A Mother’s Tongue
I got my first tattoo two weeks after I turned eighteen. I was legally allowed to, and I bought it myself, but I could not bring myself to tell my mom. She wouldn’t have been mad or anything, I just didn’t want her to know I had permanently altered my skin for the first time in my adult life. I went a day and a half before running in her office, giggly and mischievous, to pull down the hem of my jeans and show her the infamous tattoo. The first wild hair of autonomy. She looked, looked with wider eyes, and began to laugh. “You didn’t want to tell me about THIS?”
I suppose it was super stupid and weird that I didn’t tell her because… well, I tell my mom everything. Everything. I told her about my first kiss, my first fight with my best friend. I told her about when I lied to people I knew and loved. She knew the ins and outs of me, as my creator and my closest confidante.
My mom and I have always had this bizarre connection. Our fights are intense, more than would be expected between a mother and daughter. When she cries, I begin to cry. We can look at each other and know exactly what the other is thinking. She is my best friend on this earth, and so it was a strange, but obviously inevitable phenomena to hit my 20s and feel like my skin didn’t fit right anymore. When my twenties came, I changed a lot. I got serious boyfriends. I started drinking as regularly as a twenty-one year old did. I lived alone. I smoked cigarettes and made love and screamed at my friends and considered getting medicated. I pierced my nose and cut my hair and grew it out long again. I got a therapist who has helped me navigate the broken cycles my family has ingrained in me, and how to break them without losing those I love. I got a therapist who says “fuck” in our sessions and leaves me mad at my entire upbringing.
I call my mom at least once a day. I’ve done this since I turned sixteen and could drive my car anywhere else but home after school. Over time, these calls have changed. What used to be, “Hey, mom, I have tennis practice and work after class today. See you at home and I love you!” has gradually become, “Hey, mom, I am super hungover and this boy doesn’t love me anymore and I do not know what I am doing! Anyways, see you next month and I love you and miss you.”
I have cried over this change in dynamic many times. I have hated myself for being less an extension of my mom and more my own, messy person. Because I began living my life differently than she did, or maybe differently than she may have raised me to live, I assumed I was doing it wrong. However, I have learned through deep reflection and even from the encouragement of my kind and unconditional mom that me becoming who I should be is not something to be shameful of at all.
At my age, my mom was a pistol. She was untamed and perfect and beautiful and everything I want to be. She loved rock music; she loved piercings and tattoos and her friends and driving with the windows down. She loved my dad, who was completely unacceptable to my grandparents. At my age, my mom was free. And this young, wild version of her was able to morph into a caring, incredible mother because of me: her first everything that relates to the deepest love human beings are able to fathom. I know that as she watches me grow, and simultaneously fail and succeed over and over again, she is still my best friend. And her embrace has not changed with the tides of difference and autonomy and adulthood.
Love you the most, Mom.
Strike Out,
Written by: Hanna Bradford
Edited by: Sarah Singleton
Graphic by: Cindy Cao
