My great grandma taught her only daughter that the best thing a woman can do in life is give—your food, your time, your heart—you give until you bleed, and then you sew up your wounds yourself, clean stitches, coverup on your scars, a good brand.
My great grandmother taught her daughter that women come last in life, after God, family, friends, lovers, co-workers, strangers. We make ourselves big enough to take care of everybody, and small enough so nobody notices it’s us fixing all the problems.
So my nana passed that onto my mom—named Catherine because that’s the name her husband wanted and she gave and gave and gave to him—and my mom didn’t teach it to me. She didn’t want to. She had given so much of herself, that when she laughed, it sounded like she was trying to hand the laugh to somebody else—like her laugh was just a bit to make other people laugh, not like she ever thought something was funny.
My mom, she wanted me to be whole. She didn’t think it was fair, what her grandma taught her mom, what her mom taught her, that women were everybody and therefore, nobody, selves lost in the pieces they gave to God and friends and family and lovers and coworkers and strangers and then she got sick, and my nana didn’t have to teach me, the way her mom had taught her, and she had taught her daughter. I just did it.
I sat with my mom while she puked, and I let her cry on me, even though it made the air sticky and my heart beat too fast, and I was too young to understand cancer, or anything really at all and I gave and I gave and I gave, until I lost myself in bathrooms and sweat and tissues I hadn’t used myself and she begged me, to stop, my mother, but she was too weak, and so was I and by the time she tried to teach me the opposite of what her mom had taught her, it was too late. I had become them: great grandmother, grandmother, mother, mother nature, woman.
"You didn’t have to,“ they say now, but they didn’t stop me, and I became what they wanted me to be, what they expected me to be.
I tell myself, now, it’s natural, in the the blood I’m always giving to other people, healing myself before they notice they caused me pain. I tell myself I can’t help it, taking care of everybody, loving so much my heart is constantly on the verge of splitting wide open, forgetting what I need, or who I am.
We have to lie to ourselves, sometimes.
It broke my mother’s heart. She wanted me to be whole.
***
When I told my mother I loved women, she cried, told me maybe I would learn how to be something more than the parts I was giving everybody else, that a woman would know how to see me, even when I was making myself small, even when I was covering up my scars.
She was wrong.
First:
I fall in love with women, sometimes, who are selfish, bright, stars, dead on arrival, flung from somewhere I do not understand, where they learned to say no, I can’t, and to leave a room without making sure everybody isn’t just fine but good, warm, wonderful.
I love them, I tell them, because they’re fighting something. They don’t know what I mean. They take from me, and I bleed for them, and I tell them they’re brave. They try to teach me, how to stop, but they like it, the way I make them even bigger.
They break my heart.
Second:
I fall in love with women, sometimes, who are just like me. We love, and we give, and we take care. We sit on bathroom floors with people, let them cry to us. We hold people, and we solve problems, and we love so much, it sometimes burns.
But one night she’ll get food poisoning, and I’ll try to come into the bathroom with her and she’ll say to me, so matter of fact:
“I don’t need you. I can take care of myself.“
We’ll feel so good about it, what good fucking people we are, what good fucking women we are, but it will kill us, not knowing how to take from each other.
We’ll break our hearts.
Third:
I’ll call my mother up on the phone. We won’t talk about it. She will not try and save me, will not mention women I might love, or hearts she might be able to fix. I will not ask her if she needs to be saved, will not ask how she’s feeling, if she’s dizzy, if she’s spreading herself too thin. Instead, we will make each other laugh, make ourselves laughs, not laughs that sound like bits, like we’re just trying to make somebody else laugh. Ugly, snorting, full laughs, just for us, not God or friends or family or lovers or coworkers or strangers. I laugh for me. She laughs for her.
I’ll feel whole when I hang up the phone. It will not last. I’ll still count it as a win.
jacobvanloon
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