I’m fifty-three years old and over the past years I have attempted to live independently, wanting to live completely different than my mother had. In many ways I accomplished this goal but in other ways I’m her carbon copy. When I peer into the mirror, I view her identical face gazing back at me and I feel slightly uncomfortable toward this fact.
Starting at the top of my head, my short, brittle hair infuriates me. Am I denying my heritage by not being proud of my hair but being thrilled with hair extensions concealing my true Mohawk? My mother detested what nature decided to do by scalping the edges of her hairline as she aged.
Ugly age spots and discolorations have erupted on my face, marring my once satin smooth, unblemished complexion. My arched eyebrows have disintegrated into two sparse gray lines, joining in with other unmentionable gray body regions. A subtle, fine mustache rides above my lip, and scraggly witch hairs have sprouted underneath my chin. I’m constantly spending time plucking, shaving, dyeing, toning, and moisturizing; recalling the multiple times I sat there snickering while my mother performed these same rituals.
My once sexy curves, along with a cute backside, have transformed into my mother’s well rounded appearance. The same “shelf butt” I used to call my mother’s has somehow managed to attach itself to me. I used to watch my mother do strange contortionist movements while she squeezed herself into a white rubber girdle, all to control her “nasty butt jiggle”. Today I’m not far off in thinking I should wiggle myself into one of those contraptions. Thankfully there’s “Spanx” for the modern jiggle control.
Bladder control, forget about it. Somehow my bladder’s miserably failed me, even after discreetly sweating through hours of Kegel exercises. I don’t dare laugh too hard, dread when I have a coughing fit, and am constantly clenching my thighs together. I remember chasing my mother down the streets telling comedic jokes, all in an attempt to make her break out into hysterics until she had to make a beeline for the bathroom. She’d squeal, “I swear I’m going to hurt you. You made me go and wet myself again.” I’d roll on the floor and gasp with uncontrollable laughter in triumph. Now my flesh and blood children, the ones I labored with for hours, have the audacity to attempt this same stunt on me.
My mother’s joy of reading is something I gratefully inherited. You wouldn’t see her without having a paperback in her hands, some torrid, harlequin romance or a spicy, Danielle Steel novel. My nightstand holds a stack of novels waiting for me to devour. I read three newspapers daily, eagerly exploring all the world’s latest predicaments. Five-o’clock news was a staple on television when I was young. I used to detest the dreaded hour when I was forced to remain quiet. Today I have my television switched to the evening news at five o’clock, and I even watch eleven o’clock news before retiring.
Still, I do see a radical difference between my mother and me. She was docile, a follower, someone who didn’t want to stir trouble up for others or for herself. She preferred to live her life quietly, sitting back in the shadows without being noticed. Unfortunately, her life happened to be a particularly rough one. She married a sadistic, abusive man but never uttered one complaint, living with her own private agony.
I experienced years of my father’s physical abuse and endured it silently because I learned from my mother’s expert example. In public, I offered a beaming smile on my face while internally I seethed with rage. This rage was released when I developed into a very outspoken adult who vowed to never keep anyone’s vile secrets.
When my father divorced my mother, she lived alone until she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, a cancer she concealed for over a year. By the time her tragic secret was exposed the possibility of any cure was virtually impossible. She succumbed after enduring experimental treatments with nothing but dignity. She amazed her medical team by outliving her initial death sentence of six weeks by two years. She died living her belief: “You made your bed. Now go and lie in it quietly.”
