« Did you truly want a child when you had me or did you just feel like you had to?”
The silence settles into my apartment. On the table, there are the two empty plates with the crumbs from the empanadas we just finished eating. The evening light is filtering through the window and with it, some glimpses of voices from passersby. The silence isn’t heavy. She isn’t offended I asked.
She considers it, like she never truly asked herself that question before, and isn’t that answer enough?
“Your dad was older. I was out of school but not working yet. It just made sense to have one then.”
In a way, she’s right. It made sense. And it’s not like I believe she didn’t want to be a mother, or that she had resented it in anyway. This isn’t anything as simple as that. It’s just that I am 26, working my first job, and she was 25, also out of school. And no matter how much I fight against the resemblance, on so many things we are very much alike. There is a part of me that will always be rooted inside her bones, and who knows that she just went along with it because it was expected, it was normal.
I look at her now. She’s been divorced five years and living alone. She just bought her apartment. She’s settled in a way she hadn’t been in a while, free to indulge in her current obsessions with no obligation outside of her work. Through her eyes, I see myself. Settled in this new apartment that is slowly becoming more and more cluttered with the comics and the books I read, the vinyls I listen to.
When I was seven, she used to talk to me as if I was her child self. She couldn’t realise where our experiences had diverged, caught in the dread of seeing me repeat the same cycle again. How did it feel to hear her child say “Mom, the kids are being mean to me at school” and remember their sneer from twenty years ago? For a long while, she was talking to an echo of herself. I remember a car ride, I couldn’t have been older than ten. I remember her saying she’d probably leave my dad when me and my sister would both be old enough to have left the house. I remember telling her about the sadness, the emptiness and I remember her telling me about the time at 19 when she tried to end it by swallowing a fistful of sleeping pills.
I’ve spent years since teenagerhood with this drumming beat inside my chest that said “I do not want to be her, I do not want to be her”. At 19, I tried to end it by swallowing a fistful of sleeping pills.
I have pushed against the confines of this bond between eldest daughter and mother. I have done things she never would have done. I am not the one in the family who ended up doing the same studies she did, in the same school. And yet my sister is free of this entanglement in a way I don’t think I ever will. Isn’t she? Has she ever felt this wild thing in her chest kicking against her ribs in fright at the thought of becoming her? I never asked.
None of this is ever spoken aloud. Maybe in the confines of my therapist’s office. Maybe hinted at in a snarky remark that hits a little too close to home.
Things have gotten better since I’m on the other side of 25. Here I stand, decidedly single and childfree. I didn’t go through the pregnancy that made her sick. This is where the cycle ends, this is when the phantom of her 25 years younger finally fades whenever she looks at me and I stop seeing myself 25 years older when I look at her.
The echoes will remain. I will still know her better than she will ever know me. Every ache in my joints will still ignite this twinge of worry that this is that one last part of her that lies dormant within me, the sickness that grabbed her and held her down for years, the pain that stopped her from working and from holding her child’s hand on the way home from school.
She is happy now, I think. As much as she can be. The glimpse into the future I see when I look at her doesn’t feel as doomed as it used to be.
“It’s not that I didn’t want a child. I was just young. I was happy to have you. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. I had a feeling.”