An excerpt from Lynn Steger Strong’s “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About”
Photo: Silke Enkelmann /Getty Images/EyeEm There is a story of my mother that I trot around as antidote to other stories that I tell about my mother. I have, over years, used it both to show how she is good as well as how I think that she is bad. I trade in stories maybe, but I think most of us do this. We pick the stories; we curate them; we pass them on to prove things either about us or about the people that they hold inside.
She didn’t talk to me, I told someone, holding one of my babies, nursing, which she didn’t do when she had children, telling that same story of my freshmen dorm room. She didn’t crawl up onto my dorm bed and talk to me, I said. She didn’t ask me what was wrong. At that point my story changed again. I chose then to say that if I were my mother up in Boston that time she came to get me when I was still an adolescent hardly functional Depressed Person, I would have forced me to tell her what was wrong with me. I would have talked to her, I said. I would have mothered better, I thought then and said out loud to other people, as if better were so clean and clear as imagining what she must have felt like then.
She drove with her red car’s top down as she yelled at me. When we got to the tow yard, there were piles of cars stacked in the lot. The man told my mom she owed him six hundred dollars. She looked at me. I was in cotton pajama pants and a sweatshirt. My eyes were swollen from crying just minutes before. My face was swollen from the weight I’d gained. None of my clothes fit and this was what I wore as often as I could. No matter it was hot out.
The other day, I was teaching a gender studies class — nine teenage girls all anxious to say the right thing, their desks in a circle — and my students and I were talking about mothers. We were talking about the impossible positions they are placed in, the ways in which they are our models; we were talking about what little space moms have to also need and also want. My students didn’t notice but I started crying.
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