Mother Myth

I had a dream recently that a baby was crying and I was supposed to make it stop. I asked my mom to hold it, and she stared at me blankly and said, “what do you mean? This isn’t my baby, it's yours,” and then she walked downstairs, and I stayed on the top step holding my baby while it screamed. 

I keep thinking about mothers and babies and the girls in between. Adrienne Rich said, “the mother begins as, and remains, the most primary internal object to the girl,” and I think that might be right. Mother is the first connection, always—connected sinew and tissue and muscle and teeth. A body made from a body; a body that will become a person; a person who can feel you and see you, who knows you and needs you. 

I don’t have a baby, but I do have a dog, and I imagine that having a baby would feel exactly like having a dog. She taps me with her paw when she needs something; she tips her nose down and sighs when she’s sleepy. She stares at me like I know things, or maybe she stares at me because I am all she knows. She is still sooooo naughty, but she is growing smarter: she hasn’t stopped eating my shoes, but now she’ll stare at me in my eyes while she eats my shoes, daring me to say something.

I don’t have a baby, but I am becoming the ghost of my mom. I look in the mirror and see my mom, I look at my room and see my mom—in the pomegranate poster on my wall, I see my mom gently thumbing red beads from the rubyfruit. There are quilts on our beds that she sewed with her hands. There are plants curtaining our windows, and they were all propagated from one mother plant. It’s godlike, the way that she is everywhere in our house, in its bones, on its walls. And it makes sense, because what is a mother if not our first house?

I feel like I know my mom when I look through her film albums from 1990. Photos of Mom and Dad before they were Mom and Dad. In one, they dig their car out of packed snow on High Street in Lindenhurst. In another, they lean against the backs of trees, smoking cigarettes by Clark Park in the Penn neighborhood. My dad dances with two strangers in Rittenhouse Square, framed by the Curtis Institute and big expensive hotels. My mom holds a birthday cake for someone she used to love, in a house I don’t know. I feel guilty when I look at the photos for too long, because they are not photos of Mom, they are photos of someone who became “Mom.” 

I keep thinking about love, and how my mom gives all of hers away. She’s good at giving and doesn’t mind. Sometimes she runs a little too low and is the only one who can fill herself back up—sometimes no one is pouring love into her, and I watch voyeuristically, as the sacrificial cycle repeats itself. 

But I also don’t pour into her. I keep taking. Even though I’m not supposed to need her now, even though I am old enough to mother myself now (maybe this is where I place the dream). I know that if I take, she will give, and I know that’s what trips the cycle, and I do it anyway. I stare at her in the eye and eat her shoes, daring her to say something, daring her to keep anything for herself. I study her photos, waiting for the real people of my parents to climb out and speak to me, and all I see is my hungry reflection in the photos’ glossy finish. 

A good mother is a mother who pours herself out completely. No person begs to be born. It's a mother’s idea to use her body, and I think that is why it means something. Something about mothers will seem impossible to me, probably, until I become one. My own mother will seem impossible to me, probably, until she’s poured herself completely out: she will be a body deflating into asphalt, and I will be standing above her, studying the scene like it’s a film photo from a 1993 Christmas in Long Island. 

I’ve been mothering myself recently. I remind myself to take my vitamins and I tug a water bottle around with me. I made a loaf of bread yesterday because I wanted to have something to take care of. I watched the yeast bubble and rise, I dipped my fingers into the slippery dough, and I watched the dimples I poked spring back at me. 

The morning after I dreamed about my baby, I woke up with strep throat. I always feel like a baby when I’m sick. I’m going to be an adult in four months, which means I will have to be the mother to myself a lot more. I think that’s where I place the dream.