Between the generation that shows its love through food, orders and scolding and the generation that demands space, therapy and boundaries
My mother yearns, craves, squirms, grovels, raves. One at a time and many times and all at once. There's so much of her in me, I'm so sure I know what she's feeling and even thinking, that it hurts the way I notice her and all the dissection my mind does.
The mother longs for comfort and intimacy, for physical relief for all the daily toil, physical and emotional. For a lifetime she is pushed to work and run, without a word of appreciation, she is watched and criticized, humiliated and deprived of every little reward. She is not allowed, even when there is nothing to do, because she has taken care of everything – shopping, cleaning, food, dishes, laundry, cats, helping neighbors, not even after she gives him a haircut, massage or whatever else dad wants, she is not allowed to sleep during the day or watch TV or scroll or whatever she feels like doing. It is charged verbally; in fact, it's not a ban, it's just reproaches or words thrown out of contempt for her or for women or for the awkward life he leads beside her.
I think all this makes me have nothing to say to my father: I can't open the discussion about how bad it is to be a mother, and I can't think of anything else, because I know his opinion about women and I can't believe that he sees me as anything other than a “face”, as he used to call me when I was little. Or maybe because I have the impression that I understand him, half, as if one part of me is with my mother, the other is with my father. So, every visit longer than two hours, my mother circles me more like a cat in a fishbowl. He's waiting for a massage, a touch that turns into friction, anything. Get a little, always accompanied by the promise of a fulfilling tomorrow. That tomorrow is not coming, either because I stay too little, or because I am a mother of a small child and I expect her to understand that I am too busy with and with my little girl. I am wrong to have this expectation and I know I will regret the mistake of always leaving it on hold.
My mother craves and, like her own child, does not refrain from nibbling, preferably on the sly, from anything that looks appetizing and is relatively accessible.
I take out the watermelon, cut a slice, put the core in the bowl.
– Do you want watermelon?
— What? Melon? I don't want that anymore.
I'm barely out of the kitchen when I hear her biting, sipping, chewing and biting again.
Yesterday Smaranda asked for cake. I took out the tray with the cookies bought for father's day, halved, some slightly bitten and left there, as well as the box of savarin.
– Shall we eat a savarina together, mother?
– Ah… is this savarine? Go ahead, eat it.
The next moment, a part of her suddenly decides that she's not going to put her finger on the cream of the damn savarina. I look at her in amazement. He neither notices nor seems to have registered that he just tasted some whipped cream.
When she's sulking, mom walks around like New Year's Eve in big slippers that are apparently too heavy for her feet. After she shakes, washes, wipes and puts away sheets, blankets, pillows, mats and an incredible amount of dishes, she starts opening and closing the closet four times in a minute, taking bags, boxes and sachets for the cats that meow past her as if possessed. I have been with Smaranda in the bedroom for about half an hour, trying to put her to sleep. When she goes back to the bathroom, stalking Mița who vomited “like a fool”, I give her a look that makes her close the door. In less than a minute, he opens it again, so that Mița can enter the bedroom, and it remains open.
Dad's in the balcony, as usual, making te-miri-what. Turn on the handheld vacuum cleaner. The mother, caring, calls out to him:
— STOP THAT SLEEPING CHILD!
He comes to close the door. The dead bastard. The door opens, again, the mother comes in with a cloth and dabs Mita hard, like a fly you can't get rid of.
Every evening spent at my family's I think with horror of the day when the patched, thin, old and crooked-tailed Mita will die and of the depression that will engulf my mother. Where else will she channel her nerves, frustration and affection?
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Article written by Diana Rădulescu
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