Sometimes Mother Doesn’t Know Best
Old movies used to tell me that childhood for a girl was trying on your mother’s make-up, sitting next to her at a vanity while she reached for tubes and bottles and unfolded their secrets on your little face. With long, slender arms she would sling ropes of pearls around your neck and hold your hand, leading you forward, forward, until you grew into the clunking pair of heels you loved to steal from her overflowing closet.
I had nothing to steal, though, but an obligatory jade bracelet from Grandmother rattling on your thin arm. I could have stolen the ring from your finger, your fingers that could make a piano sing and made your daughter cry when she missed a note, but the diamond would have turned to a pocket full of stones weighing down my young fantasies of a husband until they drowned in the reality of the broken marriage I watched each day. My feet slid helplessly in oversized shoes you bought because they were on sale but you never helped me grow into anything but a fear of my femininity. When I sat next to you at your desk, I was asking, pleading, but you unfolded pages of math problems instead and taught me I should never let my face subtract from my brain in case I added up to something a boy would want. The birthday gifts from friends of glittery make-up and nail polish went into storage until you could give them to my girl cousins for their birthday presents. Silly, girly distractions for silly girls—not for smart ones like me, who should be as much like a man as she can if she wants to be taken seriously.
You made me rewrap the very things I wanted to tear open and decipher. You made me bind them tight in ribbon, like the hint of breasts that I bound in Scotch tape to hide how much I could never be your prodigal son. I only wanted to hold your hand and have you lead me forward, forward, towards anything. And you slung a rope without any pearls around the neck of all my questions and locked up the secrets of womanhood in an empty armoire.