As She Grows Read Free

she’s eighty years old, but she’s only fifty-three, which is just a little older than Carla’s mom, and she gets seasick on the Toronto Island ferry. And no matter how well I do in school or how nicely I clean the bathroom or fold the laundry, it’s never enough for her because there is always a mouldy corner or a missing sock. And no matter what I do she will always, for a split second, scowl at me when I first enter a room, as if since I was born I’ve been paying for a mistake I never knew I made.

    I have two mothers: one, a body, the other, a spirit. Elsie is the hand that pushed my baby carriage, the protective arm that shot out in front of me when suddenly braking, the lips that told me dinner was ready. My birth mother is the tuneless lullaby I hear each night, the ghost I feel in each breath.
    All my life they have been competing against each other inside me, resentful and jealous of the other’s role like bickering sistersseeking attention. My grandmother’s presence over my shoulder and my mother’s unoccupied space within me. And it’s a strange confession, but it is the absence that carries the most weight.
    Ever since I can remember, I have been piecing together the image of a mother. It is this mother who opens her arms to me when Elsie’s push me away. It is this mother whose song I hear at night, a promise of something better. In my mind my mother talks and breathes and walks down a street with a sexy sway of her hips. She wears glasses when she reads and blows her nose with a handkerchief. Her fingers are double-jointed, like mine. Her eyelashes are long and curved like those of the woman who walks her cat in the courtyard. Her hair is blonde and curls slightly outward at the shoulders, like my grade four teacher’s.
    “Was she a morning person?” I used to ask Elsie when I was younger. Or, “Did she eat meat?” Or, “Was she smart?” Questions posed to her while I was folding laundry or passing a doorway, always somewhere trivial, to counter any possible interpretation of my thoughts. I’d pretend they were fleeting ideas, just points of interest; not tell her that I had been thinking about them for days. I used to not want Elsie to think that I needed this, that her being my mother was not enough. She’d pause at my question, look up to the ceiling like she was deep in thought, then respond with short dismissive answers like “I’m not really sure,” or “That’s a tough one,” or “I think so.” And before I could ask more, she’d somehow always manage to change the subject or leave the room, not in a rude way, but in a way that made me feel like a nuisance, or childish, for needing more.
    And once, when I was young, I asked, “What about my father?”
    “The men in this family do not stay and they do not deserve the spoken word,” she replied with such conviction and intensity that I accepted it as an indisputable truth.

    I learned later, from Aunt Sharon, that my father was a fling. A one-night stand. Something fleeting. To know you weren’t created out of love is a disappointing truth. But there are ways I can imagine this.
    I can picture a naked motel room, a bed with no sheets, a window with no curtain. A man, perhaps married, who was out with the boys, drunk, and flattered by my young mother who laughed at his jokes and gently rubbed her hand up his thigh. Inside this room there are shadows and closed eyes and lustful fingers tracing skin in the dark.
    I can imagine my mother on the subway the next morning, hair smelling of smoke and running her tongue over thick teeth. Hiding her stiletto heels under the seat while women in business suits flap the Globe and Mail newspapers around her. A number written on the back of a receipt in her purse, though she can’t make out if that’s a t or an f in his last name. But it doesn’t matter, ‘cause it’s not his real name anyway.
    Or I can imagine it like this. I can imagine a man with a foreign accent and a polished