What I Forgot to Say
I like your hair. I’m sorry I mentioned your hair. Hair is a dangerous topic between mother and daughter. If I notice you have hair, before I know it might I not be demonically possessed by an evil Jewish mother, saying: “pull your hair out of your face. You are so pretty, why don’t you…” and “you call that a haircut?”
I forgot to say: keep away from junkies. Sorry. I actually know I’ve said this over and over. I myself failed. Once when you were a baby I found myself—and you too—in an SUV in a skanky part of Burque as a drug deal went down. The driver, buying the drugs, was a friend of your father’s, and a punk rocker. They were in a band.
“Why didn’t you take the baby and just walk away?” my therapist confronted me. In that neighborhood? Before cell phones? I sat tight, but even now I feel bad about it.
The Death Doula asked me, over a chai latte at Java Joe’s on Siler, if I was writing people letters. It’s odd—I’ve embroidered Grainne two pillowcases and I’ve written Rich a letter. But not you. Have I told you enough that I think you are brilliant and a genius artist and a great mom? Have I mentioned that your hair used to really annoy me, particularly the half-shaved head in high school? Maybe it is better for me to shut up, and just assume you know how much I love and admire you. After all, what is a daughter if not a letter, a letter to the future, a letter against the patriarchy, a letter on stationary embossed with mermaids and octopi. What is a daughter if not blue ink floating on water, ink that will make an incredible pattern, both predictable and completely new and mysterious.
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What I Forgot to Say to My Mother
Shut up and leave me alone. Stop telling me I am so fat I look pregnant. Stop telling me I look like a whore in my mini-skirt. Just stop.
But I was too inhibited to say these things, too frightened, too pressured. My mother would scream and get hysterical and I’d just take it, suck it up, patch it up, smile at dinner.
Some people leave the families they were born into and don’t look back. Yes, I could have done that. I ended up with an uneasy compromise. I left home the day after high school graduation. I told my mother only lies from my mid-twenties on. Yet there was some friendliness between us. I don’t regret that, but it also isn’t something I’m proud of. When she cleaned out the 17 room house she lived in for over fifty years she found all the cards I’d sent and all the pretty presents: the glass blown fruit, the vase embossed with lily pads and dragonflies, the amber beads. “You did care,” she said to me in a tone of nasty wonderment.
Now that I’m old and dying I have no idea what she wanted from me. She one told me how she hated it when I learned to walk, and then toddled away from her. My natural curiosity was an insult, an abandonment. Mean as she was, I wasn’t discouraged from having my own child. I just thought it would be difficult, very difficult. I thought children would bring out the desire in me to slap, to hurt, to control. But I would fight hard against the desire to inflict harm.
Imagine my shock when my daughter was born and I felt no urge to hurt her. In fact, I just wanted to enjoy her, make her smile, and keep her cozy. This wasn’t just a good feeling—it was horrifying. I’d just assumed motherhood was overwhelming and beyond annoying. Then I found it delightful. It was therefore my mother, after all, who had indulged her own anger. Not my small helpless self that had caused it.
© 2023 Miriam Sagan
