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1 8B The Michigan Daily - Wedriesday, September 9, 2009
Daughters without mothers
here are times when I find
myself sitting on the floor,
with my legs pressed against
my chest and arms wrapped
around my shins, when I look
down at my bare feet and think,
"God, there is nothing more I need
right now than a pedicure and
a mother' Yes, a pedicure and a
mother. The two are of course not
equal in importance. The former
takes precedence in immediacy,
while the latter possesses an ele-
ment of a timelessness endurance
- it is always the suffix to any of
my pragmatic requests. "God,
there is nothing more I need right
now than a haircut and a mother."
A sandwich, a pen, any thought
involving a need never ceases.to
remind me of the primary void
that lingers behind every petty
desire: my mother's absence. Each
time something goes missing from
my life, my grief is in the shape of
my mother's face. I am a mother-
less daughter, and yes, I still need
a pedicure.
The interesting thing about my
mother was that she too was a
woman defined by the premature
loss of her mother. When my sister
and I were young, she would con-
sistently remind us that she never
had a mother to teach her about
bras, periods or shaving her legs.
We were raised to be well aware
of her impermanence. We knew
what it meant to die nearly before
we knew what it meant to be alive.
Mothers, we thought, were tempo-
rary figures. "We must learn to fly
from the coop," ours told us. We
learned we had to break away and
lead our own lives.
There is an aspect of tragic inde-
pendence in the motherless daugh-
ter that I have grown to cherish in
myself, yet simultaneously despise
and resent. My mother lost her
mother at 12 - I lost mine at 14
- so we both walked alone down
the same misguided path, secretly
grasping at any lessons of wom-
anhood we could catch along the
way: the smell of my second grade
teacher's perfume, the rows of
handmade barrettes my mother
clipped to her eyelet curtains, days
and days and days of dirty dishes,
the way my aunt called everybody
"honey." I started collecting these
memories long before my mother
died because she made it clear,
very early, that she would never be
able to give me everything I need-
ed to know.
My entire childhood was devot-
ed to mirroring the ways of a self-
taught caretaker, who after every
misstep repeated the infamous
phrase: "Nobody ever showed me
how to do that." When my sister
and I were young, our hair was
always braided neatly and tight,
with two hairbands and lots of
hairspray. My mother took pride
in the way she had learned on her
dolls to polish her daughters. But
the laundrybaskets were constant-
ly overflowing. Our house was a
colorful mess, freckled with the
decorating tastes of unsupervised
children. Nothing was ever off
limits. The walls were arways cov-
ered in some form of tomato sauce
or fruit juice. We were an entire
home of motherless daughters,
or daughterless mothers, each
one of us contributing in our
own way to an arts-'n-crafts
notion of "mommy" - a collage
we created together of what we
thought mothering was really
about.
Mysister andIwouldcompare
notes over what our friends had
had for dinner. After sleepovers,
we came home with new char-
acteristics of functional house-
holds - like Sarah's family had
a chore chart or Debra's mother
gave her an allowance. Our
mother embraced our search
for normalcy, accepting neces-
sities like Tupperware and Vel-
cro shoes. Yet other times, the
vibrant, practical, swift actions
of well seasoned parents only
revealed how much more dif-
ficult it was for my mother to
raise us. Somewhat irrationally,
she rejected the ideas of Lunch-
ables and carpooling - arbitrary
conventions that seem a staple
in the lives of normal children,
yet were spurned by my mother
as "ordinary" or "boring."
Aside from the ins and outs
of domestic life that eluded our
family, there was a less tangible
but more essential piece of the
puzzle missing. For the moth-
erless daughter, the concept
of womanhood is framed in an
ethereal mystery - a place seen
somewhere off in the horizon, es into my life and steers me in a
I suspect that following my direction I would have otherwise
mother's death I have settled for missed. My friends' mothers, my
less than I deserve in the area of teachers and aunts all mothered
mothering, because the idea of me as much as I allowed them to,
but not nearly as much as they
wanted.
" b y r I may never feel comfortable in
Nobody ever the presence of an older woman.
s e m h Her company only illuminates
all the mothering I should have
to do that." received hut didn't, making me
question the woman I once called
Mom and doubting the mother I
will one day become. When I think
of my mother, I see her barefoot,
embracing a surrogate, a step- struggling to navigate around the
mother or a therapist is bloated kitchen. Her clothes were stained
with guilt and fear. It contains the and torn. I have no idea who taught
knowledge that the replacement me about dry cleaning, but I thank
may be better than the mother I her for unconsciously showing me
actually had. I am faced with a bit- its necessity.
tersweet range of emotions each I can't say who taught me how
time a maternal influence reach- to make lasagna, straighten my
hair, pluck my eyebrows or cry and
kiss in public. I have no idea who
taught me about pedicures and all
the little things that remind me
that I am still in need of a mother.
Nonetheless, I am grateful for the
village of women who shuffled in
and out of my life, unknowingly
shedding pieces of themselves
that have been monumental to
my development. But still, I can-
not silence the little girl inside me
who wonders if it may have been
her very own mess of a mother
who first brushed fresh polish all
over her toes. For with all of her
chasing and falling, my mother
learned, very early, the importance
of knowing how to fly, and wanted,
if nothing else, to teach her daugh-
ters when it was time for them to
get their nails done.
--Tali Gumbiner is an LSA senior
Full salary and benefits. All academic majors.
www.teachforamerica.org