Mother Winter

by Sophia Shalmiyev

  XXXVIII

  My daughter’s doctor prescribed her a cream that thins out the skin on her vagina. It turns out that her diaper rash developed into a partial labial fusion. The body could turn into a swamp, the German pediatrician explained as she instructed me to hold her steady so she could pull her lips apart.

  As she recovers, I read a lot of books to Frances about lost bears or bunnies looking for their mothers. I’m cold, tired, hungry, and afraid, these babes cry to the moose, deer, or owl they meet on the journey back to their burrows and caves. Not a single children’s book I’ve come across yet has the baby bear not find her way home, not see her mother at last when the tale is through—a failed reunification.

  Like the bunny in the children’s book, I had the runaway instinct early on. But I played both mother and baby in the story, hiding away and looking for her as though she were my wayward baby.

  I teach Frances all about her body in the bath. I give her a warm washcloth and show her how to spread her lips to the side and not use harsh soap because it kills the good bacteria. “It tickles to wash down there,” Franny discovers. We decide that the button can be very sensitive, and it is hers to figure out over time. Nobody is to touch her without permission. That only doctors and parents can ever see you naked unless you’re at hot springs or the beach or you just feel like running through the field naked. I want her to run through the fields naked forever and ever if she wants to. I want her to know that her button means fire and ice.

  Her brother is in the bath as well. He’s paying attention to everything I say. I catch his eye and explain that his body is also sacred and important to explore in private. To remember that we do not touch other bodies without their consent. It would be like stealing, but worse, to do otherwise.

  My mom once kidnapped me from my dad. He asked her to babysit for him while he attended an evening class at Leningrad University. As soon as he left the apartment she looked around for my green plaid coat with matted fake fur trim. But when she finished bundling me up, we heard the lock turn in the front door. She stuffed me in my cot and tucked the blanket under my chin. I pretended to be asleep. She sat on a chair beside me and her gaze seemed to glue my eyelids. He left again.

  A few hours later we were on a train out of town. She held me over her shoulder and I stared at large jars of pickled tomatoes some old lady on her way to the dacha stacked next to her seat. I don’t know what our final destination looked like, how long we stayed there, or what happened when we were forced to return home.

  In the mammalian kingdom there are cannibalistic mothers, voracious mothers, vampiric mothers, and phantom mothers.

  Rabbit mothers immediately leave the burrow after giving birth and only stop by for a few minutes each day afterward in order to feed the litter. After less than a month, the kits are left to fend for themselves. But the rabbit is actually protecting her young by minimizing the chance the burrow will be violated by predators.

  A rabbit mother will freeze when frightened. She’s a coldhearted warmblood, a creature of contradictions. The mother runs fast but knows that a still bunny won’t be spotted, so when in doubt, she’ll do nothing. When her wait becomes unbearable, it’s time to run again.

  The mother rabbit’s efficiency astounds scientists, observing her nipples burst like grapes as she lies over the hole in the ground and squirts milk into the mouths of her little ones in about a minute. She promptly escapes the litter until she’s too full to go on.

  Nursing a hangover. Nursing a baby. Nursing yourself back to health. A hospice nurse for a body that feels like sponge cake left underneath a leaky sink. By the time my cup size reached the fourth letter of the alphabet I was moaning in the shower as the coarseness of my breasts would not turn soft. Every place I squeezed and popped the caviar-like collection of blocked milk more places had to be beaten into submission. They say you cannot choke or suffocate yourself because a mechanism in your brain is there to prevent that kind of self-harm. Your arms would yield toward survival.

  My hands kneaded out the milk knots, lumped fat unmoved by my barbarity. Eject, eject, eject the baby’s liquid gold. Drink a beer like the nurse advised, dunk the blue-veined bags of rocks in scalding water and try again to make it flow out. The cysts remained for many months. Rubbing my breasts in sticky ointment and packing them on ice before plunging them back under the hot stream were the moments when I saw that my path to motherhood wouldn’t be reparative only. That I am to bite down hard on the hand that helps my son grow, now that I made myself plural. That I wasn’t going to replace you this easily, or ever, that my breasts would ache without you, too.

  Jake preferred the left breast, the bigger producer. He almost choked on the flow. The neglected right breast shrank and made less and less milk, proving the baby’s point until I became extremely lopsided. Symmetry betrayed a woman who wants to live by numbers.

  If you’ve had a baby, you might know what it’s like having things that you were used to holding dear ruined until you learn to put your toys away. When they are no longer babies, you might know what it’s like to have amnesia and miss those days. If you had a baby, you may know what it’s like to have your period and hold your tampon in with your middle finger inside your vagina while you push out a number two. If you’re a mother, you may know what it’s like to do this while having someone screaming at you to get off the toilet and there is no one there to rescue you. You may then forget to wash your hands. This is still a Soiled Dove story, a mother trying to write holding one thing inside all gushy warm and the other thing failing to come out against all odds.

  XXXIX

  It’s by the sink, and then by the record stack that I think of Cat Marnell. You don’t know. You’ve heard of Cat Marnell? Sure, okay, but you do not understand how much she makes me think of my mother, how much I wish to protect her. The men stealing her fire and torching her like she is boneless and will vanish quickly enough all while she hangs on to their dear legs for life. Our connective tissue is stiff after a lifetime of men colliding into us, into our desecrated foremothers, the Connie Ramones, the girlfriends, the groupies, the support staff with a mattress, diving off barstools while the men we reared dove off stages. I put on an anthem to make the chores seem like theater. Turn off the radio show that goes on about our narrow approaches to sexuality: aggressively advertised or chronically repressed. They should try being the three of us. Choice like at a prison canteen. Choice from that deep a lack needs to be modeled and learned anew.

  I get the dishes done. Lurch forward. I hate the wiping part. All the kitchen towels smell like last week no matter how much you wash and repeat. I fuck the forks up. I notice myself not doing it right, fighting with the egg yolk, but I’d rather wipe the crud off on my skirt when the table gets set later. I hate sitting down at a table to eat. I think about Cat Marnell when I do the dishes because I know she eats in bed, she eats off other people’s plates, or she doesn’t eat. If you don’t use your body beyond the bare branch, the bloom is beside the point. It is for suckers to grow flowers, pansies like me, crossed off, cross-shaped like a lilac, doing dishes here while Cat Marnell parties, my kind of girl. It’s insulting to consider my potential for danger here at the sink while Susan Griffin makes duplicates of echoes:

  This is a poem for a woman doing dishes.

  This is a poem for a woman doing dishes.

  It must be repeated.

  It must be repeated,

  again and again,

  again and again.

  When I finally saw Jeanne Dielman, the Chantal Akerman film of my mother’s nightmares, a quickening, like that of a first kick from the baby in the womb, tapped away at my forehead. Akerman used an actress of glamour and stature to do mundane chores for nearly two hundred minutes, famously peeling potatoes long enough to bore you into nausea. But you got sick because a contrast had been staged. The beautiful woman who prostituted and made veal cutlets in her home with the same dry, yet faithful, regard for ritual was still human to the vie
wer, maybe finally so, unlike most wives and mothers whose identity Elena vomited up at her own peril.

  At pickup, Jake is soaping up his hands. “You’re the most beautifulest mom ever. You know what, Toby doesn’t have a mom. He’s mean to me,” he says, looking in the sink, proud of the dirt. I am sitting next to him, corralling his little sister, and quickly make a note in my book to explain ambiguous loss to him later. Just be nice to kids who don’t have what you do and encourage the other kids to share, is all I can muster. Playing ball with the kids in the park after we all use the toilet I feel like a stranger, a sucker, and too wrapped up in the question as usual. Who has a mother? Strapped and unstrapped for the sixth time today, the car seat is the one to blame and comes between us, it’s not me, I swear. I chose to live downtown for a reason, to avoid the desolate anything that creeps up with driving, yet here we are, classic lazy Americans in our station wagon.

  On the car radio we hear that girls get more education but not enough leadership roles. Two men are saying Pepsi was a Russian thing, which I remember being my fave in 1989, before we left. We have a mini dance party as we park. Jake likes Weezer, but I don’t want him to grow up to be like that guy. I care about art being pure only in the sense that the person making it is less abusive of power than that person is in their public offering.

  At home Franny cries. She wants a cape like Jake’s. Blankets are not enough. She’s naked, running away from me as I change her standing up now, won’t fold away luggage at the top body part, and Jake wants to be a naked boy, too, and to play dog. She cries when he knocks her down with the blanket around his shoulders. She tries to grab his penis and then looks down and around her tummy at her vagina. He insists, “Don’t touch me unless I have clothes on.”

  I change Franny sitting down on the kitchen floor and Jake says our kitchen is too small. The radio announces that the Anita Hill trial twenty-year anniversary is upon us and I’m post post being believed myself, as I have said before, liar liar, my pants are stoking a fourth-wave feminism fire.

  Mike is not coming home from school until later and I feed the kids the old soup. Save the chops for another day, since they will just suck on the bone and mush the rest to meat juice. Their teeth are like magnets, which are sacred and holy and keep us going round. My stepmother has used magnets on her ailing joints and brittle bones.

  I have bought myself five minutes to read the story about Audrie Pott:

  On April 11th, seven months after Audrie’s suicide, the Santa Clara County sheriff arrested the three boys on charges of misdemeanor sexual battery, felony possession of child pornography, and felony sexual penetration. When they arrested the boys, police seized new phones and other electronic gadgetry their parents had bought to replace what authorities took in the fall. Police found new pictures of other nude teen girls on some of their phones, prompting them to add on new charges in July. Sources close to the case tell Rolling Stone that police discovered one of the boys was trying to make money selling the pictures.

  If every time a photograph is taken a part of a person’s soul gets stolen away we can assume that women are packaged dolls and the only thing they lose is their plastic box so that we can play with them any way we choose.

  My daughter wants to wash her doll clothes like a mama does and helps me deposit quarters into the machines at the Laundromat. I offer her my foot to stand on so she doesn’t have to be on tippy toes and stretch too hard. “I like to stretch so much,” she tells me, one eye scrunched and tongue sticking out.

  Franny loves her plastic babies. I consider getting her furniture and grooming supplies for her babies, but I struggle with this. I take a picture of her with one hand on a ministroller with a baby doll that has fallen over to one side. Her other hand is propped up on her chin, looking away from me. Franny’s plastic child will outlive her, which is a strange comfort.

  Children are obsessed with the tug of possessing and sharing. Hoarding is safety.

  My mother, too poor to drink properly, had to steal to survive. Her withdrawals could have killed her. The way my withdrawals from her over the years almost did me in. Too poor in other ways to ask for her, I just pretended she was dead.

  In the mornings, I’m trying to deal with my despondency head-on, but every bit of news reminds me of my mother being lost, being raped, being hit, unburied. I am up with the kids and take them to school by myself. By the elevator, my daughter screams in my arms and tries to slide down my torso. She asks for her dad, smelling out my sadness. I distract her from her questions with silly jokes on the way back to our apartment. I interrogate her in a sweet, sarcastic witch voice that is probably way too scary. Do you love Mama? She’s quiet. She points to her dad.

  When I drop Franny off at baby school, she protests and raises her arms up to me. She changes her mind about Daddy and now coils herself around my neck, urging me to stay past the fourth or fifth book I have read her. It never gets easier pulling away so to make myself laugh a little I say, in a thoughtful tone next to her hot cheek, “Franny, you have to stay strong and carry me always in your heart.” That’s from The Joy Luck Club, I think. I didn’t come up with that or know why I said it. I don’t want to leave her and the more I show my worry the worse the goodbyes get.

  XXXX

  Back home as I walk by the dresser mirror I realize I’m getting older. I’m really turning into my mother says a voice I stamped and forgot to mail off. I don’t know what that means because she never got older. I heard the phrase on television many times before and at a coffee shop this morning. But I have no idea if I’m ever going to look more and more like my mother every day. In our Portland apartment I have only this one undated picture of her. A passport photo never used to go anywhere I know of. And I’m so much older than she is in it. Maybe she’s going to grow up to look like me is what I think.

  I star in this short film as the wiser and bitter one. Having a recurring role is a small comfort. I get to be the parent, always in the waiting room about to get the good news that they found you wandering around by the highway, and once you get fluids and a quick body scan I can take you home and put you to bed. I make a list of ingredients for your favorite soup to keep my hands busy. The magazines in the waiting room say 1989 in neon on curled-up black. Then the plane takes off and everyone is smoking Dunhills, the fancy airport cigarettes for terminal escapists.

  My hair began falling out after my daughter’s first birthday. Luda says girl children steal your beauty. I know what you’re thinking. I already said I am getting older fast. But my hair is too thick, and I like pulling out tangled nets stuck to my feet in the shower. I kiss my daughter goodbye in the morning when she leaves with her dad for baby school. She just learned to lean in and make an mm mwah sound. As we make eye contact I tie one of my stray hairs around her ankle or wrist. I hide this act from her. Am I wrapping her in my loss or sharing in my abundance with this ritual? I can’t tell, but she obviously has no choice.

  My stepmother has a sister, Angela, who needed the protective eye more than most. She upset a woman in her communal flat who was jealous of all the money her heroin-dealing pseudohusband was making. Angela was young like soft cheese when this woman cast an evil eye her way. When Angela moved out of her flat, this witch swept the four corners of my aunt’s room and pulled out all the hairs she found in the dustpan. She burned the hair in the middle of the room and stole her good fortune, youth, and beauty. Within two years Angela’s man was found dead in the cellar of her building; she was burglarized and robbed of her prized fur coat.

  According to my stepmom, the intruders stripped the blue jeans right off her ass. I picture it like a silent protest when it was probably more like two burst pipes collapsing under a mallet, or like when my son fights me to get undressed for bed and I grab him by the ankles and pull on the ends of his pants. His thrashing around plugs me into an abstract movie reel of her home invasion.

  Angela was strung out on heroin, picking lice off her oily head at the hospital, when her
mom had to fly in from Ukraine to rescue her from bad luck. My stepmother said, “Let this be a lesson to you.”

  And so I teach my daughter to be very careful about where we can let down our hair.

  × × × ×

  As a child, I spent every summer in the Caucus Mountains. People always ask me if Azerbaijan is mostly Muslim. For some reason I don’t remember the people clearly or how they dressed, except the gold teeth, hot tea in tulip-shaped crystal, tarragon syrup with fizzy water, dried fruit, my same coloring, my eyes looking back. Maybe because I was a half-Jew, half-Russian and made no friends and just read books, I didn’t yet look for any patterns outside my home. Inside, I closely watched my two uncles get waited on by their scowling mother. They were free men. Unwed. Walking around in their underwear during the scorch of the day. They had their own rooms. They groomed themselves openly. I slept on the couch opposite the couch my granny occupied, both draped over with Persian rugs. She usually wore a head scarf tied around a big low bun, and unwrapped it before bedtime.

  When she looked down from the balcony in the night with her hair petting her waist I thought she looked like a witch. If I brushed my hair in the living room she looked at me hard and hissed, “You’re shedding. Go brush your hair under the sink like a cat.” She was worried about my uncles discovering one of my hairs in their food.

  Strays are considered unsanitary.

  × × × ×

  A tall man with shoulder-length, dark-brown, wavy hair with a nest of gray at the crown enters a bright small bedroom facing Everett Street in Portland’s NW quadrant. He’s chasing a toddler. The mother of the little girl is lying in bed with a hangover. She just peeled off her contact lenses and the blurry figures make her nausea worse. It’s 2:00 p.m. on Mother’s Day. She will pull it together by five. The husband has split ends. The wife usually cuts his hair.

  I’ve been doing a survey and the outcome seems to be this: fathers could have done better. Mothers are dead to us if they don’t.