Because You Will Never Know What It’s Like To Be A Mother

Her voice was quiet despite a jaw line that appeared as taut as a bow string seconds before letting loose its arrow. She punched up the word never in a way that must have required a fair amount of abdominal support. I felt it in my own gut from across the room. In the spot that grows solid like a cooling scrap of pot metal, pitted and disfigured, the familiar place of anxiety, fear, loneliness, and of course, love.

It’s also where I anticipate the grief of losing her will lie.

I felt slapped, no, emotionally mauled by her. It was going on one year since she and my oldest sister had spoken to one another. My mother, deceptively petite and pretty, was a stubborn beast when she felt offended or wronged in any way. She held resentments close like a worn rosary, passing her fingers over and over them until the edges of hurt smoothing under her incessant touch, could finally be let go. I did not want to add another bead that day.

But, I am the youngest of the three of us, a glutton for a situation in need of fixing, and would have disemboweled myself and laid down on the altar of family discord if I thought it would bring peace.

And so I stepped lightly upon the bridge between my oldest sister and my mother in an effort to repair it, my footing precarious, I asked her if they had spoken recently.

“Why do you ask?” she replied. “Have you been talking to her?” Another punch of air beneath her, signals danger.

I quickly denied any form of contact with my sister as my mother’s eyes narrowed me down to a former scrap of myself pinned to her horizontal field of vision. This was her signature look of divining deception and years earlier was the cause of my one and only adolescent bladder accident. When I was a child she would pair the look with the verbal command “You know you can’t lie to me.” The conditioning was so well set that I must have become something like the slobbering dog in Pavlov’s famous experiment. Now an adult, she no longer needed to utter the phrase, the look was enough.

My knees send a signal to my brain they may have to betray me.

I knew where this was heading and it wasn’t going to be good for me. I wanted out. Out of the conversation, the house, my family. Out. How could anyone be so arrogant and naive in tandem? To think I could tread these waters beneath the bridge after she had expertly picked me off like a highly trained sniper was sheer foolishness and I suddenly realized I must have a death wish.

And it was a certain kind of death I felt to my core when she smoothly let the discussion ending arrow fly in response to my claim of not understanding the conflict between her and my sister.

“Because, you will never know what it’s like to be a mother.” she said.

True. The hope of having a child of my own was removed along with my uterus when I was 32, and it was no less a death. Yes, it was also true that I had been primarily in relationships with women during the previous two decades, which arguably and anatomically reduced my chances of having a child of my own but did not extinguish my desire. Furthermore, adopting a uterus or surrogacy was well beyond my financial reach and actual child adoption laws for LGBT couples were also prohibitive. So, as far as I was concerned, her statement was fully loaded with all the truth she needed, minus one small detail. The full weight of this reality had yet to bear down on my consciousness until that very moment when her tone of voice took on the characteristic of something I could actually feel, like the edge of a blade.

To wit, my mother put her finger on one of my deepest regrets, and rather than comfort me she chose to save herself an uncomfortable discussion by indicting me as permanently childless and eternally childish in her eyes.

This was a side of my mother I most feared and disliked, but my loyalty would not allow me solid ground upon which to challenge her.

In reply to her cruel, but true declaration, there was an unfamiliar voice inside me that wanted to escape and say, “Neither will you.”. Gratefully I remained silent, and after a moment I pandered and back peddled my way out of the room.