My mom is not a hard person, though she is firm in her convictions. She holds beliefs that drive me crazy: her stance on the Anthropocene and her fear of unsanitized kitchen surfaces are two that torment me even kilometres apart. Her falsetto imperatives swim around my head when I’m cleaning or working and I know the exact phrasing she’ll employ to tell me to finish a job. There exists a personal threshold for her mewing and I know that when breached I become hostile towards her, a repercussion I behold shamefully in retrospect but can’t with all my might deny in real time. I absorbed her stubbornness and her fastidiousness in utero; I learned her standards through trial and much error growing up. But for all her many edges she is soft, and she cares, and she is whimsical in ways she may not appreciate consciously.
She is a bird with hollow bones. She rides thermals deftly, as graceful as any other airborne being. Both migratory and nesting, she sweeps great lands to seek her solaces but always she returns to her perch, of which she takes great pride, and for which as a beneficiary I am always grateful. She finds delights in myopic fancies that my sister and I can clock in unison: a bowl of children’s cereal dusted with brown sugar; the first vernal lilac’s bouquet; a golden retriever laying supine on a sidewalk. She is the pastry chef under whom I apprenticed (Anna Olsen, you’re a close second) and the smell of chocolate chip banana muffins on a Saturday morning is one that could arrest my claim at adulthood. At times it is her ceaseless milling that sends me reeling and at others it’s what I spy through windows to admire: always going, hands deceptively quick to assemble dessert for a crowd, shooing crumbs left by others off the floor into the dustpan to make room for the exquisite. She laughs heartily, gutturally, easily. She is not above the genre of teenage stoner comedy. Her attention for others is acute even when unsolicited, and it comes of no surprise when I share with her a scrap of my own life that she has predicted it, whether by tea leaves or yawning skyscapes or dreamstruck lightning.
And this last quality sometimes arrives with consequence, for what child enjoys the truth that their parents have preceded them cognitively in all imaginable ways? What does this mean for sovereignty? How do we unhitch ourselves from the interminable links to our forebears? But more importantly, how will we act when the knowers leave our sides? I think of my mom’s 2H smile lines, the swaying of her head as she accepts information for not the first time. I can’t conceive of all the dawdling notions that must bubble up inside her skull when she considers me, nor the absence of her sobriquets and monogramed idioms from my existence. A forward-facing continuation without her saccharine, scintillant, steely steadiness – a blip she as any mother has weighed and demarcated, furtively, without sharing – is one I may never be ready to engage.
But she will teach me just as she taught me to fold egg whites into batters. Her kindness always seeps through caulked tiles. Here she is in vintage lamplight, a varnished treasure with little drawers and lockets each buttoned up shut before my prying toddler’s mind, and I know just as seasons warm and counters collect dust that I’ll have to find the devices to understand. She is not a hard person; the tiger lily keys will be set into velvet and furs.