June 19, 2003
Mothers and Daughters
I think the only real woman I've ever had as an influence in my life was my grandma. She was a pistol at seventy, with a mouth like a sailor. She told my brother and I dirty jokes when we were kids. She watched Matlock and Silk Stockings and baseball. She had a huge crush on Paul O'Neill.
I remember that she had garter belts and black lacy lingerie in her dresser, which I would explore whenever she wasn't looking. With the help of my grandpa, she corrupted my brother and mine's carefully maintained diet with fish sticks and french fries and Barq's Red Creme soda. We didn't have to have fruit for dessert, either. We had Kroger brand fudge marble ice cream.
She suffered from anorexia for all of my conscious life, though I did not know what to call it then, nor did I really take much notice of it. In her last few years she stopped gardening and drinking and playing cards and Kismet. She went on a respirator, though she stubbornly smoked a cigarette with the air being pumped manually into her lungs. She moved out of my aunt's attic (where I had lounged about with her, and eaten Ramen and cheese doodles and watched bad seventies television) to a nursing home, a sterile, false environment where she roomed with an old black woman named Ruth who was convinced she was a sixteen year old white girl.
About my age, at the time.
She was diagnosed with lung cancer soon thereafter, and maladies beyond this one were to follow. I remember sitting only at her bedside when she could not muster enough volume in her voice to speak to me, where her broken arm prevented her from feeding herself. Not that she would have anyway.
My mother leaned down, pressing her ear close to grandma's mouth. Tears streamed down my cheeks.
"Why is she crying?" Grandma kept asking, though I could not hear.
Grandma died a few weeks/months later. It is odd that I cannot remember the year, or the month, of her death. I can tell you, though, that her birthday was in April.
There isn't the same kind of life in my mother. I found her diary, once, in the bottom of her sock drawer, reading only the first few lines before realizing what it was and hastening it away, blushing. I've never known a side of my mom that wasn't catering or stifling, sure and steady in the maternal role. I do not know what she was like when she was young. I can understand why she has lost herself now that my brother and I no longer are.
I still drink milk with my dinner, however, so I suppose she has not failed in that which she chose to give herself entirely over to.
astera at 11:03 p.m.