My mother taught me to love sardines and mystery books. She was the first person to tell me I could be anything I wanted. When I was a child, I would press my ear to her stomach, imagining she was teaching me a new language with every murmur and breath. She was steadfastly present, but emotionally unpredictable. Her nickname for me as a child was Queen Bee. She lives in a beautiful farmhouse, the acres in the back inhabited by her cows, donkeys, and goats. She is a successful painter, an animal rights activist, and eerily intuitive.
She likes to tell the story of how she wore skirts so short in high school, she had to wear bathing suit bottoms underneath. She was the kind of mom who periodically suggested I stay home from school, play hooky, and spend the day together. She taught me to read by having us alternate reading pages out loud before bed. In first grade, I was caught kissing a girl at a sleepover at a friend’s house. Her mother was furious, and I was sure my parents would be equally upset. When I got home, my mother took me aside and told me it was no big deal. “Kiss whoever you like,” she said. “But maybe wait until you are a little older.”
We once convinced Sarah that there was elf blood in our family, a Scandinavian lineage of magic that Sarah would only know the secrets of when she turned sixteen. For years, Sarah would pull me aside and ask if we were just messing with her or if she was really going to inherit powers when she got older. This story still makes my mother laugh. When a hunter wouldn’t stop shooting ducks at the edges of the bay, right by our front yard, my mother egged the inside of his truck; he never came back.
My mother can be generous, and she can be hard to communicate with. I vacillate between feeling like I am a great daughter or a terrible one. I wish I could divine the secret to our relationship, a hymn that could translate our misunderstandings into something more poetic than irritated texts or hurt feelings. I can’t tell if we are too alike or too different. We both dance in supermarkets, weep while watching most movies, and love puzzles. I tend to hold on to feelings and want to talk things out, exhaustively, at times. My mother sends me articles with the title “Do You Cry Too Much? You May Be a ‘Highly Sensitive Person.’ ” She prefers to hug and let go, with little desire to dissect whatever argument happened.
I am often caught unawares when I have hurt my mother’s feelings. It is never what I think it will be. She will isolate herself from me at these times, disappear from text, phone, or email. Months can go by, and I will only know she is ready to talk because she sends me an emoji with no inherent meaning—a panda, the Swedish flag, a bug. That is my cue to connect.
When I was ten years old, I was asked to read a poem I had written in front of the other fourth- and fifth-grade students, our parents, and the teachers. A few other students were also asked to perform or read. The few of us that were asked to participate talked after class and discussed how embarrassing it would be to have our parents there. When I went home after school, I informed my mother that she was not allowed to come. She tried to sway me by promising to stand in the back, but I didn’t budge; I told her I didn’t want her there.
When the day came for the performance, I stood up to read my poem and saw that everyone else’s parents were there. Every single one of them. I realized, as I looked out over all the beaming, proud parents, that something had gone terribly wrong. That I had done something wrong. That I had let down my mom. I think some part of me is always afraid I have failed my parents. When I told this story to my mother, when I was an adult, she had none of the emotional attachment to it that I did. “I think I came anyway,” she said, shrugging. “And just didn’t tell you.”