morning, and Ceci is brushing my daughter’s hair. She draws the bristles through in a single sweep, hefts up a skein of the champagne-colored locks, and braids them, her fingers flying. Moments later, Clara is ready for school, immaculate, clothes matching, her hair a complex series of plaits and twists all miraculously held to her head with only a single bright barrette. Later on, after school, I find Clara in her room and tentatively approach her. My own hair I have always worn in a mop, too busy for conditioners, just a quick scrub and a brisk, business-like rinse. “Let me do your hair,” I say. I say it softly, shyly, almost like I am in seventh grade asking a boy to dance. “Why?” she says. She doesn’t look up. She’s playing with a doll. “Because,” I say, and I don’t know how to go on. I pick up the brush with its flat-paddle handle and, standing over my daughter’s head, I see the pink seam of her scalp where Ceci has perfectly parted her hair. I bring the brush to it, drag down, and my daughter screams. She gives a loud, dramatic murderous yell and operatic tears fill her eyes. All I did was one tiny tug. I know, I
know
I haven’t hurt her. I stand there with the brush, frozen. She eyes me warily. I eye her right back. Then I cautiously slip from her room.
It is winter, shredded snow falling everywhere, muffling the mountains, bandaging the winding slopes, the skiers in their bright-red parkas looking, from a distance, like tiny beads of blood sliding down. I am twelve. I am full of holes. From across the kitchen, my mother snarls at me for reasons I cannot understand. Suddenly, she flings a spoon in my direction; it bounces off my cheek and lands, clattering, on the tiled floor.
Two years later we will sit together, my mother, father, and I, in a social worker’s office on the second floor of a psychiatric unit, where I have been temporarily placed, much to my relief. My mother’s left hand is badly bruised from where she put it through a wall. I, too, have various bruises, although the real problem, the relentless decimating daily humiliations, is harder to describe. The social worker tells me I will not be going home. My mother, who has become psychotically paranoid over the years, says, “You have abused me past what I can manage,” a classic example of projection. I nod, not knowing what else to do. Precipitating my removal from the home was the fact that my mother tried to push me down a gorge in Vermont. I survived, saved by the soft snow. I remember standing where I had slid, hearing the sound of her receding footsteps in the forest, tasting the cold on my tongue. I was fourteen then and had just begun to bleed. The trees were black, scarred. I saw them, and I understood that my mother wanted to kill me, that she always had. What was different, today, now, post-push, was that I wanted to kill her too. This, I saw, was what it meant to be a daughter, a mother. It is about blood and all the steep slopes.
Children are not subtle. They throw their arms around you or haughtily turn away. They answer you or don’t. My daughter is no different. At the end of every day, during Ceci’s tenure with us, I would come home from work. My briefcase was always bulging, my mind cramped, my stomach aflutter from all I had left to do. I was, at that point in my life, working full-time as both a psychologist and a writer. I sometimes worked sixty hours a week, trying to outrun my history, building walls with words.
I remember one homecoming in particular, not because it was better or worse, but simply because a single memory becomes emblematic, standing in for all the rest. It was winter, and when I opened the door a cold gust of air blew in. Ceci and Clara were absorbed in a book, Clara on Ceci’s lap, Ceci rocking the chair back and forth in time with the Spanish sentences. I could hear the words—
leche
,
bebé
,
perro
—but I did not understand. I saw my daughter’s sleepy eyes, how Ceci held
know
I haven’t hurt her. I stand there with the brush, frozen. She eyes me warily. I eye her right back. Then I cautiously slip from her room.
It is winter, shredded snow falling everywhere, muffling the mountains, bandaging the winding slopes, the skiers in their bright-red parkas looking, from a distance, like tiny beads of blood sliding down. I am twelve. I am full of holes. From across the kitchen, my mother snarls at me for reasons I cannot understand. Suddenly, she flings a spoon in my direction; it bounces off my cheek and lands, clattering, on the tiled floor.
Two years later we will sit together, my mother, father, and I, in a social worker’s office on the second floor of a psychiatric unit, where I have been temporarily placed, much to my relief. My mother’s left hand is badly bruised from where she put it through a wall. I, too, have various bruises, although the real problem, the relentless decimating daily humiliations, is harder to describe. The social worker tells me I will not be going home. My mother, who has become psychotically paranoid over the years, says, “You have abused me past what I can manage,” a classic example of projection. I nod, not knowing what else to do. Precipitating my removal from the home was the fact that my mother tried to push me down a gorge in Vermont. I survived, saved by the soft snow. I remember standing where I had slid, hearing the sound of her receding footsteps in the forest, tasting the cold on my tongue. I was fourteen then and had just begun to bleed. The trees were black, scarred. I saw them, and I understood that my mother wanted to kill me, that she always had. What was different, today, now, post-push, was that I wanted to kill her too. This, I saw, was what it meant to be a daughter, a mother. It is about blood and all the steep slopes.
Children are not subtle. They throw their arms around you or haughtily turn away. They answer you or don’t. My daughter is no different. At the end of every day, during Ceci’s tenure with us, I would come home from work. My briefcase was always bulging, my mind cramped, my stomach aflutter from all I had left to do. I was, at that point in my life, working full-time as both a psychologist and a writer. I sometimes worked sixty hours a week, trying to outrun my history, building walls with words.
I remember one homecoming in particular, not because it was better or worse, but simply because a single memory becomes emblematic, standing in for all the rest. It was winter, and when I opened the door a cold gust of air blew in. Ceci and Clara were absorbed in a book, Clara on Ceci’s lap, Ceci rocking the chair back and forth in time with the Spanish sentences. I could hear the words—
leche
,
bebé
,
perro
—but I did not understand. I saw my daughter’s sleepy eyes, how Ceci held
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