mommy

It turns out I may have mommy issues.

–

He fingered its edges, rounded and bored to a clean economic aesthetic. His mother had hidden it from him, because of its connection to the past and to his father, and he had never seen it until that morning when his mother died and he cleaned out her closet and bedroom. It had rested at the top of the closet next to a circular box that held an old phonograph. It couldn’t have been that old; it wasn’t any older than his mother, and his mother had died prematurely of cancer, sixty-four. She had quit smoking at his behest when he was thirteen.

When she was fat and flustered, she would point at him and the color would rise in her cheeks, and she would say—her face an exaggerated kind of caricature of angry, her anger disproportionate to whatever he did—“I quit for you. I gained thirty pounds and you never thanked me.” He was never inclined to thank her in those moments. He knew she didn’t like to betray those pieces of herself.

Before she died she lost the thirty pounds and then some. Her slight jowls deflated, and the skin that was no longer weighted down hung limply. The whole time he didn’t grieve.

True that he felt for her, but mostly she didn’t talk about the pain, and he rarely found himself compelled to ask. The chemo was difficult. Her movement was stilted as it never had been, not in sixty-four years of wear and tear, nor fifty of real labor at the nursing home. He didn’t think on it, and he didn’t see the point in grieving. They were a unit, and he wasn’t ready to be separated from her. He had resolved to follow her.

He gazed at it and it seemed his father gazed at him in his reflection, dad who had only been around for the first four formative years of his childhood. He had struggled not to lose those memories, but his memory was poor, and his great tragedy was that he didn’t know where he came from, and his mother never said. When he gazed at it he felt like a part of a family. Nevermind that his mother was gone, and his father had never been. Without her help, he had no memory, and he had never created any memories for himself.

She was so proud of him, and she made no excuses for that, or for staying home with him for the first four formative years of his childhood, and they could have had a babysitter but they didn’t. She was not ashamed of working at the nursing home, even though she could have done anything. He was her greatest achievement.

–

unfinished.