Every Mother an Icon
ESSAY
In the summer of 1980 my mother is eight months pregnant with her first child. She has black hair chopped at the cheeks, great legs and a face so solitary and fierce it feels indecent to look. I know this because of the photographs my father took in the first years of their marriage. In them she is often half-dressed, outside, stylish. Her body looks always strong and fully hers. In one photograph she leans coolly against the porch stairs wearing just a white dress-shirt rounded and slit at the bottom. A porcelain bowl rests beside her slender ankles. Her posed apathy towards my father and his camera looks very much like elegance though what I see is something closer to terror. There is, in her soft glare and clenched fist, a picture of a woman longing to be known and refusing to reveal. Innocence and suspicion. And I use these photos, their framed world of grit and glamor as mythos for a woman whose face I have long searched for an invitation.
In the photographs with her children, she changes. In one of them, taken again by my father now perched high in a tree, my mother lies on her side in the grass. Her hair is longer now, blunt and with bangs and there’s a new softness to her face. The photo looks down, birdlike, on Jack and Leah born fifteen months apart. They crawl and paw at her bare thighs. This day, she told me once, was a kind of ecstasy. I can tell even in the stillness of the photograph that Chicago’s summer breezes are turning the leaves inside out and sparkly. The branches enclose them and cast little shadows across their faces. Madonna plus one in dappled light and warm winds.
It is good to know that my father was there in the tree, that he was looking carefully and knew something about beauty. By the time I arrive the photos are in color and the composition careless. Whatever love existed between my mother and father has calcified into something silent and inert. My siblings move to Australia, Montana, Oregon. Eventually I’ll get to leave as well. My father, when he’s not traveling, sits on a frayed plaid chair in the living room snapping his fingers to one of his hundreds of jazz and blues records. He reads the journals of Arctic explorers, eats a bit of dark chocolate and sings along to songs in which someone’s baby has always gone away. My mother hates jazz. She plays Sympathy for the Devil to the teenagers she teaches at church to tell them about temptation. She rides her bike, goes to the gym and studies hard for her graduate degree in Linguistics. Everyone in the family hushes into their separate solitudes, safely orbiting on axes of self-sufficiency. For leaving me to navigate the silence, sometimes I hate them all.
Though the truth is I have been very well loved. My childhood is a sweaty blur of flowers and lakes. In the garden my mother teaches me how to bite and sip Honeysuckle. At a whisper’s distance, we kneel together among the Impatiens and search for swollen seed pods to collect in our hands and watch burst. We outline each other in chalk and sip from the hose. My brother Henry is somewhere down the street with a pack of bottle rockets and every few minutes we hear the air being pierced with a shriek.
One afternoon in high school I walk into our red kitchen, a color my mother considers a neutral, and see her through the window jumping on our trampoline. She commands her arms and legs like a gymnast and works on her form with a flat and serious face. I stand by the window and watch. The light in the kitchen looks like amber or sap, a trap a person might not mind being stuck in. I wait a little before I throw open the door to holler and I laugh at her hard and she laughs hard at herself and we are loud and laughing and never think to cover our mouths.
When I’m twenty-four and she is newly divorced we go to France to work on a farm, which is her idea of fun. There has been real cruelty between us, that particular scald of intimacy betrayed, and there will be more in the years to come. But now we are outside of Montpellier staying with a family in their centuries old compound hidden among chestnut trees and ruins. In the house there are tiny scorpions which the family finds funny and I find reason enough not to sleep. Their teenage son shows us around his ancient village and drops us off outside of town at a swimming pond tucked away behind loose forest. Together we dive into the green gold water and swim and twirl like sun drunk conspirators. Then there is a group of very young school boys that come running towards us. They throw off their uniforms and are yelling and pushing each other. Some of the boys put large rocks in their underwear before jumping off small cliffs into the water beside us. This is their daily after school game. I feel uneasy, like trespassers and look to my mom who is backstroking broadly, splashing the boys a little and not for a second thinking she doesn’t belong.
Later that day we picnic on the grass and from her purse she unwraps the cloth napkin from the paring knife she carries. We slice bits of apple and cheese, we lounge and read. My mother is a virtuoso of leisure. A short distance from our blanket there is a couple about her age sitting in folding beach chairs sharing a newspaper and food from a cooler. “That looks nice” is what my mom says. She pretends to take a picture of me but the goal is to capture the couple. She has pointed out people in pairs to me as long as I have been her traveling companion, which is to say, always.
In France I take many photos of her in vineyards and bakeries and fields. She wants her photo taken and asks for several of each pose, which is new to me. We agree that the best of them is the one of her sitting in front of a stone wall, wearing her black skirt cut above the knee, a white t-shirt and red cotton scarf. She’s lean and tan with hair dyed dark auburn. In the photo she’s mid laugh but staring straight at me and she is so beautiful in color, this woman I have spent my life loving and failing to love. She sits there in front of me mostly in shadow with stray scraps of sun lighting half of her face.
Originally published in Third Coast Magazine in April 2021
