The last time I saw my mother she had an expression on her face I cannot name to this day. My mind supplies me with a stern look, brown eyes glinting, mouth slightly open, her last words rising to the ceiling where fan blades caught and twirled them back down to me. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t like you. I don’t trust you. I don’t respect you.”
I have other pictures of my mother, ones where she stands clear, sculpted in sunlight or shadow, limned by the fluorescent lights in the kitchen, dappled by dangling plants in an outdoor tacqueria we used to frequent when I’d come to town.
I have memories of her smile – the look of delight when she’d see me standing at the arrivals gate at the airport, a look of expectation, an almost unbridled joy, her words, “I couldn’t wait to see you. You look good. I’ve been counting the days.” And my father: “She was making me crazy. Watching the clock. Afraid we’d be late.” More than a loving look; it was my mother’s face and for a decade of visits home it was etched and clear and beautiful in my mind.
But she gave me that look, and used those words. Her posture, ramrod straight against the curved back of a plush couch. Tiny feet tucked under a black dress. Tinted hair framing a hard-lined face, lips a nibble of flesh.
We had just buried her father, my grandpa. It was also my birthday, a day she suddenly refused to acknowledge. After 38 years I was shrouded by an old man who welcomed the respite from living.
The last time I saw my mother was the first time I saw her burning need to control an unordered world. Her ironclad will could not stay the family carousel, so she scattered the horses and trampled the riders.
Nothing in her face, her harsh stare, called out to me. Those dark eyes like mine offered no ledge for me to hang my hands, dig in my nails, lay down my heart. Her look was a dictum: Apologize or be decimated. I hadn’t done anything but get married, grow joyful: “shunted aside and ignored,” was her accusation.
That moment, now a memory, lies thickly over all others: My mother extracting a price for unconditional love equal to the cost she paid to give it. No change permitted in her tight little world; I saw my life through her eyes coalescing, telescoping, into one hideous moment of clarity: She had no sense of me.
I left the house that day, my mother’s words clinging to me like the red clay I sprinkled on grandpa’s coffin. Burial of a different sort; anguish tamped down six feet, emerging a time later as this: The last time I saw my mother there was an expression on her face that I no longer choose to name.
by Susan Rich, (c)2014 All Rights Reserved
