 kids, North Face jacket that always looks brand new because she keeps it clean, love notes in clean pockets, and her Taurus husband. She’s a human rhyme and she smells like flowers. She holds all her children's emotions, absorbing them into her body like it energizes her instead of drains her.
I can't be like her.
I'm too busy being messy, too busy being rage, and clumsy, and 8 million projects, no color palette, just black leggings with black shirts. I am armpit stains, and sweat, and take out boxes that went bad last week. I am busy being disordered eating, and vanilla cake, and the frustrated groan when I hear "Mom" for the 15th time, and the paper that rips when you erase too hard. I am cereal spilled on the counter, my daughter screaming, "Where the fuck is the hair brush?"
And my mind is a merry go round, a childhood favorite. But then there’s the bully throwing the merry-go-round into dizzying speeds until you're hanging on with knuckles clenched, circling until your hands smell like metal asking them to stop. And my mind is like that, only the merry-go-round is the constant spinning of thoughts about what I should say, what I want to say, what I need to say and what I want to scream just all tangled up inside, all clinging on to the spinning wheel. And you are your own bully, damnit. And the merry-go-round is just 5 different versions of you shouting different things to say and who to be.
You love them fiercely, but you also can’t help wondering what they would be like if you were more like her. Would they be better off? Would she have taught them how to put the brush back in the bathroom drawer and taught them in her sing-song voice how to ask politely if they couldn’t find it? They would’ve become tiny poems themselves floating through life.
Instead, we’re just angry lyrics tangled together with the smell of metal on our hands.
There's a whisper. Most days it's a nudge of a whisper; she tells me I'm too fat to be good, getting round in my belly. She whispers my house is a mess, my kids hate each other because I taught them anger. And they're spoiled. So, fucking spoiled. So American, just like me. And I live in a fog of whispers most days.
And my daughter says NO. Cause she's so fucking spoiled. She won't eat her dinner. And the eyes of a thousand mothers before me look up to glare at her and watch my next move.
The woman with the North face jacket turns around. She sings to me that there’s no such thing as spoiled. And I’m cruel to think so.
But the whisper drowns her out. She tells me what a spoiled daughter I raised, as pathetic mothers do. And behind her familiar voice is her mother's familiar voice, and her neighbors' mother's voices, and all those mothers' voices rise from a small village half a world away to echo her, their bodies gaunt and thin with goodness and suffering.
And a self-help book I've never read tells me what to say but the words sound foreign on my tongue because I've never heard them before. I hate those words because I’ll never hear them.
The neighbor's voice is smiling and says, have you ever just tried being me?
And the weight of their breath on my back makes me crumble and I smash a salt shaker on the counter and glass and whispers are in the folds of my palm. I don’t say anything, but everything is loud.
And suddenly it's bedtime. How did 3 minutes of self loathe turn into 3 hours.
She strolls in for a hug and asks me to keep her company. As I lay my head on her bed, her hand rolls in front of my face. Her breathing relaxes and her hand opens up. And in her tiny palm, I can smell the pollen from the flowers she picked on Lloyd St. I can smell the sand she played with at the lake and the finger paint she used in the garage. And the books she read after lunch. And underneath it all is one more hum of a smell I can barely make out… but it’s there.
the faint trace of metal on her fingers…..
My mother’s mother’s mother’s mother….
She learned to live in a box. And as she passed down that box, it became smaller and smaller with more jagged edges and different rules.
My daughter pinched herself, her 4 year old body squished between two fingers, and she called it fat. I didn’t know how this got passed down. I never talked about my body in front of her. I never commented on hers. Do genetics carry these words down? Did she hear my mother call me fat? Did she hear all the mothers before her hate themselves?
What else has she learned to say about herself?
I felt like a failure. And it’s only getting worse. Before this moment, I asked her to brush her teeth. Before this moment, she was a baby, and before that she was an idea if only I could catch a man. After that moment, I tucked her into bed. After that moment, she started talking about boys and abs and asked me if she was pretty with eye shadow on.
I used to know the calorie amounts in Triscuits and a bowl of rice. I guess I still know.
Somewhere out there, my mother is examining her waistline. At 74, she pinches and wonders.
What else has she learned to wonder about herself?
The boxes of femininity and gender keep closing in on us. And the pressures continue with every generation. Self-hatred continues; it is in our blood. And regardless of what I do, I keep teaching them rage. My job as a mother is to feed them until they hate themselves.
I’m hanging on, just constantly pulling them back into childhood, trying to hold space in neutral gear not ready to move forward but not rolling back. Not ready to let them fall into that wild current of growing up.
But they will grow up. And what will they think of me when they're older? When they sit with their friends in a college dorm and compare experiences of growing up, what will they say? Maybe my oldest will remember sledding at night, baking cakes with all the sprinkles. Maybe she mentions how strict I was at sleepovers. And someone chimes in with how strict their mother was about lessons. Someone hated their art lessons, someone played piano, someone else played violin.
And that will strike a chord, a chord she couldn’t get right and a broken bow she left on the floor.
She was on the merry-go-round. What was I doing when she was spinning?
They call them triggers and I'm the gun and motherhood is emotional warfare between you and you and no one can win. I can smell the metal on my hands but want the taste of it in my mouth. Let me off this ride, I beg…
Sometimes when I look at them, all I see is salt in my palm. I see my mess, my rage. I have to remind myself that’s not them. They’re more than whispers.
Somewhere here, I end and they begin.
They’re the flowers in my pockets. They’re the campfires and smores sending ash into the air. They’re the inside jokes and laughter well past bedtime. They’re the in-between moments. The real-life moments. I look for my girls, digging through a fog of whispers to find them. Because if I don’t find them, I won’t be nurturing daughters, I’ll be raising is ghosts.
