allison theresa

Daughter of a Mother

essays & images by Allison Theresa

introduction

I sometimes think that I read too many books about daughters with no mothers. In the narrative of myself that I’ve been writing and rewriting since I can remember, my own mother has never fit nicely. She’s too prickly, too particular, too present for a heroine to really find herself. 

Of course, this isn’t a problem with my mom but is a problem with how we think about a mother’s place in a daughter’s sense of self. In the stories, the mother is either evil or completely absent. But what of those mothers who are always around? Of those daughters who are like them and also not like them? Of the separate self that requires separation and the shared self that binds them together?

The following are writings about the space needed to grow a body, the ends of things we’ve known since the beginning, and how we wade in the boundaries between our mothers and ourselves to create an identity. 

Begin by clicking the image below and images throughout. If you’d rather not scroll, you can click here.

My mom whisked open the door in her robe. The force made her hair flutter and I fell into her across the threshold. “Allison! What’s happening?” Between sobs I squeaked out the answer, “I just wanted to be home.”

“Jesus, Allison. You scared me to death. It’s nearly 1:00am.” 

Her voice was coming down from its panicked rattle. 

“Did you and Jordin fight or something? Why are you two even up this late?”

I shook my head no into her stomach, burrowing the part between my bangs and hair like I could get back to that very first home. Her voice took on a different tone as her confusion crackled around us. 

“What the hell happened?”

Still sobbing, I reiterated, “I just wanted to be home.”

“Well, did you tell anyone you left?”

Silence was my answer.

“Allison Theresa. Did you tell Nicki you left?”

I shook my head again. She was angry but held me until the tears and the burning in my stomach stopped. 

I slept in my own bed. I was home.

———

I left this home for college assuming all would stay the same, but when I came home that summer, I found my parents’ winter coats in my closet: a slight and reasonable adjustment that shook me to my core. I remember shoving the coats to the side and shutting myself inside, resting my cheeks, hot with tears, on my knees and letting the fabric of my jeans turn from faded blue to indigo. I kept my boxes packed. I didn’t live at home anymore. 

———

When I am homesick for this home, I imagine curling up in my old bedspread, the one that has a tiny cut in the bottom from my own safety scissors. I can faintly smell the taco seasoning my mom is using. The tv on the other side of the wall is playing football at a low volume. I can sense everyone’s movements and moods from the muffled sounds they make. I lie in bed until my dad calls for me to come to the table. 

———

The second home I remember was one of my own making. Or more accurately, of our own making. Unlike the first house, this home arrived empty and begged me to paint it. 

I picked a saturated teal and post-it note yellow and painted the walls between grad school classes. I painted right over the divots and duct-taped framed cable cord. When I was finished, my husband lied and said he liked it. 

I didn’t even know if I liked it but I liked that it was mine.

We grilled steaks and drank beer under the carport where we saw a possum once. We learned how to relight the pilot light every time we turned on the heat. We spray painted a branch from the yard and hung it with lights and ornaments for Christmas. We ate half of the top tier of our wedding cake hunched over the counter on our first anniversary.

The last night I slept here was in a sleeping bag in an empty room. I’d gotten rid of so many things in preparation for our planned cross-country move, and what wasn’t sold or trashed was already on its way from Texas to New York. 

As I lay there, I tried to solidify the memories of this place. The two good years of this house seemed far away and the recent nights we spent fighting or crying or both seemed much closer. It had been a long time since our marriage had felt like home, but we had promised to try and make it livable again in a new city, in a new home.

———

When I am homesick for this home, I am homesick for the teal room. I am again marveling at the arrogant destruction of my decorating, the drops of paint on the carpet, the swipes of half-wiped-off blue on the floorboards, the shoddy patch job around the cable cord. I am sitting in the freshly painted room knowing that I want to live here with my husband forever.

———

The third home wasn’t ever really home. It was an apartment a thousand miles away from everything I knew with a man I didn’t love anymore.

On the night I left my husband, I called my brother hoping to save my mom from a panicked late-night call. But he called her anyway and she gave me an address of a hotel seven blocks away where there would be a room in my name under her credit card. 

———

When I am homesick for this place, I am homesick for the simplicity of a life barely begun. He and I are lying side by side. He is still my husband. I am whispering to him my fears and dreams while we hope the leak in the ceiling above us doesn’t return in the night.

———

When I moved out, I didn’t go looking for a home. I was just looking for a place to put my stuff, to lick my wounds, to sleep. 

My mom coordinated a series of Brooklyn hotel rooms, makeshift homes out of thin walls and wrapped plastic cups. I talked at her for days about what had gone wrong, about the ways the home I’d tried to make in her likeness collapsed, about anything but coming home to Texas. I sensed that she was furious I was so far away or maybe that I was furious I was so far away. 

I knew my home wasn’t in Texas anymore. It didn’t seem to be here either. But, I thought, at least no one will ask after my husband here. So I stayed.

———

———

After I could go a day without crying, after I had made new friends and pretended I was happy in the city, after I could hold it together enough to show my mom I was indeed ok, I spent a month’s worth of waitressing tips on a ticket back to Texas. 

I needed to go home.  

———

I met my parents at a familiar haunt. The bar smelled the same as it did the last time I was here a year ago, queso and spilled beer, but it looked different. I couldn’t pinpoint any changes in decor or even employees, but I noticed a jut of wire from the back of the neon sign, a line of dust on the floor where the dustpan failed to pick it up, a chip on a plate in the stack behind the bar.

There wasn’t much to say after the happy hour special was over and we went back to the house, but this was not the first home I remember. My parents moved into a new one the year I got married, a bigger, nicer version of the nuclear family model I loved. It is a well deserved upgrade, a modest dream home built just right, but this home was unfamiliar to me. 

That first night in this unfamiliar house, I chose to stay in my brother’s room because mine — or the one designed with me in mind — didn’t feel like mine at all. His room still had his collection of baseball hats lined up on the shelf and some of his clothes hanging in the closet from his year of living here before college. The closet in my room had a filing cabinet of tax returns and my wedding dress. Being with my brother’s old things made me feel a little less alone.

At the airport for my flight back to New York, my mom hugged me goodbye. I wasn’t sure when I would see her again. I knew I didn’t need to come back to Texas anytime soon. But when she held me, I felt like I should be here all the time. We parted and, as always, she said, “Let me know when you get home.”

I arrived at my apartment in Brooklyn and used the still shiny key to unlock the front door. I sat my suitcase on an unpacked box and dusted the red dirt off my shoes. I wrapped myself in an old quilt and made a mental list of taco ingredients for later. 

I texted my mom and told her I was home.

But, you may say, you set out to write about women and their mothers—what, has that got to do with one’s room? I will try to explain. To begin writing about daughters and their mothers I situated myself on my fire escape and wondered what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about birth; a few more about obligation; a tribute to my own mother and a sketch of my grandmother from memory; some witticisms if possible about myself as a daughter; a respectful allusion to the sexuality it requires to become a mother; a reference to the earth mother and mother of God and one would have been done. But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title A Daughter of a Mother might mean, and I may have meant it to mean, daughters and what their mothers are like, or it might mean daughters and the mothers they create, or it might mean daughters and the mothers that are made out of them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and I’d want to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able to fulfill what is, I understand, the first duty of writer, to hand your audience after an hour’s reading, a nugget of pure truth to wrap between the pages of their notebooks and keep on the mantlepiece forever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a daughter needs a room of her own in her mother’s home.

A daughter often separates herself from her mother to then become her mother; but that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of daughters and the true nature of mothers unsolved. For in this initial conception of separation and becoming, the daughter ceases to be, her self simply the sketch on top of which a portrait of her mother is painted. Any daughter will tell you this is not the case, that though their womanhood certainly resembles that of their mothers, they are, in fact, themselves. And thus I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion— daughters and their mothers remain, so far as I am concerned, enigmatic entities. But in order to make some amends I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room in a mother’s home. 

Here, then, I was (call me daughter, sister, mother, grandmother or by any name you please—it is not a matter of importance) sitting at my desk a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. That topic I have spoken of, daughters and their mothers, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of memory and trauma, bowed my head to the page. To the right and left books of some sort, written by daughters and mothers mostly, watched over my task, even seemed to vibrate in tandem. 

The first thought, glittering like a minnow in an otherwise still pond, was one of my own room in my mother’s home. Painted pale purple on my request, my room felt like an extension of me. There below the tiny tv was my collection of half-finished journals and ripped-out Seventeen pages. There on top of the book shelf was the bridal Barbie given to me for being a flower girl and the Princess Diana Beanie Baby in its plastic case. There, on the floorboard of the closet, was the spot I’d carved my own name with a pink thumbtack. 

But the minnow of this thought wiggled deeper into the murk of my memory. It darted away as another, slower moving, larger thought came into vision. 

My mother in her own room in her mother’s home. She told stories of her rooms in the house I knew only as a treasure trove of antique oddities. She called her room “The Swamp,” a garage converted into a bedroom with sliding glass doors in place of the metal ones and a heavy wooden door opening into the kitchen. The carpet, a low-pile olive green, and the two steps down from the hall gave the room its name. 

The room appears in my memory as a cold space with a queen bed crowded by stacks of records, boxes of fabric scraps, and rinsed milk bottles from my grandmother’s childhood dairy farm days. On this bed wrapped in blankets that smelled like forgotten dust, my mom read a book to my brother and me titled What is Heaven? the day before my granddad’s funeral. 

In the swish of the tail of this thought it struck me that in that moment, she sat in her own room on her own bed as both a mother and a daughter. My grandmother, in some other room of the house mourning the loss of her husband, looms in the periphery of this memory. She is the daughter my mom made a mother. 

The thought swam deeper and lead me to this: for my grandmother to have had a room of her own, was out of the question. Her parents weren’t exceptionally rich or noble, even up to the beginning of her adulthood when she bought her wedding dress and china set. Since her money, which depended on the goodwill of her father, was only enough to keep her clothed, she was barred from such alleviations as came even to Charlie or Eddie or all her brothers, from a walk alone, from a little journey out of town, from separate housing which, even if it were miserable enough, sheltered them from the claims and tyrannies of their family and allowed them the privilege of becoming men instead of women.

As a woman who is seeking an autonomous selfhood, I have no tradition behind me, or one so short and partial that it is of little help to my understanding of my self. But we think back through our mothers if we are women. 

The rooms differ so completely; they are calm or thunderous; open on to the street, or, on the contrary, give on to a dairy farm; are hung with washing; or alive with tarot cards and crystals; are hard as horse-hair or soft as feathers—one has only to go into any room in any street for the whole of that extremely complex force of feminine identity to fly in one’s face. Our rooms, in some sense, are ourselves.

Sometimes I ask my mother about what she remembers and it shocks me that it is so little. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the mother memoirs, without meaning too, inevitably lie. 

The scene, if I may ask you to follow me back to the room in October with the books, was now changed. The sun was setting slightly and its golden light cast a haze over my task. On the desk in front of me was a blank sheet of paper on which was written in large letters MY ROOM IN MY MOTHER’S HOME, but no more. A swarm of questions started. What of mothers who are always around? Of daughters who are like them and also not like them? Of the shared and separate selves that constitute every mother and daughter?—a thousand questions at once suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions; and an answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the unprejudiced, who have removed themselves above the strife of tongue and the confusions of body and issued the result of their reasoning and research in books which were to be found scattered around me. If truth is not to be found in these volumes, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and pen, is truth?

Thus provided, thus confident and enquiring, I set out in the pursuit of truth.

I read the books and wrote down quote after quote. I watched interviews with women talking about their art and their mothers. When I’d exhausted my printed and digital resources, I cornered friends at bars to ask them about their mothers. Every woman had a story for me. One told me of her mother’s incessant need to know where her daughter was at all times and the demand they spend more time together. One told me of the secrets her mother kept from her, despite her daughter knowing what her mother was hiding. One told me of her mother’s prodding words about being too thin, about not eating well, and a hypocritical complaint about smoking cigarettes. 

Now, in these stories my friends would realize at a certain moment that, without doing anything violent, she could show me the meaning of all of this. And she would begin — how unmistakable that quickening is! — beckoning and summoning and there would rise up in her memory, half forgotten, perhaps quite trivial things she shared with her mother. And she would make her mother’s presence felt, and I would feel, as she went on telling, as if she’d led me to the top of the world and show it laid out, majestically, beneath. Her mother. Her self. Her love. Her frustration. Her space within her mother’s home. 

In these stories, of which my versions you’ve read in this collection, the teller forgets that their mother is also a daughter, their stories filled with that curious quality which comes only when one’s identity is unconscious of itself. 

The freedom to define oneself apart from one’s mother depends upon material separation and simultaneous acknowledgement of an inevitable sameness. Becoming a woman depends on this freedom, the freedom to hold these two things together in the same space. And women, all humans really, have always been poor in this area, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. 

It is true that all humans begin as their mothers, a mix of cells nestled in a velvet underground of our mothers’ bodies. It is our very first home, the placental organ grown just our size, the cells that are our mother and the cells that are not, the resources that travel through our mothers to nourish us and sustain us until the alchemy of human life has finished and we are ready to separate. For the process of birth is a process of separation, the first of many that will begin to constitute the self. When a baby is born, they are cut from their mother and thus become a self. 

In the same way our first home is the womb, so too is our first self our mother’s self. As we attempt to define that self, we encounter a tangle of intangible umbilical cords that we must decide what to do with. For those who are socialized as men, their development often demands a swift and complete severance of these cords. None of the tenderness, blood, or femininity is allowed in them. For those who are socialized as women (or who identify as women), their development is often contingent on a surgically accurate assessment of which severances one can survive and which ones must remain tethered. For women, it is their mother’s model of tenderness, blood-management, and femininity they are expected to replicate. The process of becoming a woman requires one to necessarily be in connection with one’s mother while also separating from one’s mother, in other words, occupying their own room in their mother’s home. 

That is why I have laid so much stress on a room of one’s own in her mother’s home. 

I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of becoming your mother, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted, but also do not dream of becoming not-your-mother. Think of things in themselves. Your room in your mother’s home. Your mother’s room in her mother’s home. And so on. 

My belief is that if we live another century or so and all have rooms of our own in our mother’s homes; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage of connection; if we escape a little from the shadow of our mothers and see ourselves not always in relation to them but in relation to our less binary reality; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go along and that our responsibility is to the world of reality and not only to the world of our mothers, then the opportunity will come to become a new kind of woman. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her mother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born she shall find it possible to live as herself and also love her mother, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work on ourselves as daughters, even in vagueness and obscurity to our own mothers, is worthwhile.  

 “…the image…highlights another reason that many mothers tend to be critical of their daughters’ hair: they are subjecting their daughters to the same scrutiny to which they subject themselves. That a mother looks at her daughter’s face the same way she looks in a mirror suggests that she sees her daughter as a reflection of herself. This explains both why many mothers critique their daughters’ appearance and why many daughters wish they wouldn’t: The sense that our mothers see us as reflections of themselves clashes with our wish to be seen for who we are. At the same time, our mothers’ scrutiny seems to confirm our worst fears: we are fatally flawed.”

from Deborah Tannen’s You’re Wearing That?:Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation

My mom and I have the same hair. Deep auburn, staticky and stick straight. From the beginning of my memory my mom has dyed her hair to stay true to the red-tinged brown that suits us best. I’d watch from a perch on the bathtub as she carefully mixed, smeared, timed the dye. We’d journey to the kitchen to share a can of Dr. Pepper until it was time for her to use the sink’s sprayer to rinse the dye in vivid streaks down the drain. 

In the same kitchen, I often watched my mom perm and cut my grandmother’s hair. With the blue stool from her desk centered on the tile, I’d watch as wisps of white fell like down feather from my grandmother’s head to the floor, a faded mauve towel catching what lingered on my grandmother’s shoulders.

After years of making due with the mauve towel, my mom bought a cheap black cape like the ones hairdressers button too tight, and every few weeks during the summer, my mom would wrap my brother, and the blue stool under him, in the cape on the patio. She’d run electric clippers over his head, bleached nearly white by the sun, until he was appropriately shorn and we could all rub his soft stubble for good luck. 

As for my haircuts, she took me to her own hair dresser, a woman named Deb whose picture on her cosmetology license looked like a knock off Fran Drescher, and for years instructed her to cut my hair “long enough to still put back in a ponytail.” While my mom and Deb talked adult talk, I stared at myself in the mirror watching wet strands of my hair fall from her scissors. When Deb was done, my mom would take my seat, give Deb a few more instructions, and shoo me to the front with the magazines. Happy to be out of the hot seat, I was content to flip through oily pages of hairstyles and highlights. 

The attention my mom paid to my hair was in its styling. On days we travelled, she braided by hair in two, tight French braids. On days we took pictures, she sectioned my hair into curlers set with a thin cloud of hairspray. On days we needed to leave the house before my hair naturally dried, she blow-dried my hair with her round brush. As a kid I’d grow impatient with any of the processes about a third of the way through and fidgeted so much that it was nearly impossible to not touch a too-hot spot to my scalp. 

When I got old enough to drive myself, I dreaded getting my haircut at Deb’s. Her dated salon smelled like chemicals and her conversation made me anxious. There are few things a sixteen year old girl wants to talk about with a woman her mother’s age, but my mom made the appointment and I didn’t care enough to find my own. I sat in the chair—alone now—trying to say as little as possible lest the ordeal last longer. 

Deb always left me feeling worse than when I came in. Often the first thing I did when leaving her salon was shower and restyle my hair with less product and more heat. My hair spent most of its time in the two styles I had mastered: a tight ponytail and a damp mess around my shoulders. 

In the summer months before I left for college, I worked up enough resolve to tell my mom not to make an appointment with Deb. Instead, I called the Ulta in the strip mall by our house and took whatever was open that day. When the stylist asked what I wanted, I began confidently, “I need a trim and I’d like some layers,” but suddenly felt it necessary to add “but still long enough to put back in a ponytail.” The woman nodded and went back to talking over my head to her coworker about their terrible boss. I left with an indiscernible hair shape that even in my visor mirror looked ragged. 

I came home and performed satisfaction, flipping it back and forth at my dad’s and brother’s oos and aahhhs, but woke up the next morning and cried in the mirror. I turned my straightener to its highest setting and tried to iron out the errant fringe. Between the singed strands of hair that made my head look rounder, I set a brave face before meeting everyone at the table for breakfast.

Seeing my mom in the kitchen, who immediately turned to face me, I felt a fresh wave a panic. Instinctively my hand went to the back of my head to pet down the strands that stuck to nothing in the air. 

“It looks good, Allison,” my mom said from the toaster. 

The hand relaxed away from my head in relief and the wave retreated. 

“Thanks, mom.”

During that first year of college, I took to picking at my split ends leftover from the shoddy cut, a new coping mechanism in the face of new stressors. It still fit in a ponytail but looked like someone had carefully burned each end, every strand like frayed thread or a dead tree branch splitting in every direction. By the time I came home for spring break, I wanted a chop, something shorter than ponytail length, a fresh slate to start my resolve to not ruin my hair while zoning out in the back of lecture halls. 

But I didn’t know where do go. I couldn’t go back to that strip mall salon—I had avoided the Ulta altogether since my bad haircut— and I didn’t want to return to Deb’s. While laying in my spot on the couch resisting the urge to check in on my dead ends, I remembered my mom cutting my hair. In the memory I am freshly bathed with the mauve towel, less faded and still fluffy enough for my sensitive six-year-old skin, wrapped around me. My mom combs my hair carefully. The scissors rest against my back and make satisfying sounds of cutting hair in spots I can’t see. 

It was a faint memory, but even so, it was more palatable than sacrificing my head to Deb or braving my awkwardness and anxiety to try someone new. 

I rustled myself off the couch and into the kitchen where my mom walked back and forth inside that sometimes-salon square.

“Ma, can you cut my hair? I want a bob. Like a short, short.” 

She cocked her head toward me.

“I can make you an appointment with Deb. She may be booked this week but you could come back next weekend and I bet she’d have an opening.”

“I don’t want Deb to cut it. I want you to cut it.”

She shook her head and pivoted on her heel toward the stove.

“Alright. Maybe later.”

That was enough to send me back to my spot on the couch and leave her to finish lunch. 

The day wore on. I buzzed internally about the moment she’d situate herself on the back porch over the stool, the feeling of the fine-toothed comb making its way through my hair, the nonchalance I would tell my friends about my mom cutting my hair.

Lunch was had. Sportscenter played loudly in the living room. I became restless. I imagined that if all the other tasks were done, we could get to it. So I helped with the dishes, folded my laundry back in my duffle bag, and propped myself up at the counter idly, waiting for my mom to remember my request. She continued to brown ground beef for the stroganoff dinner I couldn’t stay for, not picking up on my silent inquiry. 

Frustrated, I threw my things in my car parked on the street out front and I asked her again. This time insisted. Impatient. Whiney. 

“Mom. Can you cut my hair now?”

She sighed that heavy sigh and looked at the clock before she said, “Sure, Allison. If that’s what you want to do. Go get the stool.”

Buzzing, I set up the blue stool on the back porch and whipped the mauve towel around my shoulders. I nearly leapt across the grass in bare feet to retrieve a sun-bleached clothes pin from the line to fasten the ends together. 

My mom met me on the porch with the dusty box of hair supplies. Digging through the perm rods and clipper covers, she retrieved the hairdressing scissors reserved for cutting my grandmother’s hair. I situated myself on the stool and waited. 

The sun was setting around us and the air exhaled a warm breeze. She began to comb my hair and pepper me with questions. 

“Are you sure you want it short?” 

“Why don’t I just make you an appointment.” 

“You might not be able to put it in a ponytail.”

I brushed them off: Yes, to my shoulder. No. Deb never does it right. That’s ok. I know. Then insisted: “Mom. Just do it.”

She bent at her waist to be eye level with my chin and made a heavy SWICK sound, scissors on thick hair. I felt the new ends tickle my chin and smiled. 

“You know I don’t know how to do this, right?”

My smile melted. 

“What?”

“I don’t know how to cut hair, Allison. You know that.”

“I thought you used to cut my hair all the time?!”

“I don’t know where you got that idea.”

I didn’t either. I’d seen her cut my grandmother’s hair a hundred times and my brother’s a thousand. And there was that story that a gossipy neighbor used to tell while drinking Zimas on this porch about my mom fixing her daughter’s botched bangs. But had she ever cut mine? 

Tears bubbled in my eyes and I fixed my gaze on the pointed ends of the backyard fence. 

“Well, I have to leave soon anyway, so just finish it.”

She made her way quickly around my head, neither of us saying much. Inches of my hair floated by my bare feet then drifted away in the breeze. 

When my mom passed me the small hand mirror from her bathroom drawer, I flipped my new bob back and forth. The sharp ends made a soft woosh when they flew past my ears. I didn’t bother to meet my own eyes in the mirror. 

“Looks good to me.”

I passed the mirror back to my mom and shook the towel off my shoulders. Little clipped hairs marked a line down the front of my white t-shirt where the towel didn’t quite do the job. I picked up the stool and walked inside to examine myself more closely in the large circle mirror on the mantle. 

I didn’t think the haircut was particularly bad—I liked it as much as I’d liked any of Deb’s and more than the cut that encouraged my split-end picking—but I didn’t feel satisfied. 

“Looks good, Al,” my dad offered from his recliner.

“Thanks dad.” 

My hand reached up to touch the newly exposed nape of my neck as I shook back and forth again. The whole thing felt better in motion than it did lying flat. I followed the momentum and collected my keys to start the drive back to campus. 

My mom returned the scissors to their place and the towel to the hamper while I said my goodbyes to my dad and brother. She was setting water to boil when I met her in the kitchen again. 

“Bye mom.” I reached out for a hug, “Thanks for cutting my hair.”

She brushed clippings from my neck before meeting my embrace. 

“Okay. Be Safe. Call me when you get there. I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

In my car, I waved goodbye, avoiding the mirrors around me, and held my breath until I drove past the city limits. I pulled into a gas station to take another look. In my rearview mirror, I didn’t feel anything about what I saw, but the tears I’d held back on the porch came back in full force. 

My mom had given me what I’d asked for, but as I searched for more fast food napkins in the console, it dawned on me that it wasn’t a bob I wanted but her—the feeling of her combing my hair, the sensation of her attention on me, a comfort I didn’t know how to ask for. 

By the time I pulled in to the dorms a few hours later, my eyes had receded from their teary puffiness. I tossed my bags onto my bed and made my way down the hall toward the voices in room 223. 

“Hey!!” the congregated girls sang toward my direction. But they quickly cut the sound short and let a silence bleed between us. 

One friend said through a tight smile, “…you got a haircut!”

My gut turned, “Yeah, my mom cut it.”

Julianne, a political science major and Emily Post etiquette minor, responded first. 

“Do you want us to fix it?”

Embarrassment blurred my eyes as I nodded. I met her in the communal bathroom to sit on the sink and let Julianne make tiny cuts around my head. Another friend looked on and kept us company with a story about a particularly cringy lab partner. 

For a moment our entertainer left and Julianne began softly, “Is your mom a hairdresser?”

A crimson rose in my cheeks.

“No”

“Then why did she cut your hair.”

“She used to.”

I put my hands, cold from the porcelain of the sink, to my cheeks, now hot with the rush of blood. 

“Or I thought she used to.”

Julianne let a small sliver of hair fall from a cut of her scissors instead of asking more. 

Our friend returned and brought me back around to better spirits enough to let my cheeks return to their normal color before modeling Julianne’s work to the rest of the group. 

I flipped my hair around for them and started before anyone could comment, “Julianne did a great job. I guess I should ask her to cut my hair before I ask my mom.” Everyone exhaled a relieved laugh. 

I laughed too and resolved to rewrite the memory as another “bad haircut” story.

In this story, I cut out the loaded silence and stomach-sick feeling. I trim the bit about her hesitation and my insistence. I blowdry the tears and curl the whole thing into a recognizable comedy. 

My hair grew back and when it did I razzed my mom about her poor technique and temporary omission. 

“You asked me to cut your hair!” she laughed, being a good sport. 

“Yeah, but you shouldn’t have listened to me!” I volleyed back. 

We toss our heads back in a cackling harmony, our hair in near identical form just below our shoulders. 

“I bought it brand new,” my grandmother began as I pried into her memory about her wedding dress. I furrowed my brow at this, confused. I’d frequented all of the thrift stores and resale shops in a tri-county area with this woman. I’d never in my life seen her buy something new for herself. Even most of her Tupperware came secondhand, saved from sour cream and spaghetti sauce containers. The thought of my grandmother, in her words, “picking the prettiest one from the bridal catalogue” was as strange and foreign to me as her reasons for excessive thriftiness.

Her hand lifted, hinging from the elbow that rested on her rocking chair, and her eyes closed slowly. She reached back into her memory and, for a moment, forgot I was there listening. She shook her head slightly, returning from 1952 to the living room where we sat. “Where did you say you found it?”

I don’t like to tell stories of my wedding or my marriage with my ex-husband—the pity it incites isn’t worth the anecdotes—but I like telling the story of the dress I wore. 

I found the dress in an old Samsonite suitcase, not-so-carefully folded in an old bedsheet with the accessories stuffed haphazardly in a plastic bread bag. I immediately wanted to try it on, to feel the weight of its sturdy stain and yellowed lace. I held it to my body in the bathroom mirror of the empty house. I could only see from my neck up, but I thought it would look good on me.

I imagined the day I would try it on for real: my mom’s tears, my grandmother’s nod of approval, myself set in the form of the women that made me. 

I folded it back, trying to crease it in the same spots as it was when I found it, and replaced the suitcase at the top of the closet. I was a high school senior and all my boyfriend and I could talk about was forever. 

I had seen the dress in my grandmother’s bridal portrait where her young self holds silk flowers indefinitely. My mother has a similar picture in the same dress with the same smile and coached posture. The dress looks identical, like a paper doll’s dress fit onto younger versions of the women I recognize. I wanted a photo like that. 

It’s not that my mom or grandmother pressured me to get married—in fact quite the opposite—but I craved an initiation into a womanhood that the dress seemed to embody.

At the time though, all I thought was that I loved this boy so much that I wanted to spend my life with him starting as soon as possible. 

Years after first finding the dress, I made it to the end of a college degree, my mom’s requirement before she would give any kind of blessing. The boy, now just past the threshold of being a man, switched my promise ring for an engagement ring, and I told my mom I wanted to be the third wearer of the dress. 

She responded with a measured, “if that’s what you want.” 

I had expected a gush of approval or at least a tearful hug, but I forgot that my mom doesn’t deal in sentiment. She’s taught me through example that, for sensitive souls, the way to stay unhardened is to keep your heart guarded by its cage of ribs instead of on your sleeve or anywhere else a heart’s not supposed to be. A lesson that, despite my efforts, I never mastered.

A few days after her initially cool reaction, she helped me into the dress. Muffled by the still-creased layers of fabric, she began to tell me her own story of the dress: “Grandmother cut this dress up a few years after her wedding. She was going to use it for something.”

Her emphasis on something told me that this was like the collection of perfectly cut circles of fabric stacked in the closet, the box of tangled jewelry on the dining room table, the file cabinet drawer labelled “TO SORT.” In cutting the dress, my grandmother had a final project in mind, or perhaps deep in that part of her that leaves intentions without articulation, but she had stopped before anything more than a mess was made. 

“We had to put it back together and take it in a bit so I could wear it,” my mom continued, “After my wedding, we just stuffed it into the suitcase. I guess if I’d known you would wear it, we could have preserved it.”

“Well, it’s in pretty good condition even having sat in a suitcase for years.” 

I already knew that precious things were preserved better by the magic of forgetting.

The dress came over my head and we shimmied the waist below my bust. Set in its place, the dress cut off my already shallow breathing and I began to panic. My mom has lovingly spared me from surveillance of my body, from indoctrinating me with her own insecurities, from loading food with emotional consequences, but when I looked to her through the watery veil at the edges of my eyes, she said, “knowing Grandmother, she probably cut out the extra seams.” 

I stared at the ceiling to stop the tears from betraying the excess feeling that was starting to spill.

“Get it off.” I whispered. 

She pulled the whole thing over my head from the bottom hem and left me with the dress inside out on my bed. There it seemed a skeleton of my hope. For the first time, I noticed the dime-sized wine stain that had bled through the front of the skirt. I noticed the torn lace under the armpit. I noticed the doubt of my decision to get married at all. 

I wiped my cheeks hard with the back of my hand and took a sharp inhale. I crawled my hands under the skirt and up to the shoulders and whipped the dress right side out. A thought came: If I can’t wear this dress then I don’t want to get married at all. 

I shook it off, Jesus, Allison, that’s so fucking dramatic, and threw on my clothes to meet my mom in the living room. 

“You ok?” she offered cautiously.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Let’s make an appointment with a tailor.”

At our first appointment in the local bridal shop, the only place that would dare to touch our heirloom, we were given a room in the middle of the floor. Dresses with trains and tulle and taffeta surrounded us. The dress, limp in my hands, looked more yellow in this sea of white. 

Other mothers and grandmothers paused their private performances to dote over the dress, over me, over my mom. They sighed and said things like “well if my dress looked like that I bet Lauren would actually want to wear it” and “how beautiful that you two can share this” and “you look just like your mother.”

While my mom took a seat, too close to these strangers for her liking, I followed the chipper stylist behind the curtain. 

“How exciting that you’re wearing your mom’s dress. Is she so excited?”

“Uh, yeah. I think she is.”

“Amazing. Ok sugar, let’s get you into this thing.”

A quick catch in my throat made the next words tumble out like an avalanche.

“Ok. Um. So you know, last time it didn’t fit. Like at all. Like cut off my breathing kind of not fit. And we don’t know if my grandmother left any seam. And I don’t know if I’ll even be able to button... ”

The stylist put her hand on my shoulder, interrupting my spiral.

“That’s ok, and totally normal. Let me find you something that might make it a little easier.”

She disappeared and I heard my mom’s fake laugh from just beyond the curtain. The stylist reappeared with a long-line bra with a hundred little snaps. 

“This should make it just a little easier to get it over you.”

“Ok.”

I turned around to I take off my sports bra, now feeling stupid that I put it on instead of the pretty one with the underwire. I clasped the first few fasteners and let her help me with the rest. Once secure, each inhale expanded against the plastic ribbing.

“Great, now we’ll just slide this over you. Dive right on through there.”

She held the dress open in a circle like my mom used to do with my Easter dress so as to not ruffle the hair she’d carefully curled. I poked my head through and we began the gentle tugging that brought the dress into place. 

It felt a little better than it did the first time, though none of the buttons were even close to meeting. The stylist turned me to face the curtain and pulled it open. The moms and grandmas let out oooo’s and ahhh’s like a canned reaction from a live studio audience. The stylist looked at the dress but was talking to my mom when she said, “Yup, I can see here that we will need to take it out in a few places….maybe here and a little more here.” She pointed at my waist and my bust. 

“My daughter is a little more gifted in that area.” my mom offered, landing the joke with the women sitting beside her. The stylist and I stayed silent, smiling. After a beat, I asked “do you need anything else? I’m ready to take it off.”

At the second appointment we were shown to a room with a door in the back. The dress hung with my corset on an embellished hook. A stout woman with a pincushion on her wrist met us and began to pin the now much looser dress in all the places I was unlike my mother and grandmother

“We had to take it apart so it fit you, honey. Torn right down the seam,” the woman laughed and traced the inseams with her palms. My mom followed her gestures attentively and made small talk about the age and condition of the dress. My thoughts wondered to my future sister-in-law who described birthing her daughter as “being torn at the seams.”

At the third appointment we were back in the curtained room. The stylists brought in the dress with such care that I wanted to tell her it had been stuffed in a suitcase for more than two decades. 

“Alright dear, now let’s see the whole shebang.”

I pointed my arms above my head, trained now at this dress diving, and let it slide over me. The stylist paused at the long line of buttons. “Now they just make it look like there are buttons. Everything we have has zippers. This is a real heirloom.” She let out a sigh to reassure herself and started at the bottom button. I felt a snag and hear her gasp. Quickly she said, “I should get your mom.”

With a broken button in her hand, my mom began to tuck each button in its appropriate loop. In her hands, the task was more perfunctory than performative. It was as if she was braiding her own hair or scratching her own skin.

With a soft pat she declared “There. Much better than the first time we tried.” Both of us laughed until her hand went to the small stain. “I imagine that stain is more than 50 years old. I don’t think I even had wine at my wedding.” After a beat she added, “I’m sure we could get that cleaned.” She pinched the fabric around it to assess the damage, but I pushed her hands away and smoothed out the spot in question. 

“It’s fine,” I said, imagining a twenty-year-old Grandmother. 

“Well, it’s your dress now.” 

The rest of the preparations were a blur and suddenly I was in the dress again standing at the back of the church.  My dad steadied my free hand on his arm while the other struggled to keep the bouquet from shaking. As the music rose and the pews groaned, I pulled my hand away to smooth the wine spot on my belly, somehow its imperfection more reassuring.

I couldn’t see my mom or grandmother. They had taken their spots on the pew in the front. 

Here, in this inhale before the vows and the cake and the champagne, the dress felt like a form in which my body finally fit. 

As my husband drove to our hotel that night, I realized I only had the dress. I’d forgotten my luggage back at my parents’ and I had no other clothes to change into. 

I barely got out the words “call someone” before my tears took over. I knew someone would bring me my suitcase, I knew soon I would be out of the dress, but I couldn’t stop the sobs from howling out of me. 

My new husband made the necessary calls to his best man and turned to me, wiping the inky makeup from my face with a dirty shirt he’d left in the car. 

“Do you want to go inside?”

I shook my head.

“I think we’d be much more comfortable inside.”

I set my jaw hard and stared out the windshield. He tried again.

“We can stay here but I think we’d be more comfortable…”

“I heard you. Let’s go.”

I slammed the car door shut behind me. I was mad at myself for forgetting my suitcase, mad him for no good reason, mad at the dress for being too precious a burden at the moment.

He pulled off his jacket and set it around my shoulders. I pulled it tight when we walked past another couple in the stairwell. We laughed for a moment about what kind of scene they must have seen and the stories they might imagine of the newlyweds who looked broken and terrified. But as soon as we were in the room, the tears returned and I couldn’t breathe. I laid on the bed flat to try to give my heaving lungs as much room as possible.

After waiting for what felt like an hour in this position listening to my new husband flip through cable channels, I launched myself up and hissed, “get me out of this fucking dress.”

He began the process of unbuttoning but paused after the first two. His silence threatened to bring back my tears but it was easier now to be mad then sad. I whipped around to shoot him a questioning look. 

“I just am afraid of tearing something,” he said. 

I turned back around and offered quietly “It’s ok if you mess up the buttons. Those are easy to fix. I just need it off.”

I wished he would call my mom to help me out of our dress for the last time, but it was just us and it would be just us from this point forward. Or that’s what I thought, standing there half unbuttoned missing my mom. 

My marriage story got a different ending than my mom’s and grandmother’s. After five years of marriage, it was just me lying on a different bed in a different city trying to give my lungs enough room to breathe. But I wrote the story of the dress before all of that and I wrote the end of the story of the dress like this:

People often comment about the strong likeness I share with my mother. Some overly complementary men would even say we look like sisters. But we are not sisters. She and I are made of the same material, the same dark eyes and hard-earned love. The same material as her mother. Each new Reynolds woman is created from tearing the seams of the one before. Each one the same delicate lace and stiff satin, stitched with fresh thread for a new body.

I knew from the moment I took it off that I wanted the dress back in the suitcase. The bridal store pressured us to buy the preservation package, but I refused at every turn. The idea of trying to preserve the dress made it seem like I would expect my own daughter to wear it, to mature into a recognizable iteration of me. It made me fear that I would one day be torn at the seams. So we folded it a little more carefully into a new sheet, and we tucked its edges into the same suitcase. As I closed the clasps of the Samsonite, my ring clinked against the faded metal. 

They say that, as they become women, girls become more like their mothers. But what they don’t say is that they are the same all along. A daughter’s self is sometimes secondhand.

The way I used to end the story about the dress lies about tucking it back into the suitcase we found it in, waxes poetic about a daughter’s self being secondhand from her mother and her mother’s mother, and spins the whole thing into proof that the day I wore the dress was the first day of my forever, like it had been for the other women in my family. 

The truth is the marriage didn’t take and we hung the dress on a padded hanger next to the file of documents I’d need to change my name back after the divorce. The truth is there is more of me that doesn’t fit into that womanhood I imagined while looking at my mom’s and grandmother’s bridal portraits. The truth is that no matter how you dress it up a woman’s self is all her own. 

This is how I end the story now:

It’s possible that the dress itself never fit, that my physical excess in comparison to my mom and grandmother points to some other excess, the type more allowed in 2020. It’s possible that the dress wasn’t meant to fit, and that my attempts and tucking myself inside of it were the opposite of what my mom or grandmother ever wanted for me. It’s possible that the dress doesn’t matter at all. 

But it’s hard to know. It’s hard to know anything for sure about the women in my family. My grandmother died without me really understanding her at all. My mom continues to be an enigma to me in the subjects of motivations and priorities. I feel like I arrived at adulthood without knowing how I got here or why I was still wearing a dress that didn’t fit. 

The way I end the story now is with a prayer that the older I get the less I’ll need the reassurance of the things given to me secondhand.  

Dr. Nancy Shankle begins our third class with a question, “How did we learn to talk?” 

Dr. Shankle doesn’t sound like my mother but she is like her in every other way. I arrived to the first Introduction to Linguistics class on a crisp January day to find Dr. Shankle is a woman with the same dyed auburn hair, the same quick smile that strikes me more as a feminine tick than friendliness, and the same first name as my mom. Nancy. 

Daughters seem to find their mothers everywhere. 

She offers the question to the room of 20 or so other students who signed up to for this course to meet the language science requirement of our English degree without taking the other, more ominous option of Advanced Grammar. We look blankly at one another and a prickle of heat finds my cheeks. Another silent beat ticks by. 

One student from the back, lanky, clean-shaven, huffs into the shoulder of his school issued sweatshirt, “Well, we don’t really remember that far back. We were all to young to remember.” 

Dr. Shankle pulls her mouth into that tightlipped smile I’ve seen before on my mom’s face. I look away from her and down at my lap as if she’s about to scold me. Instead, she taps the keyboard to begin the powerpoint. I put my hands to my cheeks to cool them. 

“Mr. James may not be able to remember but there are many things we know pretty intuitively about language acquisition.” 

She taps again to make the words Language Acquisition appear on the screen. I copy the words at the top of the blank page in front of me. Tap tap. Three bullet points enter from the left. 

“Language acquisition happens naturally. And there’s still so much that linguists don’t know. In fact, most of the conclusions we’ve arrived at in linguistics have been known by mothers for centuries.” 

She pauses, something I will learn is a tell that she’s veering off topic, before saying, “I felt like I learned more about language acquisition from my own daughters than the researchers we will read this semester…”

The Nancy in front of me becomes white noise as I daydream about the Nancy I know better. In this scene, she dons a pair of belted khaki shorts and the errantly permed curls she has since smoothed into a sensible shoulder length cut. She holds an infant me close and watches my mouth try to form the words I want to say. She whispers “mama” in a tone softer than the one I know from memory, gently willing me through the movements. 

Tap tap. I snap back to the present.

“….to learn to speak, children must understand six complex systems. Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. All of you in this room finished this process and if you go home and ask your parents, I’m sure they’ll have stories and insights that rival the reading assignment for this week: pages 33 through 45 of chapter one.”

I scribble the assignment and begin to pack my things. 

“One more thing before you go, shoot me an e-mail before next class and tell me what your first word was. Since none of us remember much, it might be time to call your moms and ask. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.” 

I call my mom on the way back from class and begin the ritual of our conversation. 

“Hey ma, what’s up?”

“Hey Al. Not much. Driving home. What’s up?”

“Not much. Walking home.”

This back and forth incantation gives us a chance to suss out, by the tone of the other’s voice, if it is a good time to talk, if there’s important information we need to discuss, if the other is in a mood that requires the adjustment of our own mood to match. In this case it is a: yes, no, no. A green light for the purpose of my call.

“My Linguistics professor, you know Nancy, wants to know what everyone’s first words were.” 

I hear my voice coming through the speakers of her car. 

“Okay. Like the first thing you ever said?”

Her voice is picked up by the microphone built into the rearview mirror. I hear her blinker come on. She makes a noise that sounds both like a thinking “umm” and a driving maneuver grunt before saying, “I don’t know. Probably mama or dada or something like that.” 

My cheeks grow hot for a second. I prick of pain, a paper cut feeling, a contraction of the muscle in my shoulder that carries a continual knot.

“Oh, yeah. Cool. Thank you.”

“What else did you need?”

“That’s it. That’s perfect. I’ll be able to e-mail her when I get home and then I’ll be done with homework for the weekend.”

“Nice. Ok, I’m about to pull into the garage.”

“Ok. I’m almost home, too. I’ll talk to you soon.”

“Love you”

“Love you, mom.”

I send an e-mail as soon as I am home. My mom said I either said “mama” or “dada” first. She didn’t really remember. Hope that works! 

I am early to the next class. Dr. Shankle boots up the computer while I take my seat and poke through my tote bag for a chapstick. 

“How are we today, Allison?”

Startled from my search, I squeak out a too-loud, “Good!”

I give up on the chapstick and regain a little composure, “I hope my e-mail was okay. I mean, I hope that answered your question. My mom didn’t really know.”

My professor clicks the keyboard a few times, obviously not remembering my response to the assignment, and assures me, “There were no wrong answers.”

Her clicks produce a slide with the date and course number as the rest of the class materializes. I return to my chapstick search while she dims the lights. 

“I hope you all had a restful weekend. Let’s jump right in with your fun little assignment.” 

Click. Click. 

A slide with a computer generated bar graph appears measuring the number of responses to “mama”, “dada”, and “other.” The bars for “mama” and “dada” are nearly dead even. The “other” responses are a sliver. I draw a tiny circle on my page and begin to fill it with ink. 

“Now, our class was split pretty evenly, but broader data shows—to many mothers’ dismay—that most infants get to the word ‘dada’ first.” 

I burrow into the tiny black dot. I can feel the paper dissolving into wet. 

“If we think about how we produce these speech sounds, we can get closer to the theory on this.”

She clicks to a slide labelled Phonetics. 

“Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. The basic buildings blocks of any verbal communication. Phonetically, some linguists argue, that dada is an easier sound to make than mama. Mama requires a connection and release of the lips…”

I write connect/release—mama in my notes. I fill in the ‘o’ of connect to make another black dot.

My professor goes on about bilabials, fricatives, and the iterations of phonetically acknowledged noise making. I follow along half-heartedly, wondering if my answer was alone in being counted as “other.”

I call my mom again on the way home. I’m not sure what it is I want to say. Maybe I want to giver her a chance to change her answer. Maybe I want her to tell me how babies learn to talk instead of learning it from a professor-mother-serrogate. Maybe I want to turn my embarrassment into conflict. 

After our opening ritual (yes. no. no. green light.) I tell her what I learned. 

“…It’s wild, actually. Did you know most babies say ‘dada’ before they say ‘mama’?”

My mom laughs, road noise and a couple hundred miles of distance between us. She is far away again and a conflict feels useless in the face of a choppy connection. The paper cut feeling is now a tightness turning itself in my throat as I ask again, “do you remember if I said ‘dada’ before I said ‘mama’?” 

There is only a beat of silence. I hear a fire truck passing in the background.

“That sounds about right. I don’t really remember.” 

The tightness spreads to my gut. The image of her holding me close, listening to me coo, her permed and present, fades. 

I see the joke like a scrap of paper on the sidewalk, a rip cord on a parachute, an avoidance trick I learned from her.

“Well, I don’t remember either! Was a little too young…a little too young.” 

We laugh and move on to the routine conversation where we are most comfortable until the end our commutes home. 

When I get to my room my body finds a fetal position on my bed. I pull the ends of my bedspread around me in a swaddle. I mouth the words “mama” and “dada” until the words sound like a foreign language and a nap pulls me under. There were no wrong answers.

“I do not go further and say that we as men and women owe anything to the woman who did this for each one of us severally. We owe nothing. But to ourselves we owe an intellectual recognition of the fact that at first we were (psychologically) absolutely dependent, and that absolutely means absolutely. Luckily we were met by ordinary devotion” 

“A mother’s love is a pretty crude affair. There’s a possessiveness in it, appetite, even a ‘drat the kid’ element; there’s a generosity in it, and power, as well as humility. But sentimentality is outside it altogether and is repugnant to mothers.” 

from D. H. Winnicott’s The Child and the Family: First Relationships

When I started writing about my mom, I was afraid of what I’d find. I was afraid I’d find hurt I hadn’t felt before. I was afraid I’d find memories that shifted the already strange terrain on which she and I meet. I was afraid I’d find proof of her apathy or sadness or regret. I was afraid I’d find that our connection, when examined, would be severed completely, another umbilical cord cut to define mother and child. 

What I found was my own ache for more tenderness from her, her unsentimental ordinary devotion, and the ability to hold both of these things in the same place. 

What I found was a baby book she kept for me. 

The entries are spartanically spare, a quirk of my mother’s writing in general, but span seven months in much more detail than the version penned for my younger brother. Her erratic observations of me as an infant surprise me. She doesn’t note the things I’d like to know: her feelings, the minutia of my development, her assessment of my emerging personality. She notes sleep patterns and who babysat and where we went those first few months of my life. 

When I first read these matter-of-fact entries, I was disappointed. Children always want their mothers to dote on them, to articulate their uniqueness, to situate them at the center of everything. But my mom focuses her attention on the facts. Sometimes she leaves me out entirely. 

But on a second read I noticed something fluttering around the edges. A softness that makes me ache. 

Here, even in the most straightforward entries, she is trying out referring to herself as “mom.”

When I asked her to send me photos of the book for this project she laughed, “I probably only wrote about what happened. You know, logistics.” 

She knows that I wish she talked to me about more than logistics. Maybe I’ve even said as much, but the life route-talk is what she’s good at. At various points through the years I’ve read this as callous avoidance. The times she’s changed the subject when I start to get emotional. The practical negotiations of when I could tell my grandparents about my divorce. The silences that read as disappointment, disagreement, or distance. 

But when you put it together, when it is laid out so bare in a baby book, I can see that the logistics talk is an extension her affection. 

This is true beyond just she and I. She loves all of those around her with the ferocity of a director, always situating things for the next shot, allowing those of us lucky enough to be loved by her to show up and play our parts without much thought to the production happening behind the scenes all the time.

To this effect, my mom is always moving. She jokes that she is incapable of doing just one thing. There’s always something cooling on the counter to be put away, a stack of papers to be sorted and thrown out, a phone call or thank you note to be checked off the list. On the eve of my thirtieth birthday, it strikes me as an impossible maintenance, a life reliant on momentum. 

I resisted most forms of teenage rebellion, but in adulthood I’ve swung as far away from the well-maintained life as possible. I burned through my meager life savings on a move to New York and a divorce. I am embracing an art that doesn’t pay and supplementing my income by waitressing. I am working on meditating and doing just one thing at a time. My rebellion comes in seeking a life of abstraction, reflection, and creation. A life that demands stillness. 

But I know this freedom is beholden to the structure and consistency that is my mom's practical magic.

It’s funny what we think we will want to remember. For decades I've kept journals to document what I thought I’d want to know later. In my earliest journals, I trail off often. I’d go too long between entries and get bogged down with trying to fill the imaginary readers in on the happenings of my days since I last wrote. I’d tire of writing about classmates’ birthday parties, weekend road trips, and sleepovers. On many pages, the writing stops mid-entry.

When I started a journaling practice in college as a performative act to embody the manic-pixie-English-major, I wrote in poetry to process the tidal waves of feeling that seemed to wash over me daily. On rereading these entries, the melodrama of undergrad woes plays out in predictable and unmemorable colors. 

As an adult, I write morning pages, like the rest of us attempting to follow the path of The Artist’s Way, but when I read my journals back they never seem to document the things I actually wanted to remember. I go looking for specific incidents that I recall vividly and fail to find them mentioned at all.

In my baby book, my mom does the same. She notes locations, attendees, and details that strike me as irrelevant thirty years later. 

And, like my own journals, the entries in my baby book are written in a number of different pens. I imagine my mom picking up the closest pen, sometimes purple, sometimes green, sometimes basic black, looking at the calendar or scrunching her eyebrows to pull the date from memory, and starting each entry. 

I imagine her feeling the same pang of guilt after not writing for a few days or weeks and making up for it in paragraph summaries of the weeks she missed

I don’t remember Sherri or James or much of Wilma. I don’t remember my baptism or first taste of squash. I don’t remember the family lunchtime routine. And I don’t wish I did. What I wish I remembered is how my mom felt about me, the daughter that made her a mother. 

It is rare to spot sentiment or raw sincerity in my mom. She runs complicated predictive calculations of social contracts in her head constantly. She hedges her sentences with “Well…” and ends her stories with a fading “anyway…” in case anyone listening grew bored during the telling. She knows how to arrange herself in the scene of someone else’s life as a supporting character. 

The product of this calculation is my mother’s quiet kindness. She is beloved by most and liked by all. People consider her a confidant without requiring the same divulgence from her. I learned this kindness from her and it keeps me up to my ears in people who thank me for listening, for letting them discuss things weighing on them, for showing up to their birthday parties. 

In most of my memories, my mom is not a supporting character but a shadow one. The scenes narrated in this collection were pieced together from the sensation of her presence, from bits of information that came to me in daydreams and revisionist history. She is present, always present, but often too neutral to clock. 

In contrast, my dad vacillates between being my hero and my antagonist. He is fully drawn, a character in his own right, a brightly burning star around which my world revolves. But my mom is more like the moon, made of the same stuff as I, tied to me in a way neither of us can shake, moving things inside me via her gravitational pull instead of direct heat. 

She will hate that my memory works this way, but I am incredibly grateful for it. When a daughter remembers her mother in vivid detail, it is often in the narrative of wicked witch or absent angel. My mom is neither of those. She is a woman skilled at holding space for the autonomy of others. And she has given me the gift of space since my gestation in her body, the first act of gracious space holding many of us experience, an ordinary devotion.

In the baby book, a shift happens in the entries in July. Up to this point, everyone—my mom included— is referenced by name like characters in a script. But on July 7th, my parent’s anniversary, she begins writing as if I am narrating. 

In this entry I am enjoying the movie, participating in their celebration, becoming an entity in my own right. Though I have little motor skills, I am afforded agency, an assumption that I could choose to watch or not watch a screen, the beginning of a self outside of my mom.  

The entires snap back to third person narration—Grandparents Reynolds took Allison to Enid for the afternoon—but a permanent shift has begun, and my mom’s entries in the fall narrate my experience outside of her. 

It is a crude affair, this narrative calculation. I am no longer a character in her story or some third-person version of it, but a narrator myself, spending time in scenes in which my mom has no lines.

There is no sentiment in her shift, but reading it stirs the sediment deep in my gut. 

It is true that a mother’s love is an ordinary devotion. Many of us are all born attached to ones that raise us and all are wholly dependent on their maintenance and stage magic to keep us alive. As someone lucky enough to have this process go by without note, I have arrived at adulthood unsure of how to untangle my dependence and my desire for independence. 

I came to these essays looking for something to guide me, for the clamps around the spot of the cord that I should cut, for clues to my mom’s sainthood or villainy. What I found was the space between my mother and me. What I found was an ache for her tenderness that needs to be met with my own ordinary devotion. What I found was the irreversible course of my own growth that demands I am untethered from my mom.

What I found was a line in the baby book where my mom already began to work this out for herself.