By El JAYNE

My mother’s hands are smaller than mine, so when she borrows my mittens without asking, they slip off in her coat pockets and she thinks she’s lost them. She tells me she’s sorry and she’ll replace them. She finds them a week later and puts them back in my room and hopes I’ll forget the whole thing. 

I remember things my mother forgets. She’s busy remembering things her mother forgets, and we go on like this, the three of us, blaming each other for all of it. I start to wonder if having a mother was always meant to be this painful. We have matching scars that still ooze sometimes, that we insist don’t hurt anymore. They keep us from hearing one another, ears scarred over from blow after blow.  

My fingers keep bleeding from cleaning up the glass my mother shattered. I wonder if she will ever say “thank you.” She wonders if I will ever notice the blood dripping from her own clenched fists, those small hands wrapped tightly around all the glass she picked up so I wouldn’t step on it. We stare at each other, each waiting for the other to apologize. 

My mother is constantly in motion. She’s a whirlwind, never slowing down no matter who or what stands in her way. She’s afraid of something but she doesn’t tell anyone what it is. I often wonder if she even knows what it is. Maybe she’s afraid of the answer. 

To be a daughter is to be unsatisfactory. We both know this to be true. My mother gave me her pain, family heirloom that it is, and asked me to carry it on my back, to add my own pain to the load, to share in the ancient art of suffering in silence. She practiced it, but I perfected it.  

I ask my mother to sit with me a while. I tell her she can put her load down beside mine and rest with me. She’s been carrying it so long, I know, and she’s tired like me. We don’t talk. We just sit, believing we are opposites, but always the same in the end. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

El Jayne is a writer based in St. Louis, Missouri, where they have recently completed their MFA. When not writing, they enjoy watching basketball, knitting, and daytime naps with their two cats, Willow and Cordelia.