throat ghost

The worst thing about her mother dying was finding out, for certain, that her mother did not want any more of her. She had known this, in an unknowing way, her entire life, but it was solidified only after her mother was dead. It’s funny how you can hear the same thing over and over many times, but not really hear it until…. you do. This is what happened to her. When she was young, after begging her mother for a little sister, her mother would laugh and change the subject. Sometimes, her mother would even bring it up herself, So, do you still want a little sister? She would eagerly nod her head. Her mother would again laugh. She heard this.

After her mother’s death, she read in her mother’s journal about the times when she had been sent to her father’s, and how her mother had filled that time, once simply checking into the airport hotel after dropping her off for a red eye flight, meeting a guy at the bar, sleeping with him, washing her hair luxuriously in the morning, and having breakfast alone at an outdoor café where an elderly woman commented on the strangeness of her mother wearing a ring on her pointy finger – the same ring she now wore herself as a wedding ring because her finger had gotten too fat for her real wedding ring. Only a pointy finger ring would fit her wedding finger now. In those journals, she had read somewhere, or maybe read into somewhere, that her mother hated letting her go on those visits to her father, but also desperately wanted and needed them. Her mother floated between describing handing her over to her father as both an assassination and a new lease. She heard this.

But it was not until she sat on the big red couch with her mother’s best friend, the friend who had been there the night her mother died, the friend who had known to call her in from the living room while she sat glaze-eyed watching a baseball game with the sound turned down and said, Come, it’s time. The friend who had known it was time for her mother to die when she had no idea of time, or space, or anything. They sat together, years after that night, and she heard what she had heard before, but in a way that caught in her throat, stayed, then stuck.

Pieter, her mother’s German boyfriend, her first after the divorce, built the backyard sand box she had played in as a child, and the gazebo that no one ever sat in, but looked pretty, painted white and covered in vines. Pieter was good with his hands, apparently. This, she also knew, from reading her mother’s journals. So, on that day, sitting next to each other on the red couch, as she had sat many times before with her mother, her mother’s best friend said, Pieter wanted to marry your mother, but he wanted kids, and your mother did not want any more children. Her mother’s best friend said these simple words while nodding her head slowly from left to right. It was her head movement, resolute, firm, and in the body and face of an old woman, an old woman like her mother would have been if she were still alive, that made her hear it for the first time, although she had heard it before. And what she heard was: Your mother had you half the time and she wanted no more than that.

Now, she knows there is more to what she heard that day on the red couch. She knows there is also: Your mother was figuring herself out. Your mother feared being hurt again. Your mother never got over what happened with your father. Your mother was trying to be her own person. Your mother was tired. But what she heard that day, and what rings in her head still, is: You are too much. So much, in fact, that your very own mother, who loved you more than anyone ever loved you only had enough love for 4 days a week, and no more.

She has a distinct memory of driving in her mother’s banana yellow Datsun B210 down one of the winding side streets near their house. They were arguing about time, she wanted more of it. Her mother said, Everyone has a job to do. Mine is to go to work. Yours is to go to school. You have to spend time with your father. And I have to do the things I need to do when you’re not here.

You mean, see your boyfriend.

Yes, I see him when you’re not here. That’s one of the things I do.

But why do you need to see him alone? Why can’t you see him, and I be there too?

At this her mother laughed sweetly, Honey, you don’t want to do the things we do. It’s adult time.

But this arguing in the bucket seat of the Datsun, and her tears, she remembers tears, was not the real fight. The real fight was inside her even then, at age whatever she was, nine, ten, eleven? that her mother wanted no more of her, and she wanted more than her mother would ever be able to give.

If she could have, she would have lived in the small hollow of her mother’s collar bone. She would have made herself as small as a snail and lived in that nook, smelling her mother’s skin, nuzzling the soft warmth of her neck. If she could have, she would have lived inside her mother’s throat, in her jugular. That is how fierce her desire was for more of her mother. She would have happily gagged her mother, blocking her swallows, as long as she could have been that close. And her mother may have, probably did, sense this about her. So, her mother held space, kindly amused, when she cried for more.

Her mother did not want her attached to the jugular. The fact was, her mother wanted her sometimes, and a warm quick hug would do. This, she knew as she grew up, and then knew again, wholly, when her mother’s best friend shook her head from side to side, long after her mother was dead, having held that distance between them, somehow sweetly, but held nonetheless, for as long as she could remember, until her mother was a ghost. And then, only for two weeks, did she feel her mother caressing her own jugular, skimming her chin, dancing in the notch of her own neck. The best hurt she ever felt.