(s)mothering
By Rowan Tate
My mother and I divorced when I was 19. I was tired of raising the child she couldn’t.
I was supposed to be a boy. My mother didn’t do an anatomy ultrasound because she was so sure, God had revealed it in a dream. After eight hours of labor, the doctors said it’s a girl. In all my baby pictures, I am wearing blue.
My mother would say that if I had been an only child, she would have thought she was the perfect mother. I barely cried. I wasn’t a picky eater. I loved sleeping. This is why my sister was necessary. Otherwise, we would’ve thought this was normal behavior.
My sister was born screaming. My mother was in labor for two days. Eventually, they cut her open, and ripped my sister out of her, there was no other way she was coming out. I think my sister remembers this. I think she is still angry.
I was three years old when she was born, which is old enough to be a mother. This is why three-year-old girls want baby dolls of their own, they have the instinct for something to nurse and to hold.
A mother is the only entry into the world—beyond the notion of a beginning, the way you become a life. Without her blood, you cannot start the story.
She went on screaming, my sister, she would scream when she was fed and when she was held and when she was laid down to sleep and when someone tried to talk to her. No one knew what to do. Is she sick? Is it something we don’t know? My mother took her to a doctor. He said she was very healthy. My sister went home screaming. My mother put her in the bathtub and covered her ears and cried against the door. I am afraid they will think I am hurting her, she said of the neighbors. But no one complained. I think they felt too sorry. My mother took her to another doctor, who said the same thing, there is nothing abnormal. On the drive home, my mother pulled into a Kroger and asked if I could stay with the screaming child while she ran inside for bread and eggs. I kept a sticky hand on my sister’s fuzzy head and imagined my mother checking the eggs in a carton for cracks, her cheeks wet for the sweet silence. She took the baby to one more doctor, weeks later, who looked at my mother and said get used to it, it’s her personality. After that, we had an exorcism.
I had a father but he didn’t know what grade I was in and he couldn’t remember if my birthday was on the 16th or the 18th. He was mostly in his ‘office,’ which was a wall of the garage with boxes of books in Romanian and a sheet of plywood laid flat to make a desk. If he was home, he was there, cramp-crouched over water-stained pages of Eliade or Cioran as if willing himself to tip over into the portal of a world where he could spend his days beading strings of prose in his native tongue instead of mutely installing doors. It made me sad to see him when my mother would park the car. She and I would bring the groceries in together, I would remind her to get gas tomorrow.
My sister was a problem child. I, in contrast, was the good child. She did problematic things like painting on the walls with nail polish and hiding chewed-up food in napkins around the house and turning off the air conditioner by pushing it out the window. Sometimes I would hear my mother hiccuping while she cried behind the door in the pantry, peeling garlic. Sometimes I heard her praying, Doamne ajută-mă, Doamne ajută-mă. My sister and I shared a room. We slept in the same bed. My sister writhed as she slept, as if being strangled, the umbilical cord around her neck tightening each time she is being pushed.
My mother lived through terrible things. She wants to prepare me for them. We have a dishwasher but we never use it, we store the pots and pans inside it. We never eat at restaurants, we make food like mămăliga and tocăniță at home. We never buy colorful things like Lunchables and Gushers and Lucky Charms. My mother lived through rations and secret police and occupation. She would listen to an illegal radio station called Europa Libera at midnight and was arrested when she was 16 for defiance against the state. She tells me never trust anyone, you don’t know who is watching you and where their loyalties lie as we are in the closet putting on our Sunday dresses to go to church.
My mother tells me the story about her standing in line at 4am for milk or about not knowing how to flush a toilet when she arrived in the US as a refugee or about going to a grocery store for the first time and accidentally buying dog food so many times that they become my stories too. Both my parents grew up under and fled the regime. They met in America. My father doesn’t mention the Communism. My mother says he had it better. He grew up in the city, in Bucharest, the capital. There were no rations for bread there, some people would come by train with sacks to bring to the others starving in their village. My mother, who has an eighth-grade education, says he was allowed to attend university. She says his parents were educated, one of them wrote a letter to the securitate for approval to buy a color TV saying I am requesting permission to obtain a color television so that my five children might watch Nicolae Ceausescu’s speeches in color and so that they might better follow what is being said given that color makes images more attractive and memorable to children and it worked.
My grandfather on my mother’s side didn’t have a pair of shoes until he was eight years old. My mother only ever had one pair of shoes at a time. She would wear them until the insoles and the heels peeled off, and then sometimes she would hold them together with tightly wound twine. All my shoes are second-hand from the Salvation Army and garage sales.
My father is not a bad man. There is no affair, no drunkenness, no beating, no gambling. He is a sad man, which is a more insidious disease. He wants to go back, and my mother doesn’t. My mother refers to America as the land of opportunity and giving our children a better future and a place you can dream. The dreams in my father are dying. When we practice English in the car on the way to the Romanian church that meets in a school cafeteria, he plays the game less and less. Suddenly I find myself missing the way he’d say mole instead of mall, crik instead of creek, and bitch instead of beach.
One of the girls my age cries through the entire service. Afterward, I ask her why. She says her father is gone for a business trip and she misses him. I stand there while she cries some more. I find her theatrics unnecessary.
I don’t notice until years later that I barely had a father, when I learn about things like father-daughter dates and feel an empty hole.
I don’t know how to explain to Americans that my mother sometimes calls me ‘mother.’ Vino aici, mama. Da, mama. Ajuta-mă, mama. It’s a term of endearment. Contextually, it means something like sweetie or love. But it occurs to me, one day, when I am holding on to her from behind as she sobs into the bathroom sink, that perhaps she wants me to be to her the same thing she is to me.
My mother’s marriage begins to fail sometime after my 10th birthday. I think this because the whole double-digit affair had a somber gravity to it that I interpreted as foreboding and that felt confirmed by my father spending more nights asleep in the living room and fewer days in general at home.
Sometimes my mother would wake me in the middle of the night and tell me to get in the car and while she drove she would say things like I’ve had enough and this is it I am never going back. We would park outside her friend’s house and stand pitifully outside the door in our mismatched pajamas. My mother would whisper to her friend in Romanian under the orange kitchen light while I half-slept on the faux leather sofa. Then it would be morning and we would always go back.
My college psychology professor will call what happens in the next ten years ‘textbook.’ She will refer to it as ‘codependency’ and ‘enmeshment’ and ‘parentification.’ As a freshman, it will be hard for me to make friends because I will not want to tell them about my father leaving and my sister being raped and my mother laying in bed for days without eating. It will be hard also because I live at home and not on campus, because my mother needs me. I tell my psychology professor I am interested in changing majors. She asks me why. I don’t tell her how my mother comes to me for parenting advice and how I feel responsible for my sister’s wellbeing and how my grandmother jokes that my family doesn’t need a therapist because it has me.
My sister gets married at 18 to someone who is 35 that she met two months ago. She doesn’t go to college. After I graduate, I buy a one-way ticket across the Atlantic with money I saved working in the dining hall. I solo travel across Europe and learn how to sleep in trains and hostel cots and airport seats. I do not wear makeup and look very young. Strangers will ask me with hushed concern how old are you? and breathe a collective sigh of relief when I tell them I am 22. No one asks where my mother is or if she knows where I am.
I stop talking to my mother because I don’t want her to ask how are you or where are you or what are you doing or who are you with. I stop talking to my mother because I don’t want to have to tell her I make easy money and fast friends and go clubbing and kiss boys and smoke weed and pierce my helix and get tattoos and get an Instagram and delete it and make a Hinge profile and delete it and get lost and get depressed and get better and make up stories about my childhood and joke that I am aging backwards.
Motherhood: a smothering. Motherhood: a military exercise. Motherhood: a wound you must tend to. A mother: half-woman, half-child, in bonding, in bondage. Motherhood: when trust becomes a casualty. Motherhood: learning to accept the unacceptable. A mother: longing and fantasy and wishful thinking. Motherhood: a domination, a possession, an all-access pass. Motherhood: you depend on me. Motherhood: you are my whole life. Motherhood: I will spend my whole life trying not to need you.
Rowan Tate is a creative and curator of beauty. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.