brown lace-up shoes—just a few years older than Azalea was now, sitting next to her in shorts and flip-flops—walked through the hall, she heard the strap hitting the wall.
My mom made the noise. Whack. Whack. Whack.
“When I got back to her classroom, Miss Patterson was waiting for me.” Putting her hands out in front of her, my mom said, “She gave me a light tap on each hand, and not another word was spoken about the matter. I wonder,” she mused, “if the night before, she pondered what to do and hatched the plan with her friend Mrs. McIntosh.”
Azalea grabbed another chip, munching away triumphantly for her grandma. But I was beginning to smell a rat. All of my mom’s stories seemed to revolve around her youthful delicacy, and I wasn’t buying it. She was somehow so vulnerable that even mean old Miss Patterson couldn’t bear to give her a whack on the wrists?
My mom always talked about me the same way. She would show Azalea pictures of me as a little girl, standing alone at a table with all my cousins, looking totally sad and utterly alone, and say things like “Awww…your mom was so sweet. Wasn’t she?”
And I would think: (a) You don’t know me; I was hardly sweet—more like angry as hell, even then—and (b) if you thought I was so damn cute, why didn’t you pay more attention to me? Or protect me?
I was also hurt by the fact that my mother didn’t seem to remember anything about my infancy or early life, or anything, for that matter, that I asked her about. “That was a long time ago, honey,” she’d say when Azalea was born and I asked her about the minutiae of sleep training or nursing or anything at all about taking care of the babies she swore gave her life meaning. But then she’d bust out with great advice, which I hardly took in, like the afternoon when Baby Azalea was crying after a feeding, and my mom, who was visiting, suggested I try burping her.
“Nah,” I said, figuring that since none of the doctors or midwives had mentioned it, burping was no longer a thing. But after her relentless encouragement to try it, I finally gave in. Practically rolling my eyes like an irritated teenager, I put Azalea up on my shoulder, gave her a few pats, and the cutest little sound came out of her mouth. Then she went to sleep.
By the time my mom was pregnant with me, she had already given birth to two sons—Matt two years earlier and Sam two years before that—which I figured had something to do with why she remembered so little. For instance, when I asked my mom what it was like to give birth to me, she would always tell me the same pat story about how she was so excited I was a girl. And about how the rabbi came in to meet me and said, “She is very intelligent.” I have always loved this part of the story—because of my great longing to be seen as smart, of course, but mostly because of my even greater longing to simply be seen. I like to think of this papery old man looking into my face and asking himself a question. A question about me.
In a picture taken after my birth, my mother lies in the hospital bed, holding me in her arms, a kidney-shaped bedpan and a pack of Tareyton cigarettes on the bedside table. She looks relaxed, happy, not sweaty or particularly emotional. I was her third, after all, and she was numb, having received the full “saddle block” treatment. This is the woman who told me, when I was pregnant with Azalea, that labor pains felt like when you had to “go to the bathroom,” as in pressure “down there.” In this picture, I can see that she was not kidding—she looks like someone who was just relieved of a minor burden.
My mom’s sister, Aunt Brenda, who was a nurse at the time, told my mom about the benefits of breastfeeding—which was not de rigueur at the time, or even encouraged—so Matt and I were nursed. And then, when Azalea was a baby, my mom, who had been smoking since grade school—really!—admitted